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AFIB No. 714, April 19, 2006 -
Back Issues #703 - 705/ #710 - 713
News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 724, May 24, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
A tradition of nativist xenophobia has from the beginning fueled war on radicalism. Counter-subversive movements have historically singled out the alien as the enemy because of his foreign birth, his espousal of foreign ideas ("isms"), and his asserted allegiance to a foreign country. At the end o the eighteenth century, domestic criticism and unrest were condemned as unwelcome old world discontents, and linked to the French Revolution. In the nineteenth, Socialist thought and ideas were stigmatized as foreign, as were their immigrant adherents. The Haymarket trials and the Palmer Raids flamed with this nativist fury. The foreign radicals had unforgivably rejected a government and society that were man's highest achievements, the treasured fruits of a divinely guided historical experience. Barbarians because they had spurned an opportunity to become Romans, they were not merely political "undesirables" but a threat to civilization itself. -- Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980] pp. 17-18.
Contents: Number 724
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 726/May 31, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 725/May 28, 2006
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Wednesday, 24 May 2006 -
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1. FBI STAGES UNPRECEDENTED RAID ON CONGRESSMAN'S OFFICE
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/fbi-m24.shtml
By Kate Randall
The FBI conducted a search of the office of Louisiana Representative William Jefferson over the weekend in what is the first such intrusion by an agency of the executive branch into the office of a sitting congressman in US history. In a press conference on Monday, Jefferson, a Democrat, denounced the raid as an "outrageous intrusion into the separation of powers."
The raid on Jefferson's office in the Rayburn House Office Building on Saturday night was a politically motivated breach of constitutional boundaries aimed at asserting the power of the executive branch over the legislative. It is yet another political marker in the government's moves towards dictatorial forms of rule.
The action was an unmistakable signal to any congressmen who might be inclined to seriously investigate the myriad illegal and unconstitutional actions of the administration, and hold leading members of the administration accountable.
There were, no doubt, other political calculations as well. The choice of a Democrat as the target of the raid was not accidental, given the welter of bribery and influence-peddling scandals that have beset the Republicans in recent months.
Jefferson is the subject of a bribery investigation. The FBI is probing allegations that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to promote business ventures in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. His New Orleans and Washington-area homes were search by the FBI last August.
In a search-warrant affidavit unsealed on Sunday, the FBI states it has videotaped evidence of Jefferson taking $100,000 in bribe money and that it found $90,000 of the same cash inside his apartment freezer. Two other individuals have pleaded guilty to bribing Jefferson to promote the Kentucky-based Internet and cable TV company, iGate.
Underscoring the unprecedented and egregious character of the Justice Department operation is the reaction it has provoked from leading Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist stated he was "very concerned" about the incident and said Senate and House counsels would review it.
In a strongly worded statement, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (Republican, Illinois) protested the "overreaching and abuse of power by the executive branch." He continued: "I am very concerned about the necessity of a Saturday night raid on Congressman Jefferson's Capitol Hill Office in pursuit of information that was already under subpoena and at a time when those subpoenas are still pending and all the documents that have been subpoenaed were being preserved."
Hastert added, "The Founding Fathers were very careful to establish in the Constitution a Separation of Powers to protect Americans against the tyranny of any one branch of government. They were particularly concerned about limiting the power of the Executive Branch.
"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress... Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sent an email to congressional Republicans Sunday night, commenting, "What happened Saturday night... is the most blatant violation of the Constitutional Separation of Powers in my lifetime... I am shaken by this abuse of power."
Representative David Dreier, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Rules Committee, said "I think this is really outrageous."
Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner, speaking with reporters in an off-camera briefing, said he wondered whether people at the Justice Department had looked at the Constitution lately. He predicted that the matter might eventually go to the Supreme Court.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) issued a milder rebuke, stating that "members of Congress must obey the law and cooperate fully with any criminal investigation," but that "Justice Department investigations must be conducted in accordance with constitutional protections and historical precedent."
The search of a congressional office violates the "speech or debate" clause of the US Constitution, contained in Section 6 of Article 1, concerning the legislative branch. This clause was aimed at shielding legislators from intimidation by the executive branch, and has been broadly interpreted by the courts throughout history. It traces its origins back to a clause in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, aimed at protecting the independence of Parliament against the monarchy.
Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor, commented to the Washington Post that the raid on Jefferson's office constituted "an intimidating tactic that has never before been used against the legislative branch." He added, "The framers [of the Constitution] would turn over in their graves."
Donald Ritchie, a historian with the Senate, said his office could find no record of a similar incident, though the homes and business offices of lawmakers had been searched in the past.
Information that has emerged since Saturday night makes clear that Bush administration officials were well aware they were treading on constitutionally protected ground in executing the raid. In seeking a search warrant from a federal district judge in suburban Virginia, the Justice Department outlined special procedures they would follow, including the use of a "filter team" to supposedly ensure that the search did not infringe on privileged legislative material.
This "filter team"--comprised of prosecutors and FBI agents whom the Justice Department contends are unconnected to the investigation--would review any seized items or documents to determine whether they are privileged and therefore immune from the search warrant. It is clear, however, that the members of this team would be answerable to the Justice Department, an executive branch agency ultimately accountable to the White House. As such, this "safeguard" would serve again to establish presidential powers over the legislative branch.
Another sign of the calculated nature of the operation is the fact that FBI officials activated a special command center for the sole purpose of monitoring the raid.
Defending the raid in response to the outcry from members of the Senate and House, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday would only say, "I admit that these were unusual steps that were taken in response to an unusual set of circumstances." On Tuesday he claimed that his office had decided the search of Jefferson's office was "absolutely essential to move forward with that investigation."
This is hardly plausible, given the mass of evidence the government had evidently already assembled against the Democratic congressman. There was, moreover, no legitimate reason for sidestepping the normal procedure of issuing subpoenas.
The Justice Department search of Jefferson's office must be seen in the context of the frontal assault on traditional democratic procedures and constitutional safeguards being carried out by the Bush administration. This is a government that operates in secret and refuses to hold itself accountable either to Congress or to the American people.
Its methods and policies--an illegal war based on lies, the use of torture, secret prisons and kidnappings, the denial of due process and habeas corpus rights, a vast and secret program of warrantless spying on the American people, the repeated refusal to hand over documents to Congress or allow White House officials to testify in congressional investigations, the use of the military for domestic policing operations in violation of the posse comitatus act--constitute preparations for police state forms of rule that are well advanced.
Only three days ago, Gonzales indicated that the government was considering prosecuting journalists for reporting, on the basis of leaks provided by intelligence agency whistle-blowers, information on the National Security Agency data base of the phone records of more than 200 million Americans and the existence of secret CIA prisons abroad where alleged terrorists are being held indefinitely without any access to legal process. He said that the government had the legal authority to prosecute newspapers and journalists for such disclosures.
A week earlier, on May 15, two ABC News reporters revealed that the FBI, at the request of the CIA, had been tracking their phone calls.
To condemn the FBI raid in no way implies political support for Jefferson or suggests he is innocent of the corruption charges. In fact, the rampant corruption in Washington, which involves both parties, with corporate money shamelessly used to buy congressmen and their votes, is itself a manifestation of the same process of political decay. Both parties are complicit in anti-democratic measures whose essential purpose is to defend the rule of a narrow financial elite that is enriching itself by driving down the living standards of the broad mass of working people.
In this case, the Bush administration used allegations of corruption as the pretext for a further assault on the constitutional principle of the separation of powers between co-equal branches of government--executive, legislative and judicial--so as to move further toward the establishment of a presidential dictatorship.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
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THE NEW YORKER
The Talk of the Town
May 29, 2006 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060529ta_talk_hersh
by Seymour M. Hersh
A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public's right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. "When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that 'we'll never be able to collect intelligence again,'" the former official said. "They'd whine, 'Why do we have to report to oversight committees?'" But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. "We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal."
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.'s carefully constructed rules were set aside.
Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier's network core--the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records," the consultant said. "They're providing total access to all the data."
"This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order," a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration's goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. "The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence," the former official said.
The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person--for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"--if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.
FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. "We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. â·We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others." Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because "there's no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed."
But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect's name and go to the FISA court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.
Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.
The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out. "There's a lot that needs to be looked at," he said. "We are in a technology age. We need to tweak FISA, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues."
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA "it would have got them." He told me, "The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this."
General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional staff aide said, "The concern is that the Administration says, 'We're going to do this,' and he does it--even if he knows better." Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion, after the Times expose, that the N.S.A.'s wiretap program could have prevented the attacks of 9/11. "That's patently false and an indication that he's willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President," Kerrey said.
Hayden's public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive," a Pentagon consultant told me. "It's intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you're looking and what you're after."
On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, "If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying." That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. "Nobody disputes the value of the tool," the former senior intelligence official told me. "It's the unresolved tension between the operators saying, 'Here's what we can build,' and the legal people saying, 'Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can use it.'" It's a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.
Copyright 2006 CondeNet. All rights reserved.
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3. WHISTLE-BLOWER'S EVIDENCE, UNCUT
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WIRED NEWS
Technology
May, 22, 2006
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70944-0.html
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.
In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA's visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.
Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure" and a second "Cut-In and Test Procedure" dated Jan. 24, 2003.
Here we present Klein's statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here, http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.pdf. The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.
AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens
31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program, which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network
16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002
To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting "research" using "artificial synthetic data" or information from "normal DOD intelligence channels" and hence there are "no U.S. citizen privacy implications" (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter's abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for "the majority of the TIA components," allowing several "components" to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.
In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.
Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.
This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform -- in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter -- its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.
The above-referenced document includes a diagram showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to "SG3 Secure Room," i.e., the so-called "Study Group" spy room. Another page headlined "Cabinet Naming" lists not only the "splitter" cabinet but also the equipment installed in the "SG3" room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 "backbone" routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the "splitter" cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the "secret room" on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco "secret room" is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.
One of the devices in the "Cabinet Naming" list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the "secret room": a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the "Lead Sponsor" for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled "Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance." Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the "war on terror" had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?
"The (Narus) STA Platform consists of standalone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.... These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device" (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology "captures comprehensive customer usage data ... and transforms it into actionable information.... (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications."
To implement this scheme, WorldNet's high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special "splitter" cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure, dated 01/13/03. "SIMS" is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
"A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document...."This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits."
The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion "management" employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the "splitter" cabinet.
Another Cut-In and Test Procedure document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the "splitter" cabinet. One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were "cut-in" in February 2003, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It's not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on -- it's the entire internet.
The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various "secret rooms"? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General's report (cited above):
"For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)...."
Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM "testing" are the "National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center." There are also "discussions" going on to bring in "non-DOD federal agencies" such as the FBI.
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****
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4. IRAN DEPLOYS ITS WAR MACHINE
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
Middle East
May 24, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE24Ak05.html
By Iason Athanasiadis
TEHRAN - For Hossein Shariatzadeh, a veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, now navigating Tehran's traffic-choked streets as a taxi driver, the issue of whether the United States will strike Iraq is hardly a frightening prospect.
"This is Iran," he roared. "It is fire. It is a nuclear bomb. Don't look at my sitting behind the wheel of this car. I would get up in a second and head off to the front to fight."
During his 18 months of service at the front, Shariatzadeh claims to have fought in several flashpoint events. Before being evacuated to Tehran after taking a bullet in the stomach, he participated in the 18th Mah, Fath-ul Mubin and Fajrs 1, 2 and 4 offensives, some of the most horrific campaigns of a drawn-out war characterized by trench warfare and tens of thousands of dead in return for minuscule advances.
Despite Shariatzadeh's lust to head to the front and defend his homeland, Iran's strategic planners are acutely aware that a military confrontation with the technologically more advanced US Army would be as rapid and multi-fronted as the Iran-Iraq War was static and slow-paced. Quite simply, there would not be a single front.
Neither the US nor Israel has ruled out taking military action against nuclear-related targets in Iran if ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze Tehran's nuclear program do not prove successful.
Accordingly, Iran has been quietly restructuring its military, while carrying out a series of military exercises testing its new military dogma. In December, more than 15,000 members of the regular armed forces participated in war games in northwestern Iran's strategically sensitive East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan border provinces that focused on irregular warfare carried out by highly mobile and speedy army units.
In another telling development, a second exercise was launched in the majority-Arab province of Khuzestan, reportedly aimed at quelling insurgencies in areas subject to ethnic unrest and prone to foreign influence. Involving 100,000 troops, the exercise provided a taste of how the Islamic Republic would respond to further disturbances in the strategic, oil-rich province.
The exercise came on the heels of news that the irregular Basij forces that led Iran's offensives against Iraq were being bolstered by so-called Ashura battalions with riot-control training.
It is all part of a fundamental transition that Iran's Revolutionary Guard (RG) is undergoing as it moves away from focusing on waging its defense of the country on the borders - unrealistic in view of the vast territory that requires securing and the gulf separating Iranian and US military capabilities - and toward drawing the enemy into the heartland and defeating it with asymmetrical tactics.
At the same time, the RG is moving away from a joint command with the ordinary army and taking a more prominent role in controlling Iran's often porous borders, even as it makes each of Iran's border provinces autonomous in the event of war. Iranian military planners know that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy oil-rich Khuzestan province, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks.
Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army make it clear that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating the US Army with conventional military doctrine. The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant US campaign has been followed by three years of slow hemorrhaging at the hands of insurgents.
Tehran argues that it is at a high level of preparedness and points to a number of war games carried out in recent months along its coastal zones, from Bandar Abbas and the Strait of Hormuz in January to the Persian Gulf theater in April and the Khorramshahr naval base and the northwestern parts of the Persian Gulf as of Sunday.
From several interviews with Iranian officials, researchers and foreign diplomats, it is clear that the Iranian army considers itself ready to repel a US land offensive and increasingly sees itself as the main regional power.
In line with the new feeling of invulnerability sweeping through Iran's military elite, RG commander-in-chief Yehya Rahim Safavi warned last month that "the Americans should accept Iran as a great regional power, and they should know that sanctions and military threats are not going to benefit them but are going to be against their interests and against the interests of some European countries".
Iran's new asymmetrical-warfare plan appears to be aimed at neutralizing possible US-led offensives across the Mandali-Ilam (central Iraq-central Iran) axis. The Iranian Zagros mountain range offers a natural first line of defense. It has been reported that the RG is constructing new bases at Khorramabad, Pessyan, Borujerd, Zagheh and Malayer in the province of Lorestan, which would assure the logistics of a quarter of a million troops and provide temporary shelter for half a million refugees from the border. These bases are supposedly complementing older ones further west at Sahneh and Kangavar.
"We know for a fact that no two Western wars are similar," said Hossein, a member of the RG, "and we know there are at least three possible scenarios of attacking these [nuclear] sites, including using their submarines in the Persian Gulf, commandos from the sea, or Mujahideen-e-Khalq trained in Israel and Azerbaijan to destroy the Bushehr nuclear power plant from the inside."
Even while Iran's military is choosing to go low-tech, the country's leadership is continuing to apply advanced technology to military uses. Tehran is continuing with development of its long-range missiles and is forging ahead on its indigenous satellite program that centers on Russian-supplied technology.
In addition, Tehran's aging air-defense system will be boosted by Russian-supplied land-to-air rockets. Also, Iran has aging Chinese missiles that it upgraded and could deploy on coastal batteries, fast attack boats or even warplanes. Finally, were Iran to possess the fearsome Russian-made 3M-82 Moskit anti-ship missiles, it could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet.
"While Iranian air power is somewhat limited, it has much in terms of land-to-air weaponry and has improvised much as well," Abdurrahman Shayyal, a Saudi Middle East and North Africa analyst, told Asia Times Online. "Furthermore, Iran has proved rather hard to infiltrate, and its military installations and bases are very well protected."
With the confrontation between Washington and Tehran escalating, a new, US-inspired plan to establish an anti-Iranian security regime has further raised tension in the Persian Gulf region. Aside from running covert operations inside Iran's ethnically mixed border provinces, the US administration is marshaling an alliance of Iran's Arab neighbors in the intensifying face-off.
The US media reported last weekend that the United States was trying to create a regional missile-defense system for the Gulf that would be integrated with real-time intelligence using sophisticated US Navy Aegis cruisers.
"Any security regime for the Persian Gulf that doesn't include Iran will not succeed," said Muhammad Reza Saedabadi, an assistant professor at the Institute of North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran. "It's splitting the region. It's good for the arms race and for arms sales to Persian Gulf states, but not for regional security."
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued ratcheting up the tension by refusing to offer Iran a guarantee that the United States would not attack it. "Iran is a troublemaker in the international system, a central banker of terrorism. Security assurances are not on the table," she said.
While seen as potentially threatening by several Gulf Arab governments, Iran commands significant popularity among indigenous Shi'ite Arab populations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. To a lesser extend, Sunni Arabs in the Gulf region and the wider Middle East applaud Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad for his strident anti-Western rhetoric, which emphasizes his country's independence and echoes the anti-imperialist liberation ideology of 1960s pan-Arabism.
Reflecting this mood, the English-language Gulf News published an editorial on Tuesday titled "An American offer we must refuse". It said, "As if the region was not volatile enough, the US now wants to install an advanced missile system in GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council ] states.
"Gulf countries have enough problems trying to walk a narrow path between the various positions ... so there is no need to exacerbate things further by introducing into the region such controversial measures as heightened security controls and advanced missile systems," the newspaper said.
At a "consultative summit" in Riyadh on May 6, the GCC countries indicated that they did not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but were also opposed to the use of force against it. Their position with regard to Iran, so far, bears greater similarity with the stance taken by Russia and China than the one adopted by the US and its European allies.
The GCC is a regional organization comprising the six Persian Gulf Arab states. Created on May 25, 1981, the council's members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
"The US is being completely ridiculous. While it wishes to police the region, it is dealing with a country that is significantly more powerful than Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Vietnam, and every other country bar Germany that it has ever fought," said Abdurrahman Shayyal.
Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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5. Classified French DGSE intelligence report
AL QAEDA TRAINING CAMP PASSED FROM CONTROL OF CIA TO BIN LADEN IN 1995
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 23, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR has obtained a confidential "France Only" report of the French intelligence service, Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), that states that the CIA and Britain's MI-6 maintained effective control of an important Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan as late as 1995, fully two years after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, an attack that was launched with the help of Sudanese intelligence officers loyal to Osama Bin Laden. The CIA and MI6 permitted control of training operations at Darunta, an "Arab Afghan" base located near the camp of Osama Bin Laden and used to manufacture explosives and chemical weapons and train in their use, to pass to the control of Ibn Cheikh, a Libyan leader of Al Qaeda.
The DGSE report, dated January 9, 2001, is classified "Defense Confidential" and "National (French) Use Only" states, "Besides the Maghreb enclave, the training at Darunta, which, for approximately 2 months, mainly involved the manufacture and the use of the explosives by terrorists. This training, initially provided at the camp of Khalden, in Paktia, was transferred during 1995, on the order of Ibn Cheikh, to Darunta, in order to slide [the training] from the control of the security services of certain countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom."
The report continues by stating that in 1998, the training was expanded to include the use of C-4 plastic explosives and different types of detonators (electric, acid, etc.). Training also included the use of homemade explosives (like improvised explosive devices killing so many in Iraq today) and poisons such as arsenic, cyanide, gas, diamond powder, nicotine, and ricin. After Al Qaeda took control of Darunta from the CIA and MI6, the camp was used to train Al Qaeda operatives to launch a series of deadly attacks, including the November 19, 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, the 1998 attacks on the US embassy in Nairobi, the abortive Dec. 31, 1999 "Millennium" attack on Los Angeles International Airport by Algerian Ahmed Ressam, and the attack on the USS Cole.
In 1995, James Woolsey left as CIA Director and was replaced by John Deutch. Deutch's deputy was George Tenet, who previously served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council. The National Security Adviser was Tony Lake. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was chaired by Larry Combest of Lubbock, Texas and 1995 was the year Porter Goss joined the CIA oversight committee. On November 12, 2002, only a week after winning his 10th term, Combest suddenly announced his resignation from the House. Goss took over the HPSCI gavel from Combest in 1997, after serving only two years on the committee. In 1995, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was Arlen Specter, a person whose fingerprints, like those of Goss, have been all over shady intelligence operations since the early 1960s. CIA intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer formed the CIA's Bin Laden Unit in 1996.
Two significant items emerge from the DGSE report. One is the fact that the CIA and MI6 were dealing with a Libyan Al Qaeda member at the same time Libyan leader Muammar el Qaddafi had declared war on Al Qaeda. Unlike the United States, Libya issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden on March 16, 1998. With this treasure trove of proof of U.S. (and British) support for Al Qaeda, Qaddafi had the U.S. and the neo-cons over the barrel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration now considers Qaddafi (once branded as terrorist number one) to be a good friend.
The other item is the training of Ahmed Ressam at Darunta. Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was charged with removing classified documents from the National Archives concerning the Ressam bombing plot. The question remains -- what were in these documents and did they have anything to do with the CIA's fingerprints on the Darunta camp?
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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6. U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS UNDERWAY IN SOMALIA;
RESOURCE CONFLICT ESCALATES OVER HORN OF AFRICA
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ONLINE JOURNAL
Special Reports
May 22, 2006
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_822.shtml
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
According to a May 16 report in the Washington Post, US analysts of Africa policy and officials of Somalia's interim government say that the Bush administration is secretly supporting secular Somali warlords, whose groups are battling Islamic groups for control of Mogadishu.
While the Bush administration has continued to dodge questions about what appear to be "classic" covert operations (similar to those taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, etc.), Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari has unequivocally declared "the US government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that. This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war."
Somalia is considered a "terrorist haven," as well as a potential "hotbed of al Qaeda activity." It is no surprise that in recent press conferences, new White House spokesman and propaganda mouthpiece (former Fox News pundit) Tony Snow repeatedly referred to "al Qaeda terrorists."
A senior US intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post article (who asked not to be named) says that Somalia presents "a classic 'enemy of our enemy' situation" (but "not an al Qaeda safe haven yet"), while former Clinton administration Africa specialist John Prendergast (now a senior advisor for the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group think tank) notes that "the US relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two" [for interrogation or rendition-LC].
Competing Geostrategic and Energy Interests in Somalia
Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001. This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia's resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, Somalia currently has no proven oil reserves, and only 200 billion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, and no hydrocarbon production. But this has not dimmed continuing interest in Somalia's untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of an energy bonanza following any resolution of the country's "internal security problems." The Somalian regime currently welcomes oil interests. Conoco, Agip, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips held concessions in the area. Of more immediate logistical and military interest, Somalia is situated on a key corridor between the Middle East and Africa, strategically located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, a short distance from Yemen.
As laid bare in the January 1993 report by Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, "The Oil Factor in Somalia," US oil companies, including Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips were positioned to exploit Somalia's rich oil reserves during the reign of pro-US President Mohammed Siad Barre. These companies had secured billion-dollar concessions to explore and drill in large portions of the Somali countryside prior to the coup led by warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid that toppled Barre. The US Somalia envoy at the time was CIA operative Robert Oakley, a chief "counter-terrorism" officer during the George H.W. Bush presidency, and veteran of the Afghanistan and Iran-Contra operations of the 1980s. Conoco's Mogadishu office housed the US embassy and military headquarters.
The infamous Somalia military operation of 1993, popularly depicted in the Philadelphia Inquirer series (and subsequent Hollywood film) "Blackhawk Down," was not a humanitarian mission, but an undeclared UN/US war launched by the George H.W. Bush adminstration, and inherited by the Clinton presidency. The operation was spearheaded by Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Howe (who remained in charge of the UN operation after Clinton took office), and approved by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs.
The current Bush administration's escalation in Somalia is a trip "back to the future." As noted by William Engdahl, "Yemen fits nicely as an 'emerging target' with the other target nearby, Somalia," both of which are important geostrategic "choke points":
"Washington's choice of Somalia and Yemen is a matched pair, as a look at a Middle East/Horn of Africa map will confirm. Yemen sits at the oil transit chokepoint of Bab el-Mandap, the narrow point controlling oil flow connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Yemen also has oil, although no one yet knows just how much. It could be huge. A US firm, Hunt Oil Co. is pumping 200,000 barrels a day from there but that is likely only the tip of the find.
"A new US cleansing of Somalian 'tyranny' would open the door for these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in Somalia. Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea."
The US, and US-affiliated oil interests, must, at the very least, find ways to head off the aggressive oil and gas-related operations on the part of China and its oil companies throughout the Horn of Africa region, Kenya, and Ethiopia, and West Africa.
The intense uproar over genocide in Darfur, and shrill calls for military intervention, masks intense geostrategic resource conflict being waged between competing superpowers.
As Engdahl notes, "Sudan, as noted, has become a major oil supplier to China whose national oil company has invested more than $3 billion since 1999, building oil pipelines from the south to the Red Sea port. The coincidence of this fact with the escalating concern in Washington about genocide and humanitarian disaster in oil-rich Darfur in southern Sudan, is not lost on Beijing. China threatened a UN veto against any intervention against Sudan. The first act of a re-elected [sic] Dick Cheney late last year was to fill his vice presidential jet with UN Security Council members to fly to Nairobi to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, an eerie reminder of Defense Secretary Cheney's 'humanitarian' concern over Somalia in 1991."
Recently, exploration teams from Australia have been hunting for oil in Somalia's Puntland. Canadian lawyer Jay Park, "one of the world's top oil and gas lawyers," is working with the Somalian government to create a "credible petroleum regime". According to Park, "(Somalia) is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it may be sitting on some of the greatest oil and gas treasures."
With the world facing Peak Oil and Gas, the world's superpowers are racing to secure every last drop of oil and natural gas from every remaining inch of the planet, with the African continent quickly becoming the stage for new violence and warfare. It is no surprise that Anglo-American oil interests, and the Bush administration's covert operatives, are working Somalia, and the region, for all it is worth.
Copyright 1998-2006 Online Journal
*****
REVOLUTION ONLINE
Box 3486, Merchandise Mart
Chicago, IL 60654
Tel: 773-227-4066
Fax: 773-227-4497
Web: http://www.rwor.org
- No. 48, May 28, 2006 -
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by Sunsara Taylor
http://rwor.org/a/048/luce-holy-war.html
"Do you care more about the pigs around you or God?" BattleCry leader Ron Luce asked the crowd of more than 17,000 youth gathered at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on Friday, May 12. No, this wasn't a metaphor. After reading a passage from Luke 15 that mentions pigs, he actually had a bunch of those big, oinking, pink, farm animals on stage with him! Get it, you either get with Luce's hateful, hyperpatriotic, woman-bashing, racist god, or you're a... pig?
And it became clear during the BattleCry rally, all the talk of battles, warriors and war is not metaphor either.
White Man's Burden
Early on the second day, a tribal drumbeat filled the stadium and a voice boomed out "the most violent people in human history."
Grainy images appeared on the stadium screens of indigenous Ecuadorians running and throwing spears. Proof of their "barbarism"? Never mind that their land was destroyed by oil development and their way of life undermined, these "savages" had killed five missionaries who came to destroy their belief systems decades ago. One of the supposed killers is brought on stage. He's been "civilized" by the Bible and calls on the youth to sign up for mission trips to go and convert others like him.
News flash to Luce's audience: These indigenous people, whose very existence is hanging by a thread--threatened by the encroachment of the "modern world" of exploitation, racism, environmental destruction and cultural genocide--are at least a hundred million people short of being "the most violent people in human history," even if they did what he accused them of.
The reality is that over a hundred million indigenous people were killed by the Europeans who followed Columbus to the "new world." And let's not forget that the genocide against Native Peoples was blessed by people carrying Ron Luce's Bible.
Finally, after being programmed with these racist lies, Luce's flock flooded down to the floor of the stadium to sign up for missions this summer--to Africa, Latin America, the urban U.S., Australia, the Mideast and beyond. As they went, Ron Luce offered odd encouragement, "You guys are freaks of a whole different breed...You guys are a bunch of wild animals. Man!"
Ignorance and Patriarchy
Next up on the agenda--woman bashing. If you think the world needs an alternative to the worst misogynist heavy metal or hip-hop, but you still want to see women degraded, insulted, and dehumanized, Luce has got just the thing for you.
Lakita Wright, self-proclaimed "sexpert" who has spoken to nations, Congress, and more than half a million young people this past year, stepped up to preach the "naked truth" (get it?) about abstinence and purity. Her specialty seemed to be shamelessly promoting racist and sexist stereotypes that only a Black woman trying to outdo Bill Cosby might be able to get away with.
She began with a parable that portrays "Lies" as female and "Truth" as male, then launched an attack on all the established truths about safe sex and resurrected all the oldest stigmas against those, especially women, who would engage in sex outside patriarchal marriages.
She reserved special derision for the "stupid" young women whose lives are disrupted because they have a baby. "Don't blame him [the baby]. It's your fault. You should have zipped it up. Locked it down. Clank. Clank." She drew chuckles from many men when she "slipped" and called women "flea-males," saying, "Did I say that? Well, if you lie down with dogs..."
Wright led a call-and-response about hundreds of sexually transmitted diseases and listed, with great drama, all the pain and disfigurement they can cause. Then, while claiming to care about these diseases, she went on to assail one thing that is proven to prevent them: "Condoms don't work."
Wright bemoaned the fact that judges in the U.S. today aren't required to study the Mosaic books of the Bible. These are the parts of the Bible that celebrate taking your enemies as slaves, killing their babies, and forcing women to be concubines (sex slaves), traded and controlled as possessions, and subject to the most horrific of abuses.
Reality check: Condoms save lives. Preaching "abstinence" as a way to prevent STDs kills people. Luce and his klan don't give a fuck about young people's lives--this war on condoms is driven by their literalist Biblical message: death by stoning for those who engage in sex outside of wedlock.
Holy War--For Real
After what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans, and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory.
A featured speaker, Franklin Graham, who is credited with converting George W. Bush, was introduced. He implied that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences."
He went on to assert that God sees marriage as a "relation between a man and a woman. Not a man and a man or a woman and a woman." This drew him his loudest applause of the day, never mind that the Bible celebrates many instances of marriage between one man and many women. Maybe next time I go to one of Luce's conventions, I'll bring a bunch of bumper stickers that have a stick figure of a man plus stick figures of 1,000 women with an equals sign and then the word "Marriage." People can put them on their cars to promote a model of marriage in the Bible--where King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS as a punishment).
The "heart" of Graham's speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the "battle for souls of men and women from North to South, East to West, over the entire earth." There is, he declared, "No way to God but through Jesus Christ."
Now, I actually don't believe that religion is the root cause of war--that's more driven by economic and political forces. But how long must we put up with a world where people are whipped up to kill people because--as Christian fascist general Jerry Boykin (whose troops got their asses kicked in Somalia) said: My god is bigger than your god.
Graham told the biblical story of Daniel "taming the Babylonians." After celebrating the U.S. troops who are killing in Iraq right now, he preached that there is "no difference between the Iraqis today and Babylon 1,000 years ago." In the Bible Babylon is the epitome of evil and decadence. All manner of bloodlust and plunder against it is not just condoned but celebrated. As Psalm 137:9 spells out, even the babies are to be dashed to death against the rocks!
While calling on the youth present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he exhorts them, "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!"
Then, a group of Navy SEALs are projected on the large screen above the stadium as they make their way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way, they looked like the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killing seen in rare footage out of Iraq.
Fireworks exploded and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted, bragging that all of these men have been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries, which conducts Bible studies at military bases around the world and is made up of current and retired SEALs, law enforcement, and other military who preach the Gospel. Among those on stage, one is a SEAL just back from Afghanistan and another was a member of a police SWAT team. All of them are trained to kill and do so believing God is sanctioning them.
One of the SEALs told about boot camp and being forced to surrender his entire will to the demands of his instructor. Luce stepped in to tell the audience, "That is your youth pastor. He's going to make you a SEAL for Christ." Of course, the great Commander of this religious army is God who issues his foot-soldiers armor--"a shield of faith, a belt of truth, and boots of preparedness"--as well as "offensive weapons" like the "sword of the spirit" and the "word of God."
This merging of "God's Army" and the U.S. military returns full circle to the event's opening when a letter of greeting and blessings from George W. Bush was read. After that, a minister had led thousands to bow their heads and thank the lord for giving them George Bush, who coincidentally is the U.S.'s Commander-in-Chief.
The Two Faces of Christian Fascism
BattleCry keeps this bloodthirsty holy war madness in the closet. You won't find it on their website and you wonâ·t hear it in their major media appearances. For all his on-stage bluster, and his stacks of books laced with militarism, when Ron Luce debated me on the O'Reilly Factor, he sounded more like a wilting flower, "Well, there are young people all over America and they are realizing that they are caught in the middle of this culture war... They are saying, you know what? We want our voices to be heard. We love the lord and we're not mean."
How many of the moms and dads and youth gravitating to the Christian fascists looking for life with a purpose have any idea that the agenda of their leaders is as gruesome, bloodthirsty, and horrible as the hell myth that they are being scared into submission with.
But whether or not you realize what you are signing onto, when you make your pact with Luce and his bunch, you're not only signing onto a brain-deadening fantasy that robs you of your ability to understand and change the world, you end up being led to fight--and shed blood--in a "holy war" for Bush and all he concentrates.
Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution Newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can't Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime. Click here, http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1295&Itemid=184, to watch Taylor debate Ron Luce on the O'Reilly Factor. She can be reached at: sunsarasworld@yahoo.com
Copyright 2006 Revolution Online
*****
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By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 5/14/06]
Source: Afrikan Frontline Network, nattyreb@comcast.net
- Sunday, 21 May 2006 -
The recent report that the nation's largest phone companies turned over data on millions of Americans is less surprising than the somewhat muted response it has evoked.
If polls are to be believed, nearly 70% of those polled find nothing objectionable with the secret tracking of phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Without directly challenging the accuracy of such polls, the simple facts that folks aren't up in arms, marching on the White House like angry cinematic villagers, torches in hand, on the tracks of a Frankenstein monster, is stunning.
The relative silence of Americans -- not pundits, who are paid to have an opinion -- but of average folks on this earth-shattering issue, suggests that it may be true.
What does this say about Americans?
It suggests that people have incredible faith in the government, or are so immobilized by fear that they welcome virtually anything the State advances, as long as it promises safety.
Some will say this is a natural response after 9-11.
Yet, this didn't begin on 9-11.
Illegal government spying on Americans has a long history in this country, occasioned by the fears unleashed during the Cold War. However, even when in the 1970s' such spying was uncovered, it didn't result in any end to such practices, but a transfer to another file, under another pretext. One need only read Frank Donner's 1981 book "The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System". This documented history is long, clear and undeniable.
Yet most Americans neither know, nor seem to want to know about what happened then, or what's happening now.
That great French observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw these qualities in Americans over 150 years ago, writing in his 1835 classic, "Democracy in America":
"A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart -- the slave of its own well-being, awaiting but the hand that will bind it. By such a nation the despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual. When the bulk of the community is engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times it is not rare to see upon the great stages of the world, as we see at our theaters, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action whilst all are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country; and then wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall." [From: de Tocqueville, Alexis, "Democracy in America" [2 vols.] (New York: Bantam Classic, 2004)[orig. publ. 1835] ].
As the White House and its lapdog press peddle the potion of fear, and beats the drum for more war, the alleged 'guarantees' of the Constitution are shredded like tissue-paper, daily. Wars based on lies; US torture chambers in Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan; secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and beyond; and now the tracking of millions of calls of Americans ...
Something is broken in Babylon; yet all we hear today is the silence of the lambs.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved.
Mr. Jamal's new work, WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party, is now available from South End Press, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.southendpress.org).
Check out Mumia's NEW book: "Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People": http://www.africanworld.com.
These are VERY SERIOUS TIMES for political activists in this country and around the world. Get full details and keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!! at http://www.mumia.org and http://www.movenet.org.
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The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
CHECK http://www.mumia.org FOR IMPORTANT ACTION ALERTS!
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END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
At the height of the opium trade during the Taliban regime, roughly 70 percent of the global supply of heroin originated from Afghanistan. In the wake of the US-led invasion, Afghanistan accounts for more than 85 percent of the global heroin market. In turn, the latter represents a sizeable fraction of the global narcotics market, estimated by the UN to be on the order of $400-500 billion a year. ... Intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates, which are allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks, together with their affiliates in the off-shore banking havens, launder large amounts of narco-dollars. ... Behind the trade in narcotics, there are powerful financial interests. The productive system underlying the Golden Crescent heroin market is protected by a US-sponsored regime in Kabul. US foreign policy serves these interests. Geopolitical and military control over the multibillion dollar drug routes constitutes a (hidden) strategic objective, comparable, in some regards, to the militarization of oil pipeline routes out of Central Asia. -- Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War On Terrorism" [Pincourt, QC: Global Research, 2005] pp. 228-229.
Contents: Number 723
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 725/May 28, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 724/May 24, 2006
* * * * *
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1. TALIBAN'S NEW COMMANDER READY FOR A FIGHT
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
South Asia
May 20, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE20Df02.html
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The Taliban's military offensive has begun in earnest in southern Afghanistan, with many key districts already captured by the militia that retreated from power in 2001 after the US-led invasion.
The scale and frequency of the Taliban's revitalized insurgency can be attributed directly to the recent appointment by Taliban leader Mullah Omar of legendary mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani as overall military field commander.
In the latest action - the biggest since the Taliban's ousting - in Helmand province, between 300 and 400 heavily armed Taliban fighters stormed a remote village. At least 100 people were killed, including 15 or more Afghan police and a female Canadian soldier.
Haqqani, a cleric, rose to fame during the decade of opposition to the Soviets in the 1980s. Coincidentally, at that time he was an ally of the United States.
Mullah Omar has provided Haqqani with major powers, funds and huge stockpiles of arms and ammunition and, most important, hundreds of youths who have been trained by the Iraqi resistance in urban guerrilla warfare.
Mullah Omar has demarcated specific areas of Afghanistan to different commanders, but now Haqqani is commander-at-large. He has also been charged with coordinating suicide attackers throughout the country. He is authorized to wage battles anywhere he chooses in Afghanistan.
Haqqani was not part of the Taliban movement when it first emerged from Zabul, but he was the first and most powerful commander of the Afghan resistance to surrender to the Taliban, unconditionally, in 1995. The defection paved the way for the Taliban to secure territorial advantage and finally victory in 1996.
Haqqani, in his 50s, had stunningly captured the first major city since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 - Khost - in 1991, from the puppet communist government of president Mohammad Najibullah.
Afghan parents still tell their children about the hero Haqqani, a thin man of small stature, who refused to stay in Peshawar in Pakistan, preferring the mountains, from where he kidnapped Soviet soldiers and ambushed their convoys. Haqqani stood out from other mujahideen as he was never blamed for warlordism, and he appeared to be truly dedicated to the cause of peace in Afghanistan.
Haqqani held relatively low-key positions throughout the Taliban's tenure, but remained loyal to Mullah Omar. During this time he is said to have run several al-Qaeda training camps for Osama bin Laden, with whom he was friendly.
After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Haqqani was invited to Islamabad, where the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with which he had close ties, offered him the presidency of Afghanistan, but on the condition that he break all ties with Mullah Omar and carve out a "moderate Taliban" faction. (In declassified US State Department documents, Haqqani is described as the tribal leader "most exploited by the ISI [and US] during the Soviet-Afghan war to facilitate the introduction of Arab mercenaries". [1])
Haqqani refused the offer and went back to the Ghulam Khan mountains between Khost and Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area and began his campaign of pitched battles against US-led forces. He then became a prime US target, with a number of attacks aimed specifically at eliminating him.
But although Haqqani still commanded great respect all over Afghanistan and especially among the tribal elders of Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Gardez, he still did not belong to the Taliban core - Mullah Omar's "kitchen cabinet".
He thus was not given a central role in the Taliban resistance, although he continued to mount random attacks in his area.
Mullah Akhtar Osamani and Mullah Dadullah were the central commanders, but they were not able to make any significant military breakthroughs when the Taliban's spring offensive was launched last month. Thus Haqqani's elevation.
Fresh funds, arms and human resources, and Haqqani's unquestioned military acumen honed in years fighting the Soviets, have revitalized the insurgency. An immediate spinoff was that veteran Afghan resistance figures, such as Saifullah Masoor, the commander of the renowned resistance leader Nasrullah Mansoor, who were previously sitting on the fence in Gardez and other areas, are now hand in hand with Haqqani.
The regions that the Taliban have targeted and the patterns of mobilization are similar to those used in the mid-1990s when the student militia emerged as a force to fill the chaotic political vacuum created after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and seize Kabul.
There are, though, two main distinctions today: the Taliban do not have the support of Pakistan, as they did to a large extent in the 1990s, and many independent groups have now gathered under the Taliban umbrella.
Thus the Taliban-led movement has converted into an organized revolt, concentrated in the southern provinces of Zabul, Helmand and Kandahar. Strengthened by loyal tribes, the targets are US-led coalition forces, as well as the Afghan National Army (ANA).
According to Asia Times Online contacts in Afghanistan, intense and constant battles have virtually paralyzed the ANA's ability to retaliate, and many villages and districts in the three key southern provinces are now under Taliban control. The ANA is therefore concentrating on keeping the major Afghan cities under the writ of the Kabul administration of President Hamid Karzai.
"Once again we are facing a mid-1990s-like situation when bloodshed was everywhere and the situation went from bad to worse and these circumstances allowed the Taliban movement to emerge and boot our government out," said former Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzaid in a telephone conversation with Asia Times Online. Ahmad Shah was the acting premier before the Taliban took power in 1996.
"The Karzai administration writ is nowhere, and the Afghan nation is once again in limbo," Ahmad Shah maintained.
Solid spadework
While Haqqani has provided the spark for the resistance, he could not have succeeded had thorough groundwork not been laid over the past year or so.
The Taliban launched a major recruitment drive last year. This coincided with the government of Pakistan clamping down on jihad activities in Indian-administered Kashmir.
This played right into the Taliban's hands as many former members of Pakistani jihadi organizations, including from the banned Laskhar-i-Toiba and the banned Jaish-i-Mohamed, gathered in North and South Waziristan, where the Taliban have established a virtual Islamic state along the lines of the former uncompromising fundamentalist religious Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All have pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar.
According to authoritative estimates obtained by Asia Times Online, about 27,000 fighters are gathered in North Waziristan alone. More than 13,000 are believed to be in South Waziristan. The Taliban leadership there had formed about 100 suicide squads by February, assembled under the motto "fight until the last man and the last bullet".
Partners, not followers
Now that the spring offensive has gained sustainable momentum, some of the old guard of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets have jumped into the fray, but as partners of the Taliban rather than followers of Mullah Omar.
One such is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, who operates in the Kunar Valley and Nooristan province on the border with Pakistan. According to reports from the area, his commanders and their men are grouping to pitch battle before the Taliban mobilize cadres in eastern Afghanistan.
In the Khugiani district in eastern Nangarhar province, Moulvi Yunus Khalis, the chief of his own faction of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, and his two sons, especially Anwarul Haq Mujahid, have started up activities and are instigating all tribes to revolt against the Kabul administration, as well as against foreign forces in Afghanistan.
Sporadic information coming out of the country also suggests revolts by many small warlords in the southern Pashtun heartland against the Karzai administration. However, at present they lack effective coordination among themselves, and with the Taliban.
Should they get organized, say people with close knowledge of the insurgency, a military mobilization all the way to Kabul could be only a few weeks away.
Note
1. Asia Times Online, Pakistan through the US looking glass, September 20, 2003.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
*****
ANOTHER DAY IN THE EMPIRE
Life in Neoconservative America
- Friday, May 19, 2006 -
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2. DRUG ADDICTION LUCRATIVE FOR NEOLIB BANKSTERS, CIA
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By Kurt Nimmo
"An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said," reports the New York Times. "We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack," Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and "militants," that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.
Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade--in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called "Golden Crescent" (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)--was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban--at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter--are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.
"ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels ... engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government," writes historian William Blum. "The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies," and also because selling heroin and spreading misery is highly profitable. In fact, the Soviets attempted to impose an opium ban on the country and this resulted in a revolt by tribal groups eventually exploited by the CIA and Pakistan.
"Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism," write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided "not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop," Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush's illegal invasion of the country was well underway. "Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ... The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade." In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.
Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. "Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world's heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing," notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:
Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year--nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA's Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller's banks.
It also put a pinch on the criminals and gangsters in Pakistan. "The Taliban's actions ... (destroying the opium crop) severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them," explains From the Wilderness. "Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year," not exactly small potatoes.
In 2004, according to research conducted by the Democratic Policy Committee, after "decreasing dramatically under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now [2004] produces nearly 3/4 of the world's opium. CIC [Center for International Cooperation] found that 'opium production, processing, and trafficking have surged, with revenues equaling roughly half of the legal economy of Afghanistan.' It is estimated that 1.7 million people, or 7 percent of the total population now grow poppies," all of this under the United States installed government of Hamid Karzai, the ex-Unocal employee.
But then none of this should be surprising--the CIA and neolib financiers and moneymen have long dabbled in drug dealing and drug addiction profiteering.
In addition to turning immense profits for societal parasites and other cockroach infestations on Wall Street, drug dealing is a great way for the government to intervene in the business of other nations, as Oliver North well understands (as the Contra was funded by the smuggling of cocaine). "The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by criminal narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging narco-militarists and corrupted politicians... This is really NEO-narco-colonialism, whereby local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies' illicit pipelines, the result is still a functional narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action," summarizes the CIA & Drugs website, http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/index.html.
So it is not surprising, as the New York Times puts it, there is a "Sudden Rise of Violence in Afghanistan" and the predictable murder of "a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement." In Afghanistan, the Hegelian dialect is working overtime--the U.S. government engineers the Afghan opium trade, thus resulting in social problems and violence associated with illicit drug distribution and consumption, and then turns around and organizes police training programs to combat the scourge it has spawned.
As well, for the Fabian socialist globalists, it is a great way to break down borders and implement "free trade zones," that is to say unhindered thievery zones. Call it a "war on drugs" or the endless war against "terrorism" (yet another Hegelian contrivance), it is all engineered to turn the world into a large slave plantation ruled by a decadent and debased elite cadre of neoliberal criminals.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair'anchor232499s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, with an introduction by Jeffrey St. Clair is now available through Dandelion Books: $17.95 trade paperback. He can be reached at: nimmo@nimmo.com.
Copyright 2006 Another Day in the Empire. All rights reserved.
*****
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Friday, 19 May 2006 -
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3. SENATE HEARING ON CIA NOMINEE:
DEMOCRATS RUBBERSTAMP BUSH POLICE-STATE SPYING
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/hayd-m19.shtml
By Patrick Martin
The Senate hearing Thursday on the nomination of General Michael Hayden to head the Central Intelligence Agency demonstrates the bipartisan congressional support for the Bush administration's assault on the democratic rights of the American people.
While there were scattered criticisms of the methods of the Bush administration, particularly its failure to consult with Congress, every senator on the Intelligence Committee accepted the premise that the United States is engaged in a "war on terror" and that the Bush administration's escalation of domestic surveillance and wiretapping is a product of that war.
There was no challenge to the Orwellian label, "terrorist surveillance program," which the Bush administration has chosen to apply to a program which actually involves the surveillance of the telephone calls and Internet messaging of nearly the entire American population--an estimated 225 million people. It would be far more accurate to describe the electronic monitoring and data-mining by the National Security Agency (NSA) as the "universal surveillance program"--or as the Pentagon once labeled its own version of the program, "Total Information Awareness."
Not one senator, on the Intelligence Committee or off it, will acknowledge the basic truth that the Bush administration is a far greater threat to the democratic rights of the American people than all the terrorists in the world. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda may be capable of terrible crimes, but they cannot impose a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States. That threat comes solely from the American ruling elite and its military-intelligence apparatus.
General Michael Hayden is a sworn enemy of the democratic rights of the American people. In his six years as head of the NSA, from 1999 to 2005, he was responsible for both the program of interception and eavesdropping on international phone calls, revealed by the New York Times in December, and the creation of an enormous database of the telephone calling records of 225 million Americans, made public by USA Today May 11.
While some press reports in the past week have suggested that the domestic telephone monitoring was less sweeping than reported by USA Today, perhaps limited to long distance phone calls, about 20 percent of the total, the New York Times quoted an unnamed "senior government official, granted anonymity to speak for publication about the classified program" confirming that "the security agency had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States."
A lawsuit brought by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), a group opposed to Internet censorship and spying, has produced evidence of widespread interception of traffic on the web by the same telecommunications companies that turned over phone records to the NSA. EFF legal director Cindy Cohn told Bloomberg News Wednesday that AT&T had carried out "real-time diversion of customer Internet data" as part of its collaboration with the NSA.
In his appearance before the Senate committee, Hayden adamantly defended both the legality and the necessity of telecommunications spying, while refusing to discuss any aspect of the program except in a closed session, where members of the Senate panel were sworn to secrecy. This was combined with a denunciation of leaks to the press which exposed both the illegal domestic surveillance and the CIA's network of secret prisons overseas, where selected prisoners are interrogated and tortured outside of any legal process. CIA officers "deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed, and criticized on the front pages of the newspapers," he said.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, sounded the same note in his opening remarks, when he rejected concerns that domestic spying was a violation of democratic rights, declaring, "You have no civil liberties if you are dead." This is a particularly moronic version of the bullying threats by the Bush White House that anyone who criticizes its repressive measures is opening the way for new 9/11-style attacks.
Roberts also denounces critics of the NSA spying as ill-informed, saying they were talking about a subject "about which they know little or nothing." This was a curious line of argument, given that the intelligence agencies, the Bush administration and its congressional apologists like Roberts have done their best to keep the American people in the dark about these abuses. Presumably only those who know quite a lot about the spying--i.e., the wiretappers themselves, and their political overseers--should be permitted to discuss the subject, and then only behind closed doors.
The chief spokesmen for the Democrats on the committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, accepted the framework put forward by Roberts, only in more restrained language. "The war on terrorism not only requires objective, independent intelligence analysis," Levin said, "it also requires us to strike a thoughtful balance between our liberty and our security."
The truth behind this soporific cliche, however, is that the liberty of the American people is being sacrificed to provide greater security for the US ruling class, the privileged class of multimillionaires and corporate CEOs who use both the Democratic and the Republican parties as their political instruments. The ruling elite is far more fearful of the intensifying opposition to the Iraq war and of a mass political upheaval provoked by the growing socioeconomic polarization within the United States than it is of any possible action by small bands of terrorists.
In selecting Hayden as the nominee to head the CIA, Bush is signaling an escalation of this war against the democratic rights of the American people. Hayden headed a top-secret spy agency, the NSA, which is supposedly focused entirely on foreign signals intelligence and legally prohibited from targeting Americans. Under his leadership, the NSA was refocused on the American population, accumulating what USA Today described as "the biggest database in the history of the world," consisting of the personal telephone records of nearly every person in the country.
There is every reason to believe that Hayden will play the same role at the CIA, another top-secret spy agency supposedly focused entirely on foreign intelligence and legally prohibited from targeting Americans. He is tasked by the Bush administration to intensify domestic operations of the CIA which are no doubt already under way on a large scale.
In that context, one should note the fact reported by the New York Times Thursday: by next year the number of trained CIA case officers will have tripled since 2001. Who are these agents and where are they at work? Few of these new recruits are likely to speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, Chinese or other languages necessary for assignment as intelligence operatives in the countries on the Pentagon's current target list. They don't know the cultures of those countries, but these recruits do speak English and could operate undetected within the United States. Many of them are likely already deployed in domestic spy operations, despite the legal prohibitions.
Hayden gave a hint of this in his opening statement, when he declared, "I would reaffirm the CIA's proud culture of risk-taking." He was using political code words to reassure right-wing critics of the CIA, who have complained that the agency became too timid after the exposure in the 1970s of CIA involvement in assassination plots, fomenting military coups overseas and other criminal activities, including illegal domestic spying. The "old firm" is back in business, Hayden was suggesting, and once again, anything goes.
The public hearing, which began Thursday morning, took on the character of a stage-managed farce, in which the participants were going through the motions by rote. One Republican after another voiced praise for the nominee and for President Bush. One Democrat after another raised questions, only to be told by Hayden that he could not discuss the issue in open session but would respond fully in the closed session, scheduled for the afternoon.
Among the questions he declined to answer were those related to NSA wiretapping, his attitude to torture techniques such as "waterboarding," and his opinion on whether the US government could hold a prisoner without trial indefinitely, even for life.
The ritual of the hearing was preceded by a secret briefing Wednesday of the full Intelligence Committee, conducted by the current head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, who provided details of the eavesdropping program directed at international phone calls placed by or to telephone numbers in the United States. This is the program first made public by the New York Times last December.
The Bush administration had refused to brief the full membership of the committee, limiting the information to a selected subcommittee of only seven of the 15 members. It became impossible to sustain this arrangement given that Hayden would have to testify before the entire committee in closed session.
The briefing satisfied one of the principal demands of both the Democrats and some "moderate" Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, which was that all the members from both parties should have access to information on the eavesdropping program so they could exercise "oversight." As an unacknowledged quid pro quo, the Democrats will rubberstamp the nomination of Hayden to head the CIA.
No member of either party has suggested that the illegal program be shut down. Instead, they have debated whether the program should be retroactively legalized through new legislation or simply allowed to continue on the basis of Bush's assertion of executive authority.
The complicity of both parties in Congress with the illegal program of domestic surveillance was underscored by the administration's release Wednesday of a list of 30 briefings on the program that it conducted with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate since the September 11 terrorist attacks. A total of 31 members of Congress attended at least one such briefing, far more than the eight previously reported, including five briefings for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The list includes seven Senate Democrats: two former senators, former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and former Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham; and five currently in the Senate, John D. Rockefeller IV, Carl Levin, Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Diane Feinstein and Daniel Inouye. The seven House Democrats included Pelosi, Jane Harman, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, John Murtha, Rush Holt, Anna Eshoo, Bud Cramer and Leonard Boswell.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALISATION
Behind the News, Analysis, Commentary and Intelligence on the New World Order
101 Cardinal Leger
P.O. Box 51004
Pincourt, Quebec, Canada, J7V9T3
E-mail: editor@globalresearch.ca
Web: http://globalresearch.ca/
- Friday, 19 May 2006 -
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4. GOD'S MINISTERS ARE LISTENING
The "Holy Mission" of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee
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by John Stanton
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=STA20060519&articleId=2476
[American] people are more inclined to understand...that government carries the sword as the minister of God to execute wrath upon the evildoer. -- Justice Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court of the United States
Ever heard of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC)? Well, if you haven't, you'd be smart to research the innards of the group by visiting www.ncs.gov/nstac/nstac.html. According to its charter, "NSTAC offers advice to the President on policy issues affecting not only the Government's ability to leverage the information infrastructure to better support NS/EP operations but also the Government's ability to protect the information infrastructure itself from threats and vulnerabilities that might ultimately jeopardize the country's national and economic security."
Given its mission and its powerful members--defense contractors, communications providers, software companies, government agencies--it is safe to assume that the NSTAC is one of the places where feasibility studies took place to determine whether the national security and corporate apparatus was up to the task of sweeping up the thoughts and actions of the American public and foreign interests traversing the digital domain. NSTAC likely worked closely with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Policy Organization, www.defenselink.mil/policy, and Vice President Dick Cheney's Office.
Such an effort would have had to include discussions about computer hardware and software that could be quick and intelligent enough to build patterns detailing not only generalized call and email tendencies among individuals and groups, but also the construction of dozens of relational databases designed to capture voice and text containing, say, anti-American government or conspiratorial phrases, foreign languages, and an assortment of habits common to the American public. That's a task made a lot easier due to America's real past time: information collection.
Show Me the Data!
One of the distinguishing traits of Americans is their obsession with collecting data and analyzing it for trends and, ultimately, to predict outcomes and gain an edge on competition. Think of the insurance industry, the stock market, baseball, football, hockey, basketball and the reams of statistics and percentages that businesses, consumers and sports fans obsess over (the latter for their fantasy leagues) and rely on for life's decisions. Now imagine a subset of the American populace that being the national security and corporate apparatus with unlimited financial resources to design and build the algorithms, capture techniques and computing power to grab, store and target particular keywords in all the human conversation passing through the electromagnetic spectrum, whether it's voice or text. How hard can it be? Just think of Microsoft's Excel (Microsoft is a member of the NTSAC) and the powerful data analysis tool it is for individuals and organizations. What type of datamining and analysis tools must a trillion or so dollars buy?
But wait! There's more to be concerned about. Consider the mega-conference on Lawful Intercept being held by a group called Telestrategies at www.telestrategies.com. Visit the organization in McLean, Virginia and click on the ISS World image. Conference sessions include the State of Global Lawful Interception, Regulation and Legislation, Telecom Service Providers Lawful Interception Compliance, Network Surveillance and LI Solutions, Investigative Analysis Technology Developments and Tools, Lawful Interception Standards, Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) Training Sessions, and Product Specific LEA and Government Training. Make sure to review the "track agenda" sections for a list of who's who of domestic and international participants involved in the snooping world.
So what's the point? Does it really matter if your entire life is recorded and stored by your government and its contractors? Do you even care? It's worth thinking about.
God is Government, Government is God
Let's return to Justice Scalia's comment about the American public and its habit of believing that the US government is operating as a Minister of God and wielding its sword to execute wrath upon the evildoer. Americans have another distinguishing trait and that is their very childlike and naive Judeo-Christian beliefs. Followers are instructed to live daily on leaps-of-faith and millions bow down in fear before some phantom being, or those speaking for it, who resides somewhere in the coldness of space or at the center of the earth. Have faith! is the refrain. Trust us, the messengers and ministers; we've talked to the cloud. How easy it is to convince such a silly people of anything (this holds for all the major religions).
Because American's cling to these beliefs like so many insecure children afraid to explore the world on their own, they are easily frightened and vulnerable to the propaganda and lies dispensed from a US government marketed by leaders of all stripes as One Nation Under God. It's an authoritarian's or fascist's dream come true. God's ministers work in the US government on behalf of God. So, the US government represents God. Wow! The US government is God. God Bless America!
Has anyone thought about who the messengers and ministers of God's Blessed America are? Is it the many corporations and agencies of the NSTAC? Is it the Office of the Vice President? Maybe it's the Secretary of Defense, his Policy Organization, and the dozens of defense contractors that actually execute US policy. Perhaps it's the US Congress and its legions of lobbyists.
One thing for sure. It is comforting to know for a fact that God really is listening.
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. He is the author of A Power But Not Super and co-author of America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.
Copyright John Stanton and the Centre for Research on Globalisation 2006. For fair use only/pour usage equitable seulement.
*****
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5. SOUTH AFRICA COOPERATING WITH BUSH ADMINISTRATION
ON SECRET RENDITION FLIGHTS
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 18, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- According to South African sources, South Africa is secretly cooperating with the Bush administration in facilitating rendition flights from Africa, including South Africa, to secret CIA prisons in North Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. The fact that South Africa, which, under President Nelson Mandela refused U.S. warships docking rights in the country, is now cooperating with the Bush administration is sending shock waves through South Africa and the African continent. Rashid Khalid, a Pakistani national, went missing seven months ago. According to current and former South African intelligence personnel, Khalid was abducted by South African security personnel and turned over to British special forces. It is now suspected that Khalid ended up in one of America's numerous gulags and may have been tortured and killed.
Khalid's family took the case to the Pretoria High Court. Last Sunday, a group of seven Pakistanis who showed up at the High Court to show support for Khalid's family were whisked off by South African Home Affairs agents. In addition, South African security police arrested a man named Yaseen Suliman, a fast food vendor who delivered food last week to Khalid's lawyers in the court building. When he returned home with one of the empty food containers, Suliman found it contained a Home Affairs Ministry file containing very sensitive information concerning the disappearance of Khalid. Suliman informed the Court that the file was in his possession but he was later charged with theft. Suliman made an official statement to the court about the incident, but his statement is being suppressed by the court and the government. The judge in the case ordered the "food container file" placed under court seal.
According to South African sources, recently fired National Intelligence Agency chief Billy Masetlha has charged that South African intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies are working closely with the CIA, MI6, and the private U.S. security firm Kroll. Informed South African observers claim that elements of the ruling African National Congress and the neo-con Democratic Alliance opposition are in lock step with neo-con operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain.
WMR has obtained the details of the food container "brown file," now sealed by court order:
Law student and fast-food vendor Yaseen Suliman delivered food to lawyers at Pretoria High Court on May 10. He sat in on the case and listened for a while, whereafter he retrieved his empty food containers and went home. Next morning he discovered lawyers had deliberately or accidentally placed a brown folder labeled "Ismail Ebrahim Jeebhai" in the container. (Jeebhai is the name of the Muslim Moulana who was abducted with Khalid in November 2005 by men with foreign accents, and later released from South Africa's notorious Lindelani deportation camp.)
The folder contained correspondence between lawyers for Home Affairs and Foreign Ministry officials requesting the "urgent assistance" of South Africa Consular services in getting Pakistani officials to confirm that Rashid was deported on November 6.
It contained an e-mail dated February 16, 2006 from South Africa Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula's lawyer, Lee-Anne DeLaHunt, to Home Affairs civil servant Maggie Mahuma, saying that counsel for the minister, Advocate Vas Soni, had advised that they needed an unclassified letter from Pakistan dated subsequent to an earlier court order. DeLaHunt said Foreign Affairs advised that the formal request must be directed from their director general to South Africa's director-general of consular services, Mr D Naidoo, which would be followed up by the South African consular staff in Islamabad.
The folder also contained a request from South African acting Foreign Affairs director general P Nkambula, dated February 16, 2006, requesting Naidoo to urgently help procure such a letter, which should be unclassified as it would form part of court proceedings.
Finally, the folder also contained a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Imran Yaqub, director of operations of the National Crisis Management Cell of the Ministry of Interior in Islamabad, duly "signed" on 31 Jan 06, stating that Khalid Mehmood arrived in Pakistan subsequent to his November 6 deportation and was "with the exception of a skin ailment (eczema) in good health."
On May 16, Presiding Judge Justice Poswa ordered the Home Affairs Ministry to produce information on Khalid's deportation. The government indicated Khalid was deported to Pakistan but Poswa said it is "well known that, around the world, people were disappearing and then showing up in US detention camps," adding, "the manner in which human beings disappear is of concern."
The Pretoria High Court has also ordered a halt in deportation proceedings against the seven Pakistanis detained at the High Court by security police.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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- Friday, May 19, 2006 -
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POSADA CARRILES: EXTRADITE OR PROSECUTE
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By JOSE PERTIERRA
http://www.counterpunch.org/pertierra05192006.html
The first year anniversary of Luis Posada Carriles' detention by the Bush Administration was the 17th of May. At first glance, we might view this as a cause for celebration: that a notorious international terrorist, a man known as the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America, accused of downing a passenger plane with 73 passengers on board has been caught and is in jail, presumably to await prosecution for his crimes. Yet the Bush Administration did not charge Posada Carriles with terrorism, nor has it prosecuted Venezuela's request for his extradition-a request that has been pending since June of last year.
The only charge brought against Posada Carriles by the Bush Administration is a mere immigration infraction: i.e., entry into the United States without inspection: an infraction whose maximum penalty is removal from the United States. The Bush Administration used the immigration case against Posada to spin a tall-tale: to try and fool people into believing that the U.S. takes the Posada case seriously and to give the appearance that the wheels of justice are grinding along, when in fact the White House is simply using the immigration case as the prop with which to stonewall the prosecution of this international terrorist.
Posada Carriles stands indicted in Venezuela for 73 counts of first degree murder in relation to the downing of a passenger plane on October 6, 1976. At the time, it was worst act on terrorism perpetrated on a civilian airliner.
Most of the bodies recovered from the wreckage were too grotesquely disfigured to be identified by their family members. The forensic report performed by the coroner describes the condition of the nine year old Guyanese girl whose remains were recovered from the downed aircraft: "Body of a girl around 9 years of age . . . . Brain missing, only facial bones, scalp and hair remaining. Lungs and heart destroyed. Liver and intestines shattered. Buttocks missing on right lower limb. Compound fracture of tibia and fibula . . . " None of the 73 passengers aboard the plane survived.
Posada Carriles was tried in Venezuela for first degree murder in relation to the downing of the plane, but before the Court could render a verdict, he escaped from prison with the help of tens of thousands of dollars from extremist groups in Miami. He continued his campaign of terror from his lair in Central America, dispatching terrorists to Cuba to set bombs in Havana's finest hotels and restaurants, killing an Italian tourist and wounding several others. He was convicted in Panama for trying to blow up an auditorium full of students at the University in 2000. He was pardoned by then President Mireya Moscoso, in apparent violation of Panamanian law, and schemed for way to legally return to Miami, where his three accomplices who were also pardoned had recently received a heroe's welcome.
Under oath, Posada told the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Immigration Court that he illegally entered the United States in March of last year through the Texas border with the help of a coyote. That is not true. According to FBI documents presented in federal district court in Miami last month in relation to the arms case brought against his long time friend and financial benefactor, Santiago Alvarez, Posada was brought to the United States in March of 2005 aboard a shrimp boat called the Santrina owned by Alvarez. Four other Miami Cubans helped Posada to come to U.S. shores aboard the Santrina.
It is a serious felony to smuggle anyone into the United States, but if the person smuggled is a terrorist the penalties could include as much as thirty-five years in prison. The United States has not charged anyone with helping to smuggle Posada Carriles into this country. He sacrificed his credibility in order to cover for his friends.
For weeks, Posada lived openly in Miami, even going shopping at the mall. The United States claimed that it had no information as to his whereabouts, yet the Application for Asylum that he filed with the Immigration Service on April 12, 2005 listed not only his name, but his address as well.
Venezuela formally asked the United States government on May 10, 2005 to put an extradition detainer on him, but Washington continued to feign ignorance as to his whereabouts.
It wasn't until May 17, 2005, that the DHS had no choice but to arrest him. During a bizarre press conference in Miami that day, Posada boasted that the government wasn't looking for him and announced that he would abandon his asylum claim and leave the country. Posada's brazenness was too much for DHS to swallow, and federal agents detained him immediately after the press conference and gingerly escorted him to a golf cart, wearing no handcuffs, to board a waiting helicopter.
Washington, however, exercised an immigration (and not an extradition) detainer on him. He was charged only with immigration infractions. Immediately, the U.S. government prejudged the case and issued a communique the day of his arrest that said: "as a matter of immigration law and policy, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) does not generally remove people to Cuba, nor does ICE generally remove people to countries believed to be acting on Cuba's behalf," a not so veiled reference to Venezuela.
Rather than prosecuting Posada's extradition to Venezuela, the United States set in motion a purely administrative immigration matter, designed to protect rather than prosecute him.
In the immigration matter, Posada made several claims for relief: 1. that he was still a lawful permanent resident of the United States, 2. that he qualified for asylum, 3. that he qualified for withholding of removal, 4. that he qualified for protection from deportation under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).
Although it is true that Posada had been a permanent resident in the 60s, Posada long ago abandoned that status by establishing several domiciles abroad from which he conducted his campaign of terror. Moreover, the statutes prohibit a terrorist and a criminal from receiving either asylum or withholding of removal.
That left Posada to exclusively pursue CAT relief, because the Torture Convention does not bar criminals or terrorists from protection. However, the standard for CAT relief is a very high legal standard, much higher than the standard for asylum: the applicant must establish that it is more likely than not that he would be tortured if sent to a proposed country of removal. The burden or proof is on the applicant to show a clear probability of being tortured abroad. According to Department of Justice statistics published in 2003, the Court only grants 3% of the Torture Convention cases.
During the litigation of his application for CAT relief, we witnessed one of the sorriest episodes of legal maneuvering ever by U.S. prosecutors. The Government prosecutor set the tables to virtually guarantee that the Immigration Judge would grant Posada Carriles Torture Convention relief.
Posada called only one witness in his immigration case. A so-called expert on Venezuela who testified that in his expert opinion, Posada would be tortured if returned to Caracas. The witness testified that he "observed the effects of torture" on other notorious individuals whom he knew in Venezuela and that he feared Posada might suffer the same fate.
That witness was none other than Joaquin Chaffardet, friend, business partner and lawyer of Luis Posada Carriles in Venezuela. Chaffardet had also been Posada's boss at the DISIP in the early 1970s, a man that Posada has been close to for the past forty years. The prosecutor never even cross-examined the witness or raise the possibility that the witnessed may be biased, rather than the disinterested observer he pretended to be.
Other than Chaffardet's questionable testimony, no evidence in support of the theory that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela was presented.
The prosecutor not only failed to conduct any cross-examination, she failed to present a single document as evidence in the case: none of the CIA and FBI declassified cables that are on the internet, none of the almost thousand pages of documents that Venezuela gave the United States in relation to its extradition request, none of the interviews that Posada himself has given over the years where he boasts being a mastermind of terror. None!
The government's tactic worked. Immigration Judge William Abbott credited Chaffardet's testimony as credible and found a "clear probability" that Posada would be tortured if returned to Venezuela. Judge Abbott ordered his removal from the United States, but not to Venezuela or Cuba because he found clear probability that he would be tortured there.
Not surprisingly, DHS declined to appeal the decision. It was the decision that the White House wanted all along.
The order granting deferral of removal to Posada Carriles does not alter DHS' authority to detain him. In a letter to Posada dated March 22, 2006, DHS announced its decision to detain him "for now". The letter told Posada that he has a "long history of criminal activity and violence in which innocent civilians were killed." His release from detention concludes DHS in its letter to Posada, "would pose a danger to both the community and the national security of the United States."
In support of its interim decision to continue to detain him, DHS cites Venezuela's pending extradition case against Posada and the fact that Posada fled from a Venezuelan prison while his trial for the downing of a passenger plane in 1976 was pending. "Your past also includes your escape from a Venezuelan prison which was accomplished after several attempts utilizing threats of force, explosives and subterfuge," says DHS in its Decision.
DHS goes on to cite Posada's own statements to link him to the "planning and coordination of a series of hotel and restaurant bombings that occurred in Cuba . . . in 1997." These bombings resulted in the murder of an Italian tourist and the wounding of several others. DHS also cites Posada's conviction in Panama for "crimes against national security," in reference to his attempt to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2000 with C- 4 explosives as President Castro was to speak to an auditorium with full of students.
Although it's clear that Washington doesn't want to deport him to Venezuela, it is not prudent to release him. The only way that he can continue to be detained without an extradition detainer is with a government finding that he is a danger to the community.
But the extradition case is not going to go away. Unless Posada has a heart attack and dies in prison, the law is eventually going to force the US government to proceed with the extradition case. A lot of people think that Judge Abbott's finding that Posada may not be deported to Venezuela is a ruling on Venezuela's extradition request. That is not the case. Extradition rulings trump immigration decisions. Although Posada may not be deported to Venezuela, he may be extradited there.
Moreover, even if Secretary of State Rice decides in her discretion not to extradite Posada, the treaties and conventions signed by the US government in the past obligate this country to prosecute him for the downing of the plane in the United States.
The United States is bound by three specific legal instruments to extradite or prosecute Posada Carriles for 73 counts of first degree murder:
1. The Venezuela-US extradition treaty of 1922.
2. Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation, in force since 1973.
3. International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, in force since 1998-but retroactive where a treaty of extradition exists between the parties.
In support of its extradition request, Venezuela submitted documents showing that Posada is under indictment in Venezuela for first degree murder in relation to the downing of the plane, that there is an arrest warrant outstanding against him in Caracas and that there is probable cause to hold him for trial as the mastermind of the downing of the passenger plane.
This is an airtight case. Only the Bush Administration's desire to shelter this international terrorist impedes his extradition, but the law is clear. It obligates the United States to either extradite or prosecute.
The Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation is very clear.
Article VII
The Contracting State in the territory of which the alleged offender is found shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged, without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution. Those authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the law of that State.
The Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings says the exact same thing in Article 8. There is no discretion. The United States must either extradite or prosecute. It cannot pretend he is simply an undocumented immigrant and place him in a comfortable holding facility in Texas until the extradition case goes away.
Venezuela's extradition case is not going to go away. The government of Venezuela is firmly committed in the fight against international terrorism. Venezuela's commitment is not to an a la carte war on terror, such as the Bush Administration wages: a war that distinguishes between "good terrorists" and "bad terrorists".
Terrorists are criminals and must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Venezuela's interest in Luis Posada Carriles will not rest until he stands trial for the first degree murder of 73 defenseless passengers aboard that civilian aircraft.
We are prepared to legally do whatever it takes to make sure that the United States government abides by its legal obligations to either extradite or prosecute him.
Jose Pertierra is an attorney, practicing in Washington, D.C. He represents the Venezuelan government in the case of Luis Posada Carriles.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.
*****
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THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
May 19, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/168069/
By Chris Floyd
Beneath the thunder of the mighty cataclysms unleashed by the Bush administration -- the war crime in Iraq, the global torture gulag, the epic corruption, the gutting of the U.S. Constitution, the open embrace of presidential tyranny -- a quieter degradation of American society has continued apace. And this slow descent into barbarism didn't begin with President George W. Bush, although his illicit regime certainly represents the apotheosis of the dark forces driving the decay.
With the world's attention diverted by the latest scandals and shameless posturings of the Bush faction -- domestic spying, bribes and hookers at the CIA, military units roaring down to the border to scare unarmed poor people looking for work -- few noticed a small story that cast a harsh, penetrating light on the corrosion of the national character.
Earlier this month, the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London released its annual World Prison Population List. And there, standing proudly at the head of the line, towering far above all others, is that shining city on the hill, the United States of America. But strangely enough, the Bush gang and its media sycophants failed to celebrate -- or even note -- yet another instance where a triumphant America leads the world. Where are the cheering hordes shouting "U.S.A! U.S.A!" at the news that the land of the free imprisons more people than any other country in the world, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of its population?
Yes, the world's greatest democracy now has more than 2 million of its citizens locked up in iron cages, an incarceration rate of 714 per 100,000 of the national population. The only countries within shouting distance are such bastions of penological enlightenment as China (1.55 million prisoners, plus some unsorted "administrative detainees"), Russia (a wimpy 763,000) and Brazil (330,000), whose exemplary prison management has been on such prominent display this week.
But although the U.S. prison population has soared to record-breaking heights during Bush's presidency, America's status as the most punitive nation on earth is by no means solely his doing. Bush is merely standing on the shoulders of giants -- such as former President Bill Clinton, who once created 50 new federal offenses in a single draconian measure. In fact, like the great cathedrals of old, the building of Fortress America has been the work of decades, with an entire society yoked to the common task. At each step, the promulgation of ever-more draconian punishments for ever-lesser offenses, and the criminalization of ever-broader swathes of human behavior, have been greeted with hosannahs from a public and press who seem to be insatiable gluttons for punishment -- someone else's punishment, that is, and preferably someone of dusky hue.
The main engine of this mass incarceration has been the 35-year "war on drugs," a spurious battle against an abstract noun that provides an endless fount of profits, payoffs and power for the well-connected while only worsening the problem it purports to address -- just like the "war on terror." The war on drugs has in fact been the most effective assault on an underclass since Stalin's campaign against the kulaks.
It was launched by Richard Nixon in 1971, after urban unrest had shaken major U.S. cities during those famous "long, hot summers" of the '60s. Yet even as the crackdowns began, America's inner cities were being flooded with heroin, much of it originating in Southeast Asia, where the CIA and its hired warlords ran well-funded black ops in and around Vietnam. At home, gangs reaped staggering riches from the criminalization of the natural, if often unhealthy, human craving for intoxication. President Ronald Reagan upped the ante in the 1980s with a rash of "mandatory sentencing" laws that put even first-time, small-time offenders away for years. His term also saw a new flood -- crack cocaine -- devastating the inner cities, even as his covert operators used drug money to fund the terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua and run illegal weapons to Iran, while the downtown druglords grew more powerful. The U.S. underclass was caught in a classic pincer movement, attacked by both the state and the gangs. There were no more long, hot summers of protest against injustice; there was simply the struggle to survive.
Under Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton, the feverish privatization of the prison system added a new impetus for detention. Politically wired corporations needed to keep those profit-making cells filled, and the politicians they greased were happy to oblige with "tougher" sentences and new crimes to prosecute. Now Bush Jr. is readying another front in the war on the underclass, promising this week to build 4,000 new cells for immigrant detainees -- having prudently handed Halliburton a $385 million "contingency" contract back in February to build, lo and behold, "immigrant detention centers" should the need for them arise, The New York Times reports.
Like the war on drugs, the equally ill-conceived war on immigrants will be directed at the poorest and most vulnerable, not the "coyote" gangs who profit from human trafficking -- and certainly not the U.S. businesses and wealthy homelanders who love the dirt-cheap labor of the illegals. Those for-profit prisons will soon be filled to bursting with this new harvest.
A nation's true values can be measured in how it treats the poor, the weak, the damaged, the unconnected. For more than 30 years, the answer of the U.S. power structure has been clear: You lock them up, shut them up, grind them down -- and make big bucks in the process.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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- AFIB No. 722, May 17, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
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ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
Underlying the continuity between the Burma, Laos, and contra operations is the importance to all all three of the drug traffic. As John Ranelagh has written of the KMT Burma army, it "never fought; it rapidly became a drug-producing operation instead." Though the fighting in Laos was real enough, the question has frequently been raised whether America's "secret team" was helping to maintain a drug operation in support of their anti-communist war, or helping to maintain a war in support of a drug operation. Similar questions have been raised about some of the contra leadership and their U.S. supporters (at least in Costa Rica): is their primary motive to fight or to engage in the drug traffic. In Miami the FBI has allegedly received an eyewitness report of cocaine being loaded on Southern Air Transport planes in Barranquilla, Colombia, at a time when the contra-supporting Southern Air Transport planes were in the Barranquilla area, as confirmed by flight records found in the downed Hasenfus plane. (The airline has denied any involvement with drugs.) -- Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era [Boston: South End Press, 1987]: pp. 34-35.
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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 723/May 21, 2006
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
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- Wednesday, 17 May 2006 -
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1. FBI TRACKING REPORTERS' PHONE CALLS IN CIA LEAK INVESTIGATION
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/abcn-m17.shtml
By David Walsh
Two ABC News reporters, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, revealed Monday that the FBI, at the behest of the CIA, was tracking telephone numbers they called as part of an effort to expose sources responsible for leaking information damaging to the Bush administration. In an effort to alert them to the dangers, a senior federal law enforcement official told the pair in an in-person conversation, "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."
Other sources told Ross and Esposito that telephone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, were being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
In an interview on the "Democracy Now!" radio program, Ross commented, "It was clear to us that somehow the government knew our records. We were told our phone calls weren't being recorded, but just who we were calling. Now, in terms of trying to track down insiders at the government who are providing us with information, that's really about all they need." Ross added that the FBI had acknowledged they were tracking journalists' phone calls. "The person I talked to said, 'Well, it may be more like backtracking.' But under this administration, what used to be hard to do, in going after reporters and their phone records, is now easy."
Indeed FBI officials, according to ABC News, did not deny that the television network's telephone records, along with those of New York Times and Washington Post reporters, had been sought as part of an investigation of leaks at the CIA. The FBI press office indicated that its inquiries into such matters begin with an examination of government phone records.
"The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information," the statement said.
In their attempted crackdown on the press, the FBI is making wide use of National Security Letters (NSLs), a provision of the Patriot Act. The NSLs are a type of administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the provision, worthy of a police state, "a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government" (ABC News).
Asked why he and Esposito were being targeted, Ross suggested to "Democracy Now!" that there were two stories "that the CIA considers to be evidence of criminal behavior on the part of someone." Following the initial Washington Post story on secret CIA prisons around the world, the two ABC News reporters revealed that the two eastern European countries hosting these facilities were Poland and Romania, "and this set off quite a firestorm inside the CIA."
ABC News also reported on a US attack in Pakistan, using a CIA Predator with missiles attached to it, that resulted in the deaths of 18 people. "We got word of that very early and reported it, and that infuriated the CIA, because it embarrassed them with the Pakistanis. They hadn't quite made up the cover story they use when the CIA operates inside Pakistan. Generally, the Pakistanis will say it was a bomb they set off or something to cover the fact that the US operates inside Pakistan sometimes. So those two incidents resulted in the CIA being upset and asking for an investigation as to who leaked that information," Ross said.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that "under 'long-standing' Justice Department provisions, a reporter must be notified within 90 days that his or her records have been obtained, and that subpoenas for the records must not be issued until after the department attempts to negotiate access with the reporter. Spokeswomen for ABC and the Times said their organizations had received no official notification of the effort to seek their phone records."
In his interview with "Democracy Now!," ABC's Ross commented, "It's chilling, to say the least, and I guess I've concluded that this requires, you know, on my part, your part, all of us who are reporters and care about the truth, really reporting on this subject, and I don't think it's self-centered. I think it's important that everyone know this is what's happening and, you know, let Americans decide if that's how they want the government to operate."
The leaks to Ross and Esposito helped uncover major illegalities committed by the American government--the establishment of secret torture prisons, in violation of international law, and the assassination of foreign citizens in a country with which the US is not at war. The FBI witch-hunt against the reporters is intended to both punish those responsible for past disclosures and intimidate others in the future from revealing knowledge of crimes committed by the government and its agencies. The spying on the ABC investigative journalists is another sinister episode in the buildup of a police-state apparatus and atmosphere in the US. It has received minimal coverage in the mass media, particularly the television news.
This is not the first incident involving the alleged tracking of reporters' phone-calls. The Columbia Journalism Review Daily reminds us that in January 2006, NBC's Andrea Mitchell conducted an interview with James Risen, whose New York Times article the previous month had exposed a broad program of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) without court-issued warrants. Out of the blue, Mitchell asked Risen whether he had "any information about reporters being swept up in this [NSA] net."
When he replied, "No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future," Mitchell followed up: "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, [CNN's] Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" Clearly, the NBC reporter had been tipped off about government spying on Amanpour. NBC later cut the question about the CNN reporter from its online transcript of the interview, explaining that it had eliminated the passage "so that we may further continue our inquiry." Nothing has been heard about the matter since.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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IN THESE TIMES
News
May 15, 2006
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2650/
By LEAH A. NELSON
Russell Tice has something to say, but there is no one he can talk to.
He explained as much at a mid-February hearing before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Tice is a 20-year veteran of the United States intelligence network, having worked for Naval Intelligence, the Department of Defense and, most recently, the National Security Agency, where he held the position of intelligence analyst and capabilities officer. He has intimate knowledge of the innermost workings of the intelligence community, and wants to tell Congress about an NSA program that, he says, is unconstitutional and possibly criminal.
"What [the American people] know about is Hiroshima," he says. "What I'm going to tell you about is Nagasaki. I'm going to tell you about three Nagasakis." He is gagged, however, by the non-disclosure agreement he signed before becoming privy to top-secret government activities.
"Anyone who comes forward is really made into a martyr," says Beth Daley, Senior Investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, who works with whistleblowers. "It discourages other people from coming forward."
Tice's story is complex. In 2001, he suspected a co-worker at the Defense Intelligence Agency of being a double agent. He discreetly notified a DIA counter-intelligence officer, who told him that the FBI had investigated and there was nothing to his concerns. He still had his doubts, but when he brought up the matter again in 2003, the NSA's security office called him in for an emergency psychological evaluation. Despite having cleared him for duty after a routine examination nine months earlier, they declared him to be suffering from paranoia, and downgraded his clearance to "red badge" status. (An independent psychological evaluation has refuted this diagnosis.) He was reassigned to do odd jobs at the NSA motor pool, where he began to talk to other demoted red badge employees, and his supervisor accused him of trying to form a union.
Tice asked the Inspectors General at both the NSA and the Department of Defense to investigate the matter, and neither claimed to find any impropriety. In February 2004, he told the NSA's security office that if he didn't receive a new investigation or get his security clearance back, he was going to talk to the press. Shortly after that, he lost his job.
The NSA denies that it practices retaliation against whistleblowers. Yet, Tice is still being monitored by the agency. In a January 9 letter to Tice, Renee Seymour, Director of NSA Special Access Programs Central Office, reminded him that he was required to report problems to "appropriately cleared individuals" at the NSA or Department of Defense before talking to any congressional committees--and reinforced that no one in either the House or the Senate Intelligence Committees was cleared to receive the information he wished to divulge.
James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace, is an expert on the inner workings of America's intelligence agencies. "The congressional intelligence committees have lost total control over the intelligence communities," says Bamford. "You can't get any oversight or checks and balances; the Congress is protecting the White House and the White House can do whatever it wants."
Bamford notes that the last time congressional hearings on potential abuses of power were commonly held was when the Democrats controlled the executive branch and Republicans controlled the legislature. Because the same party controls both branches, he says, there is little incentive to investigate.
This is not entirely for lack of trying. At the subcommittee's hearing on national security whistleblowers, ranking Democrat Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) asked Chairman Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) to join him in writing a letter to both the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees regarding Tice's case. Shays agreed, and Kucinich spokesman Doug Gordon says they are currently discussing the matter.
"This shouldn't be a partisan issue, but that's not the attitude in this town," Tice says. "I fear for us."
Copyright 2006 In These Times
*****
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3. THE ULTIMATE NET MONITORING TOOL
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WIRED NEWS
Technology
May, 17, 2006
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70914-0.html
By Robert Poe
The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications.
Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around.
"Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."
Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.
Internet companies can install the analyzers at every entrance and exit point of their networks, at their "cores" or centers, or both. The analyzers communicate with centralized "logic servers" running specialized applications. The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.
Brasil Telecom and several other Brazilian phone companies are using Narus products to charge each other for VOIP calls they send over one another's IP networks. Internet companies in China and the Middle East use them to block VOIP calls altogether.
But even before the product's alleged role in the NSA's operations emerged, its potential as a surveillance tool was not lost on corporate America.
In December, VeriSign, also of Mountain View, chose Narus' product as the backbone of its lawful-intercept-outsourcing service, which helps network operators comply with court-authorized surveillance orders from law enforcement agencies. A special Narus lawful-intercept application does this spying with ease, sorting through torrents of IP traffic to pick out specific messages based on a targeted e-mail address, IP address or, in the case of VOIP, phone number.
"We needed their fast packet-detection and inspection capability," says VeriSign Vice President Raj Puri. "They do it with specialized software that can isolate packets for a specific target."
Narus has little control over how its products are used after they're sold. For example, although its lawful-intercept application has a sophisticated system for making sure the surveillance complies with the terms of a warrant, it's up to the operator whether to type those terms into the system, says Bannerman.
That legal eavesdropping application was launched in February 2005, well after whistle-blower Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country. But that doesn't mean the government couldn't write its own code to do the dirty work. Narus even offers software-development kits to customers.
"Our product is designed to comply (with) all of the laws in all of the countries we ship to," says Bannerman. "Many of our customers have built their own applications. We have no idea what they do."
Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****
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4.
5.5 TON COCAINE BUST REVEALS NEW DETAILS OF 9.11 ATTACK
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THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS
World Exclusive
May 16, 2006
By Daniel Hopsicker
VENICE, FL -- A MadCowMorningNews investigation into the ownership of the DC9 airliner caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico last month has uncovered explosive new details about some of the many lingering mysteries still surrounding the 9.11 attack.
San Diego defense contractor Titan Corporation, already implicated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of a shadowy St. Petersburg FL company which owned the DC9 "Cocaine One" flight busted in Mexico, employed a Lebanese contractor who assisted Mohamed Atta and other terrorist hijackers in Venice, Florida.
For Titan, the revelation marks the latest in a remarkable series of recent scandals, including employees charged with torture and rape at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a record $26 million fine and conviction for fixing a Presidential election in the African nation of Benin, and growing infamy for being the biggest money backer of disgraced and soon-to-be-jailed former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
The story begins when, while researching "Welcome to TERRORLAND" three years ago, we discovered that Makram Chams, a Lebanese national, had provided significant logistical support for Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.
Chams, we learned, had even entertained recently-convicted Zacharias Moussaoui in his apartment in Venice.
Breaking news from the forest where no one's around
Makram Chams owned a Kwik-Check convenience store in Venice, where the biggest overseas money transfer to the terrorists, $70,000 from the UAE, was sent, according to the testimony of FBI agents during the 9.11 Commission hearings.
Actually the FBI testimony never mentioned Chams, or his store.
They did however show the receipt for the money order at the final hearing of the 9.11 Commission, which we attended. And we were already familiar with the address where the money order went: 201 Nokomis Avenue.
Makram Cham's Kwik-Chek... Strangely, Chams left town soon after the 9.11 attack, abandoning a thriving convenience store which has stood vacant ever since.
In a story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, reporter Earle Kimel, who first broke the story of Mohamed Atta's American girlfriend, Amanda Keller, called Chams' abandoned store "A pocket of urban blight in the otherwise smartly tailored suit of downtown Venice."
Just another freak coincidence?
An understanding of what Makram Chams had been doing while in Venice--and for whom--had eluded us, and been one of our biggest unanswered questions, one which might shed light on whether the U.S. Government possessed guilty foreknowledge--or even culpability--in the 9.11 attack.
Our search for Chams had been unsuccessful. No one knew where he was, or why he'd left. But now Chams has re-surfaced in Saudi Arabia, where he worked in an unlikely capacity: as a contractor for American defense firm Titan Corp.
News of Makram Chams' current whereabouts came to us when a researcher recently sent this addendum to Titan Corp's 2005 SEC filing:
"On March 14, 2005, Makram Majid Chams, a former consultant of Titan filed a claim with the Preliminary Committee on Labor Disputes Settlement in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Chams alleges that Titan wrongfully terminated his consulting agreement and that he was defamed by Titan's publication in a local newspaper of a mandatory notice that he is no longer representing Titan. The plaintiff is seeking approximately $21.9 million in damages. We intend to defend our position vigorously."
Was the man suing Titan in Saudi Arabia, "Makram Majid Chams," the same "Makram Chams" who'd lived in Venice?
Only a dunsky could doubt it
The answer was "yes." A marriage announcement in the Sarasota Herald Tribune from January of 1998 gave us the full name of the Makram Chams who'd lived in Venice, identical to the name of the man suing Titan in Saudi Arabia.
"Makram Majid Chams," said the announcement, had married "Rim Ghazi Abou Zein, both of Venice."
The news was nothing short of astonishing. The man who'd assisted terrorist hijackers in Venice...working for an American defense contractor in Saudi Arabia? What was Chams doing for The Titan Corp? What made him think they owe him $22 million dollars? And most importantly...
Was Makram Chams already working for Titan while in Venice?
While we didn't know the answers to any of these questions, one thing we did know was that Bob Woodward would not be on the case. The major media steered completely clear of stories about what was clearly the biggest 9.11 crime scene that wasn't reduced to rubble: Venice, Fl., home to three of the four terrorist pilots.
We decided to take a closer look at Makram Chams.
Hangin' with the 'Mak Jack' Attack
A Venice Yellow Cab driver, Bob Simpson, first told us that the Middle Eastern man who owned the convenience store had been close to the hijackers, and that Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi frequently met at an apartment in Venice which he rented. (Watch him talk about it.)
Simpson had been questioned closely by the FBI three days after the Sept. 11 attack. "I heard a voice say 'this is Special Agent Joe Anderson from the FBI calling,'" he told us. "My heart sort of skipped a beat. Then he said, 'Don't worry, you haven't done anything wrong.'"
"He asked if I'd seen pictures of the terrorists, and if I had, wanted to know if I recognized any. I said yes, I recognized Mohamed Atta. I'm the day driver for Yellow Cab in Venice, and he was in my cab a bunch of times in August," cabbie Simpson explained. "The night driver had him even more than I did."
Simpson picked up Atta at the convenience store owner's apartment on several occasions. He told the FBI he had been asked to drive to Orlando by a relative of the Middle Eastern man who owned the convenience store.
"Their (the terrorists) best friend used to live upstairs on the second floor," stated Simpson, pointing to the Burgundy Square Apartments in downtown Venice. "I saw Atta and Al-Shehhi there."
"They were always hanging out together at the store. Most of the time, I'd be called by their friend, or they would call saying pick them up there at the market."
Dead eyes then, Dead everything now
That the terrorist hijackers spent much time hanging out in Makram Chams' Kwik-Check was independently confirmed by numerous observers, including a local psychiatrist who contacted us recently.
"Nokomis Ave runs right behind the hospital in Venice," stated the psychiatrist. "Each day as I left the hospital for the office I'd head north on Nokomis. At the corner of Nokomis and Miami there was this little (Kwik-Chek) convenience store run by middle-eastern types."
"Half the time I'd be late for the office and I'd stop in there and grab something awful for lunch. A woman and a large man were usually behind the counter. Some days I'd go in there and no one would be behind the counter but there would be loud talking in the back."
"A few times I saw Atta in there, hanging around. Once I made eye contact with him--dead on! Emphasis on "dead" because when we locked eyes a chill went through me and I thought: "He's got 'dead' eyes."
"When you become a shrink you sometimes get attuned to what might be going on with a person just from seeing how they look--their faces and eyes--on the street or in public. The chill I got when I saw Atta was not the chill of fear. It was a chill about how sick he looked. He looked to be one of the most depressed persons I'd ever laid eyes on."
"He looked so depressed that it was as if he was already gone. In retrospect I feel he may have been just as happy to die for the sake of ending it all as he was to die for Allah."
"A couple of weeks after 9/11 the convenience store closed up," stated the psychiatrist, who has since moved out of state. "I was down there last summer visiting the old psych unit crew, nurses and staff, at a yearly reunion at Sharkey's, and the store was still closed up. I found a reference to the store on the TERRORLAND website, and it got me thinking."
"I wish I'd paid more attention back then... but who knew?"
Who was the Saudi in Armani and shades?
Cabbie Simpson told of how he had picked up a wealthy Saudi businessman at the Orlando Airport after picking up the convenience store owner at the apartment in Venice. The FBI expressed interest in the rich Saudi, he said.
"They were especially interested in a rich Saudi guy that I'd been sent to pick up at the Orlando Airport. They said they already knew that he'd ridden in my cab because they'd gotten my cab number from a surveillance camera at the airport."
"He flew in on a private jet, and was dressed in Armani and shades, with his wife, who wore traditional Arab clothing. After clearing international customs, they proceeded back to a Venice apartment rented by the convenience store owner."
Six weeks later, he drove the wealthy Saudi's wife back to the Orlando Airport, Simpson told the FBI. Again they left from the convenience store owner's Venice apartment. When he arrived to pick up his fare, Simpson was asked to come up to the apartment to help carry a chest down to the cab.
"The chest was so heavy it took two people to carry," Simpson said. "A big bald guy who was there helped me carry the chest down." The man who helped him carry the chest down the stairs to the cab, said Simpson, was Zacharias Moussaoui.
A fungible commodity useful everywhere
Cabbie Simpson had been so clearly impressed with how heavy the chest had been that we too were intrigued. We called a man we knew to have worked for many years in American intelligence to ask what he thought made the chest so heavy.
"Gold," he replied immediately. "There was gold in that chest."
The identification of Moussaoui in Venice confirmed what we had reported exclusively nearly four years ago, when we learned that the second Dutch national flight school owner at the Venice Airport, Arne Kruithof, was questioned for two days by officials taking depositions from potential witnesses in Moussaoui's trial.
Further confirmation of Moussaoui's presence in Venice came much later from an unlikely and usually highly-dubious source: Rudi Dekkers.
Continuing the FBI cover-up about the terrorist's activity in Venice, jurors in the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui were never told that Moussaoui had been there.
They did however, hear testimony which confirmed the allegation in "Welcome to TERRORLAND," of a systematic cover up by the FBI of the fact that Venice was the terrorist's main base of operations.
In February 2001, the jurors were told, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been spotted in Clearwater Florida flying a single-engine plane registered to Huffman Aviation...almost two months after the FBI's official chronology states Atta left Venice and Huffman for good.
Ask Jack how Gus Boulis became "Abramoff-impaired"
We had initially thought that Makram Chams was probably an Arab operative sent in early to smooth the way for the hijackers.
Then we discovered that Chams had been a PARTNER in 1997 and 1998 in a gambling boat called "Vegas in Venice," which cleaned up in Venice for two years.
This information only added to our puzzlement. We wondered: Where does an immigrant, bootstrapping himself up in America through the time-tested method of owning a convenience store, get the JUICE to be a partner in a gambling boat?
People kill to get jobs like that in Florida.
Just ask Jack Abramoff.
The controlling partner in the gambling ship in which Makram Chams was a partner is Ian Goldfarb, from Gladwyne, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia.
The only other local partner in the casino ship, we were shocked to discover, was Max Burge, who we'd interviewed during research for "Welcome to TERRORLAND," because Burge owned the planes used at Huffman Aviation.
Small world. But it soon got even smaller...
Frederic Geffon from "Royal Sons," the aggravated part-owner of "Cocaine One," told us that he had done business with Burge.
The San Diego FBI: Confidential informants you can trust!
Royal Sons had used the address of Huffman Aviation's hanger at the Venice Airport in a few airplane ads. This is inexplicable, at least it is to Royal Son's Frederic Geffon, who denies ever placing plane ads with a Venice Airport address. His denial rang a little hollow with his claim that anyone could have placed ads claiming to be him.
Possible, perhaps. But also, we think, highly unlikely.
We finally found someone who knew what had happened to Makram Chams. It was his sister, May Chams. She was then working at the same pharmacy in Venice where we discovered, much later, that Mohamed Atta had brought his father, less than two weeks before the attack. We persisted in questioning May, in the face of her obvious hostility, and were finally rewarded.
"Mak is in San Diego," she told us,"helping the FBI."
Only now does her statement make sense to us. But, if Makram hotfooted it to San Diego on "business" after the 9.11 attack, it would be a strong indication that he had a relationship with Titan Corp... while he was still in Venice.
Compromise current operations at your peril
It has since been revealed that Titan trains mercenaries, and provides mercenaries for operations. Current operations. Ongoing operations...
Disclosures in the Duke Cunningham scandal lead directly to Titan. Before it is done, this may present someone with some very thorny problems.
As a result of our investigation so far, for example, we will be reporting in our next story that by delving into the relationships between the corporations involved in the 5.5 ton cocaine caper we have been able to uncover evidence of the unmistakable presence, behind the scenes in the scandal, of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi...
The very same Adnan Khashoggi who has been a force behind a well-financed disinformation campaign billing itself the "9.11 Truth Movement."
The U.S. military has a 1200-man psychological warfare battalion, we learned recently. They probably aren't all working in Iraq. In all likelihood, a psy-op has been waged against the American people to draw attention from questions about who the terrorists were associating with--and what they had been doing--while they were in the U.S.
Questions with answers.
Someone would prefer they not become public.
But you won't find much about any of this on the innumerable websites of the "9.11 Truth Movement." Most seem to be utterly fascinated currently with speculation about materials which might have been secreted inside the Twin Towers which could have made them collapse.
They used to utterly fascinated with proving that no plane hit the Pentagon. Before that there were utterly fascinated with the idea that the planes were flown by remote control. And on and on.
Controlling the debate is easy when a billionaire is footing the bill.
Advantage Khashoggi.
But it ain't over till its over... And there's a DC9 sitting in Mexico tonight whose anxious owners know something about this powerful truth:
It ain't over.
Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.
Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker
*****
THE NARCO NEWS BULLETIN
Reporting on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America
Al Giordano, Publisher
E-Mail: publisher@narconews.com
- Issue No. 41, May 16, 2006 -
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DRUG TRAFFICKERS OBTAINED CLASSIFIED DEA DOCUMENTS FROM U.S. EMBASSY
IN BOGOTA 'AT WILL'
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By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1816.html
Informant Told Lie Detector that Corrupt U.S. Agents Helped Narcos Protect Drug Crops from Fumigation Raids
Narco News has obtained yet more evidence supporting the maze of charges in a leaked Justice Department memo that links DEA agents in Colombia to narco-traffickers.
The memo, authored in late January 2004 by Justice Department attorney Thomas Kent, alleges that Drug Enforcement Administration agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers' payrolls, engaged in money laundering and complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much about their nefarious activities.
After Narco News exposed the Kent memo in a January report, the DEA reacted initially with great concern to the corruption allegations, but only days later an agency spokesman dismissed the charges in the memo as being "unfounded." The mainstream media followed the same script, with the Associated Press reporting that its sources claimed the Kent memo had been investigated and the probe found "no wrongdoing."
However, since that January report, Narco News has uncovered additional DEA documents that lend further support to the charges in the Kent memo.
And now, yet another document, http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/Polygraph.pdf, has found its way to this publication.
One of the charges leveled in this recently uncovered document is that "narco-traffickers knew a day in advance, with coordinates, when DEA/CNP [Colombian National Police] were going to fumigate the marijuana/coca fields. Thus, they were always prepared to protect the fields."
And why did they know?
This new DEA document reveals the following:
"During the interview with the [DEA] Inspectors, the CS [a confidential informant who also was a narco-trafficker] stated that over the last few years, he/she had been able to obtain between 50 to 60 documents from the BCO [the DEA Bogota Country Office] at will. This is not a new revelation to us ... as we met with [DEA Miami Group Supervisor] David Tinsley on January 2000; whereas GS Tinsley related to us that he had a CS that was obtaining documents from inside the BCO and showed us an original document, not a photocopy."
Shooting the Messengers
Previously, Narco News reported that DEA Miami Group Supervisor Tinsley attempted to blow the whistle on the leaks within the DEA office in Bogota. For his efforts, he claims he was retaliated against and eventually fired by the agency.
However, Tinsley took his case to court and won, and was reinstated at the DEA with back pay plus interest.
Another DEA agent in Florida, Ed Fields, also attempted to expose the alleged link between narco-traffickers and certain Bogota DEA agents. DEA sought to silence Fields as well, according to the Kent memo, and he "found himself the target of numerous OPR investigations."
Fields, who recently retired from the DEA, currently has a case pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. That case stems from a whistleblower complaint he filed that claims the DEA retaliated against him, in part, for his efforts to expose the allegedly corrupt activities in the Bogota DEA office.
Kent also alleges that the watchdog agencies at both DEA and the Department of Justice charged with investigating the alleged corruption actually worked to cover up the evidence of the Bogota Connection.
Specifically, Kent contends that the DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility (or OPR, essentially the agency's Internal Affairs department) and individuals in the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have worked to keep a lid on the corruption charges. According to Kent, these offices actually sabotaged investigations being carried out by the Florida DEA agents and by one of the OIG's own agents.
Lie Detector
The DEA document that has now been leaked to Narco News by an anonymous source is the report on a polygraph test conducted in late February 2003 on a DEA confidential source. This confidential source, according to the Kent memo, was actually a narco-trafficker who allegedly had DEA agents in Bogota "on his payroll."
This connection came to light, the Kent memo alleges, after a man that Fields and Miami DEA agents were wooing as a source of information on Colombian guerrilla rebels was compromised by information leaked out of the DEA's Bogota office.
A Feb. 12, 2006, story in the Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language affiliate of the Miami Herald, revealed that the source of information was Jose Nelson Urrego, a major player in the "North Valley Cartel" narco-trafficking organization in Colombia.
Urrego became a well-known name in political circles in Colombia in the mid-1990s when he was linked to allegedly providing drug money to Ernesto Samper's presidential election campaign. Samper survived the scandal and served as president of Colombia until August of 1998. In fact, the Colombian attorney general who made the accusation against Samper was replaced by Gomez Mendez, a Samper crony, the Nuevo Herald reported.
Urrego was compromised, the Kent memo claims, after he was faxed a document that contained internal DEA information revealing that he was snitching on the FARC (Spanish initials for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The FARC is the largest leftist insurgent group in that country's civil war, accused by U.S. officials of drug and arms trafficking.
In other words, whoever sent this document to Urrego was essentially threatening his life, as being pointed out as a DEA collaborator can be a death sentence in the drug underworld. Through a later wiretap, the Miami DEA agents were able to determine that a narco-trafficker had indeed obtained the internal DEA information that was used to expose Urrego.
"That person [the narco-trafficker threatening Urrego] is also a DEA informant," the Kent memo states, "and is believed to have been controlled by the Bogota Country Office. Among other things, it was alleged that the informant [the narco-trafficker] had several agents on his payroll who provided him with classified information. The agents were believed to work in Colombia and Washington, D.C."
The Kent memo states that the narco-trafficker was later subjected to a polygraph by the DEA. That lie-detector test was conducted in Florida sometime between mid-2003 and mid-2004, sources previously told Narco News. In his memo, Kent simply writes that the narco-trafficker "passed the test."
In other words, the narco-trafficker "passed the test" because he did not "lie" about receiving confidential DEA documents.
However, the Kent memo claims, a high-level OPR official told the polygrapher not to report on the test, but rather to say "that the test never took place."
As Narco News reported on January 17, sources said that the polygrapher refused to follow that order and actually did file a report on the test results with his immediate supervisor in the DEA's polygraph program. "There is a DEA report on the results of that polygraph (on the narco-trafficker)," one source said at the time. "Someone needs to get that document."
Well, it appears someone (Narco News) has done just that.
Cat Out of the Bag
The DEA report on the polygraph test recently obtained by Narco News indicates that the confidential source (the narco-trafficker who exposed Urrego) did admit to receiving classified information from a DEA agent in Bogota. Portions of the polygraph report are redacted and blacked out, but Narco News, with the help of sources familiar with the case and the Kent memo, was able to fill in some of the blanks.
The report states that the DEA performed a lie detector test on the confidential source/narco-trafficker and asked how he came into possession of "a DEA classified document housed at American Embassy, DEA Bogota Country Office... The CS stated that [a DEA agent in Bogota] was the one that provided the document [used to expose Urrego] so there was no point in lying to it."
The DEA report also indicates that the polygraph examiner, DEA Office of Investigative Technology Staff Coordinator E. Victor Perez, did not issue an opinion on the results of the lie-detector test, due in part to a need to conduct further testing. However, according to the report, "[DEA] OPR decided not to conduct any further polygraph testing."
"... I suggested that [the way to] find out with certainty whether the DEA [agent] in CB [Colombia] was involved in any way in this situation was to conduct a specific test about him. ... However, at this point, I could not discount his [the DEA agent's] involvement in this matter..." the DEA polygraph examiner writes in the report.
The DEA report then goes on to paint the following picture of precisely how the narco-trafficker gained access to classified DEA documents and information while working as a Confidential Source.
The CS related to SC Perez the following events regarding the document in question [the leaked document outing Urrego]. The CS stated that sometime during the middle of November 2002, [REDACTED] BCO [DEA Bogota Country Office] requested the CS's presence at the BCO's offices. The CS was escorted through the American Embassy and inside the DEA offices to [REDACTED] office. At that time, [the DEA agent] showed the CS a document containing names of other CSs, with their addresses, phone numbers, and where they were working at as sources, i.e. [REDACTED] The CS told [the agent] that he/she was not acquainted with any of those names in the list. Then, [the agent] retrieved the document from the CS and took it, along with other papers, to a back office.
This back office was large, well appointed and with the pictures of President G.W. Bush and others. The CS said that the document was never left unattended. The CS stated that he/she had been to the DEA offices in many instances sometimes alone and sometimes with [REDACTED] a CNP captain, and a member of the Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU). The CS knew the layout of the office very well...
Around 8th of January 2003, the CS met with [REDACTED] (one of the CS's sub-sources) at ... house and discussed the above-mentioned document and its importance. Three to five days later, they met again, at a cafe near the Unicentro Commercial shopping center located at 122/19th Street in Bogota. At this time, [REDACTED] showed the CS the document but did not give it to him/her. The CS paid ... 200,000 Colombian pesos (around $200 USD) for general expenses, but not for obtaining the document.
Now, if, as DEA claims, the allegations in the Kent memo are "unfounded," then how do we explain these latest revelations in this DEA polygraph report?
Why does the report itself indicate that DEA OPR declined to pursue further testing of the confidential informant/narco-trafficker to determine conclusively where the leak was in the U.S. Embassy in Bogota? Someone certainly had access to the classified DEA information that was used to out Urrego. That's what prompted the polygraph test, right?
And why, as the Kent memo claims, was this DEA polygraph examiner asked to bury the results of his test? Was that request made in order to hide the fact that the narco-trafficker/informant had confessed to receiving classified documents from DEA personnel in Bogota? Is the fact that this polygraph report has been in the possession of the DEA for years, with no apparent follow-up, evidence of Kent's contention that a major cover-up has been orchestrated within the Justice Department and DEA with respect to the Kent memo?
What else has been buried for the convenience of the government and at the expense of justice and human life?
The Bogota Connection continues to unravel...
Narco News is funded by your contributions to The Fund for Authentic Journalism. Please make journalism like this possible by going to The Fund's web site, http://www.authenticjournalism.org, and making a contribution today.
Copyright 2006 The Narco News Bulletin
*****
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALISATION
Behind the News, Analysis, Commentary and Intelligence on the New World Order
101 Cardinal Leger
P.O. Box 51004
Pincourt, Quebec, Canada, J7V9T3
E-mail: editor@globalresearch.ca
Web: http://globalresearch.ca/
- Monday, 15 May 2006 -
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"Terror Mastermind" Abu Musab Al Zarqawi is "Incompetent"
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by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20060515&articleId=2446
Modern psychological operations, or PSYOP,... is not unlike the public advertising that we are all exposed to wherever we go, every day, through all kinds of mass media. (US Airborne, Psychological Operations/Warfare)
The Pentagon has released yet another mysterious video allegedly discovered in April by US forces in a hideout in the Al-Yusufiyah neighborhood of southern Baghdad. The video portrays "Terror Mastermind" Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi acting in a "foolish" and "incompetent" fashion. He appears "confused" on how to handle a US M-249 squad automatic weapon (SAW), which every US serviceman learns from day one.
Without further examination, the US media concurs in chorus: the video is authentic and the enemy is "incompetent". Echoing the official Pentagon statement, the video, which portrays Zarqawi in US-style sneakers, mishandling a US produced machine gun, is casually categorized as "Al Qaeda propaganda", apparently intended to boost Zarqawi's image among his numerous followers. According to CBS Charles Osgood: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq, obviously wanted to show his followers and the world what a fierce and fearsome warrior he is. So on one of his recent propaganda videotapes, he's seen in the desert firing long bursts from a machine gun." (CBS, 5 May 2006, emphasis added)
In the words of Major Rich Lynch, Commander of Coalition Forces in Iraq: "He's very proud of the fact that he can operate this machine gun. Here is Zarqawi, the ultimate warrior, trying to shoot his machine gun. He's shooting single shots. He looks down, can't figure it out. Calls his friend to come unblock the stoppage.... He's wearing his black uniform and his New Balance tennis shoes, as he moves this white pickup truck, and his close associates around him, his trusted advisers, do things like grab the hot barrel of a machine gun and burn themselves." (CNN, 5 May 2006)
Apparently the version of the video found by US forces in the safe house in the Al-Yusufiyah neighborhood is not the Al Qaeda "cleaned up propaganda version" meant for viewing by Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Middle East. The US military managed to get its hands on the complete unedited raw footage "showing what Zarqawi's people apparently edited out, showing Zarqawi talking into the camera while fumbling and having trouble shooting the weapon in the automatic mode until somebody shouts for a soldier to go help him out" (CBS, op cit.). And this is the version which is also being aired on Iraqi television.
Who is Incompetent? Zarqawi or the US Military?
The video portrays "Enemy Number One" as "foolish" and unable to operate a machine gun. Zarqawi's US made sneakers become a talking point on network television. The American media not only applauds, it expands at length on the ridicule surrounding Zarqawi without begging the "obvious" question: If terror mastermind Al Zarqawi is really incompetent, why is it that the US military and intelligence apparatus with its sophisticated weaponry and multibillion dollar budget is unable to defeat him? In the words of Britain's Sunday Times: "[T]he most devastating American firepower cannot find, let alone suppress, Al-Qaeda's Musab al-Zarqawi,..."
If you believe the Pentagon's new line on how silly Zarqawi really is, does this not also point to "weaknesses" of the US military in waging an effective "war on terrorism" in Iraq?
Turning Point in Pentagon PSYOP
The "incompetence" of Zarqawi seems at odds with previous media reports where he is presented as the skillful mastermind, capable of deceiving US military and intelligence operatives, possessing dangerous weapons of mass destruction and capable of waging a second 911 attack on America using handmade chemical and biological weapons.
In Colin Powell's historic presentation to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003, Zarqawi is upheld as a casus belli, working in cahoots with Saddam. He is portrayed as leading an international network of terrorist operatives, involved in attacks in different parts of the World. He was allegedly coordinating a chemical weapons plant in Northern Iraq prior to the US invasion, he also had links to the Tehran government; he was said to behind the 2005 Amman bombings as well as supporting Jemiah Islami, the Southeast Asian Islamic network accused of the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia. And now the Pentagon says, quoting the raw footage of an al Qaeda sponsored video: he is "incompetent" and unable to handle an automatic weapon. Meanwhile, the US has set up an elaborate military command structure (US Northern Command) to protect the homeland against Zarqawi and bin Laden.
Whose propaganda program are we dealing with? Zarqawi's or the Pentagon's? Or both?
The answer to this question was provided in a recent article in the Washington Post. Released barely a few weeks earlier, the article provides details on leaked internal military documents which confirm the existence of a PSYOP "Zarqawi program" at the Pentagon. (WP. 10 April 2006) The latter consists in creating a "Zarqawi Legend" by feeding disinformation into the news chain:
'"The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work..." (WP, 10 April 2006, further details)
In this regard, the senior commander entrusted with Pentagon's PSYOP operation is General Kimmitt who now cooupies the position of senior planner at US Central Command (USCENTCOM), responsible for directing operations in Iraq and the Middle East confirms that
"There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."
A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program. "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism inIraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts... (Ibid)
Is the recently released video, which consists in ridiculing rather than villainizing "Enemy Number One", part of the Zarqawi PSYOP program?
According to US military sources, the purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is "to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops. (U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, See also History of Psychological Operations/Warfare).
The practice of "successful propaganda" in relation to the Iraq war has gone well beyond the official boundaries contained in military manuals. Propaganda creates an "outside enemy". Al Qaeda led by Osama and Al Qaeda in Iraq led by Zarqawi. Al Qaeda is behind most news stories regarding the "war on terrorism" including the suicide attacks. What is rarely mentioned is that this outside enemy Al Qaeda is a CIA "intelligence asset", used in covert operations.
There is evidence that the many of the "Al Qaeda in Iraq" sponsored suicide attacks on civilians are being conducted by US-UK special forces or by US sponsored paramilitaries.
In March, an American "security contractor" was found with explosives in his car. In September 2005, two British Special Forces disguised as Arabs, wearing wigs and traditional Arab headscarves were arrested by Iraqi police while driving a booby trapped car loaded with ammunition towards the center of Basra at the height of a major religious event. These operations, which are now an integral part of war propaganda, serve to villainize the Iraqi resistance, as well as weaken the antiwar protest movement in the US and Western Europe.
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty" published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, at www.globalresearch.ca. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His most recent book entitled: America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005, contains a detailed analysis of the role of Zarqawi in the Adminstration's disinformation campaign.
To view the Zarqawi video clip (MSNBC) click: http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=83654578-ee66-45ff-9938-1b4b131b9e0e&t=m5&p=News_NBC%20News
Copyright Centre for Research on Globalisation 2006. For fair use only/pour usage equitable seulement.
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7. THE NEW POWER BEHIND OSAMA'S THRONE
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
South Asia
May 18, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE18Df04.html
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN border - Whether he is viewed as a living legend for jihadis or as a reviled terrorist, the mere mention of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's name provokes strong reactions, and is an invaluable tool in the propaganda war between the two sides.
On the ground, though, at least in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that span Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reality is that bin Laden, while remaining a source of inspiration in the anti-West struggle, is acknowledged as no longer being in command of al-Qaeda's operations.
In that role, he has been superseded by Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to investigations and interviews conducted by Asia Times Online in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Indeed, in the four years since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda, after years of financial blockades and arrests, has emerged more as a loose (and ideologically divergent) grouping of mujahideen waging open jihad - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It would be absolutely wrong to say that al-Qaeda has evaporated into the air," a man from the Pakistani tribal areas of Waziristan told Asia Times Online. "The organization is very much active on the ground, but the sharp edges of circumstance have modified it into a new shape and it is now part of mainstream jihadi activity. The ultimate goal of the [jihadi] organization is to launch jihad from Khorasan [Afghanistan] to Jerusalem."
Calling himself Nasir ("supporter"), the man claimed to have intimate knowledge of Taliban and al-Qaeda activities in the region, where the Taliban have gained a strong foothold for their insurgency in Afghanistan and where al-Qaeda operatives are known to have taken shelter since being driven out of Afghanistan in 2001.
"It is true that Osama's activity has not been heard of for a long time, but Dr [Ayman] al-Zawahiri [al-Qaeda deputy leader] is active and moves all over and is now the main engine behind a lot of activity, even outside Afghanistan," Nasir asserted.
Another man, whom Asia Times Online had met in the northern mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who just called himself a mujahid, said, "The al-Qaeda command structure, as it was known at the time of September 11, which carried out specific missions to target US interests, has largely been abandoned, but it has quickly been replaced.
"Nowadays, Arabs go straight into Afghanistan and join various Taliban commanders. At the same time, the Pakistani Taliban have formed bases in North and South Waziristan. All of them pledge their allegiance to Mullah Omar," the mujahid said.
"All global operations have been shunned for now. Sheikh [bin Laden] is inactive. Actually, Sheikh does not have any money left," a colleague of the mujahid said. Introducing himself as Abdullah ("Servant of Allah"), he was from the Afghan province of Nuristan and said he was part of the Taliban-led resistance. He also described himself as a "host", a term generally used for those who provide shelter to Arab-Afghans - those Arabs who have joined the insurgency and spent time in Afghanistan.
"He [bin Laden] kept changing his location; he spent a lot of money on his people and associates, and of course for his survival. The channels of money kept choking one by one and finally dried up," said Abdullah with a forlorn look on his face.
"This was a strange situation in which everybody [Arab-Afghan] was striving for survival, and once Osama's shelter [money] was off, they were scattered," Abdullah explained.
The most significant result of this was a sharp turn by al-Qaeda toward mainstream jihadist activity, mainly against allied forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The switch, though, carries with it inherent dangers, both for al-Qaeda and for some Muslim countries.
A visit from Iraq
The Taliban, and to a lesser extent al-Qaeda, have established a de facto Islamic state in the North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan. In effect it is beyond the control of Islamabad. This correspondent planned to travel there, but was warned that it would not be "fruitful", presumably in terms of life expectancy.
Instead, some contacts from North Waziristan traveled to the city of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, to speak to Asia Times Online, including Nasir.
They related that about two weeks ago, three men representing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in charge of Iraqi operations, were summoned from that country. The men met with Zawahiri in South Waziristan and were bluntly told to "immediately stop attacking Shi'ites in Iraq" and to "bring about [Sunni] reconciliation with Shi'ite groups" in Iraq. Further, they were ordered to "develop a common anti-US strategy along with the Shi'ites in Iraq".
This development is significant in the context of the vacuum that now exists within al-Qaeda, given bin Laden's reduced influence. In essence, three forces are in play: the jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan who answer to Mullah Omar; the jihadis centered in Iraq under Zarqawi; and the "traditional" al-Qaeda represented by Zawahiri (and bin Laden).
The first two forces are moving further away from the core of al-Qaeda, largely over the issue of takfiri (a belief that sects that are not Wahhabi-based are infidel and apostate).
Bin Laden has opposed this concept, arguing that al-Qaeda should not attack other Muslims, but takfiris see anyone beyond their beliefs as fair game, hence Zawahiri's advice to Zarqawi's men that they stop attacking Shi'ites in Iraq and concentrate on driving out the US-led forces, the "true" infidel.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, powerful figures such as Qari Tahir Yaldevish of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Sheikh Essa (an Egyptian) are very well respected among the al-Qaeda leadership, but they have been at the head of a successful drive to expand the influence of takfiris in Waziristan.
They have found comrades in the likes of Moulvi Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, who are committed to waging pitched battle against Pakistani military forces in what they call a "real" jihad as the troops represent the Pakistani administration, which they say has become a facilitator of the Americans.
From the wounded body of al-Qaeda, underground networks have largely been abandoned and replaced by open jihad. This jihad, though, has a deadly twist, especially for Pakistan: although Muslim, it's now a fair target.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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8. MOUSSAOUI: FROM DEATH TO SLOW-DEATH
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By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 5/4/06]
Source: Afrikan Frontline Network, nattyreb@comcast.net
- Sunday, 14 May 2006 -
Few places held more surprise at the Life verdict for a French citizen and alleged Al-Qaeda soldier, Zacarias Moussaoui, than death row.
Government prosecutors pulled out all the stops to get a death sentence, and their use of the tearful testimony of the families of 9-11 victims was designed to use emotion as a fuel to rocket the Moroccan straight to death row.
That an Alexandria, Va. jury declined the invitation can only be called remarkable. If there is one jurisdiction that can be termed death-prone, Virginia fits the bill. The federal prosecutors, who could've tried Moussaoui almost anywhere, opted for Virginia for precisely that reason. A southern, conservative state, one firmly looped to the American Death Belt (indeed, a state virtually in the shadow of the Pentagon), Virginia was supposed to be Moussaoui's Waterloo.
The jury decided otherwise.
Several jurors apparently concluded that Moussaoui was a minor player in the events of 9-11, and had but "limited" knowledge of them.
The Justice Dept. spent over 4 years bringing the case to trial, and spent millions of dollars in search of a death sentence. Ironically, according to press reports, Moussaoui offered to accept a death sentence, if only he was given better prison conditions.
The government decided to spend the money, and try the case.
Indeed, Moussaoui gave them more than they seemed to need to send him to the gallows, but the jury didn't believe it.
However, although the government lost its objective, that doesn't mean that the 37-year old Frenchman "won" anything substantial. He went from the threat of Death Row to the grim reality of slow-death row. Life in a prison hell of a cell. It is a death sentence in everything but name.
But that reality pales beside the remarkable fact that 12 American jurors, in a case of this enormous magnitude, refused to do the easy thing: decide for death. While it is undoubtedly true that Moussaoui was in jail on 9-11, and therefore played no part in that day's events, his guilty plea opened the door wide for death.
That the jury declined to so sentence him is another matter.
It is tempting (but perhaps too early) to read this verdict as a turning point in the American Death Machine. If a jury rejects it in *this* case, of a dark-skinned, French-speaking foreigner, who openly praises the country's arch-enemies of al-Qaeda, who boasts of his wish to have participated in the harrowing carnage of 9-11, in a courtroom within a stone's throw of the site where a plane plowed into the walls of the Pentagon, it speaks volumes of the apparently growing distaste for the death penalty.
It's hard to surprise guys on Death Row; this case did it.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved.
Mr. Jamal's new work, WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party, is now available from South End Press, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.southendpress.org).
Check out Mumia's NEW book: "Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People": http://www.africanworld.com.
These are VERY SERIOUS TIMES for political activists in this country and around the world. Get full details and keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!! at http://www.mumia.org and http://www.movenet.org.
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The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
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In the Program, the NSA determines, on its own, which telephone numbers and e-mail addresses to monitor. The NSA doesn't have to get approval from the White House, the Justice Department, or anyone else in the Bush administration before it begins eavesdropping on a specific phone line inside the United States. Instead, it has set up its own internal checklist to determine wherther there is "probable cause" to begin surveillance. The Bush administration argues that the NSA checklist substitutes for the determination of probable cause in a court of law, but neither federal prosecutors nor other Justice Department attorneys even review the case of a suspect before the NSA begins to listen to his or her phone lines. Occasionally, to Justice Department officials audit the NSA program, but the NSA unilaterally decides on whom to spy. Bush's executive order gives the NSA broad latitude to decide what might constitute a suspicious phone nember or e-mail address. ... The existence of the Program has been kept so secret that senior Bush administration officials have gone to great lengths to hide the origins of the intelligence it gathers. When the NSA finds potentially useful intelligence in the U.S.-based telecommunications switches, it is "laundered" before it is widely distributed to case officers at the CIA or special agents of the FBI, officials said. Reports are said not to identify that the intelligence came from intercepts of U.S.-based telecommunications. -- James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration [New York: Free Press, 2006]: pp. 52-53.
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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 723/May 21, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 722/May 17, 2006
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Friday, 12 May 2006 -
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1. U.S. GOVERNMENT PHONE SPYING TARGETS ALL AMERICANS
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/nsag-m12.shtml
By the Editorial Board
The exposure in Thursday's USA Today of a vast and secret National Security Agency data base tracking the phone calls of hundreds of millions of Americans is further evidence of the advanced preparations for the establishment of a police state in the United States. The NSA database is a blueprint for political repression and intimidation on a massive scale.
The patently illegal government surveillance has nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks, as claimed by President Bush and echoed by both the media and Democratic Party politicians who criticize various aspects of the program. It has been implemented by a state apparatus which sees its major opposition as coming from among the American people, not scattered bands of Islamic terrorists. At a time of growing social opposition, the government is systematically collecting data to find out what people are thinking and to whom they are talking.
The phone-tracking program has, according to the USA Today report, been underway since shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The three largest telecommunications companies in the US, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, agreed secretly to collaborate with the Bush administration and hand over to the NSA their records of every telephone call made by every one of their approximately 200 million customers. The program, carried out without court-issued warrants or Congressional oversight, is in flagrant violation of federal statutes as well as civil liberties guarantees laid down in the Bill of Rights.
It means that the government has at its disposal information concerning the personal, business and political relationships and activities of most Americans--information that can be turned over to the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and other state agencies.
This program, as well as the previously leaked program of illegal NSA eavesdropping on international telephone and email communications, has been carried out with the knowledge and approval of leading members of Congress from both the Republican and Democratic parties. Whatever protests are made by politicians in either party in the wake of the program's exposure, and whatever congressional hearings are held, their primary purpose will be to provide political cover for the collaboration of Democrats as well as Republicans in an unprecedented attack on democratic rights.
Nothing will be done to halt the illegal spying or hold accountable those, beginning with Bush himself, who have systematically lied to the American people and broken the law in order to create the infrastructure of a police state.
The willing participation of major corporations in this operation underscores the erosion of any serious support within the American ruling elite as a whole for democratic rights, and the turn toward authoritarian forms of rule to suppress growing opposition among working people to the vast concentration of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy.
The secret surveillance program reported by USA Today goes far beyond the program for intercepting international phone calls which was revealed last December through a leak to the New York Times. In what one source for the USA Today story called "the largest database ever assembled in the world," the NSA has compiled a record of nearly every phone call made in the United States since 9/11, combined with a historical record of phone calls going back for many years before. The records include the phone number from which each call was made, the number dialed, and the duration of the call.
While the name of the person making the call is supposedly not included in the NSA database, such information is easily obtained by cross-referencing with other government and commercial databases.
USA Today said the program did not involve actual listening to the conversations--a physical impossibility given the billions of calls monitored--but rather the amassing of information for data mining, in which complex software programs are used to find patterns in the calling. Having created "a database of every call ever made," the NSA is in a position to track down the personal, business, social and political affiliations of any person targeted by the US government.
According to Leslie Cauley, the reporter who wrote the story, "Chances are that your cell phone calls, as well as your home phone calls, have been tracked." She added in a press interview that there was a "high likelihood" that this information was being passed on to the FBI and CIA.
AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth control local, long-distance and cell phone service in most of the country. A fourth company, the much smaller Qwest, has refused to participate in the NSA program. The Denver-based Qwest provides local phone service in 14 western states as well as long-distance service in some areas. According to the USA Today article, Qwest balked at going along with the NSA program because of its dubious legality.
The phone companies were asked to provide the complete past telephone history of all their customers, as well as regular updates of contemporary phone usage. This means that the NSA now possesses a historical database that extends back at least to the 1984 breakup of the old AT&T monopoly, if not back to the oldest records available. The lifetime telephone usage of virtually every living American is now in a government dossier.
The NSA database could be used to track down anyone associated with political organizations opposed to the policies of the Bush administration, such as socialist, antiwar, civil rights and civil liberties groups. Anyone in regular telephone contact with such organizations is undoubtedly flagged as a potential "terrorist" in the NSA database. In the event of a roundup of such political opponents, the database would supply the names and phone numbers of all those in close contact with those targeted for arrest, thus providing a road map for further arrests and detentions.
Searches of the NSA database could also pinpoint all those who regularly called selected countries overseas, thus generating a list of potential targets for immigration raids. The database could also be used to monitor phone calls made to the media--such as those from the whistleblowers who spoke to the Washington Post about secret CIA torture centers in Eastern Europe or who exposed the illegal NSA monitoring of international phone calls. The White House could also identify government employees who regularly call Democratic members of Congress.
The information could be used to intimidate and blackmail individuals and coerce them into informing on friends, relatives and business associates.
As with all its other attacks on democratic rights, the Bush administration is defending the massive NSA phone spying as an "anti-terrorist" measure. But it is preposterous to claim that the federal government needs information on the call patterns of every American in order to locate and monitor a handful of terrorists. Nor would there be any reason, in relation to anti-terrorist investigations, for the NSA to accumulate the records of phone calls made long before Al Qaeda came into existence.
President Bush essentially confirmed the USA Today report in a brief prepared statement issued Thursday after the article sparked a flurry of commentary in the media and on Capitol Hill. Bush did not deny the substance of the newspaper's account, while claiming that all the administration's surveillance actions are legal and are solely directed against Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups. "The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he claimed. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."
The credibility of this statement can be judged by recalling what Bush said after the New York Times first reported the secret NSA warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls. Bush claimed at the time that only international phone calls made by or to terrorist suspects were being monitored. "In other words," he said, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States." It has since emerged that the NSA eavesdropped illegally on thousands of domestic phone calls as well.
Bush used a similarly deceptive formulation in his statement Thursday. "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," he declared, although what USA Today reported did not concern listening to phone calls, but rather recording private call information, which is equally illegal under Section 222 of the 1934 Communications Act. The Bush administration did not seek approval for the call-monitoring program from the secret court set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, just as it bypassed the FISA court for the warrantless phone-tapping.
Bush added this claim: "The intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat." The White House has briefed only a handful of members--although the legal requirement is for briefing of the entire membership of both Senate and House intelligence committees. Nonetheless, Bush has repeatedly cited the briefing of key Democrats on his administration's domestic spying programs to highlight the collaboration of the Democrats, exposing the hypocrisy of their pro-forma protests.
On Monday, Bush demonstratively reaffirmed his intention to continue these programs by naming Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to head the CIA, replacing Porter Goss, who was ousted last week. Hayden, now deputy director of national intelligence, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005, and was therefore responsible for the establishment of the call-tracking program.
Both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said that they would question Hayden about the program during his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin next week. Hayden has vociferously defended the NSA program of warrantless interception of international phone calls. He called it "targeted and focused," adding, "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States." The phone-tracking program, however, is the opposite: a massive dragnet targeting every telephone call placed by every person in the US.
Last month, during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asserted that the White House might have the legal authority to order warrantless wiretapping of domestic phone calls as well as international calls. "I wouldn't rule it out," he said. Gonzales was not asked about tracking phone calls, only about listening in.
It is not yet known whether President Bush signed a secret executive order for the call-tracking, or whether the program was undertaken without such formal authorization. Bush did sign an executive order for the warrantless NSA wiretapping of international calls and emails.
The Bush administration has already moved to suppress one inquiry into illegal NSA spying. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) announced Wednesday that it was closing down an investigation into whether Justice Department lawyers took improper action in approving the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, on the grounds that the NSA refused to grant the OPR the security clearances required to proceed. In other words, those carrying out the illegal wiretapping used the "classified" stamp to block any investigation into their activities.
With each revelation of police state measures, the lack of any genuine commitment to democratic rights within the political establishment becomes more evident. Not a single leading Democrat, and none of the leading US newspapers, responded to last December's exposure of NSA phone tapping by demanding that the program be halted. The Democratic leadership has opposed even a token resolution for Bush's censure over the illegal operation.
Already the media and politicians of both parties have sought to downplay the significance of the phone-tracking program, while accepting uncritically the pretext that it is motivated by the vicissitudes of the so-called "war on terrorism." The truth is that the program exposes the enormity and immediacy of the assault on the democratic rights of the American people.
This threat must not be underestimated. It is the outcome of a protracted breakdown of American democracy, rooted in the crisis of the capitalist system and the resulting malignant growth of social inequality.
The only social force that has a genuine interest in and commitment to democratic rights is the working class. Working people can defend these rights only by forging an independent socialist movement in opposition to the two-party system through which the corporate oligarchy maintains its rule.
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2. GOVERNMENT HAS LONG HISTORY OF ABUSING PERSONAL INFORMATION
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KNIGHT RIDDER WASHINGTON BUREAU
Top Stories
Friday, May 12, 2006
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/14567056.htm
By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has assured Americans that their government isn't spying on them, but history explains why many remain uneasy about this week's news that their phone records have been turned over to federal agents.
The government has a long track record of abusing personal information that's gathered in the name of national security. From the Red Scare in the 1920s to illegal wiretaps during the Nixon era, Americans have struggled to find the right balance between individual rights and collective security.
"The potential for abuse is awesome," a Senate investigation committee concluded in a 1976 report detailing illegal wiretaps, break-ins and other abuses that government agents committed in the 1960s and '70s.
The Senate panel, known as the "Church committee" after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, warned that technological advances would make it even harder for the government to stay within acceptable limits of respecting privacy rights, especially when the nation is at risk of attack.
"In time of crisis, the government will exercise its power to conduct domestic intelligence activities to the fullest extent. The distinction between legal dissent and criminal conduct is easily forgotten," the committee wrote. "In an era where the technological capability of government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward 'big brother government.'"
The government has been collecting and storing information on its citizens since at least 1912, when the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, recruited waiters, socialites and other well-placed individuals to eavesdrop on conversations and report any suspicious talk.
By the Red Scare in the 1920s, when the government made large-scale arrests of radicals and leftists in the wake of communists taking power in Russia, the bureau had assembled a rapidly expanding database of more than 150,000 names.
Abuses over the years cross party lines and political ideologies. Franklin Roosevelt wanted a file on Americans who sent him critical telegrams. Lyndon Johnson asked the FBI to get him the phone records of Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, remembered today as a champion of the underdog, approved wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly every recent president has ordered questionable "name checks" - a search of FBI files for any damaging information - on political opponents.
During the Nixon administration, a name check on journalist Daniel Schorr backfired when the FBI misunderstood its instructions and conducted a full background investigation, including interviews with Schorr's associates. White House officials, desperate for a cover story to explain the FBI probe, made the improbable claim that Schorr had been under consideration for a government appointment.
The Church committee concluded that few politicians can resist the chance to gather information on their enemies, and few intelligence-gatherers can resist pressure to please the president. There has been no evidence so far that any phone records the government has collected recently in its search for terrorists have been misused, but that's small comfort to civil libertarians.
"It's about human failings, human failings amplified by technology," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "Men are not angels. Our Constitution was written by people who understood that human nature has many flaws."
In some cases, intelligence-gatherers try to use the information they collect against their enemies. In one of the most notorious examples, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover launched a campaign to discredit King that included an attempt to get him to commit suicide.
After gathering evidence of King's extramarital affairs, the agency sent a compilation of incriminating audiotapes to King's wife and sent him a note suggesting that he take his own life.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. ... You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation," the note said.
Bush's defenders say the current controversy bears no resemblance to past abuses and is being blown out of proportion.
"Let's talk about this in a rational way. We're in a war with terror and there are people out there that want to kill us," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. "I don't think this action is nearly as troublesome as it's being made out. They're not tapping our phones and getting our conversations."
The government is using the phone records for data mining, the process of searching through a large volume of information to find useful patterns, in this case, evidence of terrorist communications.
"The problem isn't data mining. It's the people who do it," said Daniel Larose, a statistics professor at Central Connecticut State University and the author of "Data Mining Methods and Models." "It's easy to do badly. Humans tend to see patterns where no patterns exist. They might classify someone as suspicious who doesn't deserve suspicion."
Larose, who has written two other books on the subject, said data mining was like a knife. "You can use it to cut your birthday cake," he said. Or "you can use it to murder somebody in an alley."
Copyright 2006 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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GUERRILLA NEWS NETWORK
War On Terror
Thursday, 11 May 2006
http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/2273/Keeping_tabs_on_SOCOM
By Sam Urquhart
Reports have detailed the growing role of Special Operations Command worldwide, but what are they doing?
Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is the branch of the U.S. military concerned with aspects of modern warfare that occur away from the public eye, underneath the radar of other states and the mainstream media. It has, unsurprisingly, benefited massively from the War on Terror and Iraq. In January 2005, it emerged that underneath SOCOM, Rumsfeld had established an organization known as the "Strategic Support Group." SSG, the Washington Post reported, was "intended to add missing capabilities--such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for direct access to national intelligence databases--to the military's much larger special operations squadrons" while some in the Pentagon had begun to refer to it as "secret army of Northern Virginia."
Since then, information on the SSB, SOCOM and its relationship to other government bodies has been sparse.
What exactly is SOCOM up to? This year, we have heard a little about the expansion of military teams onto State Department territory. We sometimes hear about covert operations in "denied areas." For example, according to Seymour Hersh, SOCOM may well have had teams in Iran for over a year.
Some commentators suggest that this represents a military incursion into State Department territory and that State is somehow likely to find this a problem. In the ranks, this may be so, but not for Condoleezza Rice, who in January of this year committed her department to working closely with the military including in "post-conflict situations" a strategy she calls "transformational diplomacy." If people on the ground don't like it, that is not a problem as "In the coming years hundreds will move across borders and into the front lines of diplomacy where they are needed most."
Presumably because a few will be moving out when the military toughs move in.
Ann Scott Tyson reported in the Washington Post in late April that Donald Rumsfeld had hatched a plan to further expand the power of the military. "The details of the plan are still classified" she wrote, "but the documents envision 'a significantly expanded role for the military -- and in particular a growing force of elite Special Operations troops -- in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.'" The product of at least a three year germination period, she wrote, "they reflect a beefing up of the Pentagon's involvement in domains traditionally handled by the CIA and State Department."
As Mike Whitney explained on 25 April, the aim is to create a parallel service to complement State Department representatives in strategic embassies overseas or, as Whitney put it, "to put the US military under private control and turn the world into one massive war zone."
This is consistent with the 2006 QDR, which I reported on earlier this year and which promised to gain US access to previously "denied areas" through surveillance capabilities and to operate across the world, using small rapid response teams under the cloak of secrecy. That was a Department of Defense, not a CIA document. Now, with the transition from Porter Goss to Michael Hayden seeming likely at Langley, it also seems plausible that the Defense establishment is seeking to consolidate its power over intelligence gathering overseas.
Fortunately for us, the U.S. is a democracy in name and form, if not entirely in substance. Hence we can have some access to what plans are being laid, how much money is being raised to pay for them and the likely consequences of putting them into action.
Hydrogen powered spy planes
One SOCOM initiative which is taking off right now is a hydrogen powered surveillance plane known as Helios or Global Observer manufactured by AeroVironment Ltd. The DoD obviously trusts AeroVironment as they have entered into "a sole source contract with [them]...[as] the Government does not have the data rights to this system to enable competition."
The BBC reported on Helios back in 2003. "Liquid hydrogen stored on board and oxygen extracted from the air are combined in fuel cells. The electricity generated drives the propellers," says the Beeb, "a full tank of hydrogen would keep the unmanned plane in the air for 24 hours."
A project justification document from February 2006, states that the Helios is explicitly required for "persistent surveillance in denied areas." (Not for romantic solutions to climate change as the Beeb hoped in its earlier peek). By denied areas, they mean foreign countries, places where people might take offence if a spy plane lingered over their heads for twenty-four hours.
In-Q-Tel
SOCOM has also taken on a share of the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, along with the CIA. In theory, In-Q-Tel is supposed to be a tool for investing in promising technologies to be used in "national security" matters. Redherring.com reports that its capital has grown over time to around $50m since "the CIA established In-Q-Tel in 1999 and so far it has worked with about 90 companies and helped bring more than 120 technologies to market." A February 6 request for funds for a similar fund by NASA let slip that the CIA had been joined by SOCOM in funding these new technologies, but what exactly are they?
The technologies being invested in by In-Q-tel include, the "state-of-the-art speech recognition and patent pending conversion technologies to listen to recorded conversations and create minable databases" being developed by a company named Callminer.
Attensity are working on tools for the "structuring and analyzing the vast amounts of text found in written reports, communications, open source documents, and other data feeds," by which they mean "structured and unstructured data sources, such as warranty claims, customer feedback, and field service records."
Then there is Initiate, whose "Identity Hub software...overcomes duplicate and fragmented records, multiple identifications, transpositions, misspellings, nicknames, aliases, address inconsistencies and identity misrepresentations to instantly find and accurately link all the records about a person, household, organization or other object across disparate systems and data sources."
In a similar vein, Intelliseek have a means "to find, categorize, rank, summarize, and filter data no matter what its source, location, format, or language" while Pixlogic are marketing a tool that "automatically see[s] the logical visual objects in an image, or any text that may appear in the image/video, indexing this content without manual intervention, and allowing users to search and retrieve the specific pictures/video segments they need with just a few clicks of the mouse."
Keyhole Inc., the company responsible for the software behind GoogleEarth are also on board, with their creations that are "enabling fast, fluid interaction with multi-terabyte network-resident databases of Earth imagery and geospatial information. Users can 'fly' from space to street level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information including roads, schools, businesses, and demographics."
Skybuilt Power provide a "mobile power station" and Tendril "a distributed programming interface to instantiate, manipulate, and orchestrate previously non-computerized activities related to buildings, factories, cities, crops, homes, and other objects in the physical world."
To smooth the way, Agentlogic have developed a sort of robotic agent, via "software [which] assures that users are aware of important events across many systems on a near real-time basis, and allows users to pre-define actions to automatically take in response to events whenever possible."
This is not to mention the technology offered by A4 Vision, whose "products are designed for broad security applications such as surveillance and access control, [and] law enforcement...Through innovations in 3D data capturing and processing capabilities, these systems permit industry-leading accuracy in real-time facial recognition and tracking."
Onpoint is another venture capital arm of the defense establishment, being marshalled by the U.S. Army. Every single one of their companies deals with the development of alternative fuel sources, generally rechargeable batteries or fuel cells for use by the armed forces.
As their own website states, the soldier of the future will have to "operate for days, or even weeks, without re-supply, so the power/energy requirements of the soldier's equipment must be available for extended periods." They will have to operate in "extreme environments" and independently.
When put together these tools provide an insight into an oncoming web of international and maybe domestic surveillance and supervision. In intelligence operations such as the assasination of dissidents or the toppling of unfriendly governments, it is easy to see how facial recognition, data mining and 24 hour surveillance from the air could be useful.
Without it being publicly understood, an army for the New American Century is slowly being built.
The Project for the New American Century planned for a total reformation of the U.S. army to turn it into a flexible, futurized tool useful for projecting the power of Washington wherever necessary and to be able to operate underneath the radar of conventional detection. That plan is still proceeding apace. As the largely neocon thinktank explained in 'Rebuilding America's Defenses,' published in September 2000. "Air warfare may no longer be fought by pilots manning tactical fighter aircraft sweeping the skies of opposing fighters, but a regime dominated by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft. On land, the clash of massive, combined-arms armored forces may be replaced by the dashes of much lighter, stealthier and information-intensive forces, augmented by fleets of robots, some small enough to fit in soldiers' pockets."
Even though no-one is really talking about it, those promises they made before September 11 are gradually materializing through bureaucratic tools such as investment funds and procurement, precisely the areas of U.S. policy that receive little attention because they are either unglamorous or impenetrable. That is all the more reason to keep SOCOM above the media radar.
Copyright 2006 Guerrilla News Network
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4. SAN DIEGO DEFENSE FIRM TITAN CORP. LINK
TO 5.5. TON COCAINE BUST IN MEXICO
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THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS
World Exclusive
May 11, 2006
By Daniel Hopsicker
Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker
Venice, FL -- The MadCowMorningNews has uncovered evidence implicating a San Diego defense contractor, The Titan Corporation, in fraud involving the shadowy St. Petersburg FL company involved in last month's mysterious 5.5 ton cocaine seizure in Mexico.
Titan is already embroiled in major scandals which include the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and conviction and a $28 million fine for fixing a Presidential election in the African state of Benin. The company is also receiving attention for its role as the biggest campaign contributor of disgraced former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
A MadCowMorningNews investigation of Titan Corp. also revealed that the firm has a curious and so-far unexplained connection to Makram Chams, a mysterious Lebanese man who provided assistance to Mohamed Atta and other terrorist hijackers in Venice Florida before the 9.11 attack.
Chams, who owned a convenience store in Venice, befriended and assisted the terrorist hijackers before disappearing after the 9.11 attack, leaving behind a thriving Kwik-Check mini-market which has since stood abandoned in the heart of the Venice business district.
Evidence in SEC filings recently brought to our attention reveal what happened to Chams: he went to work for Titan. According to documents filed by the company, Chams was a contractor working for Titan Corp in Saudi Arabia as recently as last year.
FAA motto in connected dope busts: Don't Ask Don't Tell?
Even more bizarre is the discovery of the embattled San Diego defense contractor's inexplicable involvement with SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL., a company recently in the spotlight of unwanted attention as the last clear user and owner of "Cocaine One," the DC9 recently caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.
The burning question: Who owned the DC9 airliner busted in Mexico?
The current answer: Nobody knows.
Almost a month ago The MadCowMorningNews requested complete records from the FAA on both DC9's which had once been controlled by SkyWay and partner Royal Sons LLC. Although we check the mailbox every day, with varying feelings of hopefulness, to date they have not responded.
Perhaps it's a simple matter of not being cleared for that information.
Nor is anyone else, apparently, which is small consolation, but then small consolation is better than none in a nation where current auto registrations are at the fingertips of every traffic patrolman in America, while major ticket items like airliners clearly are not.
What business did Titan Corp. have with SkyWay Aircraft?
We still don't know. As we will see, Titan put out a press release fraudulently plumping the prospects of the soon-to-be-completely-insolvent SkyWay, a company which had no products and no prospects.
SkyWay did however possess two DC9's sitting around tricked out to look like Dept of Homeland Security aircraft. Were individuals in Titan's executive management aircraft enthusiasts?
Apparently, yes. The individual at Titan with a yen for SkyWay's wild blue yonder has ties to another subject of current scandal: Brent Wilkes.
Small world.
Welcome to The Official Dusty Foggo Memorial SkyBox
In May of 2004 Titan Corp. announced in a press release a major purchase from SkyWay, a penny stock fraud company about to go bankrupt amid accusations by investors of fraud after they discovered the firm had nothing but non-existent products to show for its two year cash burn of almost $40 million.
Somebody's doing damage control, because on Titan's page of press releases on its website, this release, curiously enough, is the only one missing.
Try clicking the link, http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:7-Hy972jqkAJ:www.titan.com/media/news.html?select=3+skyway+press+releases&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=23.
In a scenario reminiscent of the Tom DeLay scandal, who company President Brent Kovar boasted had appointed him to a national Republican Business Council, the money was spent on an array of executive perks which included a half-dozen identical black Hummers equipped with police lights on their roofs, as well as to pay for a skybox at a Tampa stadium housing baseball's Devil Rays.
Titan officials did not return phone calls seeking comment on why a billion dollar defense contractor with sensitive government defense and intelligence contracts had loaned its name and prestige to a soon-to-be-bankrupt firm whose owners were at that moment said to be stripping it of everything not nailed down.
One thing the two firms did have in common was that both were major contributors to the Republican Party. In addition to padding the Duke-ster's pockets for those late-night poker cum hooker-fests at the Watergate Hotel, Titan was a major contributor to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, who returned the favor in a mock-heroic defense of Titan's employees accused of torture and rape at Abu Ghraib prison.
A cursory look at SkyWay cash which found its way into Republican pockets includes major contributions to Florida Republicans like U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who visited the firm during Homeland Security Week, and pronounced the firm's "vaporware" technology "awesome."
A new business strategy with a twist that's getting old
SkyWay Chairman Glenn Kovar gave $5000 to the DEFEND AMERICA PAC, $5000 to SENATE VICTORY FUND PAC, and more than $6000 to the REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE.
Perhaps it for this reason that SkyWay's investors and shareholders we spoke to who were fleeced in the deal hold out little hope that any of the guilty parties will be criminally charged, or even lose their jet-black Hummers.
A May 13, 2004 press release headlined, "SkyWay Communications Holdings Corp. Announces New Business Strategy as the Result of Agreement with Major US Defense Contractor," Titan promised as much as half a billion dollars worth of business to the grateful company...
"We are excited about the possibilities Sky Way Aircraft System technology offers," said Titan's David Stinson.
It was standard boilerplate, until we discovered this incestuous nugget: before signing on with Titan Stinson was the executive vice president of an Annapolis Maryland firm, Intergraph, whose Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) deal with Brent Wilke's ADCS Inc. opened the money spigot now being investigated by the FBI.
Teaching the boy to play the game
It was originally German software from a company called VPMAX which became a fountain of spendable cash. John Karpovich was VPMAX's U.S. distributor.
"John Karpovich, who helped run the document conversion program at the Defense Department before his retirement, said Wilkes infuriated Pentagon staff by claiming that the document conversion money belonged to him," reported the Washington Post.
"Brent came in and said, 'That's our money,'" Karpovich recalled. "He said, 'The congressmen put the money in there for us.'"
Karpovich was reluctant to talk with us, but conceded he'd watched the deal being put together by Bent Wilkes, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, and the just-deposed No. 3 man at the CIA, Dusty Foggo.
"Brent called me said he heard the product was great, and asked me to meet him in Washington. He had a suite at the Watergate. We met there and went to dinner with Dusty Foggo. He seemed like a sharp guy, at least he knew the inside of the government pretty well. We went to dinner with Dusty, and he and Brent talked about old times."
Karpovich had been castigated by Hunter, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he told us, for trying to sell the software to the Pentagon too cheaply.
Someone really needs to fry for this. Really
"In the meeting Duncan Hunter pointed to me and said to Wilkes, 'Your boy doesn't know how to play the game,'" said Karpovich.
"They took a $6000 product, gave it another name, and sold it to the defense department for $32000 a pop. Later on we began to get calls from military bases around the country," Karpovich stated. "They were saying, hey, we just got this expensive software. What are we supposed to do with it?"
The deal now worked for everyone... except maybe U.S. taxpayers, and dead U.S. servicemen in Iraq whose Humvee's didn't get armor plating until it was too late because there wasn't enough money for it in the Pentagon budget.
Titan Corp, recently purchased by an entity called the L3 Corporation, bills itself as "a leading provider of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance systems to the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, selected U.S. Government intelligence agencies and aerospace prime contractors."
The allegations of corporate lawlessness being leveled against Titan Corp. are unprecedented for a mid-sized defense contractor, on a scale not seen since the Lockheed bribery scandals of the 1970's.
Ironically, Lockheed aborted a $2 billion buy-out of Titan a year ago, after the magnitude of the firm's exposure to sanction caused the company to have second thoughts.
Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.
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5. U.S. ALLY AZERBAIJAN DENIES CIA RENDITION FLIGHTS LANDED THERE
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 14, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A few weeks after Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliev (who, like George W. Bush the son of a Cold War-era spy boss and former President -- Gaidar Aliev -- and who was elected president in a fraudulent election) visited the White House, the oil-rich nation and neighbor of Iran denied it had hosted CIA rendition flights. However, the European aviation authority, Eurocontrol, registered 63 CIA flights from Frankfurt to Baku, Azerbaijan.
WMR was provided by a reliable European source with the following identified CIA flights to Azerbaijan:
21.01.03 N8183J Tepper Aviation
- from Frankfurt, Germany overflight Austria to Baku
23.04.03 N312ME Aviation Specialties
- from Goose Bay, Canada to Frankfurt, Germany (dep. 24.4.) to Bucharest, Romania to Baku
06.05.03 N157A Aviation Specialties
- from Baku to Bucharest, Romania (dep. 10.5.) to Frankfurt, Germany
13.06.03 N313P Premier Executive Transport
- from Washington, DC to Frankfurt, Germany to Baku
16.06.03 N58AS Aviation Specialties
- from Baku to Bucharest, Romania to Ramstein, Germany
09.07.03 N379P Premier Executive Transport
- from Baku overflight Iceland to Glasgow, UK
13.12.03 N88ZL Lowa Ltd.
- from Wilmington, NC to Cleveland, OH to Baku
15.12.03 N88ZL Lowa Ltd.
- from Baku to London, UK to Newburgh, NY
23.04.04 N85VM Assembly Point Aviation
- from Schenectady, NY to Guantanamo to Washington, DC (26.4.) to Shannon, Ireland to Baku
28.04.04 N85VM Assembly Point Aviation
- from Baku to Shannon, Ireland
12.08.04 N85VM Assembly Point Aviation
- from Washington, DC to Ireland, Shannon (dep. 13.8.) to Kabul, Afghanistan to Baku
15.08.04 N85VM Assembly Point Aviation
- from Baku to Shannon, Ireland
20.05.05 N4009L Stevens Express Leasing
- from Aberdeen, UK to Munich, Germany (dep. 21.5.) to Bucharest, Romania to Baku
08.07.05 N1HC United States Aviation Co.
- from Richmond, VA to Baku
28.10.05 N505LL Path Corporation
- from St. John's, Canada to Ponta Delgada, Azores to Barcelona, Spain (dep. 31.10.) to Istanbul, Turkey (dep. 1.11.) to Baku (Report Turkish newspaper)
15.11.05 N505LL Path Corporation
- from Baku to Istanbul, Turkey to Amsterdam, Netherlands (dep. 18.11.) to ReykjavÃk, Iceland to Frobisher Bay, Canada to Grand Forks, ND
Just after George W. Bush hosted the dictator Aliev, Vice President Dick Cheney was in Astana, Kazakhstan praising that nation's dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev while, at the same time, lambasting Russia's President Vladimir Putin for crushing democracy there. The Bush regime's Central Asia policy is based on oil and supporting dictators in return for basing rights and logistics support for U.S. torture flights. Aliev and Nazarbayev are in lock step not only with the Bush administration but with those who control the Bush administration -- the Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli Mafia (RUIM), the same entity that supports "Al Qaeda." Putin broke up the Mafia's control of Russia's industries, including the energy industry, earning the wrath of the Mafia oligarchs and their facilitators in the White House and Pentagon.
Nowhere is the Bush-RUIM link more evident that in the Balkans. Recently, it was disclosed by Amnesty International that the Pentagon contracted with Aerocom, a Moldovan company owned by RUIM kingpin and UN- and US Treasury Department-blacklisted arms smuggler Viktor Bout, to fly 99 tons of Kalashnikov AK-47s and ammunition from Eagle base in Tuzla from July 2004 to 2005, ostensibly for use by Iraqi security forces. The remainder of the 200,000 assault rifles were said to be shipped from Eagle base to Iraq via the Croatian port of Ploce. The rifles and ammunition came from Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin stockpiles. Some of the Bosnian weapons were originally purchased from Bosnian Defense Fund assets -- the Washington and Sarajevo-based fund for weapons purchases was established in the 1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and Marc Zell at Riggs Bank in Washington and the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo from contributions solicited from Arab and Muslim nations.
It is now being reported that the Pentagon's Kalashnikovs never made it to Iraq. WMR has been told by reliable sources in Latin America that some of the weapons are now in the hands of right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and other Latin American nations for use against populist leaders and candidates for office.
The imprimatur of RUIM is found throughout the Bush administration -- Chertoff, Abramoff, Kidan, and Marc Rich's one-time attorney, Scooter Libby -- are symptomatic of the disease of international organized criminal control of the U.S. government, as well as those of Israel, Britain, Bosnia, Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Dubai, Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and now, Iraq. Putin stamped this disease out in Russia and Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, France, Italy, Lebanon, Syria, South Africa, and other nations are well aware of the links their opposition forces have to these same criminal syndicates.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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6. U.S. MILITARY, INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS RAISE CONCERNS
ABOUT POSSIBLE PREPARATIONS FOR IRAN STRIKE
Use of Iraq terror group bypassed Congress, sources say
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THE RAW STORY
Top Story
Thursday, May 11, 2006
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/US_military_seen_ready_for_Iran_0511.html
Larisa Alexandrovna
Concern is building among the military and the intelligence community that the US may be preparing for a military strike on Iran, as military assets in key positions are approaching readiness, RAW STORY has learned.
According to military and intelligence sources, an air strike on Iran could be doable in June of this year, with military assets in key positions ready to go and a possible plan already on the table.
Speculation has been growing on a possible air strike against Iran. But with the failure of the Bush administration to present a convincing case to the UN Security Council and to secure political backing domestically, some experts say the march toward war with Iran is on pause barring an "immediate need."
"In March/April of this year [the US] was pushing for quick closure, a thirty day window," says a source close to the UN Security Council, describing efforts by the Administration to "shore up enough support" to get a UN Chapter 7 resolution.
A UN Chapter 7 resolution makes it possible for sanctions to be imposed against an uncooperative nation and leaves the door open to military action.
The UN source also says that a military analysis suggests that no military action should be undertaken in Iran until spring of 2007, but that things remain volatile given this administration's penchant for having "their own way."
Strike could come earlier than thought
Other military and intelligence sources are expressing concern both privately and publicly that air strikes on Iran could come earlier than believed.
Retired Air Force Colonel and former faculty member at the National War College Sam Gardiner has heard some military suggestions of a possible air campaign in the near future, and although he has no intimate knowledge of such plans, he says recent aircraft carrier activity and current operations on the ground in Iran have raised red flags.
Gardiner says his concerns have kept him busy attempting to create the most likely scenario should such an attack occur.
"I would expect two or three aircraft carriers would be moved into the area," Gardner said, describing what he thinks is the best way air strikes could be carried out without disengaging assets from US fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Two aircraft carriers are already en route to the region, RAW STORY has found. The USS Abraham Lincoln, which recently made a port call in Singapore, and the USS Enterprise which left Norfolk, Virginia earlier this month, are headed for the Western Pacific and Middle East. The USS Ronald Reagan is already operating in the Gulf.
In addition to aircraft carrier activity, Gardiner says, B-2 bombers would be critical.
"I would expect the B-2's, the main firepower asset, to be flown on missions directly from the United States," Gardiner explained. "I would expect B-52's to be flown in strikes from the UK and Diego Garcia."
"Finally," he added, "a large number of cruise missiles would be fired from the carrier support ships."
Steven Aftergood, senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, says that the B-2 bomber is capable of such long range activity.
"The B2 bomber was designed, with the Soviet Union in mind, for intercontinental operations," Aftergood said. "With aerial refueling, it has a range of up to 10,000 miles."
Like Gardiner, Aftergood has heard similar claims with regard to a June strike, but has not been able to confirm them independently.
Intelligence sources confirm hearing the allegations of a June attack, but have been unable to fully confirm that such an attack is in the works. Both the New Yorker and the Washington Post have previously reported that the Pentagon is studying military options on Iran.
All sources, however, agree that given the administration's interest in regime change, an attack on Iran is likely, regardless of international support or UN backing. Furthermore, all sources agree that Gardiner's scenario is the most probable, including an estimated duration and "pause" assessment.
Gardiner believes that the entire initial operation could run quickly, roughly 24-72 hours. "Most of the strikes would be at night," he said. "The Iranian nuclear facilities will be targeted; more important however, a major effort would focus on Iran's capability to retaliate. The US will target missile facilities, air bases and naval assets."
"After the initial effort, there will be a pause during which time the Iranians will be told that if they retaliate, the air strikes would continue," he added.
The Pentagon did not return calls for comment.
Advance teams under way; Congress 'bypassed'
As previously reported by Raw Story, a terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is being used on the ground in Iran by the Pentegon, bypassing US intelligence channels. The report was subsequently covered by the Asia Times.
Military and intelligence sources now say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Congressional aides for the relevant oversight committees would not confirm or deny allegations that no Presidential finding had been done. One Democratic aide, however, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, did say that any use of the MEK would be illegal.
In addition, sources say that a March attack that killed 22 Iranian officials in the province of Sistan va Baluchistan was carried out by the MEK.
According to a report by Iran Focus filed Mar. 23, the twenty-two people killed in the ambush included high ranking officials, including the governor of Zahedan.
"Hours after the attack took place, Ahmadi-Moqaddam announced there was evidence the assailants had held meetings with British intelligence officers," the Iranian news service reported.
"Radical Shiite cleric Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also claimed the people behind the attack were the same as those behind a spate of bombings in Iran's south-western province of Khuzestan earlier this year and in 2005," it added.
Military and intelligence sources say that MEK assets were responsible for this attack, but did not know if the US military was involved or if US military assets were part of the ambush.
One former high ranking US intelligence official described the use of MEK as more of a "Cambone" operation than a "Department of Defense operation."
Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence Stephen Cambone, a stalwart neo-conservative, is considered by many to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man.
During a White House briefing in early May, outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan denied that the administration was using MEK, among several other terrorist organizations named, for ground activity in Iran.
"There are numerous reports about low-intensity operations ongoing in Iran from three different places -- PKK going over the border into Iraq, the MEK southern border of Iraq into Iran, and also certain operations from Balochistan involving also the Pakistanis," a reporter asked. "Does the U.S. have a policy, given also reports which I know you won't comment on, on possible special forces operations in Iran?"
"Our policies haven't changed on those organizations," McClellan said. "They remain the same. And you're bringing up organizations that we view as terrorist organizations."
"We would never cooperate with them, in terms of--" the questioner continued.
"Our policy hasn't changed," McClellan replied.
Military, intelligence community alarmed
According to a New Yorker article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, other activities aimed at intimidating and agitating Iranian leadership are also underway.
"One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of 'coercion' aimed at Iran," Hersh wrote.
The increase in violence on the southern border of Iran, the movement of aircraft carriers into the region, the insistence of Iran's leadership that they intend to be a player on the nuclear stage and the Bush Administration's focus on regime change make military and intelligence sources nervous.
"[President] Bush thinks that history will judge him as a great leader, not unlike Winston Churchill," one former high-ranking military intelligence official remarked.
For now, Gardiner and others remain on the sidelines as the Administration plots their next move.
Copyright 2006 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
*****
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- Thursday, May 11, 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
Meet the Shock Troops of the Christian Youth
7. BATTLE CRY FOR THEOCRACY
_________________________________________________________________________
By SUNSARA TAYLOR
http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor05112006.html
If you've been waiting until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army" to get alarmed, wait no longer.
In recent weeks, Battle Cry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit and this weekend they plan to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.
They claim their religion and values are under attack but, amidst spectacular lightshows, hummers, Navy Seals, and military imagery on stage, it is Battle Cry that has declared war on everyone else! Their leader, Ron Luce, insists: "This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent--the 'forceful' ones--will lay hold of the kingdom."
A glimpse at Battle Cry's Honor Academy, which trains 500 youth each year and preaches that homosexuality and masturbation are sins, reveals a lot about what kind of society they are fighting for. Interns are forbidden to listen to secular music, watch R-rated movies or date. Men can't use the internet unsupervised and the length of women's skirts is regulated. The logic behind this, that men must be protected from the sin of sexual temptation, is what drives Islamic fundamentalists to shroud women in burkhas!
Behind their multi-million dollar operation that sends more than 5,000 missionaries to more than thirty-four countries each year, are some of the most powerful and extreme religious lunatics in the country. Their partners include Pat Robertson (who got a call from Karl Rove to discuss Alito before the nomination was made public), Ted Haggard (who brags that his concerns will be responded to by the White House within 24 hours), Jerry Falwell (who blamed September 11th on homosexuals, feminists, pagans, and abortionists), and others. Their events have been addressed by Barbara Bush (via video) as well as former President Gerry Ford. This weekend's event will include Franklyn Graham who has ministered to George Bush and publicly proclaimed that Islam is an "evil religion."
What most of these figures have in common is their insistence that the Bible be read literally and obeyed as the inerrant word of God. And, as Ron Luce leads youth to pray, "I will keep my eyes on the battle, submitting to Your code even when I don't understand.outside my comfort zone in the battle zone," it would be foolish to expect that there is any part of the Bible's literal horrors this movement would be unwilling to enforce. That includes stoning disobedient children and non-virgin brides (Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and 22:13-21), executing gays (Leviticus 20:13), and keeping slaves (Peter 2:18).
Already they staged a protest on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall precisely because they were "the very city hall steps where several months ago 'gay marriages' were celebrated." Their answer to the scourge of rape and violence against women is to end divorce, spread ignorance, insist on virginity--the very things that will more entrap women in these nightmares. And this Friday, they are planning rallies at fifty City Halls nation-wide.
Of course, like the President who gave Ron Luce an appointment to the White House Advisory Commission on Drug-Free Communities, Battle Cry tells its share of bald-faced lies. For one, they claim that "a society fortified by biblical principals and a strong moral code...is the heritage our forefathers fought and died to secure for us." But the word "God" never appears in the Constitution. After three-and-a-half months of debate about what should go into the document that would govern the land, the framers drafted a constitution that is secular.
Battle Cry also claims America has been "set aside for God's purposes--a country established for good and fruitfully blessed so that we might take God's message to the ends of the earth." It is revealing that for all their talk about the value of life and the evils of violent imagery, Battle Cry never speaks against the real violence and loss of life being inflicted by U.S. troops in Iraq.
Still, there is one thing that Battle Cry gets right: this country is in the midst of a deep moral crisis. We are indeed living through times when business-as-usual is unconscionable.
As the Bush regime wages unjust wars and conducts torture in our names, as they leave New Orleans to rot, and drag us closer each day to a theocracy where abortion and birth control are banned, science is pulled under, and gays are persecuted, it is no wonder that young people are searching for meaning and morality.
The truth is, however, youth will not find the morality they need in a stadium listening to Ron Luce preach about religious war and intolerance. And they won't find it while buying Battle Cry's keepsake dog-tags.
These young people need to be challenged to look around them and think for themselves.
I am confident that if they do, many of them may find that the truly moral way to live is to throw their tremendous energies and dreams of a better world into stopping this madness and driving out the Bush regime.
This generation--and their counterparts all around the world--will have to live with the consequences of this culture war, one way or another.
Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can't Wait/Drive Out the Bush Regime. Here's a clip of her debate with Ron Luce on the O'Reilly Factor, http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1295&Itemid=184. She can be reached at: sunsarasworld@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.
*****
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
May 12, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/167899/
By Chris Floyd
They say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but these days, fearmongering invocations of "Islamofascism" perform the same rump-covering function just as well.
Defenders of U.S. President George W. Bush's war crime in Iraq -- particularly those super-tough "liberal hawks" who have cast their lot with the crony conquistadors -- trot out the term at every opportunity. What else can they do? All the other excuses for their pet war have been exploded as bare-faced, deliberately concocted lies. So they've been reduced to the ludicrous claim that Bush's murderous plunder is actually a noble defense of civilization against black hordes of "Islamofascists." In this way, these desk-bound warriors seek to identify themselves with the sainted figures of old, like George Orwell, who actually put their bodies on the line against real fascists.
Yet it is painfully obvious that the forces which come closest to matching this ignorant propaganda term have in fact been empowered by Bush's war. Obscurantist clerics and deadly sectarian groups backed by Bush now rule in Iraq, while his war of aggression there -- and his global gulag of torture and unlawful detention -- are swelling the ranks of violent extremists around the world, as his own State Department acknowledges in its latest report on international terrorism.
For example, last month, 14-year-old Ahmed Khalil was shot dead by the Bush-backed Iraqi police on the doorstep of his home, the Independent reports. His crime? Homosexuality. He was just one of scores of homosexuals -- or suspected homosexuals -- systematically slaughtered by the sectarian militias that Bush is arming and training to serve as Iraq's official "security" forces. Ironically, Ahmed might not even have been gay; he was having sex with men in the neighborhood for money to help his poverty-stricken family, which has been completely wiped out in the economic meltdown wrought by Bush's "liberation."
The "sexual cleansing" campaign by the death squads Bush has unleashed is just part of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, where -- by conservative, "tip-of-the-iceberg" estimates -- almost 4,000 civilians have been murdered in Baghdad alone so far this year, many of them "hogtied and shot execution-style," the Los Angeles Times reports. "Others were strangled, electrocuted, stabbed, garroted or hanged. ... Many bore signs of torture such as bruises, drill holes, burn marks, gouged eyes or severed limbs." Most such killings are now being carried out by the government-backed militias and their infiltrated agents in the Bushist police brigades, as Bush's ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, openly admits.
Keep in mind why this is happening. Iraq's bloody "regime change" was engineered in order to implement a thorough-going economic rapine plan drawn up for the Bush administration in early 2003 by the corporate consulting group BearingPoint, as Antonia Juhasz reports in her new book, "The Bush Agenda." BearingPoint, headquartered in the CIA company town of Maclean, Virginia, provided a detailed blueprint for opening up Iraq to predatory foreign "investment" on terms that allowed the wholesale looting of the nation's wealth while acing Iraqi companies out of the action.
Bush's appointed satrap, Paul Bremer, executed the blueprint faithfully during his dictatorial rule in Baghdad. His edicts were then incorporated wholesale, hugger-mugger and without negotiation into the new Iraqi constitution. They are now the law of the land. The dark heart of the scam is, of course, the oil laws. Now that a "sovereign" government has been established, these can be finalized at last. The plan is for 40-year "production-sharing agreements" that will give Bush's oil cronies a vast slice of Iraq's oil output at rock-bottom prices ("at cost"), as Chris Cook reports in the Asia Times. This windfall will make today's record-breaking oil company profits look like chump change.
Last week, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced that it is dispatching a "petroleum adviser" to Baghdad to help the new Iraqi government complete its "critical petroleum law," Dow Jones Newswires reports. The adviser is being sent at the request of the U.S. State Department, headed by former oil exec Condoleezza Rice. And the company contracted to supply the adviser is -- oh, you already guessed! -- BearingPoint Inc.
So that's why Ahmad Khalil had to die, along with thousands of others, gay and straight, Sunni and Shiite, religious and secular, Iraqi and American. It has nothing to do with any of the grand abstractions employed by the apologists for empire to mask their complicity with the immoral dictates of raw power: national security, humanitarian intervention, the war on terror, Islamofascism, and so on. No, it's just a crude, brutal -- and no doubt temporary -- marriage of convenience between old-fashioned religious extremism and old-fashioned elitist greed. Both are committed to the destruction of Iraqi society in order to impose their own form of bondage in place of Saddam's tyranny.
As long as the Iraqi sectarians are willing to give away their nation's wealth in exchange for some of the temporal power now in the gift of the money-grubbing Bush elite, the suffering of the Iraqi people will only increase day by day. Yet the inevitable break-up of this unholy union -- when the sectarians decide to throw off their vassalage, or when Bush's looming attempt to secure the Iraqi conquest by eliminating its greatest threat, Iran, results in a horrendous revolt by the Iranian-backed extremists he has enthroned in Baghdad -- this suffering will reach a new pitch of agony.
There is no good solution to the hell Bush has wrought in his arrogance and folly. There is only blood and horror all the way down.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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- AFIB No. 720, May 10, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
[Joaquin] Sanjenis was an opportunistic little man who managed to punch a CIA meal ticket the rest of his life. When he met [Watergate burglar Frank] Sturgis he was filling a bucket of rotten eggs which would become known as Operation 40--the secret police of the Cuban [Bay of Pigs] invasion force. The ultrasecret Operation 40 included some nonpolitical conservative exile businessmen, but its hard core was made up of dice players at the foot of the cross--informers, assassins-for-hire, and mob henchmen whose sworn goal was to make the counterrevolution safe for the comfortable ways of the old Cuba. They were the elite troops of the old guard within the exile movement, who made an effective alliance with CIA right-wingers against CIA liberals in order to exclude from power any Cubans who wanted, albeit without Castro, Castro-type reforms from land redistribution to free milk for rural children. ... But Operation 40 members soon became involved in drug smuggling. The unit was hastily shut-down in 1970 when an Operation 40 plane carrying a cargo of heroin and cocaine crashed in Southern California. -- Warren Hinkle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. [New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1992] pp. 52-53, xliv.
Contents: Number 720
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 722/May 17, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 721/May 14, 2006
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_________________________________________________________________________
Goss Made His "Bones" on CIA Hit Team
_________________________________________________________________________
THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS
World Exclusive
May 7, 2006
By Daniel Hopsicker
"Look out kid, They keep it all hid." -- Bob Dylan "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
Venice, FL -- Deposed CIA head Porter Goss was once a member of the CIA's super-secret Operation 40, an assassination squad which roamed through North and Central America during the 1960's.
Along with a number of men whose names became famous and whose lives and careers comprise a large part of America's Secret History, Goss appears (see a comparison) in the historic photograph at right [AFIB Editor's Note: See http://www.MadCowProd.com for photo], which also appears on the cover of "Barry & 'the boys': The CIA, the Mob, and America's Secret History."
It is the only extant photograph of the members of Operation Forty, the CIA's assassination squad, taken in a Mexico City nightclub in 1963.
Coupled with his close proximity to the terrorist hijackers who used his Congressional District in Charlotte County as one of their main bases of operations, this fact virtually shouts out for closer examination during the post-mortems dissecting his tenure as CIA chief.
When we first saw the photo, it was in the yellowed frame used by nightclub photographers back in the 60's. It bore the name of a nightclub (La Reforma) in Mexico City, and was stamped with a date, January 22, 1963, ten months to the day before the Kennedy assassination.
"Guido, meet the General. General, meet Guido"
The Mexico City nightclub photo reveals a mixed group of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types. It was discovered among keepsakes kept in the safe of the widow of CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal, where it was overlooked by a 7-man team from the U.S. State Department which showed up at her house in 1995 to comb through her records.
Barry Seal had been recruited at the age of 17, along with Lee Oswald, by CIA agent David Ferrie, at a two week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1957.
The product of a patrician Connecticut upbringing, an elite preparatory school and Yale University, Goss entered the high-stakes espionage game being played out between the Florida Keys and the coast of Cuba after the CIA-backed coup against Castor collapsed at the Bay of Pigs.
"During his junior year, he met a CIA recruiter through his ROTC commanders," reported the September 24, 2002 Orlando Sentinel, in a story headlined "TERRORISM FIGHT KEEPS REP. GOSS IN POLITICAL FRAY."
"It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late 50's to approximately the early 70's," Goss told antagonist Michael Moore.
At the time the picture was taken Barry Seal was a young-looking 24-year old. Porter Goss was the same age.
"They've given you a number, and taken 'way your name"
Seal is seated third from left. Sitting right next to him (second from left) is Porter Goss. Beside Goss is notorious "freedom fighter" Felix Rodriguez (front left), a Cuban vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime in Cuba who later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.
On the other side of the table is the the only spook celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft... Covering his face with his sport coat is Frank Sturgis, famous for being one of the Watergate burglars.
Beside Sturgis (front right) is another famous spook, at least among Kennedy assassination researchers, William Seymour, the New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal). Seymour is regarded by many researchers as the man who on several notable occasions is said to have impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald, when that lone nut gunman was out of the country.
At the time it was taken the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips, AKA Maurice Bishop, who reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.
"You don't have the negative too do you?"
The sensitive nature of the picture was confirmed by a person who had known and worked with Seal, who incidentally had been the inspiration for the hit song "Secret Agent Man," by his buddy Johnny Rivers in the mid-60's.
The man, also the executor of Seal's estate, reacted with unconcealed shock when first shown the picture. "Where did you get that?" he demanded. "I didn't know there were any... Where did this picture come from?"
"Yeah, Barry was Op Forty," Jerry Patrick Hemming confirmed. "He flew in killer teams inside the island (Cuba) before the invasion to take out Fidel."
Frank Sturgis, a member of the team that broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972, later admitted to having been part of Operation Forty.
Other famous names who belonged to Operation Forty include Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson and "Blond Ghost" Ted Shackley.
Colonel William Bishop showed author Dick Russell a series of photographs of Latin-looking individuals who belonged to the group. On the backs of the pictures were the words "Special talent 1960-65, Ice pick man... Butcher... Sniper and demo [demolition] expert... Propaganda... Knife man... Pilot and navigator... Mutilator."
"Bishop said, 'We weren't playing a nice game.'" When nephew Chuck Giancana wrote about Mob Boss Sam Giancana's strategic move to Mexico in early 1963, he wrote this about Operation Forty...
"It was to be an all-out, no-holds-barred Latin American push. Mooney (Giancana) settled into a lavish Mexico City apartment and went right to work, drawing on the expertise and mammoth resources of the recently-formed CIA team of assassins and operatives specifically trained for Latin American clandestine operations. CIA insiders jokingly dubbed the team the White Hand, an allusion to the Mafia killer progenitors the Black Hand."
"You're not cleared for that information"
Although the photo was available at the time of his confirmation as head of the CIA, the major media showed no inclination to press Goss on the matter. In fact, the party line rang out everywhere.
"Rep. Porter J. Goss has disclosed precious few details of his CIA employment from roughly 1960 to 1971," reported a profile in the Associated Press. Reuters called him a "mystery man," and said he had been "close-mouthed about his past."
"He worked in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico--tumultuous countries during that decade of the Cold War," Reuters reported.
During a 2002 interview with The Washington Post, Goss joked that he performed photo interpretation and "small-boat handling," which led to "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits."
He acknowledged he had recruited and run foreign agents and said he would be uncomfortable traveling to Cuba but wouldn't say more.
"With a prep-school education and a Greek major at Yale, Goss passed up the conventional life to be a CIA spook," reads one typical wire service account.
Actually, the facts lean heavily towards the proposition that with "a prep school education and a Greek major at Yale," Goss's choice to become a CIA spook in the early 60's was an entirely conventional one.
"Closed orders and secret societies"
The appointment of Porter Goss revealed that what passes for American civic life may in reality be just an elaborate game of Inside Baseball. Goss found himself paired often with fellow Floridian, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leading the joint congressional inquiry into the attacks.
The two men share another unique distinction: both were having breakfast on the morning of September 11th, 2001 with a man who reportedly wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta.
"When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service."
In testimony before Congress on February 9, 2004, Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay noted, "Closed orders and secret societies, whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of failure without outside input."
When was the last time anyone heard a weapons inspector mention secret societies?
Do you ever get the feeling there's something they're not telling us?
"Man in a trench coat, Badge out, laid off,
Says he's got a bad cough... Wants to get paid off.
The pump don't work, 'Cause the Vandals took the handles."
Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.
Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker
*****
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Monday, 8 May 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
SUDDEN RESIGNATION OF CIA DIRECTOR GOSS:
ANOTHER TREMOR IN BUSH ADMINISTRATION
_________________________________________________________________________
News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/cia-m08.shtml
By Patrick Martin
The resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss, announced abruptly by the White House on Friday, is another demonstration of the instability and vicious infighting within the Bush administration. Goss ends a relatively brief 18-month tenure at the agency, a period during which he conducted a political purge in which at least a dozen top CIA officials were driven out.
The Goss resignation is the outcome of a protracted and murky conflict within the military-intelligence apparatus, involving John Negroponte, Bush's choice as the first Director of National Intelligence, the military intelligence apparatus--headed by Stephen Cambone, the most trusted deputy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--and multiple factions within the CIA itself.
Negroponte apparently has emerged as the victor in this infighting, with his deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, named by White House officials as the likely choice to succeed Goss at CIA. In an indication that the conflict is continuing, however, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, appeared on "Fox News Sunday" to oppose the as-yet-unannounced selection of Hayden, saying that the career military intelligence official has experience only in electronic information-gathering, not in covert operations.
There are no clear policy differences among Negroponte, Rumsfeld, Cambone and Goss. They all share responsibility for the Bush administration's criminal war of aggression in Iraq, and for the debacle that the US occupation of the oil-rich country has become. To some extent, there is an institutional conflict between the Pentagon, which controls 85 percent of the vast intelligence budget, and Negroponte's new agency, established in 2005 to centralize control over all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
The immediate impulse for Goss's ouster, however, is his apparent link to the sex and bribery scandal involving former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham, who resigned from Congress last fall and has been sentenced to prison for steering military contracts to several favored companies in return for cash and other payoffs.
Three major newspapers--the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and San Diego Union-Tribune--have published articles in the last 10 days reporting that the investigation into Cunningham's corrupt practices, once thought to be limited to several defense contractors, had been expanded to include other congressmen and government officials, including the number-three official at the CIA, executive director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, who was installed in that position by Goss.
One contractor named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes of San Diego, California, is reportedly suspected of arranging for a Washington-area limousine company to provide prostitutes for Cunningham. These services were provided in conjunction with weekly poker parties in the capital, attended by Republican politicians, government officials and businessmen, which Wilkes has hosted for the past 15 years. A CIA spokesman has confirmed that Foggo, a boyhood friend of Wilkes, had been a regular at those parties.
Christopher Baker, president of Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., the company which provided the limos for these parties, was awarded a $21 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security last year to provide transportation services for top DHS officials. This was despite Baker's criminal record for drug possession, attempted petty larceny, and two felony charges for attempted robbery and car theft, two personal bankruptcy filings and a tax lien from the Internal Revenue Service, which seized his house in 1998.
The Post said that the source of the allegations against Wilkes and Baker was Mitchell J. Wade, one of the defense contractors who admitted bribing Cunningham. Wade has pled guilty to charges in that case and is cooperating with prosecutors. "Wade said limos would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and bring them to suites Wilkes maintained at the Watergate Hotel and the Westin Grand in Washington," the newspaper reported. The Union-Tribune cited a statement from Baker's attorney confirming that Baker had provided limousine services for Wilkes's poker parties from 1990 on, but denying any link to prostitution.
Baker's business arrangements with the DHS were highly unusual. In addition to his own criminal record, which would ordinarily make him an unlikely candidate for a contract to transport top officials in charge of US domestic security, Shirlington Limousine was in poor financial shape. It lost a contract with Howard University for non-performance, and was repeatedly sued for non-payment. At a critical time, in April 2004, the company was awarded a $3.8 million DHS contract for which it was the sole bidder. A year later, Baker succeeded in escaping bankruptcy, paying $125,000 to his creditors. In October 2005, his company won a much larger one-year contract for $21.2 million.
A DHS spokesman sought to explain the relationship with the preposterous claim that while the department conducted criminal background checks for all the limousine drivers, no such check was required for the company's owner. The agency was unaware of Baker's long record of petty crime, the official said.
The connections between Foggo and the Cunningham case may go beyond the seedy questions of gambling and prostitution. Several press reports indicate that the CIA inspector general is examining whether Foggo rigged any contracts from the agency to companies associated with Wilkes. Foggo has told his CIA associates that he will follow Goss into retirement, stepping down as the CIA executive director.
The New York Daily News reported Saturday that Goss himself "may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman," adding that Foggo could soon be indicted in the case. The newspaper cited statements by former CIA operative Larry Johnson, a frequent critic of the Bush administration, that Goss and Foggo "share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars," and that he understood Goss had occasionally attended the parties thrown by Wilkes. According to the News, "One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said."
While the tabloid newspaper focused attention on sex and bribery, the more establishment press--particularly the New York Times and Washington Post--were careful to distance the Goss resignation as much as possible from the sordid details of the case. The Times went so far as to publish separate articles on the two subjects Sunday, as though it were possible to consider the political conflicts within the Bush administration outside of the gross corruption that is such an essential part of its character.
Foggo is a career CIA mid-level official who was suddenly vaulted into the top ranks when Goss became director and forced out the previous number-three executive, Michael Kostiw, as part of a purge of allegedly anti-Bush officials in the upper reaches of the agency. Foggo reportedly became a Goss crony while serving as chief of logistics at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany, during the period when Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was on inspection trips to CIA offices overseas.
Goss's tenure as CIA director has been one of near-continual crisis, particularly the last eight months, since the existence of clandestine CIA detention centers overseas was made public by the Washington Post. This was followed by a frenzied anti-leaking campaign spearheaded by Goss personally, in an effort to find the source of the Post report. Last month, a veteran CIA official in the inspector general's office, Mary McCarthy, was fired only a week before her scheduled retirement, allegedly for failing a lie detector test about contacts with the press, including the Post. But McCarthy has subsequently denied even knowing of the secret prisons, let alone being the source, and CIA officials admitted that there was no evidence against her on that leak.
The nomination of Hayden could prove to be a political time-bomb for the administration, since confirmation hearings would likely feature questioning about his work at the NSA, where he was responsible for the secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, an operation whose existence was revealed to the New York Times in December. This leak produced another high-pressure internal security investigation, although no one has yet been fired or charged with being the source.
The leaks and counter-leaks demonstrate the increasingly Byzantine atmosphere in official Washington. With all political issues funneled through the increasingly dysfunctional channels of a two-party system in which the nominal opposition, the Democratic Party, offers no alternative to the Republicans, policy disputes within the ruling elite cannot find expression in open debate.
Moreover, so great is the chasm between the official rhetoric of the "war on terror" and reality of predatory seizure of oil resources and strategic positions to benefit American imperialist interests, that no one in the Bush administration, Congress or the corporate-controlled media can discuss foreign policy and security issues publicly in a realistic and serious way.
Hanging over all these debates is the question of the 9/11 attacks and the ample warnings that the military and intelligence agencies received in advance. After countless toothless investigations, not a single top official has been punished for what was either colossal incompetence or deliberate malfeasance. Instead, the conflicts within the intelligence apparatus are taking on the character of a veiled struggle within a palace court.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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3. 'NINE FINGERS' AND THE THIRD MAN
New connections between the CIA and the Cunningham Scandal
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HARPER'S MAGAZINE
Washington Babylon
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
http://www.harpers.org/sb-ninefingers-and-third-2308948203.html
By Ken Silverstein
Justin Rood at TPM Muckraker posted an interesting story yesterday, explaining why the Bush Administration's explanation for Porter Goss's sudden departure from the CIA looks increasingly lame. Here's another piece of evidence suggesting that the CIA chief's dismissal was wholly unexpected: one of Goss's top aides traveled to Iraq just days before his boss was let go and had absolutely no idea of what was coming down the pike. "The turf-battle line is purely a cover story," said a former CIA official I spoke with. "The reason they had to act now was because they were scared about what's going to come out about [the Cunningham scandal]."
Goss has no direct role in the Cunningham affair, at least nothing that has been definitively reported, but several key people close to him do. They include Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whom Goss had picked to fill the number-three slot at the CIA and who resigned yesterday, and Brant Bassett (nickname "Nine Fingers"), previously a CIA official and senior staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence when Goss was chairman.
Foggo is closely tied to Brent Wilkes, the San Diego defense contractor who is alleged to have bribed Cunningham and provided him with prostitutes. Foggo has admitted he was at some of Wilkes's now-infamous parties at Washington hotels--though he denies any knowledge of the prostitutes--and the CIA and law enforcement authorities are carefully examining his relationship with the defense contractor. Newsweek has reported that Foggo, Cunningham, and Bassett/"Nine Fingers" attended a Wilkes poker party at the Westin Grand Hotel.
I've learned that Bassett's role in the broader story may be more involved than that. Two former CIA officers told me that Foggo, Bassett, and a third man--a CIA official close to Goss, whose name I learned but am withholding because he remains undercover--have been friends for years and worked together overseas. According to these two sources, Bassett and the undercover officer (whom Goss brought up to the 7th Floor at Langley when he took over the CIA) positioned Foggo to be picked by Goss for the number-three slot.
Perhaps more importantly, I'm told that Bassett, like Foggo, has connections to Wilkes. Bassett was born in 1949 and raised in the San Diego area (home turf to Wilkes, Foggo, and several other players in the Cunningham affair), where he attended Escondido High School. According to two sources, Bassett and Wilkes know each other and have ties that go beyond the merely social. Bassett has been deployed by the CIA to various overseas assignments and has seen duty in Mexico and Germany, among other places; he previously used State Department and United States Information Agency cover.
Foggo, said my sources, is considered a competent administrator, if not a shining star. "He's a great logistics guy," one former intelligence official told me. "He makes the trains run on time. If you need something delivered to Afghanistan, he can make it happen." But Foggo has apparently gotten into personal trouble at the agency on a few occasions (see Jason Vest's April 28 post at the POGO blog, which refers to those matters), and one important, not-yet-answered question is: why would Goss name Foggo, a man whom he knew to have a checkered past, to such a high position at the CIA?
So now two of Goss's close associates, Foggo and Bassett, have a lot of explaining to do about their relationship with Brent Wilkes--the pivotal figure in the Cunningham affair. And just today, TPMMuckracker pointed out that Gen. Michael V. Hayden, President George W. Bush's nominee to replace Goss, once hired the services of MZM, the firm owned by Mitchell Wade; Wade has admitted to bribing Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Maybe a coincidence, but definitely an odd one.
* * *
Update, 5:47 PM: TPM Muckraker has now reported that Bassett received a $5,000 consulting fee from Brent Wilkes; I had heard of this and have just obtained documentation on the fee. See page 2 of this financial disclosure form (PDF) filed by Bassett when he was on the Hill.
Copyright 2006 Harper's Magazine Foundation
*****
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4. UPDATE ON CIA PROPRIETARY 'SKY WAY AIRCRAFT'
AND 5.5 TON COCAINE SHIPMENT
_________________________________________________________________________
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 10, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR reported on April 21 on a major cocaine shipment, using a CIA proprietary aircraft, that landed in Mexico en route from Caracas, Venezuela with 5.5 tons of cocaine on board. The pilot was reported to have "escaped" from Mexican police. U.S. and foreign neo-con propaganda organs immediately tried to link the aircraft, a DC-9 that was sold to unknown persons in Venezuela by a Clearwater, Florida-based firm called Royal Sons, LLC, to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The plane was painted in the colors and bore an insignia similar to those used by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The insignia identified the aircraft as "Sky Way Aircraft."
It has now been revealed by knowledgeable sources that Sky Way is affiliated with an off-shore company called DuPont Fund 57289, Inc., headed by a "Richard DuPont, Jr.," who likely does not exist. DuPont Fund is not affiliated with the DuPont business group or any subsidiaries of the multinational chemical firm. DuPont Fund is headquartered at Apartado 10455-1000 in San Jose, Costa Rica. This is the same address used by Red Sea Management, Ltd., an off-shore company and trust facilitator that is linked to another address -- 76 Dean Street in Belize City, Belize, which is apparently a post office box drop. Red Sea has a Cyprus-based subsidiary called Dark Sea Consultants that specializes in on-line gambling operations in the Middle East and East Asia. WMR sources report that this operation, involving cocaine smuggling and on-line gambling, is linked to the illegal operations of convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, members of Russian-Israeli-Ukrainian crime syndicates, and top Republican elected officials, including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, and others who benefited from the infusion of drug and gambling proceeds into their political war chests, as well as the financing of pay-offs and bribes to election officials in Florida, Ohio, and other states to buy the 2004 election for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The editor reported on aspects of these operations following the 2004 election.
Election Fraud, http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/electionfraud.htm.
Buying of election, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_172.shtml.
Votergate, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_173.shtml.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
*****
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5. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE SURFACES OF BUSH'S ILLEGAL SPYING
An Oregon attorney may have proof of Bush's domestic spying operation --
which means the illegal program's days may be numbered
_________________________________________________________________________
ALTERNET
Feature Story
May 8, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/35807/
By Onnesha Roychoudhuri
Five months after news of the NSA's warrantless spying program broke, and after we've learned numerous details of the program's extent, a Portland, Ore., attorney may have finally obtained hard evidence of illegal wiretaps by the government.
Thomas Nelson has been practicing administrative law for most of his professional life, but after Sept. 11 he first began offering pro bono work for immigrants detained in broad FBI terrorism sweeps. He is currently leading a little-discussed case that may contain the first documented evidence of an illegal wiretap and believes that, as a result, he himself has been subjected to warrantless -- and therefore illegal -- wiretaps and physical searches, the kind of clandestine operation that Nixon referred to as "black bag jobs." And as a result of extreme carelessness by the FBI, Nelson may have his hands on the only solid evidence of these searches.
The story begins in February 2004, when the Office of Foreign Assets Control froze all funds of the Oregon branch of the Saudi Arabian charity Al-Haramain. Attorneys Asim Ghafoor and Wendell Belew defended the charity against the government's allegations that Al-Haramain Oregon was taking part in terrorist activities.
In August 2004, as a routine court procedure, the FBI provided the lawyers and defendants with documents relating to the trial. The FBI's lawyers accidentally released a document that showed the government had used logs of conversations between the lawyers and their clients, Soliman al-Buthi and the organization, to categorize Al-Haramain as a terrorist group. The catch is that the logs were obtained without a warrant.
Ghafoor and Belew initially assumed that the document was obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- which allows for warrantless wiretaps as long as a warrant is obtained within 72 hours. But they grew suspicious when the FBI requested the return of that document. The lawyers immediately complied, but the FBI failed to contact both Al-Buthi and Seda, both now living overseas, to get their copies back.
When the New York Times broke the news of the NSA spy program last December, Belew and Ghafoor realized that the logs obtained of their attorney-client communications were probably a result of the program. That's when they contacted Thomas Nelson, an attorney representing al-Buthi in a separate case (PDF).
Another missed 'slam dunk'
On May 6, 2004, Nelson's close friend, 37-year-old civil and immigration lawyer Brandon Mayfield, was arrested as a material witness in the Madrid train bombings. The linchpin in the case against Mayfield was a low-quality fingerprint from a bag in Spain that contained detonation devices.
Though Mayfield hadn't traveled abroad in nearly a decade, and although the Spanish authorities continually asserted their doubts regarding the print match, the Department of Justice held him for two weeks while they tried to compile evidence in the case.
While Nelson helped Mayfield put together a defense, he observed firsthand the lengths to which the government went to to justify Mayfield's detainment. After the fingerprint was mistakenly tied to Mayfield, Nelson says the FBI started following him to try to find any evidence against him.
As the Portland Oregonian reports,
Initially, Portland's squad of investigators had just a few pieces of information about Mayfield. They knew his birthday and Social Security Number, and that he'd served in the military from 1985 to 1994. Analysts checked FBI databases to see if Mayfield was the subject of any investigations. He wasn't, but a deeper search circumstantially connected Mayfield to "other suspected terrorists." Court records showed that less than two years earlier, Mayfield had represented Jeffrey Leon Battle in a custody dispute. Battle was a member of the Portland Seven, a group arrested in 2002 for plotting to fight with the Taliban against U.S. soldiers.
Mayfield's legal files were seized by the government, and he had to fight to have them reviewed by a third party that could provide sufficient protections of the privileged material. An Oregon judge agreed to this and, finding nothing suspicious, ordered the government to release them.
Even as Spanish officials questioned the fingerprint match, FBI officials in Washington urged Portland prosecutors to disregard them. An e-mail from an FBI counterterrorism supervisor reads, "I spoke with the lab this morning, and they are absolutely confident that they have a match on the print. -- No doubt about it!!!!"
These kind of "slam-dunk" pronouncements have a way of backfiring: On May 19, Spanish authorities conclusively determined that the print belonged to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian citizen. On May 20, Mayfield was released, and the judge in the case refused the government's request to continue monitoring Mayfield's communications.
Nelson's experience with Mayfield's case gave him a better sense of what was happening to him when he took on Soliman al-Buthi's case at the end of 2004. Soliman, remember, while currently overseas, is one of the few who was provided with a copy of the conversation logs accidentally released by the FBI. And while the FBI did not attempt to make contact with al-Buthi, he is, according to OFAC, a "specially designated global terrorist."
If they were looking for al-Buthi, he wouldn't be hard to find. Just this past month, the Washington Post covered the work al-Buthi is doing in Saudi Arabia: "Sulaiman al-Buthi, a Riyadh-based spokesman for the International Committee for the Defense of the Final Prophet, says this religious but peaceful activism could put an end to violence and drive groups like al-Qaida out of business."
When he isn't publicly speaking against al-Qaida, he is working as an assistant director of beautification in the city of Riyadh. "Basically, he's the flower guy," Nelson told Amy Goodman in an interview, "He is responsible for the second annual Riyadh Flower Festival."
Though the FBI knew that an alleged "terrorist" possessed a document containing information about the NSA program, they did not try to find al-Buthi, or contact his lawyer, Thomas Nelson -- at least not directly.
The black bag jobs begi
Nelson officially started representing al-Buthi in September 2004; soon after, the FBI document was inadvertently released. A few months later, Nelson observed inconsistencies when he came to his office: His computer would be left on, disks still in the drive, materials shifted. Fellow lawyers from the office, working late, noticed someone on at least three occasions posing as a member of the janitorial crew, trying to get into the office.
The Oregonian reported that attorney Jonathan Norling "was sleeping on a couch at their practice early one morning last May, when a man dressed as a custodian tried to enter Nelson's office. Norling startled the man twice one night in July, when he caught the man trying to enter the locked office." The man in question had what appeared to be a valid badge for the building. But Norling notes, "This person wasn't a cleaning crew. I know the cleaning crew. I've worked here seven years, and I've worked a lot of nights, and I never experienced anything like that until Tom was working (on this case)."
Though Nelson approached the security people at the building, they wouldn't talk to him. "They were very blunt," he told AlterNet in a phone interview. He then took his concerns to the building manager. "It was all very disconcerting and inconclusive," says Nelson. "There was no direct denial. At the end, I said, 'You probably couldn't tell me if something was going on anyway.' He said, 'That's probably right.'"
After these incidents, Nelson brought the al-Buthi files to his house. That's when he and his wife experienced lapses in his home alarm that the company monitors refused to explain. "They basically stonewalled us," says Nelson. "We kept calling people and they kept referring us around and saying 'We'll call you back,' but no one would ever call back."
Sensing that he may be experiencing the same kinds of searches as the FBI performed in Brandon Mayfield's case, Nelson wrote a letter [PDF] to Karin Immergut, U.S. attorney for Oregon in September 2005, requesting she "look into the matter and to inform me if representatives ... have engaged in these searches." Immergut said she was not aware of any warrantless searches. After the New York Times broke the NSA story, Nelson wrote Immergut again, stating that, based upon the report, he may be the target of searches outside of the scope of FISA. Immergut responded, "I was completely unaware of any NSA surveillance program until I read about it in the media," and suggested Nelson contact the NSA directly.
Which is exactly what Nelson did. But the only response [PDF] he received reads like pure bureaucratic satire:
Rest assured that safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. However, because of the highly classified nature of the program, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with Executive Order 12598, as amended. Moreover, the third exemption to FOIA provides for the withholding of information specifically protected from disclosure by statute. Thus, your request is also denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of the information is exempted from disclosure pursuant to the third exemption.
Nelson believes the clandestine searches of his home and office have ended. But he still feels a lingering sense of discomfort: "Every time I think about the possibility that they were in my home, I get very angry ... My office is one thing, my home is something else. I don't want a bunch of spooks showing up there."
The fact that most frustrates Nelson is that no one ever tried to contact him or al-Buthi personally; rather, they resorted to what Nelson thinks must be illegal searches. "In retrospect," Nelson says, "I think they were trying to get the [leaked FBI] document back. If the searches were pursuant to FISA, it would be interesting to find out what they told the judge to get a warrant -- 'We've been conducting this illegal wiretapping program, we've embarrassed ourselves, there's this document out there that Nelson has, will you give us a warrant to get it back?'"
This is the circular logic that lies at the root of the debacle: In order to hide evidence of an illegal search program, the government is taking part in illegal searches.
Nelson has been cautious since he took on Asim Ghafoor and Wendell Belew's case against the NSA. Having intimately experienced the violation of law the government is willing to take part in to keep the NSA program under wraps, Nelson elected to put the classified document in the hands of the judge. Filing it under seal, Nelson hopes to keep the document safe and the case alive.
The formal legal complaint, [PDF] filed in February, states clearly that Ghafoor and Belew's communications with their Al-Haramain charity clients were recorded without a warrant outside FISA: "Defendant National Security Agency did not obtain a court order authorizing such electronic surveillance, nor did it otherwise follow the procedures mandated by FISA."
Though the evidence is promising, the battle is far from won. The Department of Justice is fighting hard to get the classified document back under its control. Nelson and his co-counsel Steve Goldberg raised an objection -- pointing out to the judge that it might not be wise to hand evidence over to a defendant in the case, which led to this tense exchange:
U.S. District Judge Garr King: What if I say I will not deliver it (the document) to the FBI, Mr. Coppolino?
DoJ Attorney Anthony Coppolino: Well, your honor, we obviously don't want to have any kind of a confrontation with you; we want to work this out, but it has to be secured in a proper fashion. And I respect the court's, you know, authority, but on the other hand, I also would have to reiterate that it has to be secured properly.
Nelson fully expects the DoJ lawyers to pull out all the stops in order to justify the executive power behind the NSA program and for the president's right to keep the program from the public. The DoJ already filed a request explaining why the document, and hence the case, should never be made public. That explanation was unsurprisingly filed under seal, proving that even explaining why something should be classified has been deemed a classified matter. But despite the powers he's fighting against, Nelson believes that the fact that the document has seen the light of day means the fight will eventually be won.
The continued obfuscation of inquiries into the NSA program illustrates that the president's lawyers blur the distinction between protecting our national security and protecting the president's transgressions of the law from scrutiny.
There are a handful of individuals and organizations enduring intensive intimidation campaigns and spearheading legislation against the president and the NSA to put a stop to a program that is slowly undermining the basic tenets of our legal system.
Simply electing to represent someone designated a "terrorist" requires attorneys to obtain a license from OFAC or risk jail. As Nelson explained, "The purpose of OFAC is to keep an eye on 'terrorists' and, by extension, their attorneys ... Frankly, I don't think this process could pass constitutional muster, but that's a fight for another day."
While the legal ins and outs of the NSA spy program may at times be complex, the essence of what Thomas Nelson is fighting for is simple: upholding the judicial tenet of "innocent until proven guilty" and the separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.
In the coming weeks, the government must file a response to Thomas Nelson's complaint. While the DoJ will inevitably try to push it from the courts, and from public attention, it is only a matter of time before the simplicity of what is at stake takes root. As Nelson explained, "It's a question of whether one man can, as commander in chief, ride roughshod over all the protections in the Constitution. If this is our response to 9/11, we've lost. If this kind of practice can occur because of 9/11, Osama won."
Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an assistant editor at AlterNet.
Copyright 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
*****
THE NARCO NEWS BULLETIN
Reporting on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America
Al Giordano, Publisher
E-Mail: publisher@narconews.com
- Issue No. 41, May 7, 2006 -
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6. U.S. CONGRESS PULLS THE SHADES ON THE HOUSE OF DEATH
_________________________________________________________________________
By Bill Conroy
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2006/5/7/145153/0809
The staffs of U.S. senators Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., appear to be drinking the cool-aid mixed up in the House of Death by the departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS).
Staff members from both offices were briefed last November about the details of the mass murder in Ciudad Juarez, the participation of a U.S. government informant in those murders and the subsequent cover-up carried out by the Executive Branch agencies involved in the House of Death case -- including DHS' U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio and El Paso.
The senators' staffs also were told about the fact that a DEA agent and his family were nearly murdered as a result of the bungled drug-sting operation and that one of the narco-thugs working with the informant, another Mexican cop by the name of Miguel Loya, was allowed to escape as a direct result of the cover-up within DOJ and DHS.
To date, according to the three members of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) who provided the briefing, neither of the senators, or their staffs, have even bothered to contact the NSWBC members for additional follow-up information or documentation.
"They have done nothing; zilch; '0'," says Sibel Edmonds, the founder and director of the NSWBC. "I made many follow up calls: still nothing; this is outrageous."
The NSWBC is a coalition of more than 60 whistleblowers who have come together from a host of U.S. agencies, including the CIA, DHS, DOJ and NSA. Among the NSWBC's members are Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the Pentagon Papers; Russ Tice, a former NSA intelligence analyst who helped to expose the Bush Administration's illegal domestic spying program; as well as Edmonds, a former FBI language specialist who exposed major national-security breaches within the bureau.
To make matters worse, according to Sandalio Gonzalez, the former high-level DEA official who exposed the DOJ cover-up in the House of Death, one of the staff members present at the briefing in November was a DOJ attorney, Robin Ashton, who has been detailed to serve on Sen. Leahy's staff.
It is a long-standing practice for various Executive Branch agencies, such as DOJ, to assign employees to temporary assignments with Congressional offices. Generally, the Executive Branch agency continues to pay the detailee's salary while the individual is on assignment. The theory is that the detailees can gain a better understanding of Congress while at the same time help Congressional members gain more insight into the workings of the Executive Branch.
However, theories don't always work out in reality, critics of the practice point out.
All three NSWBC members present at the November briefing -- Edmonds, Gonzalez and Professor Bill Weaver, senior advisor to the organization -- claim that Ashton was dismissive and not concerned with the allegations and evidence brought to the table at the meeting concerning the murders and subsequent cover-up by DOJ and DHS. The reason, they contend, is that Ashton's loyalties are with DOJ by virtue of the fact that her career is tied to that agency.
Weaver claims it was clear from the start of the Nov. 21 briefing that Ashton did not see the House of Death mass murder as a big deal, even after being made aware that ICE agents and a U.S. prosecutor were aware that their informant was participating in the homicides.
"I don't remember the precise words she used," Weaver says, "but her comments were essentially: 'I do not understand the concern. People are killed all the time by drug dealers. We (the U.S. government) did not really do anything (wrong). We just sat back. If we rush in every time targets broke the law, we would never be able to make cases against the big fish'."
In reply to Ashton's dismissive comments, Gonzalez says he pointed out to her that "people may get killed all the time, but the difference in this case is that the government let their informant participate in the murders."
DOJ Insider
Ashton is far more than a low-level DOJ attorney. Until August of 2005, just prior to being detailed to Leahy's staff, she served as deputy director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA). The EOUSA deals directly with U.S. Attorneys around the country in providing oversight and support in a variety of areas, including legal issues, personnel, management, budgeting and policy development. The EOUSA also provides staff and budgetary support for the Attorney General's Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys, which plays a key role in determining DOJ policies and programs.
The NSWBC representatives at the briefing claim that Ashton's presence represented a major conflict of interest because two of the major players in the alleged ongoing cover-up of the DOJ's complicity in the House of Death murders are Assistant U.S. Attorney Juanita Fielden in El Paso and U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton in San Antonio. Sutton, at the time of the briefing, served as the vice chairman of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys and in late March of this year was appointed chairman of the committee.
In a nutshell, the NSWBC members showed up in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 21 to meet with staff representing Grassley and Leahy expecting a fair hearing of the facts and to urge the senators to call for congressional hearings over the House of Death case. Grassley is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; Leahy serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
However, instead of a fair hearing, the NSWBC members contend they were put in the position of making their case to a connected DOJ attorney whose future career is in the hands of the very agency accused of participating in the cover-up. In fact, Ashton is slated to return this summer to DOJ, where she serves as an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., according to individuals with that office.
"While with DEA, I was detailed to another agency, but I knew damn well who paid my salary and who I had to report things to," Gonzalez stresses. "So the minute I found out who she (Ashton) was, I knew that anything I said would go right back to DOJ."
But conflict-of-interest issues are not only surfacing in Leahy's office. Gonzalez points out that he originally met with an investigator with Sen. Grassley's office in late spring of 2004, shortly after it became clear that ICE agents and a U.S. prosecutor were complicit in the House of Death murders. At the time, Gonzalez says, the investigator informed him that an ICE employee was detailed to the senator's staff.
"And he (the investigator) expressed concern to me," Gonzalez claims, "that anything he said in a staff meeting where that ICE official was present would be reported back to ICE."
Gonzalez adds that when he met with Grassley's staff for the November 2005 briefing, they claimed that the files of the investigator he met with in 2004 contained no information on the House of Death case. That investigator has since left Grassley's staff.
Tracy Schmaler, a press spokeswoman for Sen. Leahy, denies that Ashton was unconcerned with the House of Death allegations and insists that Ashton did her job properly. Schmaler also was seemingly incensed that anyone would accuse Ashton of serving the interests of DOJ while working for the Senator or of being a mole for the agency. She insists that the "burden of proof" should be on the whistleblowers to demonstrate that Ashton's loyalties are with the Justice Department in the House of Death case.
"She (Ashton) never dealt with the (House of Death) case while at DOJ," Schmaler claims.
Gonzalez points out, though, that as deputy director of EOUSA, Ashton would have dealt with U.S. Attorney Sutton. Gonzalez adds that it was made clear to everyone at the briefing, including Ashton, that Sutton played a key role in the cover-up of his office's complicity in the House of Death murders.
"In the briefing (that Ashton attended), we made no bones about the fact that we were talking about Johnny Sutton," Gonzalez says.
Schmaler refused to allow Narco News to speak with Ashton directly. In addition, though promising to check into it, she declined to discuss what action, if any, had been taken by Leahy's office on the House of Death case.
"Sen. Grassley's office took the lead in organizing the (November) briefing, so they would be in a better position to comment," Schmaler said.
The press secretary for Grassley's office, Beth Levine, when contacted, also promised to look into the status of the House of Death investigation in her office, but stressed that "just because there have been no hearings, that doesn't mean nothing is going on."
Well, if something is going on, it continues to be a mystery seemingly without a sense of urgency. The first of more than a dozen murders in the House of Death drug-war tragedy occurred in August 2003.
Both Schmaler and Levine failed to get back to Narco News with the promised status update on the case.
Other Priorities
Narco News made more than eight phone calls to the offices of Grassley and Leahy over the course of a week seeking information on what is being done, if anything, on the House of Death mass-murder case. Neither Schmaler or Levine seemed all too pleased with Narco News' persistence on this matter, or our attempts to contact staff members present at the November briefing directly for comment. In any event, not one staff member, other than the press front people for Leahy and Grassley, returned calls.
After evading questions about what was being done by Leahy and Grassley in the House of Death case, Schmaler and Levine each indicated at one point, in separate phone conversations, that they did not have time to talk further and needed to move on to more pressing Capitol Hill concerns. Schmaler actually seemed to be yawning during one phone conversation.
It could be that the senators themselves are not aware of their staff members' apparent lack of concern over murder, including the torture and slaying of U.S. citizens, and the documented trail of the cover-up within DOJ and DHS. Maybe their staffs have failed to brief them on the House of Death case because they are just too bogged down in other career-enhancing concerns now on the table, such as pursuing vote-sensitive matters like high gas prices and immigration "reform."
After all, dead brown people -- particularly Mexicans, as many of the victims were in the House of Death mass murder -- can't vote. And in general, as evidenced by the bigotry marking the immigration controversy, brown people are deemed exploitable and disposable from the vantage point of the citadels of power.
Racism, without a doubt, is at the core of why the House of Death murders were allowed to occur in the first place, according to Gonzalez.
"If this had been a city on the Canadian border, these murders would not have happened," Gonzalez stresses. "Our government would not allow Canadian citizens to be tortured and murdered... But, in the House of Death case, they did let it happen because it was El Paso and Juarez and a bunch of Mexicans that they don't give a shit about."
As far as the ongoing cover-up in the House of Death, and the lack of will within Congress to call hearings to unravel that cover-up, that boils down to priorities. And the chief priority for the self-absorbed leadership class inside the Beltway is self-interest. After all, messing with powerful people in the Executive Branch often results in payback when it comes to other important pet projects and career objectives that might be in the works.
In that light, it's simply not prudent for staff members to encourage their bosses to knock over an outhouse (launch congressional hearings) when it might well stink up their own backyards as well.
"Johnny Sutton is a well-wired guy, all the way to the White House," Gonzalez says. "No one is going to go after him. That's the bottom line."
Then again, maybe these particular senators, Grassley and Leahy, who do have a track record, at times, of stepping up to the plate on matters of justice and human rights, will come around to seeing the importance of fighting this fight, of drawing a line in the sand when it comes to torture, murder and U.S. government complicity in those acts. Time will tell, but given the time that has already past -- nearly three years since the first murder -- it appears the dead have a better chance of rising from their graves.
Drug War Pretense
Regardless of how all the facts finally sort out in the House of Death in Ciudad Juarez, the sad truth is that the whole sordid affair -- the indifference, the corpses, the cover-up -- is just another tragic act in the warped war on drugs along the border.
In this case, the U.S. government was willing to look the other way as its own informant, a former Mexican cop, Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez Peyro, also known as Lalo, participated in multiple gruesome murders between August 2003 and January 2004. The bodies of a dozen victims -- including Luis Padilla, a U.S. resident and father of three children -- were covered in lime and dumped like trash in a shallow grave in the backyard of the House of Death on Parsioneros Street in Juarez. This act of mass murder was tolerated all so U.S. federal agents and prosecutors could line up convictions to help juice their careers.
And in order to prevent those same U.S. law enforcers from claiming victory in this bloody skirmish, the narco-traffickers attempted to strike back at the informant Lalo, who was the key witness against them. In the process, in August of 2004 at a Whataburger fast-food restaurant in El Paso, they mistakenly cut down an innocent man -- a U.S. citizen and the father of a two-week old kid.
It also could be argued that, in addition to the drug dealers, even certain U.S. government officials might not mind waking up to find Lalo out of the picture, permanently. Now, both sides may get their prize, as Lalo is slated to be extradited to Mexico soon, back to a certain death at the hands of the narcos he betrayed. In that way, a critical witness to the U.S. government's complicity in mass murder in Juarez will be silenced, just like the victims in the House of Death.
All this could have been prevented if the informant had been kept under control from the start, if the U.S. law enforcers overseeing Lalo would have put people's lives before their careers.
Apparently, if we are to judge the actions to date, or inaction, of our "leaders" in the U.S. Congress, far more needless death is in the cards. But maybe in the eyes of these elected officials charged with assuring oversight of Executive Branch agencies like DOJ and DHS, mass murder along the border -- even if U.S. law enforcers are complicit in that carnage -- is no cause for concern.
Maybe those now seated in Congress no longer see themselves as representing all the people, but rather only as ruling over the people. From that pedestal of privilege, maybe they do not deem the torture and murder of a dozen or more brown people along the border worth their time or effort.
We can only hope that they prove that assumption wrong, but hope alone does not bring back the victims or prevent the same cruel acts from playing out again and again without consequence to those pulling the strings in this travesty of justice.
If any lesson is to be drawn from the House of Death, it is that maintaining the pretense of the war on drugs seems to be more important than human life itself.
And until our so-called leader's kick their addiction to this deadly pretense, we can be assured that, elsewhere along the border, the players in this game have already put a down payment on the next House of Death.
Narco News is funded by your contributions to The Fund for Authentic Journalism. Please make journalism like this possible by going to The Fund's web site, http://www.authenticjournalism.org, and making a contribution today.
Copyright 2006 The Narco News Bulletin
*****
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7. 40 YEARS AFTER: THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
_________________________________________________________________________
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 4/30/06]
Source: Afrikan Frontline Network, nattyreb@comcast.net
- Sunday, 7 May 2006 -
Amazingly, it has been 40 years since the Black Panther Party was founded.
Some sticklers to detail will point to the fact that it was in October, not May, of 1966, that the Black Panther Party was founded by two young men in Oakland, California, named Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.
That's true; but that's not the end of the story.
The late African nationalist, Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael), when a leader of SNCC (or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), published a month before Huey and Bobby joined together, an article detailing SNCC's efforts to organize both in the South and the Northeast. In a September, 1966 article published in the "New York Review of Books", Ture wrote:
"SNCC today is working in both North and South on programs of voter registration and independent political organizing. In some places, such as Alabama, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, independent organizing under the black panther symbol is in progress. The creation of a national "black panther party" must come about; it will take time to build, and it is much too early to predict its success. We have no infallible master plan and we make no claim to exclusive knowledge of how to end racism; different groups will work in their own different ways. SNCC cannot spell out the full logistics of self-determination, but it can address itself to the problem by helping black communities define their needs, realize their strength, and go into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for themselves. Without knowing all the answers, it can address itself to the basic problem of poverty, to the fact that in Lowndes County 86 white families own 90 per cent of the land. What are black people in that county going to do for jobs; where are they going to get money? There must be reallocation of land, of money. [From: Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Vintage, 1965/1971). p. 22.]
It was in fact, SNCC's efforts in Lowndes County, Alabama, that inspired Huey to use the name 'Black Panther Party.'
But, it's been 40 years. It's safe to say that much of the history of Huey's Party remains hidden history. This isn't rhetoric -- it's fact.
One year ago, I received a wealth of letters from college students who read my book, "WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party" (South End, 2004). Here, scores of letters, from a wide variety of students from various racial and ethnic groups, almost all of whom expressed shock and surprise, not just at the unknown history of the Party, but of the history of Black history overall. One writer, Shanara P. noted, "... most of the facts you wrote in your book were never taught in the schools I went to."
Wayne S. wrote: "'The Beginnings of the Black Panther Party and the History it Sprang From' and 'The Deep Roots of the Struggle for Black Liberation' should become amendments to the history books which choose to leave out the violent uprisings against slavery. If I had not read these chapters, I could have been a graduate-level student about to get a masters degree but would have absolutely no idea of one of the catalysts of the Civil War, such as the Christiana rebellion. This is just one example of the pseudo factual history books which are being implanted around our schools."
Another student, Jon M., wrote: "I feel cheated because this is the first time I have heard such stories."
As a writer and historian, I was, of course, delighted by such letters. But as a former member of the Party, it was eye-opening at how invisible the Party has become with the passage of time.
But why should we be surprised? What did we expect?
The Party played a major role, in its time, to organize our People into resistance to the State. For many millions of youth, Black History means reading about (or hearing boring lectures about) Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and perhaps Malcolm X. It rarely goes deeper than that.
Before this generation goes on to its ancestors, we should, we must, do our level best to pass on our lessons, so that they live in our people's minds and lives.
There is, already, a new formation that has arisen, which calls itself New Afrikan Black Panther Party, which has prison chapters in several states. Unlike other formations which have used the BPP name, these youngsters actually read and study the works of Huey P. Newton, George Jackson, and other leading Party members. The struggle continues!
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved.
Mr. Jamal's new work, WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party, is now available from South End Press, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.southendpress.org).
Check out Mumia's NEW book: "Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People": http://www.africanworld.com.
These are VERY SERIOUS TIMES for political activists in this country and around the world. Get full details and keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!! at http://www.mumia.org and http://www.movenet.org.
To download Mp3's of Mumia's commentaries visit http://www.prisonradio.org or http://www.fsrn.org
The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
CHECK http://www.mumia.org FOR IMPORTANT ACTION ALERTS!
PLEASE CONTACT: International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ; P.O. Box 19709; Philadelphia, PA 19143; Tel: 215-476-8812; Fax: 215-476-6180: E-mail: icffmaj@aol.com AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!
Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal/AM 8335/SCI-Greene/175 Progress Drive/Waynesburg, PA 15370
WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN NOT REST!!
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News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 719, May 7, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISO& PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPANERS TIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side. ... But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. ... Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. ... But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction! -- Stephen Colbert, Transcript, White House Correspondents Dinner, April 29, 2006, Editor & Publisher, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002461887.
Contents: Number 719
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Friday, 5 May 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
1. THE MOUSSAOUI VERDICT DEALS BLOW
TO BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S 9/11 COVERUP
_________________________________________________________________________
News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/mous-m05.shtml
By Patrick Martin
The decision by an Alexandria, Virginia jury to sentence Zaccarias Moussaoui to life imprisonment, sparing him a death sentence, is a humane and intelligent action and a rebuff to the Bush administration. In issuing its verdict, the jury rejected the government's demand for a death sentence and, by implication, its attempt to use the Moussaoui case to cover up both its inaction before 9/11 and its inexplicable refusal to put any of the principal figures in the 9/11 conspiracy on trial.
By all accounts, the 12 jurors made a painstaking review of the evidence in the case, pouring through their notes on the testimony as they filled out a complex 42-page form assessing the aggravating and mitigating factors argued by the prosecution and defense. Moussaoui pled guilty a year ago to participating in the conspiracy that led up to the 9/11 attacks, and the trial was confined to the choice between two penalties--life imprisonment without parole or death.
The principal hurdle for the prosecution was the fact that Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001 on immigration charges, when his bizarre behavior after enrolling at a Minnesota flight school brought him to the attention of local FBI agents. He was sitting in jail during the 9/11 attacks, and obviously played no direct role in the worst terrorist attacks in US history, in which nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered.
The Justice Department, in seeking the death penalty, argued that Moussaoui's silence about the Al Qaeda plot, and his false claims that he was merely interested in learning how to fly large airplanes, had prevented the federal government from taking measures, such as intensified airport security, that would have forestalled the suicide hijackings. This was a tenuous argument, one that, as Judge Leonie Brinkema pointed out, came close to challenging Moussaoui's Fifth Amendment right to remain silent after his arrest.
But after the jury seemingly accepted the prosecution's argument, issuing an initial decision last month that Moussaoui was eligible for the death penalty, most courtroom observers declared that a death sentence was a foregone conclusion. Having determined that Moussaoui's silence gave him a share of the responsibility for the deaths on September 11, 2001, the jury would necessarily impose the maximum sentence.
Instead, however, as they reviewed the evidence, some of the jurors effectively reversed their earlier finding. Three jurors cited an additional mitigating factor on their form--one not argued by the defense because it had already supposedly been decided--declaring that Moussaoui should not be executed because he actually knew very little of the 9/11 conspiracy.
While the jurors remain anonymous and it is not yet possible to determine their precise line of reasoning, some general considerations are clear. Nine of the 12 jurors found that Moussaoui's upbringing and history of violent abuse by his father were mitigating factors. Three found that Moussaoui's experience of racial discrimination in France as he was growing up was another mitigating factor. Although the jurors rejected claims by Moussaoui's attorneys that he is a paranoid schizophrenic, they heard videotaped depositions from two of Moussaoui's sisters, who suffer from that mental illness and are confined to French asylums.
The jurors were undoubtedly affected by the extraordinary testimony of two dozen family members of 9/11 victims who agreed to appear as defense witnesses. Although they were not permitted to state an opinion about the appropriate penalty for Moussaoui while on the stand, their appearance clearly conveyed opposition to the government's demand for a death sentence and undermined its claim that only the execution of Moussaoui could provide "closure" for the 9/11 families. Outside the courtroom, many of these 9/11 relatives declared their opposition to capital punishment and to making Moussaoui an Al Qaeda martyr.
Among both the family members and the jurors, the growing public rejection of the death penalty has made itself felt. Although the Bush administration chose to bring the case in conservative Virginia, in a city near the Pentagon, rather than in more liberal New York, the jury pool in Alexandria has not been reliably pro-death. By one account, federal juries in Alexandria have declined to impose the death penalty in all six cases brought in that district since 1998.
The jurors heard diametrically conflicting expert witnesses on Moussaoui's sanity, but the defendant's own performance certainly raised doubts about his mental capacity, both at the time of the 9/11 attacks and today. His repellent gloating over the deaths of innocent people and his baiting of his own lawyers--one of them Jewish--were combined with grandiose and clearly false declarations of his own central role in Al Qaeda.
The most bizarre statement came when he took the stand and, under oath, declared that he was to have been the pilot of a fifth hijacked airplane, accompanied by the failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid and other Al Qaeda supporters. Aside from the fact that Reid was not in the US in the summer of 2001 and had no known relation to the 9/11 plot, he also made Moussaoui the beneficiary of his will, an act which makes little sense if the two were to take part in the same suicide hijacking. Even the FBI conceded that there was no evidence to support Moussaoui's claims.
As well, there were depositions from those the CIA has named as the two leaders of the 9/11 plot now held in secret US prisons overseas, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, both of whom testified that Moussaoui was considered too unstable and unreliable even to be a suicide hijacker, and had been relegated to a secondary role, if even that.
This raises another aspect of the Moussaoui case, one that is of utmost political importance, whatever role it may have played in the jury's deliberations. Why was the bit player Moussaoui on trial, and not those identified as the planners and organizers of the 9/11 attacks who are in US custody? Binalshibh was captured in September 2002, Mohammed six months later. Anything they may have known at the time about Al Qaeda's operations has been extracted from them--certainly they can know nothing today of contemporaneous intelligence value. Yet they remain, perhaps indefinitely, in the custody of the CIA, facing no tribunal for their crimes.
There are two likely reasons why Mohammed and Binalshibh have not been brought to trial. The first is that they have been tortured so systematically that they are physically or mentally unfit to participate. The second is that if accorded the opportunity of a public trial, with competent legal counsel, they might well reveal embarrassing facts about the longstanding connections between Al Qaeda and American intelligence agencies.
It was, after all, the CIA which created Al Qaeda through its recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists, including bin Laden, to participate in the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Moussaoui is too young and too inexperienced to have personal knowledge of these connections, but not so Mohammed and Binalshibh, two of bin Laden's closest lieutenants.
There is reason to believe, moreover, that these connections did not suddenly cease after bin Laden's declaration of war on the United States in 1996. There have been unconfirmed reports of CIA-bin Laden contacts as late as the summer of 2001. And the European media has reported US government surveillance of Mohammed Atta throughout the period that the 9/11 attacks were being organized.
The fundamental unanswered question about 9/11 is how much the Bush administration and the US intelligence services knew of the plans for terrorist attacks, and at what level the decision was made not to interfere with these preparations, in order to obtain a suitable pretext for US military intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East.
The jury verdict of life imprisonment for Moussaoui provoked bitter and frustrated comments from Bush himself, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and such media outlets as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News.
Bush declared, in a typical non sequitur, "The end of this trial represents the end of this case, but not an end to the fight against terror." He said that the jury had spared Moussaoui's life even though that "is something that he evidently wasn't willing to do for innocent American citizens." Apparently, the president regretted the jury's decision to act in a more enlightened fashion than the Al Qaeda terrorist.
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed column by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, headlined, "They Should Have Killed Him," as though the jury should have strung Moussaoui up in the courtroom personally. In an accompanying editorial, the Journal declared that the verdict demonstrated the danger of routing terrorism cases through the court system, instead of the summary military proceedings sought by the Bush administration for those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay--none of whom has been tried, more than four years after the concentration camp opened.
The most irate comment came from the tabloid Daily News, which denounced the jury for considering mitigating factors like violent abuse in childhood. "The thought that U.S. jurors are capable of such muddled thinking is horrifying," the News opined. "Any role in 9/11, any foreknowledge of the attacks, any aid and comfort given Al Qaeda is grounds for death."
If the ultimate crime is being forewarned about 9/11 and then taking no action, then former CIA Director George Tenet, a raft of FBI supervisors, as well as Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice should all be facing criminal investigations and indictments. It was on August 6, 2001 that Rice presented Bush a CIA memo warning of Al Qaeda plans to hijack airliners inside the United States, with the possibility they could be used in suicide attacks. The vast machinery of the federal government ground on without taking a single action to forestall the attacks.
In sharp contrast to the hysteria and cover-up from the White House and the media, many relatives of 9/11 victims have reacted to the Moussaoui case by calling once again for a more serious effort to uncover the truth about the terrorist attacks and punish their perpetrators.
Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died at the Pentagon on September 11, told a press conference that she respected the jury's decisions. "We showed the world what we do to terrorists," she said. "We'll show them respect no matter how much disrespect they show us. It makes us a finer society."
Such attitudes, expressed by relatives of the victims and acted upon by the Virginia jury members, demonstrate that no matter how much the media, not to mention the government, has attempted to debase popular consciousness, they have not been able to stamp out democratic sentiments and humanity in the American people.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans
_________________________________________________________________________
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
Nation & World
May 8, 2006
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060508/8homeland.htm
By David E. Kaplan
In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI's regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation's first local department of homeland security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit.
The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County."
Glazed hams aren't the only items that America's local cops are protecting from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and antiwar protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the Web. Unlike with Washington's warrantless domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on the role of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism. A U.S. News inquiry found that federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the nation's security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of training and standards. "This is going to be the challenge," says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, "to ensure that while getting bin Laden we don't transgress over the law. We've been burned so badly in the past--we can't do that again."
Rap sheets
Chief Bratton is referring to the infamous city "Red Squads" that targeted civil rights and antiwar groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Veteran police officers say no one in law enforcement wants a return to the bad old days of domestic spying. But civil liberties watchdogs warn that with so many cops looking for terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be inevitable. "The restrictions on police spying are being removed," says attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence files. "And I don't think you can rely on the police to regulate themselves."
Good or bad, intelligence gathering by local police departments is back. Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials, and privacy experts reveal a transformation among state and local law enforcement.
Among the changes:
Since 9/11, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state police intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more than 100 police intelligence units reaching into nearly every state.
To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to assemble lists of "potential threat elements"--individuals or groups suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state authorities have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets, ranging from genuine terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists.
Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far behind the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland security grants to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for the conduct of local intelligence operations only last year; the standards are voluntary and are being implemented slowly.
The resurgence of police intelligence operations is being accompanied by a revolution in law enforcement computing. Rap sheets, intelligence reports, and public records are rapidly being pooled into huge, networked computer databases. Much of this is a boon to crime fighting, but privacy advocates say the systems are wide open to abuse.
Behind the windfall in federal funding is broad agreement in Washington on two areas: first, that local cops are America's front line of defense against terrorism; and second, that the law enforcement and intelligence communities must do a far better job of sharing information with state and local police. As a report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police stressed: "All terrorism is local." Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested by a state trooper after a traffic stop. And last year, local police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted what the FBI says could have been America's worst incident since 9/11--planned attacks on military sites and synagogues in and around Los Angeles by homegrown jihadists.
The numbers tell the story: There are over 700,000 local, state, and tribal police officers in the United States, compared with only 12,000 FBI agents. But getting the right information to all those eyes and ears hasn't gone especially well. The government's failure at "connecting the dots," as the 9/11 commission put it, was key to the success of al Qaeda's fateful hijackings in 2001. Three of the hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, were pulled over in traffic stops before the attacks, yet local cops had no inkling they might be on terrorist watch lists. A National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan, released by the Justice Department in 2003, found no shortage of problems in sharing information among local law enforcement: a lack of trust and communication; lack of funding for a national intelligence network; lack of database connectivity; a shortage of intelligence analysts, software, and training; and a lack of standards and policies.
The flood of post-9/11 funding and attention, however, has started making a difference, officials say. Indeed, it has catalyzed reforms already underway in state and local law enforcement, giving a boost to what reformers call intelligence-led policing--a kind of 21st-century crime fighting driven by computer databases, intelligence gathering, and analysis. "This is a new paradigm, a new philosophy of policing," says the LAPD's Bratton, who previously served as chief of the New York Police Department. In that job, Bratton says, he spent 5 percent of his time on counterterrorism; today, in Los Angeles, he spends 50 percent. The key to counterterrorism work, Bratton adds, is intelligence.
The change is "huge, absolutely huge," says Michigan State University's David Carter, the author of Law Enforcement Intelligence. "Intelligence used to be a dirty word. But it's a more thoughtful process now." During the 1980s and 1990s, intelligence units were largely confined to large police departments targeting drug smugglers and organized crime, but the national plan now being pushed by Washington calls for every law enforcement agency to develop some intelligence capability. Experts estimate that well over 100 police departments, from big-city operations to small county sheriffs' offices, have now established intelligence units of one kind or another. Hundreds of local detectives are also working with federal agents on FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have nearly tripled from 34 before 9/11 to 100 today. And over 6,000 state and local cops now have federal security clearances, allowing them to see classified intelligence reports.
"The front line"
Some police departments have grown as sophisticated as those of the feds. The LAPD has some 80 cops working counterterrorism, while other big units now exist in Atlanta, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Then there's the NYPD, which is in a class by itself--with a thousand officers assigned to homeland security. The Big Apple's intelligence chief is a former head of CIA covert operations; its counterterrorism chief is an ex-State Department counterterrorism coordinator. The NYPD has officers based in a half-dozen countries, and its counterterrorism agents visit some 200 businesses a week to check on suspicious activity.
Many of the nation's new intelligence units are dubbed "fusion centers." Run by state or local law enforcement, these regional hubs pool information from multiple jurisdictions. From a mere handful before 9/11, fusion centers now exist in 31 states, with a dozen more to follow. Some focus exclusively on terrorism; others track all manner of criminal activity. Federal officials hope to eventually see 70 fusion centers nationwide, providing a coast-to-coast intelligence blanket. This vision was noted by President Bush in a 2003 speech: "All across our country we'll be able to tie our terrorist information to local information banks so that the front line of defeating terror becomes activated and real, and those are the local law enforcement officials."
Intelligence centers are among the hottest trends in law enforcement. Last year, Massachusetts opened its Commonwealth Fusion Center, which boasts 18 analysts and 23 field-intelligence officers. The state of California is spending $15 million on a string of four centers this year, and north Texas and New Jersey are each setting up six. The best, officials say, are focused broadly and are improving their ability to counter sophisticated crimes that include not only terrorism but fraud, racketeering, and computer hacking. The federal Department of Homeland Security, which has bankrolled start-ups of many of the centers, has big plans for the emerging network. Jack Tomarchio, the agency's new deputy director of intelligence, told a law enforcement conference in March of plans to embed up to three DHS agents and intelligence analysts at every site. "The states want a very close synergistic relationship with the feds," he explained to U.S. News. "Nobody wants to play by the old rules. The old rules basically gave us 9/11."
"Reasonable suspicion"
The problem, skeptics say, is that no one is quite sure what the new rules are. "Hardly anyone knows what a fusion center should do," says Paul Wormeli of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a Justice Department-backed training and technology center. "Some states have responded by putting 10 state troopers in a room to look at databases. That's a ridiculous approach." Another law enforcement veteran, deeply involved with the fusion centers, expressed similar frustration. "The money has been moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance, or training," says the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. There are now guidelines, he adds, "but they're not binding on anyone." In the past year, the Justice Department has issued standards for local police on fusion centers and privacy issues, but they are only advisory. Most federal funding for the centers now comes from the Department of Homeland Security, but DHS also requires no intelligence standards from its grantees.
At the state level, regulations on police spying vary widely, but a general rule of thumb comes from the Justice Department's internal guidelines that forbid intelligence gathering on individuals unless there is a "reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity. Since the reforms of the 1970s, the FBI says its agents have followed this standard; Justice Department regulations require local police who receive federal funding to do the same in maintaining any intelligence files. But there is considerable leeway at the local level, and since 2001, judges have watered down police spying limits in Chicago and New York. The federal regs, moreover, have not stopped a parade of questionable cases.
Suspicion of spying is so rife among antiwar activists, who have loudly protested White House policy on Iraq, that some begin meetings by welcoming undercover cops who might be present. "People know and believe their activities are being monitored," says Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the country's largest antiwar coalition. There is some evidence to back this up. Documents and videotapes obtained from lawsuits against the NYPD reveal that its undercover officers have joined antiwar and even bicycle-rider rallies. In at least one case, an apparent undercover officer incited a crowd by faking his arrest. In Fresno, Calif., activists learned in 2003 that their group, Peace Fresno, had been infiltrated by a local sheriff's deputy--piecing it together after the man died in a car crash and his obituary appeared in the paper.
The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a $7 million fusion center run by the state Department of Justice, also ran into trouble in 2003 when it warned of potential violence at an antiwar protest at the port of Oakland. Mike Van Winkle, then a spokesman for the center, explained his concern to the Oakland Tribune: "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act." Officials quickly distanced themselves from the statement. The center's staff had confused political protest with terrorism, announced California's attorney general, who oversees the office.
"Absurd" threats
But this expansive view of homeland security has at times also extended to union activists and even library Web surfers. In February 2006 near Washington, D.C., two Montgomery County, Md., homeland security agents walked into a suburban Bethesda library and forcefully warned patrons that viewing Internet pornography was illegal. (It is not.) A county official later called the incident "regrettable" and said those officers had been reassigned. Similarly, in 2004, two plainclothes Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies monitored a protest by striking Safeway workers in nearby San Francisco, identifying themselves to union leaders as homeland security agents.
Further blurring the lines over what constitutes "homeland security" has been a push by Washington for states to identify possible terrorists. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security began requiring states to draft strategic plans that included figures on how many "potential threat elements" existed in their backyards. The definition of suspected terrorists was fairly loose--PTEs were groups or individuals who might use force or violence "to intimidate or coerce" for a goal "possibly political or social in nature." In response, some states came up with alarming numbers. Most of the reports are not available publicly, but U.S. News obtained nine state homeland security plans and found that local officials have identified thousands of "potential" terrorists. There are striking disparities, as well. South Carolina, for example, found 68 PTEs, but neighboring North Carolina uncovered 506. Vermont and New Hampshire found none at all. Most impressive was Texas, where in 2004 investigators identified 2,052 potential threat elements. One top veteran of the FBI's counterterrorism force calls the Texas number "absurd." Included among the threats cited by the states, sources say, are biker gangs, militia groups, and "save the whales" environmentalists.
"The PTE methodology was flawed," says a federal intelligence official familiar with the process, "and it's no longer being used." Nonetheless, these "threat elements" have, in some cases, become the basis for intelligence gathering by local and state police. Concern over the process prompted the ACLU in New Jersey to sue the state, demanding that eight towns turn over documents on PTEs identified by local police.
Another source of alarm for civil liberties watchdogs is the explosion in police computing power. Spurred by a 2004 White House directive ordering better information sharing, the Justice Department has poured tens of millions of dollars into expanding and tying together law enforcement databases and networks. In many respects, the changes are long overdue, yanking police into the 21st century and letting them use the tools that bankers, private investigators, and journalists routinely employ. From TV shows like 24 and CSI, Americans are accustomed to scenes of police accessing the most arcane data with a few keyboard clicks. The reality couldn't be more different. Law enforcement was slow to get on the technology bandwagon, and its information systems have developed into a patchwork of networks and databases that cannot talk to one another--even within the same county. Rap sheets, prison records, and court files are often all on different systems. This means that days or even weeks can pass before court-issued warrants show up on police wanted lists--leaving criminals out on the streets.
States and cities began linking up their systems in the 1990s, but since 9/11 their progress has been dramatic. At least 38 states are working on some 200 projects tying together their criminal justice records. Concerned over disjointed police networks around its key bases, the Navy's Criminal Investigative Service is funding projects in Norfolk, Va., and four other port cities, creating huge "data warehouses" stocked with crime files from dozens of law enforcement agencies. The FBI is also running pilot database centers in the St. Louis and Seattle areas in which the bureau makes its case files available to police. To local cops who have long complained about the FBI's lack of sharing, the development is downright revolutionary. "It made people nervous as hell, including me," says the FBI's Thomas Bush, who oversaw the initial program and now runs the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division. "The technical aspect is easy, but you need to have the trust of the community and the security to safeguard the system."
The benefits of all this are undeniable. Armed with the latest information, police will be better able to catch crooks and spot criminal trends. But in this digital age, with so much data available about individual Americans, the lines between what is acceptable investigation and what is intrusive spying can quickly grow unclear. Consider the case of Matrix. Backed by $12 million in federal funds, at its peak in 2004 the Matrix system tapped into law enforcement agencies from a dozen states. Using "data mining" technology, its search engine ripped through billions of public records and matched them with police files, creating instant dossiers. In the days after 9/11, Matrix researchers searched out individuals with what they called "high terrorist factor" scores, providing federal and state authorities a list of 120,000 "suspects."
Law enforcement officials loved the system and made nearly 2 million queries to it. But what alarmed privacy advocates was the mixing of public data with police files, profiling techniques that smacked of fishing expeditions, and the fact that all these sensitive data were housed in a private corporation. Hounded by bad publicity and concerned that Matrix might be breaking privacy laws, states began pulling out of the system. Then, early last year, the Justice Department quietly cut off funding.
Matrix no longer exists, but similar projects are underway across the country, including one run by the California Department of Justice. Having learned from Matrix's mistakes, users are employing what tech specialists call "distributed computing." Instead of creating a single, vast database, they rapidly access information from sites in different states, often with a single query. The effect is essentially the same. "If people knew what we were looking at, they'd throw a fit," says a database trainer at one prominent police department.
Hacker's discovery
Another concern is the quality--and security--of all that information. In Minnesota, the state-run Multiple Jurisdiction Network Organization ran into controversy after linking together nearly 200 law enforcement agencies and over 8 million records. State Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, a Republican who oversees privacy issues, found much to be alarmed about when a local hacker contacted her after breaking into the system. The hacker had yanked out files on Holberg herself, showing she was classified as a "suspect" based on a neighbor's old complaint about where she parked her car. "We had a real mess in Minnesota," Holberg later wrote. "There was no effective policy for individuals to review the data in the system, let alone correct inaccuracies." In late 2003, state officials shut down the system amid concerns that it violated privacy laws in its handling of records on juvenile offenders and gun permits.
Such problems threaten to grow as law enforcement expands its reach with increased intelligence and computing power. The key to avoiding trouble, say experts, is ensuring that concerns over privacy and civil liberties are dealt with head-on. In a recent advisory aimed at police intelligence units, the Department of Justice stressed that success in safeguarding civil liberties "depends on appointing a high-level member of your agency to champion the initiative." But that message apparently hasn't gotten through, judging from the response at a conference sponsored by the Justice Department a few weeks back on information sharing. Among the crowd of some 200 local and state officials were intelligence officers, database managers, and chiefs of police. When a speaker asked who in the audience was working with privacy officials, not a single hand went up.
As Washington doles out millions of dollars for police intelligence, its reliance on voluntary guidelines may backfire, warn critics, who worry that abuses could wreck the important work that needs to be done. "We're still diddling around," says police technology expert Wormeli. "We're not setting clear policy on what we put in our databases. Should a patrol officer in Tallahassee be able to look at my credit report? Most people would say, 'Hell, no.'" Current regulations on criminal intelligence, he adds, were written before the computer age. "They were great in their day, but they need to be updated and expanded."
Civil liberties watchdogs like attorney Gutman, meanwhile, want to know how efforts to stop al Qaeda have ended up targeting animal rights advocates, labor leaders, and antiwar protesters. "You've got all this money and all this equipment--you're going to find someone to use it on," he warns. "If there aren't any external checks, there's going to be an inevitable drift toward abuses." But boosters of intelligence-led policing say that today's cops are too smart to repeat mistakes of the old Red Squads. "We're trying to develop policies to build trust and relationships, not spy," says Illinois State Police Deputy Director Kenneth Bouche. "We've learned a better way to do it." Perhaps. But for now, at least, the jury on this case is still out.
With Monica M. Ekman and Angie C. Marek
Copyright 2006 U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.
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INTELLIGENCE ONLINE
Editor, Olivier Schmidt
E-mail: intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr
Web: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/intelligence-adi
Publishing since 1980
- No. 478, 1 May 2006 -
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3. GREAT BRITAIN: FIFTH SPECIAL FORCES UNIT OPERATIONAL
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A new British Army unit, the 1,200-strong Special Forces Support Group (SFSG), became fully operational in mid-April. The unit, consisting of Royal Air Force (RAF) freefall experts, Royal Marine commandos, and members of the Parachute Regiment, was commissioned to support the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Squadron (SBS). It will be based at RAF St. Athan, near Cardiff in Wales, and will be under the control of Hugh Kernohan, Director of Special Forces Section, at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), in London. The SFSG will train with the SAS and the SBS, and will specialize in diversionary tactics, supporting firepower and defensive cordon protection around SAS and SBS operations. It will also support the Metropolitan Police and regional police forces in anti-terrorist situations considered "so physically dangerous that [the police] need assistance from the Army", according to the MoD.
The SFSG is the fifth British special forces unit. The four others are the SAS, the SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), which carries out covert intelligence-gathering operations using HUMINT sources, and the 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment, which specializes in SIGINT and ELINT tasks. The SFSG will have high-tech computerized satellite communications equipment allowing it to download GCHQ and MI6 intelligence. It will also have SOFLAM laser marking systems designed to direct the RAF to designated targets. All serving SFSG personnel will be allowed to retain the cap badges of their original regiments. However, the new shoulder emblem, a silver dagger (also used in SAS and SBS badges) pierced by a red-lined black lightening flash on a green background, bears more than a passing resemblance to the insignia of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel -- more commonly known as the SS.
COMMENT: The selection process for the SFSG is expected to be far more strict and intrusive than that for the SRR, which was created by the former Defense Secretary, Geoff Hoon, in 2004. Based in Hereford, the SRR initially used personnel -- many of whom were veterans of the Northern Ireland campaign -- from the Intelligence Corps, the SAS, and 14th Intelligence Company. In less than 18 months, the regiment has been involved in two politically controversial incidents. Last July, SRR officers were among the plain-clothes "watchers" who followed Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes to Stockwell Underground station in London where he was shot dead by SAS-trained SO19 police officers after being wrongly identified as a suspected suicide bomber (INT, n. 464 1).
On 19 September, following a gun battle in Basra, Iraq, in which two Iraqi policemen died, two SRR operatives (initially identified as members of the SAS), using an unmarked civilian vehicle and dressed as local Arabs, were arrested by Iraqi police after being caught in possession of weapons and bomb-making equipment. What began as a "special forces covert operation" quickly deteriorated into a high-profile international fiasco when the O/C of British forces in southern Iraq, Brigadier John Lorimer, ordered soldiers to storm the jail where the SRR men were being held after negotiations to secure their release failed. The two "covert operatives" have since returned to Britain, despite an arrest warrant issued by Judge Raghib Hassan al-Muthafar in connection with the death of the (British-trained) Iraqi police officers (INT, n. 466 29).
Copyright ADI 2006
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NEW STATESMAN
Columnists
Monday 8th May 2006
http://www.newstatesman.com/200605080016
John Pilger
The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth, writes John Pilger
The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a "civil war" and "sectarian violence" were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.
And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next country. Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda, which, as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism, "penetrates electronically" with its equivalent of a party line.
The party line changed the other day. For almost three years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the "insurgency", led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the "insurgents" followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to distract attention from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of their country.
Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian violence" and "civil war", the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream", is that the Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the break-up of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration. The ministry of the interior in Baghdad, which is run by the CIA, directs the principal death squads. Their members are not exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior officers in Saddam's Ba'ath Party. This unit was formed and trained by CIA "counter-insurgency" experts, including veterans of the CIA's terror operations in central America in the 1980s, notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire's Workshop (Metropolitan Books), the American historian Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option thus: "Once in office, [President] Reagan came down hard on central America, in effect letting his administration's most committed militarists set and execute policy. In El Salvador, they provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told, US allies in central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands and drove millions into exile."
Although the Reagan administration spawned the current Bushites, or "neo-cons", the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam, death squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA murdered up to 50,000 people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s in Indonesia CIA officers compiled "death lists" for General Suharto's killing spree during his seizure of power. After the 2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time before this venerable "policy" was applied in Iraq.
According to the investigative writer Max Fuller (National Review Online), the key CIA manager of the interior ministry death squads "cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador". Professor Grandin names another central America veteran whose job now is to "train a ruthless counter-insurgent force made up of ex-Ba'athist thugs". Another, says Fuller, is well-known for his "production of death lists". A secret militia run by the Americans is the Facilities Protection Service, which has been responsible for bombings. "The British and US Special Forces," concludes Fuller, "in conjunction with the [US-created] intelligence services at the Iraqi defence ministry, are fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias."
On 16 March, Reuters reported the arrest of an American "security contractor" who was found with weapons and explosives in his car. Last year, two Britons disguised as Arabs were caught with a car full of weapons and explosives; British forces bulldozed the Basra prison to rescue them. The Boston Globe recently reported: "The FBI's counter-terrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials."
As I say, all this has been tried before - just as the preparation of the American public for an atrocious attack on Iran is similar to the WMD fabrications in Iraq. If that attack comes, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth. Imprisoned in the Hilton lift, staring at CNN, my fellow passengers could be excused for not making sense of the Middle East, or Latin America, or anywhere. They are isolated. Nothing is explained. Congress is silent. The Democrats are moribund. And the freest media on earth insult the public every day. As Voltaire put it: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Copyright 1913-2006 New Statesman
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5. CIA CHIEF QUITS AFTER 'HOOKERGATE'
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THE SUNDAY TIMES
World
May 07, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2168449,00.html
Sarah Baxter, Washington
ALL the ingredients for a spy thriller involving prostitutes, poker, a congressman called Randy and parties at the legendary Watergate complex may lie behind the sudden resignation of Porter Goss as director of the CIA last Friday.
The saga has already been named "Hookergate" and the CIA is buzzing with rumours that there is more to Goss's departure than meets the eye.
The timing is certainly curious, coming hard on the heels of the CIA's confirmation last week that Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the number three in the nation's spy centre who was hand-picked by Goss, had attended poker games at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels in Washington with Brent Wilkes, a defence contractor and close boyhood friend.
Wilkes is under investigation for allegedly providing Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a disgraced Republican congressman, with prostitutes, limousines and free hotel suites.
The net is also closing in on Foggo, who is being investigated by the FBI over the award to Wilkes of a $3m contract to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Foggo has admitted playing poker with Wilkes, he insists that no prostitutes were present.
A former senior CIA official said this weekend that he had been told by a trusted source inside the agency that Goss, 67, had attended one of the poker games. The CIA has denied it. "Goss has repeatedly denied being there, so if it were to come out that he was, he is finished," the former official said.
Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative and a Bush administration critic, said Goss "had a relationship with Dusty and with Brent Wilkes thatâ·s now coming under greater scrutiny".
Johnson vouched for the integrity of Foggo and Goss but said: "Dusty was a big poker player, and it's my understanding that Porter Goss was also there (at Wilkes's parties) for poker. It's going to be guilt by association."
President George W Bush said on Friday that Goss's tenure at the CIA was one of "transition", although that temporary description was not used when Goss was appointed to the job only 19 months ago.
Behind Bush's public explanation for Goss's departure lies a second authorised version, according to which Goss lost a turf battle for power and prestige with John Negroponte, the politically adept new director of national intelligence, a post created to oversee all intelligence gathering after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Inside the CIA Goss quickly became unpopular after he drove out some of the agency's most experienced hands -- more than a dozen senior officials left.
Some saw the revolving door as necessary after the CIA failed to uncover Al-Qaeda's plots and supplied faulty intelligence on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Even so, Goss will not be mourned by colleagues. "There's more champagne being drunk tonight than on New Year's Eve," said one former high-ranking CIA official after Goss's resignation was announced.
Associates say the former Republican congressman never got a handle on the job. "It was like watching a friend in pain," one said. "I think he got in over his head."
Goss is expected to be replaced tomorrow by General Michael Hayden, head of the National Security Agency (NSA), who is close to Dick Cheney, the vice-president. Bush had hoped to announce his appointment at the same time as Goss's departure. But the CIA chief reportedly said: "If we're going to do this, let's go ahead and do it." It implies that Goss was sacked more brutally than Bush's polite words about his "able" leadership of the CIA had suggested.
The significance of "Hookergate" in Goss's demise has yet to emerge, but CIA officers and congressmen are nervous about how far the allegations of sleaze will reach.
The disgraced congressman Cunningham, a 64-year-old Vietnam flying ace, was sentenced to eight years in prison in March for accepting bribes from defence contractors while a member of the defence appropriations sub-committee.
It was obvious that he was living way above his means on a Washington yacht called the Duke-Stir where, in his pyjamas, he would entertain women with champagne. A penitent Cunningham is said to be co-operating with the FBI.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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6. A FINANCIAL 'WATERGATE' EMERGING AT THE CIA
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 6, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- General Hayden's nomination to be the next CIA Director came as another scandal involving the intelligence agency emerged in addition to the "Hookergate" scandal centered on the Watergate and another Washington hotel. Under Goss, the CIA's venture capital arm, IN-Q-TEL, which provides CIA money to promising high-tech start-up firms, became the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation for possible massive misappropriation of taxpayer money and private money involving IN-Q-TEL, NASA's venture capital branch -- Red Planet Capital -- The US Special Operations Command's venture capital firm On Point, and the infamous Carlyle Group -- the war profiteering company in which George H. W. Bush, the Bin Laden family, and former Secretary of State James Baker have held major financial interests.
Suspicions about IN-Q-TEL were raised in late April when its 35-year-old CEO, Amit Yoran, abruptly resigned to "spend more time with his family." Yoran, an Israeli-American, had been on the job for just four months after he succeeded IN-Q-TEL's first CEO, Gilman Louie, a well-known Silicon Valley investor and technical guru. Before taking over IN-Q-TEL, Yoran was the director of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security. Under Yoran, IN-Q-TEL's operating budget increased exponentially and the firm began negotiating with various high-tech firms to develop deep data mining programs and spy technology. Yoran's rumored successor was said to be Mark Frantz, who Yoran brought from The Carlyle Group to be IN-Q-TEL's managing general partner and board of trustees member. Frantz worked for George H. W. Bush and held a senior position with Alex Brown, later merged with Deutsche Bank, the firm where the CIA's former Executive Director, A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard served as Chairman. IN-Q-TEL's board of trustees chairman is Lee A. Ault III of Delray Beach, Florida, who also serves on the board of Office Depot.
Individuals familiar with IN-Q-TEL report that the company is suspected of steering CIA funds to start-up firms with close ties to the GOP as well as "pump and dump" penny stock firms tied to three foreign nations -- Israel, Dubai, and Malaysia. The emerging IN-Q-TEL scandal is mirrored by the financial scandal involving favoritism in CIA contracts to Brent Wilkes' ADCS and its subsidiaries.
Deputy DNI Gen. Michael Hayden, who presided over dubious multi-billion dollar contracts -- including Groundbreaker and Trailblazer -- as NSA director, has a great deal of experience in covering up cost overruns, contractor fraud, and contract favoritism. Beyond the need to have a good foot soldier at the helm of the CIA, the Bush administration is clearly hoping that Hayden, using his special form of intimidation through the use of psychiatric and security personnel to threaten whistleblowers, can tamp down the financial "Watergate" emerging at the CIA.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
May 5, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/167796/
By Chris Floyd
The U.S. conquest of Iraq is an emotional matter. Passions flare at white heat on both sides of the issue. This is understandable. It is indeed very difficult to remain dispassionate while watching a mass murder take place. Opponents of the conquest are naturally driven into chaotic furies of outrage and despair, while supporters are necessarily pushed to rhetorical and political extremes in their frantic attempts to countenance such an appalling crime. It is not a situation conducive to rational analysis.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to step back from the barricades now and again to remind ourselves of the reality so often obscured by the blood-red mist of emotion clouding our eyes. The chief reality, of course, is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is primarily about oil and the preservation of the American way of life. It is based on the premise that the latter is a question of supreme importance, a moral value overriding all others. That "the American way of life" is itself riddled with gross inequalities is beside the point here, for these inequalities greatly benefit all those who have the power to make or influence policies in "the national interest."
Once this basic premise is accepted, the conquest -- which otherwise seems a pointless, reckless paroxysm of elitist greed -- can be seen as a logical if difficult step undertaken in accordance with a carefully reasoned strategy. War, mass death, torture, repression and the monstrous lies surrounding the instigation of the conquest can thus be justified as "necessary evils" to secure a greater good.
To put it simply, America must have unfettered access to Persian Gulf oil in order to maintain the infrastructure of its economy -- indeed of its entire society, which is based on the availability of cheap gasoline and other petroleum-based products. In the coming decades of oil scarcity, the vast reserves in the Middle East will be even more crucial. The Bush administration estimates that Iraq's current reserves, when fully developed, could reach 220 billion barrels; if the still-unexplored territories of its western wasteland are counted, this figure could top 300 billion, far surpassing the reserves of Saudi Arabia, as Canadian journalist Paul William Roberts reports in his important new book, "A War Against Truth." What's more, Iraqi oil is remarkably easy to extract, and thus remarkably profitable.
Anyone who controls Iraq's oil industry will ultimately be able to break the Saudi-led OPEC cartel, inhibit or at least modulate the rise of China and India to superpower status and squeeze Russia, whose economy now depends on exports of its increasingly expensive, hard-to-extract oil, as Roberts notes. Thus, none of these potential rivals will be able to challenge America's global hegemony -- the "full spectrum dominance" that has been publicly touted as the overarching goal of U.S. policy by Bush factionists such as Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz since 1992.
Such hegemony can only be maintained by military means. Hence the more than 700 U.S. military installations, ranging from vast city-fortresses, like the permanent U.S. bases now being built in Baghdad and Balad in Iraq, to small "lily-pad" jumping-off points for quick strikes around the globe. Hence the Bush administration's ongoing militarization of space and its accelerated drive to test and develop new nuclear weapons. Hence the unleashing of secret Pentagon forces to conduct "military operations other than war" in dozens of countries without any legal restraints, as noted here last week.
Military force is essential because the U.S. economy is now in an advanced state of decadence and cannot win its way to continued dominance by peaceful means. The U.S. elite is now given over almost entirely to the manipulation of financial instruments to produce vast private profits, disconnected from the surrounding community. The actual production of actual goods is in steep decline, bringing with it a corresponding decay in the quality of American life below the elite level. Without cheap oil -- and despite the panicky sticker-shock at the pump today, Americans still pay far less than most people for fuel -- the whole fragile house of cards could fall. Thus dominance and survival have become intertwined; and both depend on mastery of the Middle East's resources.
Saddam Hussein became a target not because he oppressed his people or warred with his neighbors or threatened Israel or once developed WMD -- all of which he did during his years as a U.S. ally. He had to be removed because he would not allow U.S. and British oil firms to exploit Iraqi resources, but was instead signing deals with Chinese, French and Russian companies. This was intolerable. It put the preservation of the American way of life, and the global dominance on which it now depends, in the hands of foreign interests. With global reserves dwindling, Iraq's oil was simply too important to be entrusted to others any longer. Direct intervention was required.
And so the war came, with its lies, murder, ruin and corruption. Yet how many of those opposed to this horrific military action are prepared to pay the actual cost of ending it -- that is, to relinquish the guarantee of cheap oil and the lifestyle it sustains? The number is doubtless very small. The large remainder should perhaps be seen as the true Bush base. For while they may oppose his tactical incompetence in this instance, they share, wittingly or unwittingly, his strategic goal. With this basic common cause between the elite and the majority, the wars for oil will go on, no matter who sits in the White House.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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In the drug war, Los Angeles was Ground Zero. ... Operation Hammer was a counterinsurgency program that sometimes resembled the Phoenix program in Vietnam. There were hundreds of commando-style raids on "gang houses." More than 50,000 suspected gang members were swept up for interrogation based on factors such as style of dress and whether the suspect was a young black male on the street past curfew. Of those caught up in such Hammer sweeps, 90 percent were later released without charge, but their names were held in a computer database of gang members that was later shown to have included twice as many names as there were black youths in Los Angeles. [LAPD police chief Darryl] Gates sealed off large areas of South Central as "narcotics enforcement zones." There was a strict curfew, constant police presence and on-the-spot strip searches for those caught outside after curfew. ... In this war there were many innocent victims. -- Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press [London: Verso, 1998] pp. 77-78.
Contents: Number 718
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 717/April 30, 2006
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1. THE 'NEW TOTALITARIANISM' NOW
DEFINES A DESPERATE NEO-CON END GAME
_________________________________________________________________________
THE COLUMBUS FREE PRESS
National Issues
May 1, 2006
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2006/1946
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
As the Bush/neo-con kleptocracy disintegrates in a toxic cloud of military defeat, economic bankruptcy, environmental disaster and escalating mega-scandal, its attack on basic American freedoms--its "New Totalitarianism"--has escalated to a desperate new level, including brutal Soviet-style prosecutions against non-violent dissidents and an all-out offensive for state secrecy, including an attack on the internet.
In obvious panic and disarray, the GOP right has turned to a time-honored strategy--kill the messengers. While it slaughters Americans and Iraqis to "bring democracy" to the Middle East, it has made democracy itself public enemy Number One here at home.
The New Totalitarianism has become tangible in particular through a string of terrifying prosecutions against non-violent dissenters, an attack on open access to official government papers, and the attempted resurrection by right-wing "theorists" of America's most repressive legislation, dating back to the 1950s, 1917 and even 1797.
Bush's universal spy campaign is the cutting edge of the assault. The GOP Attorney-General has told Congress both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln engaged in electronic wiretapping. He has deemed the Geneva war crimes accords a "quaint" document and treats the Bill of Rights the same way.
Evidence of no-warrant spying on thousands of US citizens continues to surface. Like all totalitarian regimes, this one believes its best defense is to terrorize its citizenry by intruding, Big Brother-like, into all facets of personal life. Inevitably, it is moving prosecute whoever reveals that spying is going on, including a KGB-style search for the hero who leaked Bush's warrantless wire-tap program.
Along with spying comes official secrecy. The Bush regime is reclassifying millions of pages of harmless, marginal documents to prevent public scrutiny. It demands access to the papers of the deceased investigative reporter Jack Anderson so they can be reclassified. It has moved to prosecute reporters, government officials and even lobbyists who have used documents in ways the administration doesn't like.
In Ohio, the official secrecy has entered the state level. Governor Bob Taft, the first sitting criminal governor in Ohio history, is moving to classify thousands of pages of state policy papers. Taft recently admitted to four misdemeanor crimes involved with Tom Noe, a Republican hack now under both state and federal indictment.
Noe can't explain the whereabouts of some $15 million in state funds he supposedly invested. Taft says any documents that allow him to make policy are "privileged." As critics point out, if an aide hands him even a copy of a published newspaper, it becomes covered under "executive privilege" in the first time in Ohio history, and its "mis-use" can be a crime.
Should the trend expand, US citizens could find themselves shut out of access to even the most rudimentary official information at all levels, down to the smallest town.
Simultaneously, prosecutions against dissenters have dramatically escalated. Taft walked away from his convictions with a small fine and an apology. But a community organizer here has been sentenced to 119 days in jail for speaking out at a Columbus School Board meeting. A severe diabetic, Jerry Doyle has been temporarily turned away from his jail sentence due to life-threatening health problems. But authorities intend to imprison Doyle while Taft walks free.
Ironically, Doyle was initially charged with trespassing at the podium although he had an authorized speaker's slip. He was complaining about a school official, Sheri Bird-Long who stole some $200,000 from the school system, pleaded guilty to one felony count of having an unlawful interest in a public contract and one misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of property, a theft-related offense. Unlike Doyle, Bird-Long got no jail time upon conviction.
In Cleveland Heights, Carol Fisher has been charged with a major felony for putting posters on public lamp-posts. The posters are critical of the Bush attack on Iraq. Fisher, who is committed to non-violence, was assaulted by local police who ordered her to take down the posters, then threw her down on the ground and charged her with felonious assault.
"I am 53 years old," she says, "not exactly a spring chicken. A hand comes down to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a park bench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about."
Fisher says the police cursed her, shouting "Shut up or I will kill you!...I am sick of this anti-Bush shit!...You are definitely going to the psyche ward." Fisher now faces years in prison and the loss of her livelihood.
Such gratuitous, mean-spirited and overtly repressive prosecutions against non-violent dissenters have proliferated throughout the Bush era, in which ordinary citizens with moderate bumper stickers or t-shirts have been turned away from or arrested at public events.
The clear and present purpose is to spread a climate of totalitarian fear aimed at reversing the sacred American freedoms embodied in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
The campaign runs in tandem with the attack on academic discourse coordinated by David Horowitz and other haters of open debate. In the guise of seeking "balance," the rightist campaign aims to purge liberals from the liberal arts.
It parallels the industry-centered attempts to clamp down on the internet, which has been the sole grassroots source of reliable information and dissenting opinion in the US for years.
With total corporate domination of the major media, only the internet and a few talk radio shows and liberal magazines have kept alive the American tradition of a free press. Predictably, the administration is using a corporate front to shut off this last source of open "diablog."
Bush has taken the same tack against science itself. As Joe Stalin exiled and killed researchers whose fact-based conclusions seemed to contradict the Party line, so the GOP attacks the overwhelming consensus among climatologists that global warming is real. With true Orwellian flare, the administration disappears official research (and researchers) whose data say the oil barons who define Team Bush must curb their emissions.
The repression has reached new theoretical levels. In recent weeks, right-wing journals such as the National Review have featured articles demanding enforcement of ancient legislation outlawing "sedition." With the US now "at war," the right-wingers say it is perfectly fine for Bush to arrest and imprison those who advocate peace. In particular they cite repressive legislation used in the 1950s to clamp down on "known Communists." They also cite acts passed in 1917, during World War I, and the Sedition Act, passed under John Adams in 1797.
These laws in essence gave the Chief Executive power to imprison American citizens at will. Woodrow Wilson used them to jail Eugene V. Debs and thousands more who resisted US intervention in Europe. Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for urging resistance to a war opposed by a significant majority of the American people (Debs ran for president from his Atlanta prison cell in 1920 and got nearly a million votes). Some dissenters were arrested for carrying posters that quoted Wilson's own writings in favor of peace. Opponents of the military draft were routinely jailed without trial. A "Red Scare" was used as cover to smash the Socialist Party and r