Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Monday, February 28, 2005
It's Called Torture
President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, "the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity."
Someone should tell that to Maher Arar and his family.
Mr. Arar was the victim of an American policy that is known as extraordinary rendition. That's a euphemism. What it means is that the United States seizes individuals, presumably terror suspects, and sends them off without even a nod in the direction of due process to countries known to practice torture.
A Massachusetts congressman, Edward Markey, has taken the eminently sensible step of introducing legislation that would ban this utterly reprehensible practice. In a speech on the floor of the House, Mr. Markey, a Democrat, said: "Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us. It is morally wrong whether it is captured on film or whether it goes on behind closed doors unannounced to the American people."
Unfortunately, the outlook for this legislation is not good. I asked Pete Jeffries, the communications director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, if the speaker supported Mr. Markey's bill. After checking with the policy experts in his office, Mr. Jeffries called back and said: "The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that suspected terrorists should be sent back to their home countries."
Surprised, I asked why suspected terrorists should be sent anywhere. Why shouldn't they be held by the United States and prosecuted?
"Because," said Mr. Jeffries, "U.S. taxpayers should not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and incarceration costs."
Excerpts from transcript of detainee's tribunal
Officer: You do understand this is an administrative hearing and not a legal proceeding. ... You will be receiving more specific instructions shortly of how to bring your question to U.S. courts.
Paracha: Your honor, I have been here over 17 months. Would that be before I expire?
White House Must Charge or Free Suspect
A federal judge ordered the Bush administration Monday to either charge terrorism suspect Jose Padilla with a crime or release him after more than 2 1/2 years in custody.
U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd in Spartanburg, S.C., said the government can not hold Padilla indefinitely as an "enemy combatant," a designation President Bush gave him in 2002.
"The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant," Floyd wrote in a 23-page opinion that was a stern rebuke to the government. He gave the administration 45 days to take action.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Sibel Edmonds: 'I Saw Papers That Show US Knew al-Qa'ida Would Attack Cities With Airplanes'
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".
She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."
She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."
Justice Dept. Opposes Bid to Revive Case Against F.B.I.
Sibel Edmonds, was a contract linguist for the bureau for about six months, translating material in Azerbaijani, Farsi and Turkish. Ms. Edmonds was dismissed in 2002 after complaining repeatedly that bureau linguists had produced slipshod and incomplete translations of important terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Ms. Edmonds also accused a fellow Turkish linguist in the Washington field office of blocking the translation of material involving acquaintances who had come under suspicion and said the bureau had allowed diplomatic sensitivities with other nations to affect the translation of important intelligence.
"The effect of the government's posture in this case will be to discourage national security whistle-blowers," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is helping Ms. Edmonds. "She is fighting for the right to prove that she was wrongfully terminated."
The case has become a lightning rod for critics who contend that the bureau retaliated against Ms. Edmonds and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the antiterrorism campaign.
The A.C.L.U. joined her cause last month, when it asked the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reinstate her suit against the government. The suit was dismissed in July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked a rarely used power and declared the case as falling under "state secret" privilege.
Top Former CIA Agent Condemns New Terror War
"hardmen" are back at the CIA helm with a whole suitcase full of revamped dirty tricks ranging from political assassinations and death squads to the shuttling of detainees to interrogation and torture facilities worldwide. Few people know more about how the CIA operates on the ground than former agent Robert Baer, one of the agency's top field operatives of the past quarter-century.
An Arabic speaker, Baer spent most of his career running agents in the souks and back alleys of the Middle East, before becoming disillusioned with what he saw as interference by Washington politicians in the CIA's efforts to root out terrorists.
He believes that at precisely the time when terrorist threats were escalating globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being "scrubbed clean" instead.
I put it to him that since 9/11, the cost of being complacent has been recognised and that the CIA is now getting its hands dirty again.
"Yes," says Baer, "but in the wrong direction.
"It is totally reactionary," he insists. "It's like they woke up on 9/11 and just started shooting at anybody and anything."
To give just one example, he says that what is referred to as "extraordinary renditions" - the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process - is not only wrong, but often counterproductive for gathering intelligence.
"They are picking up people really with nothing against them, hoping to catch someone because they have no information about these [terrorist] networks."
... It was on September 15, just a few days after the attacks on New York and Washington, that George Tenet - then director of the CIA - produced at top secret document known as the Worldwide Attack Matrix for ratification by President Bush.
It was, in effect, a licence to kill. Among the actions already under way or being recommended in the document were those ranging from "routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks." Implemented as outlined, the Matrix, "would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history."
Since then the agency has hacked into foreign banks, used secret prisons overseas and spent millions bankrolling "friendly" Muslim intelligence services. They have assassinated al-Qaeda leaders, spirited prisoners to nations with brutal human rights records and amassed countless files.
Some might say this is what secret services do anyway, but there are concerns about how far the CIA is prepared to go.
"Everything I've heard anecdotally about the primary suspects connected to September 11 says they are being truly tortured. They are not [merely] being made to feel uncomfortable," says Baer.
What did he know about the "Worldwide Attack Matrix," and was it the blueprint for current CIA activities?
"I think it was the blueprint right after 9/11. I don't know specifics about it, but I know what matrices are. You collect what you believe to be facts and identify people and get rid of them. Either by arresting them, or getting local government to arrest them, or kidnapping them and putting them in the extraordinary rendition system."
The Matrix document as drafted and presented to Bush specified targets in 80 countries around the world. The CIA even prepared a Memorandum Of Notification, which would allow the agency to have virtual carte blanche to conduct political assasinations abroad.
A sorry record for a conservative administration
... the camouflaged domestic spending cuts contained in the Bush budget will -- if accepted by Congress -- do serious damage to education initiatives, low-income assistance and environmental programs over the next five years.
The worse news, documented in the second report, is that these cuts will not even begin to deal with the looming calamity of runaway entitlement spending on the retirement and health care costs of the baby boom generation.
You won't find either of these warnings spelled out in the budget message of the president.
... Elementary and secondary education programs, including the president's No Child Left Behind initiative, would be cut by $11.5 billion over the next five years, with a 12 percent reduction from inflation-adjusted 2005 levels in fiscal 2010 alone.
The WIC program, which subsidizes the diets of low-income pregnant women and nursing mothers -- a major preventative against low-weight babies -- would be cut by $658 million, enough to reduce coverage in 2010 by 660,000 women. Head Start funds would be reduced $3.3 billion over five years, with 118,000 fewer youngsters enrolled in 2010.
Clean water and clean air funding would decline by $6.4 billion over five years, a 20 percent cut in 2010. Community development programs used by cities to build up impoverished neighborhoods would lose $9.2 billion in five years, a 36 percent cut in 2010.
Most of these cuts would come out of state and local budgets, adding to the burdens their taxpayers would have to take up if services are to be maintained.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Our Friends, the Torturers
The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.
The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.
He was taken into custody on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2002, and was not released until Oct. 5, 2003. He was never charged, and when he wasn't being brutalized, he spent much of his time in an unlit, rat-infested cell that reminded him of a grave.
Government officials know that this kind of activity is not just wrong but reprehensible, which is why they won't admit publicly to the policy that permits them to kidnap individuals like Mr. Arar and send them off to regimes known to engage in torture. The policy is known as extraordinary rendition, which is an extreme variation of a little-known but longstanding legal principle called rendition. Rendition most commonly refers to the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from a foreign country to the United States for the purpose of answering criminal charges.
... In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.
US Army Destroyed Mock Execution Pictures
Pictures of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posing with hooded and bound detainees during mock executions were destroyed after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq to avoid another public outrage, Army documents released Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union show.
The results of an Army probe of the photographs were among hundreds of pages of documents released after the ACLU obtained a federal court order in Manhattan to let it see documents about U.S. treatment of detainees around the world.
The ACLU said the probe shows the rippling effect of the Abu Ghraib scandal and that efforts to humiliate the enemy might have been more widespread than thought.
"It's increasingly clear that members of the military were aware of the allegations of torture and that efforts were taken to erase evidence, to shut down investigations and to humiliate the detainees in an effort to silence them," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.
Administration Is Warned About Its 'News' Videos
it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing "video news releases" that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role.
Mr. Walker, who as comptroller general is chief of the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, said in his letter: "While agencies generally have the right to disseminate information about their policies and activities, agencies may not use appropriated funds to produce or distribute prepackaged news stories intended to be viewed by television audiences that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
... The two best-known cases of such video news releases - one concerning the new Medicare law, the other an antidrug campaign by the Bush administration - drew sharp rebukes from the G.A.O. after separate investigations last year found that the agencies involved had violated the law.
Those cases were followed by disclosures that the government had paid at least one conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote the administration's No Child Left Behind education measure and had put two other conservative writers on the federal payroll to help develop programs. These episodes have prompted calls from Democrats for stricter oversight of the administration's publicity practices, which have cost millions of dollars of federal revenue.
In the Medicare case, a video made in the style of a newscast featured a spokeswoman named Karen Ryan who claimed to be reporting from Washington on Medicare law changes strongly backed by the administration but opposed by many Democrats, who consider them a windfall for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. In part of one script, she said that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."
... "The G.A.O. is sending a clear message to the Bush administration: shut down the propaganda mill," Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey said in a statement on Friday. "The G.A.O. is simply telling the White House to stop manipulating media, stop paying journalists and be straight with the American people."
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."
Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.
Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.
And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.
"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."
Added Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of Beirut's Daily Star: "The idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions about what would happen have proven false."
To paraphrase Tommy Franks' comment on Douglas Feith, these neocons are the "fucking stupidest people on earth". It was clear before the election that replacing Saddam with a democratic government in a country with a Shi'ite majority would create a government close to Iran. What a gift to the country that Bush is going to attack next. And what a failure for this pathetic country that we live in, which is being bankrupted and shamed by this gang of fools in Washington.
Bush's sick priorities create economic mess
Bush's first-term tax cuts were too expensive and too skewed toward top earners to work as effective, self-correcting economic stimulus. Instead, predictably, they've driven the nation deep into the red. Having reduced tax revenue to a share of the economy not seen since 1959, the cuts are a huge factor in the swing from a budget surplus to a $412 billion deficit.
... Mr. Bush has unceasingly pursued deficit-financed tax cuts, even as the weak dollar has failed to fix the trade imbalance. The result is that the country's deficits - and borrowing needs - remain enormous even as dollar-based investments are becoming less attractive.
Lately, Mr. Bush has been talking the deficit reduction talk, but there's no sign that he is willing to walk the walk. In his 2006 budget, he pledges to slash spending, but largely in areas that would have only a small impact on the deficit and where cuts would be politically difficult, not to mention cruel, such as food stamps, veterans' medical care, child care and low-income housing.
Meanwhile, he is pounding the table for more deficit-bloating measures - making his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a 10-year cost of as much as $2.1 trillion; putting into effect two high-income tax breaks that were enacted in 2001 but have been on hold, at a 10-year cost of $115 billion; and introducing new tax incentives to allow high earners to shift even more cash into tax shelters, at a cost that would ultimately work out to more than $30 billion a year when investors cashed in their accounts tax-free.
Oh, yes. Mr. Bush also wants to borrow some $4.5 trillion over two decades to privatize Social Security, which is a bad idea even without the borrowing and a horrendous one with it.
The global financial community won't be fooled.
Bush Team Tried to Suppress Pre-9/11 Report Into al-Qa'ida
Federal officials were repeatedly warned in the months before the 11 September 2001 terror attacks that Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida were planning aircraft hijackings and suicide attacks, according to a new report that the Bush administration has been suppressing.
A newly-released memo warned the White House at the start of the Bush administration that al Qaeda represented a threat throughout the Islamic world, a warning that critics said went unheeded by President Bush until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The memo dated Jan. 25, 2001 was an essential feature of last year's hearings into intelligence failures. A copy of the document was posted on the National Security Archive Web site at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB147/index.htm on Feb. 10, 2005. Page one of the three-page memo is shown. Click on the image to open the 3-page memo as a .pdf file.
Critics say the new information undermines the government's claim that intelligence about al-Qa'ida's ambitions was "historical" in nature.
The independent commission investigating the attacks on New York and Washington concluded that while officials at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) did receive warnings, they were "lulled into a false sense of security". As a result, "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures".
The report, withheld from the public for months, says the FAA was primarily focused on the likelihood of an incident overseas. However, in spring 2001, it warned US airports that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable".
Kristin Bretweiser, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said yesterday the newly released details undermined testimony from Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, who told the commission that information about al-Qa'ida's threats seen by the administration was "historical in nature".
Senate May Open Inquiry Into C.I.A.'s Handling of Suspects
WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 - The Senate intelligence committee is moving toward adoption of a plan to conduct a formal inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency's handling of suspects captured in the American effort to curb terrorism, Congressional officials from each party said this week.
The inquiry would be the first by Congress to address the C.I.A.'s conduct in what has remained a shadowy corner of American counterterrorism efforts. The agency is believed to be holding at least three dozen senior members of Al Qaeda at secret sites around the world, and former intelligence officials say it has been involved in the extrajudicial handing over to third countries of scores of other suspects, in an arrangement known as rendition.
The C.I.A.'s inspector general is already conducting several reviews of the agency's detention and interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, including several episodes in which prisoners have been injured or killed in C.I.A. custody, intelligence officials have said. However, no C.I.A. review is known to be under way into the renditions or the treatment of prisoners at the secret sites, where those being held by the agency include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The top Republican on the panel, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, confirmed in an interview on Friday that he and his staff were reviewing a proposal submitted by the top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, which called for a formal investigation into detention, interrogation and rendition. Mr. Roberts said he was not sure that a formal investigation was warranted, but he suggested that the two sides could agree on a review.
"I don't anticipate any difference of opinion regarding the subject," Mr. Roberts said.
Detainee Says He Was Tortured While in U.S. Custody
SYDNEY, Australia, Feb. 12 - Mamdouh Habib still has a bruise on his lower back. He says it is a sign of the beatings he endured in a prison in Egypt. Interrogators there put out cigarettes on his chest, he says, and he lifts his shirt to show the marks. He says he got the dark spot on his forehead when Americans hit his head against the floor at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
After being arrested in Pakistan in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, he was held as a terror suspect by the Americans for 40 months. Back home now, Mr. Habib alleges that at every step of his detention - from Pakistan, to Egypt, to Afghanistan, to Guantánamo - he endured physical and psychological abuse.
The physical abuse, he said, ranged from a kick "that nearly killed me" to electric shocks administered through a wired helmet that he said interrogators told him could detect whether he was lying.
Speaking publicly for the first time since he was freed two weeks ago, Mr. Habib, a 49-year-old Australian citizen born in Egypt, also described psychological abuse that seemed intended to undermine his identity - as a husband, a father and a Muslim man. At Guantánamo, he said, he was sexually humiliated by a female interrogator who reached under her skirt and threw what appeared to be blood in his face. He also said he was forced to look at photographs of his wife's face superimposed on images of naked women next to Osama bin Laden.
Ministers believe Briton was tortured by US officers
British ministers believe US interrogators could be guilty of torturing and abusing Moazzam Begg, one of the Britons released from Guantanamo Bay last month, The Independent on Sunday has learned.
Britain has rejected initial claims by the Pentagon that Mr Begg's allegations are unfounded, and has insisted that the US launches a second, more intensive, inquiry into his case.
The Foreign Office believes that Mr Begg, a former bookseller from Birmingham, has made "credible" allegations that he was severely ill treated by US intelligence officers at Bagram air base in Afghanistan three years ago. A source said: "There is genuine concern about the allegations which have been made. We want a proper investigation."
Pentagon covers up failure to train and recruit local security forces
Training of Iraq's security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned.
Instead, only figures for troops "on hand" are issued. The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country's bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks' training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police.
The resulting confusion over numbers has allowed the US administration to claim that it is half-way to meeting the target of training almost 270,000 Iraqi forces, including around 52,000 troops and 135,000 Iraqi policemen. The reality, according to experts, is that there may be as few as 5,000 troops who could be considered combat ready.
The gap between troops "on hand" and the overall target for fully trained and equipped security forces has actually widened in recent months, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington- based think-tank. Between October and November last year, just before the Pentagon quietly stopped giving figures for fully trained troops, the shortfall more than doubled, from 69,400 to 159,000. At current levels, the targets would not be met until next year.
The sleight of hand over troop numbers provoked a sharp clash during Condoleezza Rice's Senate confirmation hearings to become Secretary of State. After she quoted Pentagon figures claiming 122,000 Iraqis had been trained, she was told by Democratic Senator Joseph Biden: "Time and again this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel. And that is simply not true. We're months, probably years, away from reaching our target goal."
David Isenberg, an analyst at the British and American Security Council, said "disaster is too polite a word" for efforts to train Iraqi forces. "We are not being honest about the numbers," he added. "We have no consensus about who has been trained, about who we are talking about."
Friday, February 11, 2005
Lawyer: Contractor Beat Afghan As His Duty
RALEIGH, N.C. - A CIA (news - web sites) contractor charged with beating an Afghan detainee who later died was protecting the nation against terrorists and should not be prosecuted because he was following directives from the president and his administration, his lawyers argued in filings released this week.
Lawyers for David A. Passaro, a former Army Special Forces soldier from North Carolina who was hired as CIA contractor, also contend that the alleged beating of Abdul Wali occurred outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
Passaro's lawyer, public defender Thomas P. McNamara, filed his motion to dismiss the federal charges in December, but the document was only made publicly available this week.
In it, McNamara points out that Bush said on Sept. 12, 2001, a day after terrorist attacks in the United States that resulted in the deaths of 3,000 people, that the nation "will use all our resources to conquer this enemy." He also cites remarks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House officials that he argues immunize Passaro from prosecution.
McNamara wrote that the laws under which Passaro was charged were "not designed for application to the front lines of battle."
Passaro was charged in June with four counts of assault, accused of beating Wali with his hands, feet and a flashlight as he tried to get information about rocket attacks on U.S. forces.
Prosecutors say Wali died June 21, 2003, after two days of interrogations and beatings by Passaro. Three paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division will testify that they witnessed the beating, prosecutors said. Passaro is not charged in his death.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Paranoia Grips the U.S. Capital
The Pentagon's new spy arm will be largely excluded from Congressional oversight or media examination. Its special operations teams will roam the globe, all under cover of "deep black" missions of which no records will be kept, and no questions asked.
Equally worrying, the Pentagon's new special-ops units are headed up by notorious religious fanatic, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who calls the U.S. Army "the house of God" and Islamic insurgents "agents of Satan." He warned Muslims, "my God is bigger than your god, which is an idol."
Boykin's command will now dispatch post-modern Christian crusaders to cleanse the world of Satanic Muslims and other miscreants. The Pentagon's new special forces will be able to run operations of which the CIA knows nothing.
The 9/11 Commission called for improved intra-agency co-operation and data sharing -- instead, the U.S. will get far less co-operation, as the Pentagon goes its own, secret way.
The Ethics of War: Is the US Military Guilty of War Crimes in Iraq?
Human Rights Watch has also documented numerous cases in which military authorities have failed to adequately investigate allegations of indiscriminate or excessive force against civilians. In October, Britain's Channel 4 news aired video footage, shot from a cockpit camera, that appears to show U.S. pilots attacking and killing a group of unarmed civilians in Fallujah. The British newspaper the Independent carried a story about the April incident, which has gotten no coverage in mainstream U.S. media.
According to Independent reporter Andrew Buncombe, "The 30-second clip shows the pilot targeting the group of people in a street in the city of Fallujah and asking his mission controllers whether he should 'take them out.' He is told to do so ... . At no point during the exchange between the pilot and controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are armed or posing a threat."
A similar incident was reported in Baghdad in September, when a helicopter fired on a group of Iraqi civilians who had gathered around a disabled Bradley fighting vehicle, killing 13 and wounding 61. There have been a disturbing number of such reports of massacres, but few have resulted in criminal prosecution.
But the most troubling questions of war crimes are raised not by isolated incidents involving individual soldiers, but by strategies and tactics that put large numbers of citizens at risk. As the occupying power, the coalition forces have a legal obligation under the Geneva Conventions to protect civilian lives. The U.S. military has offered repeated assurances that the bombing of Fallujah, Baghdad and other Iraqi cities is carried out with precision weaponry that is carefully targeted against insurgent positions, and that every effort is made to minimize civilian casualties, but the sheer volume of civilian casualties undermines the credibility of those claims.
We know that hundreds of civilians were killed last spring in the assault on Fallujah that followed the killing of four civilian contractors, but there is no reliable count of the number of civilians killed in the near-daily bombardment that followed -- often using indiscriminate 500-pound bombs -- or in the capture of the city in November.
Most Americans probably have little sense of the scale of destruction caused by the U.S. assault on Fallujah, a city roughly the size of St. Paul. But it is devastated, reported Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist for Britain's Guardian in a documentary shown on British TV. "Fallujah used to be a modern city; now there is nothing. We spent that first day going through the rubble that had been the center of the city; I don't see a single building that is functioning."
In that attack, U.S. and Iraqi troops stormed the city's main hospital, making it off-limits to Iraqi civilians, and bombed a second hospital and an emergency clinic -- all violations of international law.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Oil firms fund climate change 'denial'
Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that "a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change" is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.
Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.
A Whistle-Blower's Inside View of the Homeland Security Nominee In 2001, Chertoff was the head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department and I was legal advisor to the department on matters of ethics. When I "did the right thing," and gave the department advice that conflicted with what it wanted to hear, I was forced out of my job, fired from my subsequent private sector job at the government's behest, placed under criminal investigation without any charges ever being brought, referred for disciplinary action to the state bars where I'm licensed as a lawyer, and, so I've been told as I've been searched time and again at airports, put on the "no fly" list.
Here's what happened. In 2001, I was a legal advisor in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. On Dec. 7, I fielded a call from a criminal division attorney named John DePue. He wanted to know about the ethical propriety of interrogating "American Talib" John Walker Lindh without a lawyer being present. DePue told me that Lindh's father had retained counsel for his son.
I advised him that Lindh should not be questioned without his lawyer. That was on a Friday. Over the weekend, the FBI interviewed him anyway. DePue called back on Monday asking what to do now.
I advised that the interview might have to be sealed and used only for intelligence-gathering or national security purposes, not criminal prosecution. Again, my advice was ignored.
Three weeks later, on Jan. 15, 2002, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced that a criminal complaint was being filed against Lindh. "The subject here is entitled to choose his own lawyer," he said, "and to our knowledge, has not chosen a lawyer at this time." I knew that wasn't true.
Friday, February 04, 2005
Without a Doubt--Bush's Certainty is Based on Insecurity
''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
... The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the modern era, and ''it's both exclusive and exclusionary,'' Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative policy group, told me. ''It's a too tightly managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being offered.''
... In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''
EPA Faults Findings on Mercury
EPA's political appointees instructed the agency's staff last year to use a predetermined target for reducing mercury, rather than doing the necessary studies to find the lowest possible emission levels that could be achieved in the shortest possible time.
Rather than relying on "an unbiased calculation" to make this determination, she said, the process "was compromised" by intervention from top officials.
Tinsley urged the agency to strengthen its pending rule "to better ensure that human health is protected." She also recommended that it conduct further analysis, including assessing the costs and benefits of emission reductions.
"We concluded that EPA's rule development process for this case was inconsistent with expected and past EPA practices, including a failure to fully assess the rule's impact on children's health," she said in a statement accompanying the 54-page report.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Deeds, Not Words: A Progressive Alternative to the Bush Doctrine: "Bush's security policy has backfired. 'A new world order is indeed emerging,' Lind wrote, but Bush's strategies have generated so much ill-will abroad that 'its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.'
'Practically all new international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation.'
A fascinating and underreported 119-page study, 'Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project,' recently issued by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, underscores Lind's arguments by highlighting the steep decline of US moral, political and economic capital. Available on the CIA's website, the report predicts that in 2020 China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and other nations will have emerged as powerful rivals to US global dominance, 'transform[ing] the geopolitical landscape' and significantly eroding US power. "
Gonzales OK Could Be Seen as OK for Torture Rules: "Gonzales' assertion that international treaties do not apply to interrogations carried out by U.S. forces outside U.S. territory is wrong.
The administration's position 'is completely inconsistent with the spirit, the legislative history, and in some respects with the language' of the Convention [Against Torture], said Sofaer, who was the Bush administration's point man when the convention was presented to the Senate for ratification in 1990. In the hearings, Gonzales was also asked whether he agreed with a 2002 memo he commissioned from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- where Yoo was a lawyer -- that concluded that all harsh tactics were acceptable up to the point of 'intentionally causing permanent damage to vital organs or permanent emotional trauma.'
Gonzales answered: 'I don't recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department.'
In his written responses submitted after testifying, Gonzales still could not recall his prior views on the 2002 memo and refused to disclose any documents related to it. "
Videos of Riot Squads at Guantanamo Show Prisoners Being Punched and Stripped From the Waist Down: "Videotapes of riot squads subduing troublesome terror suspects at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay show the guards punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down, according to a secret report. One squad was all-female, traumatizing some Muslim prisoners. "
Videos of Riot Squads at Guantanamo Show Prisoners Being Punched and Stripped From the Waist Down: "Videotapes of riot squads subduing troublesome terror suspects at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay show the guards punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down, according to a secret report. One squad was all-female, traumatizing some Muslim prisoners. "
Respecting the Spirit and Letter of the Law: On the Nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States: "The Bybee ['Torture'] memo drew universal condemnation and scorn for at least two of the legal opinions that were included in its text. First, it described torture as being prohibited under U.S. law in only very circumscribed circumstances. It defined torture so narrowly that horrific harm could be inflicted against another human being in the course of an interrogation overseas and not be prohibited. According to the memo, unless such acts resulted in organ failure, the impairment of a bodily function, or death, they could be considered legal. In fact, the first page of the memorandum states, 'We conclude that the statute [against torture], taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts. . . This confirms our view that the criminal statute penalizes only the most egregious conduct.'
The second but equally shocking and erroneous legal conclusion reached in the so-called 'torture' memorandum states, 'We find that in the circumstances of the current war against al Queda and its allies, prosecution under Section 2340A [the relevant provision of U.S. law prohibiting torture] may be barred because enforcement of the statute would represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war' as the Commander-in-Chief. This means the White House believed that a President can simply 'override' the U.S. law prohibiting torture, just because he disagrees with it. He can ignore the law by proclaiming, in his own mind, that the law is unconstitutional. Not because a court of the United States has found the law to be unconstitutional, but because a war-time President decides he simply does not want to be bound by it.
What an astounding assertion! Think of it! A President placing himself "
Respecting the Spirit and Letter of the Law: On the Nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States: "The Bybee ['Torture'] memo drew universal condemnation and scorn for at least two of the legal opinions that were included in its text. First, it described torture as being prohibited under U.S. law in only very circumscribed circumstances. It defined torture so narrowly that horrific harm could be inflicted against another human being in the course of an interrogation overseas and not be prohibited. According to the memo, unless such acts resulted in organ failure, the impairment of a bodily function, or death, they could be considered legal. In fact, the first page of the memorandum states, 'We conclude that the statute [against torture], taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts. . . This confirms our view that the criminal statute penalizes only the most egregious conduct.'
The second but equally shocking and erroneous legal conclusion reached in the so-called 'torture' memorandum states, 'We find that in the circumstances of the current war against al Queda and its allies, prosecution under Section 2340A [the relevant provision of U.S. law prohibiting torture] may be barred because enforcement of the statute would represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war' as the Commander-in-Chief. This means the White House believed that a President can simply 'override' the U.S. law prohibiting torture, just because he disagrees with it. He can ignore the law by proclaiming, in his own mind, that the law is unconstitutional. Not because a court of the United States has found the law to be unconstitutional, but because a war-time President decides he simply does not want to be bound by it.
What an astounding assertion! Think of it! A President placing himself "
Respecting the Spirit and Letter of the Law: On the Nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States: "The Bybee ['Torture'] memo drew universal condemnation and scorn for at least two of the legal opinions that were included in its text. First, it described torture as being prohibited under U.S. law in only very circumscribed circumstances. It defined torture so narrowly that horrific harm could be inflicted against another human being in the course of an interrogation overseas and not be prohibited. According to the memo, unless such acts resulted in organ failure, the impairment of a bodily function, or death, they could be considered legal. In fact, the first page of the memorandum states, 'We conclude that the statute [against torture], taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts. . . This confirms our view that the criminal statute penalizes only the most egregious conduct.'
The second but equally shocking and erroneous legal conclusion reached in the so-called 'torture' memorandum states, 'We find that in the circumstances of the current war against al Queda and its allies, prosecution under Section 2340A [the relevant provision of U.S. law prohibiting torture] may be barred because enforcement of the statute would represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war' as the Commander-in-Chief. This means the White House believed that a President can simply 'override' the U.S. law prohibiting torture, just because he disagrees with it. He can ignore the law by proclaiming, in his own mind, that the law is unconstitutional. Not because a court of the United States has found the law to be unconstitutional, but because a war-time President decides he simply does not want to be bound by it.
What an astounding assertion! Think of it! A President placing himself "
Judge: Bush Administration Violated Endangered Species Act: "The Bush administration violated the Endangered Species Act when it relaxed protections on many of the nation's gray wolves, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones in Portland handed down a decision Tuesday rescinding a rule change that allowed ranchers to shoot wolves on sight if they were attacking livestock, said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.
... the judge ruled that the government acted improperly by combining areas where wolves were doing well, such as Montana, with places where their numbers had not recovered.
'Interior Secretary Gale Norton tried to gerrymander the entire contiguous 48 states so that wolves in a few areas would make up for the absence of wolves in much larger regions,' Robinson said. 'Now, instead of drawing lines on the map based on political considerations, any future lines must be based on science.' "
