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Recharging The CIA
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER

Posted Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005
Want evidence that the CIA is trying to get its groove back? Consider the tale of the tippler. An agency spook trying to recruit a potentially useful overseas target felt compelled to warn his bosses recently that the man enjoyed a drink. Fearing that deskbound managers would veto the contact, the spook was thrilled to be told "to use his instincts, be smart and see" what develops. The episode, related to TIME by someone close to the agency, is meant to illustrate how, a year into Director Porter Goss's tenure, the CIA is inching back to the risk-taking culture that helped it share credit for winning the cold war.

Knocked from its perch as the chief U.S. intelligence agency when Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA is focusing on the critical task of planting human spies. President Bush told Goss a year ago to hire 50% more spooks "as soon as feasible." Sources say Goss's plan is to go back to basics: hide more spies posing, for example, as cultural or economic attachés in embassy-based CIA stations, and reopen stations that closed when the cold war ended. Camp Peary, the CIA's secret training center in eastern Virginia, runs a roughly six-month course to mint new spies for such postings. Classes at the Farm, as it's called, are packed, officials say.

Government sources say the agency also plans to plant more spies under nonofficial cover (NOC), one of the most dangerous yet potentially productive assignments. NOCs--posing perhaps as students or executives--don't enjoy diplomatic immunity. That means the U.S. would deny any link to the spies and offer them no protection from prosecution or even execution if caught--especially in a country with no diplomatic relations with the U.S.

But Goss, in an interview at agency headquarters in June, said he is giving his spies more autonomy in the field and backing them up--whenever possible--if something goes wrong. "We have tried to reduce the number of 'May I, Mother?' requests and let you make the decisions out there," he said.

From the Dec. 05, 2005 issue of TIME magazine

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=231...05&format=print

Mon 28 Nov 2005

CIA claims: US needs time for reply
The US has told the European Union it needs more time to respond to allegations of CIA secret jails and flights in Europe, as the bloc's top justice official warned that any EU country found to have hosted a clandestine detention centre could face punishment.

The warning, issued by EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini, comes amid rising concern about alleged CIA activities in Europe, with investigations being carried out in half a dozen countries.


Frattini said any EU nation found to have secret CIA prisons on their territory could have their EU voting rights suspended - a measure unprecedented in the 25-nation bloc.

The Council of Europe - the continent's main human rights watchdog - is investigating the allegations, and EU justice official Jonathan Faul last week formally raised the issue with White House and US State Department representatives, Frattini said.

"They told him, 'give us the appropriate time to evaluate the situation.' Right now, there is no response," he said.

The CIA has refused to comment on the European investigation.

Frattini said suspending EU voting rights would be justified under the EU treaty which stipulates that the bloc is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, and that a persistent breach of these principles can be punished.

Clandestine detention centres would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

Allegations that the CIA hid and interrogated key al Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported on November 2 in The Washington Post.

A day after the report appeared, Human Rights Watch said it had evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.

© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2005, All Rights Reserved.


This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2317912005

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CIA Director Defends Intelligence, Methods Tue Nov 29, 5:31 PM ET



CIA Director Porter Goss, saying his agency struggles to penetrate terrorist sanctuaries overseas, insists that "we know more than we're able to say publicly" about Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In a rare television interview, Goss defended the CIA's track record, which has been tarnished by allegations ranging from erroneous or hyped intelligence leading to the war in Iraq to reports the agency runs secret prisons abroad for terrorism suspects and uses harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture.

"What we do does not come close to torture," Goss said, though he declined to elaborate on the agency's interrogation techniques.

Al Qaida leaders Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi haven't been found "primarily because they don't want us to find them and they're going to great lengths to make sure we don't find them," Goss said in the interview broadcast Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." "We're applying a lot of efforts to find out where they are." He insisted the CIA knows "a good deal more" about the men "than we're able to say publicly."

Goss said one of the hardest parts of the CIA's mission is to "penetrate into some of the sanctuary areas" — whether harsh terrain or "at the heart of a city, in a ghetto or slum area where people don't regularly go."

"Knowing how to find those places and getting to penetrate them is going to be the hardest part of this business," he said.

Even with the CIA's mistakes, Goss said, the agency is "the gold standard by any measure" in terms of human intelligence.

"We don't get it right every time," he said, "but I don't think there's anybody who could even come close."

Reports have surfaced recently that the CIA runs secret prisons in Europe for detaining and interrogating suspects. The U.S. has not confirmed those reports, and Goss did not address them directly.

"We're fighting a war on terror," he said in response to a question about the prisons. "We're doing quite well. Inevitably, we're going to have to capture some terrorists and inevitably they're going to have to have some due process. It's going to be done lawfully."

The interview was taped inside the operations room at the agency's headquarters in suburban Langley, Va. A red light flashed throughout the interview, indicating there was someone in the room who did not have a security clearance — the interviewer, ABC's Charles Gibson.




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Judge Rejects Appeal of CIA Arrest Warrant By AIDAN LEWIS, Associated Press Writer
Tue Nov 29, 5:02 PM ET



A judge has rejected an appeal by a former CIA station chief in Milan against an arrest warrant issued for his alleged role in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric, ruling that he was not protected by diplomatic immunity.

Italian judges have issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA agents, including the former station chief Robert Seldon Lady, accused of involvement in the kidnapping of cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

The judge on Monday rejected arguments by Seldon Lady's lawyer, Daria Pesce, who claimed that he was protected under international treaty and Italian law, and that evidence of his involvement in any alleged abduction was weak.

Prosecutors claimed Nasr's abduction was a serious violation of Italian sovereignty, and said it hindered Italian terrorism investigations. They reconstructed the alleged operation through cell phone traffic and other evidence, contending that Seldon Lady played a central role.

They have sought the extradition of the 22 suspects, and the Italian Justice Ministry is deciding whether to press the case with Washington.

Prosecutors claim that Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was abducted on a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, before being flown to Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured. He is believed to still be there.

Pesce contended that Seldon Lady's work as an intelligence officer accredited at the U.S. Consulate protected him.

But Milan Judge Enrico Manzi ruled that Seldon Lady lost immunity when he left his post in August 2004, and that in any case consular officials could be arrested for grave crimes, according to court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

He said that consular officials did enjoy protection, "but always within the limits of international law. Within these limits, naturally, is the principle of the sovereignty of the host state that cannot allow on its territory the use of force by a foreign state that outside every control of the political and judicial authorities."

Neither Seldon Lady, who owns a home in Italy, nor any of the other suspects has been arrested, with all of them believed to be out of the country.

Pesce said Seldon Lady was in the United States. She said she planned to appeal Manzi's decision.

Manzi noted in his ruling that there had been contacts between Seldon Lady's phone and others used by suspects believed to have carried out the kidnapping.

The judge said evidence from a raid on Seldon Lady's home, turning up among other evidence a photo of Nasr and records of Internet searches to plan the route of Nasr's transfer from Milan, "have made the picture of evidence against him even more complete."

Nasr's alleged abduction was purportedly part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible ill-treatment.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government, a strong U.S. ally, has denied it had any prior knowledge of the alleged kidnapping. The United States has consistently declined comment on the case.




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Rice: CIA reports to be clarified

Tuesday, November 29, 2005; Posted: 2:33 p.m. EST (19:33 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the U.S. government will clarify reports that the CIA transported terror suspects on covert flights via European airports, the new German foreign minister said after a meeting with her.

"I am happy that we addressed this issue at length. It was right not to avoid this conversation," Steinmeier said. "I am especially delighted that it was understood that there are concerns in the European public but also in the parliaments."

Steinmeier also said that the U.S. government had agreed to meet European concerns and that "they will seek clarification -- this has been assured to us."

The Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights watchdog, is looking into the reports that the CIA set up secret jails in some European nations and transported terror suspects by covert flights to be interrogated and detained there.

The United States has not confirmed the existence of the secret prisons, and Eastern European countries deny knowledge of any covert facilities.

Steinmeier said Rice also had offered American help in the case of a German woman who was reported missing in Iraq and is believed to be kidnapped. Susanne Osthoff and her driver have been missing since Friday.

"I asked if we can count on the geographic knowledge of the American officials (based in Iraq)," Steinmeier said. "And I was assured of it.

"The German government refuses to be blackmailed," Steinmeier said referring to a video obtained by ARD public German television, in which the alleged kidnappers reportedly said the two will be killed unless Germany ceases its dealings with the Iraqi government.

Steinmeier is also scheduled Tuesday to meet Rice's top deputy, Robert Zoellick, and national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Steinmeier's visit paves the way for new German Chancellor Angela Merkel's first meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush, which is expected to take place in Washington next January. Merkel took office earlier this month.

Merkel has repeatedly pledged to strengthen relations with the United States, ties that deteriorated after former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder openly opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Steinmeier's visit is of particular interest because of his former role: he served as Schroeder's chief of staff and was said to be one of the main architects of Schroeder's foreign policy.

However, Steinmeier stressed on Tuesday that, in their coalition agreement, Germany's new governing parties stated that "trans-Atlantic relations are not at odds with European integration."

"For German foreign and security policy, those are the two pillars."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

CIA Director Defends Detention Policy

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 29, 2005; 1:06 PM

CIA Director Porter J. Goss defended the agency's "debriefings" of terrorist suspects, saying in an interview broadcast today that they yield "good results" but do not involve torture.

In the rare interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" program, Goss expressed some frustration about the Central Intelligence Agency's inability to penetrate terrorist sanctuaries in remote areas or cities abroad, and he said terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi are going to great lengths to avoid detection. But he said the CIA knows more about the men than it is able to say.


TRANSCRIPT
CIA Director Goss Is Interviewed on ABC's Good Morning America
NOVEMBER 29, 2005 SPEAKERS: PORTER GOSS, DIRECTOR, CIA


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Goss did not deny the existence -- reported earlier this month by The Washington Post -- of a secret CIA prison system overseas that has included sites in Eastern Europe. Asked why the United States needed secret prisons, Goss said: "We're fighting a war on terror. We're doing quite well in it. Inevitably, we are going to have to capture some terrorists, and inevitably, they are going to have to have some due process, and inevitably, that is going to happen, and it's going to be done lawfully and under all of the law and order and protections of due process that this country affords."

The comments came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prepared for a trip to Europe next week in which concerns about the reported prison system are expected to come up. Yesterday, the European Union's justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, warned that he would call on the organization to suspend the voting rights of any EU member state found to have hosted a secret CIA prison in violation of EU human rights principles.

Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based advocacy group, has reported that Poland and Romania appeared to be among the countries that have allowed the CIA to run covert detention centers on their territory. Officials from both countries have denied the allegations.

Poland is an EU member, while Romania has applied to join and hopes to be accepted in 2007.

Rice plans to visit Romania on her European trip, which also includes stops in Germany, Ukraine and Belgium, where she is scheduled to hold talks at the EU headquarters in Brussels.

In an interview published today in USA Today, Rice indicated she intends to remind Europeans that "we are fighting a war on terror" and that the United States must take certain actions "in order to protect not just ourselves but to protect others."

She added: "We haven't ever fought a war like this before. We've never fought a war before . . . where you can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them, because if they commit the crime, then thousands of innocent people die."

In his interview with ABC, Goss said he was working to create "a leaner headquarters" with "a little less regulation" and "less red tape." The agency is "doing innovative things and putting people overseas in different ways than we've ever done before," he said. "It's a new game."

In response to a question from interviewer Charles Gibson, Goss said: "What I wish I knew more about now was how to penetrate into some of the sanctuary areas. They can be in harsh terrain that is hard to manage, or they can be in the heart of a city, in a ghetto or a slum area, where people don't regularly go and things can be going wrong. Knowing how to find those places and get in and penetrate them I think is going to be the hardest part of this business."

As for why the agency has not been able to find bin Laden or Zarqawi, Goss said: "Well, primarily because they don't want us to find them, and they're going to great lengths to make sure we don't find them. And I assure you we're employing a lot of efforts to find out where they are. And I don't want to get into the depth and the details, but we know a good deal more about bin Laden and Zarqawi and [top al Qaeda deputy Ayman] Zawahiri than we're able to say publicly."

Regarding torture, the CIA director said: "What we do does not come close because torture, in terms of inflicting pain or something like that, physical pain or causing a disability, those kinds of things that probably would be a common definition for most Americans, sort of, you know it when you see it, we don't do that because it doesn't get what you want."

He added: "We do debriefings because . . . the nature of our business is to get information. And we do all that. And we do it in a way that does not involve torture because torture is counterproductive."

Goss refused to discuss specific interrogation techniques. "What we do, as I said many times, is professional, is lawful, it yields good results, and it is not torture," he said.

CIA director denies torture being used on terror suspects Tue Nov 29,12:44 PM ET

CIA director Porter Goss denied in an interview that the intelligence agency uses torture in interrogations of terrorism suspects, but would not comment on specific interrogation techniques.

Goss told ABC television torture was "in eyes of the beholder."

"What we do does not come close because torture, in terms of inflicting pain or something like that, physical pain or causing a disability, those kinds of things that probably would be a common definition for most Americans," he said.

"We don't do that because it doesn't get what you want," he said.

Goss was asked whether "water boarding," a technique in which a prisoner is made to feel as if he or she is drowning, was a form of torture.

"I'm not going to comment on any individual techniques that anybody has brought forward as an allegation or has dreamed up or anything like that," he said.

"What we do, as I said many times, is professional, is lawful, it yields good results and it is not torture," he said.

Goss' interview comes amid a furore in Europe over a Washington Post report that the CIA has held top al-Qaeda captives in secret prisons in at least eight countries, including eastern European democracies.

The European Union has threatened sanctions against any country housing such facilities and European countries are pressing Washington with questions about reported CIA flights through their territory.

Goss was asked why such prisons were needed.

"Inevitably we are going to have to capture some terrorists and inevitably they are going to have to have some due process and inevitably that is going to happen and it's going to be done lawfully and under all of the law and order and protections of due process that this country affords," he said.




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SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 109
November 30, 2005


** PUBLIC ACCESS TO AERONAUTICAL DATA WILL BE BLOCKED
** DOMESTIC MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ON THE RISE
** HEARING: FOIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY
** CIA RECRUITMENT FLOURISHES


PUBLIC ACCESS TO AERONAUTICAL DATA WILL BE BLOCKED

Extensive databases of aeronautical information that have long been
publicly available will be withdrawn from public access next year, a
U.S. intelligence agency said yesterday.

"The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will go forward
with its previously announced proposal to remove its Flight
Information Publications (FLIP) and Digital Aeronautical Flight
Information File (DAFIF) from public access," according to an NGA
news release issued on November 29.

NGA said that copyright concerns raised by foreign data sources were
the driving factor for the decision to withhold the information from
the public.

Proponents of public access argued that the move was unnecessarily
restrictive in its scope.

It sets "a very bad precedent" when "the introduction of any
copyright-protected material renders a massive public-domain
database off-limits to the public," said one subject matter expert
who requested anonymity because he works with NGA. "Many, many
other databases are at stake."

"The decision that NGA should have taken, in my view, was to have
offered a redacted version of the databases for public sale. DAFIF
-- a really big database -- could easily have been stripped of its
Australian-supplied [copyrighted] data and kept public and
available," he told Secrecy News.

The data withdrawal will be begin in January 2006 and will be
completed in October 2007.

The NGA did not approve another proposal to withdraw certain paper
maps from public access.

"NGA has decided not to withdraw paper map products to a scale of
1:250,000 to 1:5,000,000. These products will continue to be
available to the public," the news release stated.

The industry expert welcomed that decision. But he said that "the
unstated reality is that NGA has mostly turned off the oxygen to
cartographic production, so few new maps are being prepared as
digital masters and even fewer are being sent to the printing
press."

The NGA proposal to withdraw public access to aeronautical data,
which was originally announced in November 2004, drew "numerous
comments ... from private citizens and special interests groups."

See "NGA to Go Forward with Proposal to Remove Aeronautical Data from
Public Access," NGA news release, November 29:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/11/nga112905.html


DOMESTIC MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ON THE RISE

The military role in domestic intelligence collection appears to be
rapidly shifting in subtle and profound ways, as new missions are
assigned to little-known military organizations and most
congressional overseers are silently acquiescent or actively
supportive.

One of the public manifestations of the changing landscape is a new
Defense Department Instruction that "establishes procedures, and
assigns responsibilities ... for the conduct and administration of
DoD counterintelligence (CI) collection reporting activities."

See "DoD Counterintelligence Collection Reporting," DoD Instruction
5240.17, October 26, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/i5240_17.pdf

The Instruction was issued by Stephen A. Cambone, the Under Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence. His authorities and responsibilities
are themselves defined in the updated DoD Directive 5143.01, dated
November 23, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5143_01.pdf

The expansion of domestic military surveillance was reported in the
Washington Post on November 27, and was elaborated with new details
by William M. Arkin in his Washington Post blog. See "Domestic
Military Intelligence Is Back," November 29:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/


HEARING: FOIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The strengths and weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act were
explored in a May hearing of the House Government Reform Committee,
the transcript of which has just been published.

The lead witness was Allen Weinstein, the Archivist of the United
States, who recalled that long before he became Archivist, he sued
the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, which is indeed an
excellent credential. Other witnesses included representatives of
the Justice Department, the Government Accountability Office, media
and public interest groups.

See "Information Policy in the 21st Century: A Review of the Freedom
of Information Act," hearing before a subcommittee of the House
Government Reform Committee, May 11:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2005/foia.html


CIA RECRUITMENT FLOURISHES

The Central Intelligence Agency is in several respects a wounded
agency. Its authority is diminished, and its credibility on
everything from weapons of mass destruction to information
classification policy is in tatters, leaving it an object of
derision.

See, for example, "CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters
All These Years," which is intended to be a satire, in The Onion,
November 30:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43014

But there are still plenty of people who are eager to work there,
more than the Agency can even consider hiring.

See "It's no secret: CIA scouting for recruits" by John Diamond, USA
Today, November 23:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-11...a-recruit_x.htm

In recent years, "We had 100,000 applicants for CIA," said Rep. Randy
"Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) at an October 19 hearing of the House
Intelligence Committee. "You know how many got looked at? Thirty
thousand. Seventy thousand never even got a letter back. That's
bad."

Speaking of bad, Rep. Cunningham, who was an intelligence
subcommittee chairman, resigned in disgrace from Congress on
November 28 after admitting that he accepted millions of dollars in
bribes and evaded taxes.

The public policy consequences of such gross corruption at the
highest levels of the intelligence oversight process have barely
begun to be assessed.

Rep. Cunningham was a reliable advocate of unbending secrecy in
intelligence matters. On at least two occasions, in 1997 and 2000,
he voted against public disclosure of the aggregate intelligence
budget figure-- since that would damage national security.



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Intelligence chief: U.S. safer since 9/11
Negroponte rejects criticism that reform is moving too slowly
From David Ensor
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In his first one-on-one interview as the nation's first director of national intelligence, John Negroponte told CNN, "I think our country is safer today" because of better integrated intelligence efforts.

He also rejected criticism that his office may be moving too slowly.

"I think the story is quite the contrary," he said, pointing to a new National Clandestine Service, which includes all the nation's spies, and a new National Security Branch at the FBI. (Read about the findings from the former 9/11 commission that disagrees)

Negroponte said the nation's intelligence has been improved since December 8, 2004, when Congress approved an intelligence reform law creating his office, despite "the fact that we've been operating from temporary quarters." (View an organizational chart of the restructured intelligence community)

"We are scattered a bit here and there and that has made things somewhat difficult to carry out some of our activities, but we've overcome those obstacles," Negroponte said.

"I certainly believe America is safer than it was at 9/11," he said. "I believe from an intelligence point of view that our intelligence effort is better integrated today than it was previously. I think we are doing a good job at bringing together foreign, domestic and military intelligence." (Read excerpts from the Negroponte interview)

The exclusive CNN interview was conducted at the Directorate of National Intelligence's temporary headquarters in the New Executive Office Building across from the White House.

Critics -- including some key members of Congress and former senior intelligence officials -- have complained that Negroponte's team is moving too slowly to implement change in the intelligence community. (Watch how others think Negroponte's doing -- 2:24)

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, for example, said in testimony October 19 that "there are four words missing, I think, from the way I sense the system is currently operating with the new director of national intelligence. Those are speed, intensity, urgency and accountability."

'Stay tuned' for secret prison announcement
The interview came as the Bush administration grapples with how best to respond to demands from European governments for information about news stories saying the CIA is running secret prisons for al Qaeda prisoners in Europe, among other places.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to travel to Europe in coming days and has promised some answers.

Asked what role he will play getting them for her, Negroponte said, "This is a collective effort that involves the intelligence community and the State Department and other interested agencies."

He added, "I think you ought to just stay tuned for what she says during the course of that visit."

When he took the new job, Negroponte became the person responsible for briefing the president each day on the latest intelligence. He said he spends about two hours a day preparing for the briefing session.

"One hour in the night, and one hour in the morning when I get myself updated," he said.

Negroponte denied suggestions he has too little authority over the intelligence budget under the law.

Although 80 percent of the money spent on intelligence is in the Pentagon's budget, "I think we've got ample authority" he said, and "we've already taken on some fairly difficult budgetary decisions" involving substantial amounts of money.

He defended the way authorities handled the New York subway and Baltimore, Maryland, tunnel threats recently. "I think you could say, in some respects, the system worked there," he said.

"We had threat information which was of perhaps ... questionable reliability. Nonetheless, because of the magnitude of the risk, it was considered important to pass that information to local authorities.

"Now, one doesn't want to second-guess what local authorities do with the information that is passed to them, since they have responsibilities to protect the people of their localities and to protect the infrastructure."

He said "the steps that were taken, in both those instances, were not ... unreasonable."

Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has argued the federal government "should have handed them information ... with bigger caveats that said we don't think this is reliable, or we don't know how reliable it is, so please don't use it until we can check something out. That is what the DNI is supposed to do. It's supposed to be the coordinator."

Concerning reports of low morale at the CIA, and key personnel quitting, Negroponte said CIA "recruitment levels are still high. To be sure there have been quite a few retirements, but I think some of that simply has to do with the demographics, baby boomers retiring and so forth."

He said there is a "major effort under way to increase both analysts and human intelligence collectors in the CIA."

Negroponte said he does not favor any changes for now in the laws governing the intelligence community.

"I think now we ought to let the dust settle and we ought to give ourselves and the other agencies in the intelligence community time to implement the new law," he said.

Intelligence overhaul led to position
Negroponte's position was created in a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community passed by Congress in December 2004 and signed into law by Bush.

Many elements of the legislation came from proposals made by the independent 9/11 commission investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Among other things, the bill boosted the number of border guards and customs inspectors and required federal agencies to establish minimum standards for the states in issuing driver's licenses and birth certificates.

One of the legislation's most prominent measures called for the creation of the post of national intelligence director, who has authority over the budgets and most assets of 15 U.S. spy agencies.

The director is also charged with ordering the collection of new intelligence, coordinating information sharing between agencies and establishing common standards

Bush nominated Negroponte -- a vereran diplomat then serving the U.S. ambassador to Iraq -- to the position in February 2005.

Before heading to Iraq, Negroponte had been the U.S. representative to the United Nations between 2001 and 2004. Congress formally approved his new appointment in April.

MalcontentX: The PlameGate Affair is A Smokescreen
Saturday, 3 December 2005, 12:14 pm
Opinion: MalcontentX

Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .

The PlameGate Affair is A Smokescreen...

by MalcontentX
Nov, 2005
From: http://www.communitycurrency.org/PlameGate.htmlLimited Hangout.
Distraction.
Facade.
Magnetic manna for hypocrites and toadies.
A soothing piece of political candy for those with a taste for solutions convenient.

Ever get the feeling like you're the only person in the world who really understands what's going down? -I mean, with respect to a particular situation?

Yeah, not an accurate (or pleasant) feeling to have; for, if one's objective analysis is basically sound, then surely there are others who understand; yet in the midst of the grand social dialogue, its cascade of concepts flowing back and forth, when one hears the essential component of a story so-consistently misplaced, one feels alone, and saddened for the state of our collective understanding.

Yet perhaps I'm wrong; or perhaps this may be an opportunity for a breakthrough of sorts.

Perhaps.


******* # # # ********
Take the case of "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson, and the "crime" for which some senior members of the Bush Administration may be facing jail time.

Of all the thoughtful observers I routinely scan across the internet, I have found only two that come close to the heart of the matter. One is a rather brief reflection from a somewhat anonymous observer [1] (who has nevertheless proven his/herself to be consistently astute). The other comes from investigators Ralph Schoenmann and Mya Schoen [2] , who have provided a meticulous and well-documented analysis (in audio format) upon which I will be relying somewhat for my analysis here.

ADVERTISEMENT

******* # # # ********
Now, the source of the confusion seems to arise around the desire by many to do something to stop the war in Iraq, and to see that those who lied... to get us into it, are held accountable.

An admirable goal.

The war in Iraq constitutes a grotesque violation of human rights, international law, and ethical government. Many know this. Many are speaking out. Yet into this mix are slithering a whole slew of questionable characters, slowly but surely shifting the ground of the dialogue away from the real architects of the war; and many are the well-meaning yet short-sighted observers, it seems, who are unconsciously allowing this to happen.


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Let's look at this a little more closely.

Bush, Cheney, and their entire administration repeatedly lied to get us into this war.

Virtually the entire Congress and Senate bought the lies and voted to give Bush the power to invade.

Virtually the entire mainstream press bought the lies, and dutifully documented the details of the invasion from the inside of a tank -in this, the latest expression of the so-called "war on terror."

All this is a matter of record.

Well yes, now is the time for a great hand-wringing amongst the press and politicians: 'yes,' they say, 'we hate to admit it but... we were duped,' fooled, misled.

And we know this is udder [3] nonsense. We know that any conscientious citizen could have gone on the internet within hours of Bush's or Powell's speech and exposed them for the juvenile frauds they were; yet with all the budgetary powers the press and politicians have to investigate the facts, they somehow "missed" the reality.

Let's be clear about this: they "missed" it because they WANTED to miss it.

They wanted to miss it because their integrity is thoroughly compromised to the military-industrial complex upon which they feed.... and which wanted the war to proceed.


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Yet somehow the intelligence bureaucracy, (it seems, we are being told) is different; it appears as if the CIA and co. was trying to tell the truth about the WMD/yellowcake claims, but were somehow manipulated or prevented from doing their job.

But wait: of all the elements within the military-industrial-complex, is not the intelligence bureaucracy among the most firmly committed to the manufacture of war -and the lies necessary to achieve it? Have not its agents consistently proven themselves to be the bastions of deception and intrigue?

The "Valerie Plame indictment" is unravelling within the context of an assertion that the intelligence community is an entity standing somewhat at odds or even independent of the political games going on in Washington.

Is this true?

Were the analysts prevented from doing their job?

Or does "the company" merely want it to appear that way?


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Let's look at the political context.

Broadly-speaking, why did we go to war? Why did top officials systematically lie to get us into Iraq? The immediate reason is obvious: oil. The longer-term reason is geo-political strategy: the control of the world's resources, beginning with the middle-east, and the usurpation of the former Soviet Republics in order to contain China; and the deeper, fundamental reason is that the American Empire is bankrupt from the inside out... entirely addicted [4] to the expansion of its war machine for the continuation of its economic life.

The war-machine must grow, or the entire house of cards will begin to fall.

(If you don't know that, dear reader, then you need to do your homework; or, simply try to follow the logic here with an open mind).


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Central to the war-machine is the element of secrecy.

Let's remember that, within any class society, any society dominated by a powerful few, there is always the danger that elected officials (and those whom they appoint) may cease to serve the interests of all -and instead, use the apparatus of government to further the interests of the few, in secrecy (to some degree).

This is nothing new: it's built into the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights. The different branches of the Federal Government, split into the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, were specifically designed to mitigate against the collection of power in any one area.

Even as some of the "founding fathers" were speaking of the necessity for the "eternal vigilance" of an awakened citizenry, most of them constituted the very economic elite (at the time) that posed the greatest danger to government "for, by, and of the people"; and, throughout American history [5] , there has been an ongoing struggle for the control of the government, (at all levels) between the various economic elites and the grass-roots organizations of the common people.

Through numerous bloody wars, violent oppression, civil unrest, it's not difficult to see that the elite few have generally had the run of things. And today, in the era of the multinational corporation, with over half the world's wealth concentrated in the hands of 1% of the global population, it's quite clear that the power of the few is more-concentrated than ever, that the checks and balances have been overwhelmed, and that its primarily the corporate interest that government serves today.

Now, in a nominally-democratic society such as ours, the nature of this unethical allegiance is that it must be carried out in secret; that is, the compromised politicians and bureaucrats must put on a show of allegiance to "the people," so that we, the people, do not rebel.

Alas, by virtue of the bald-faced belligerence of some Republican hawks these days, and the apathetic response this seems to get from the general public, some may assume that this "show" is not all that significant; but this would be a grave mistake.

We must not confuse the effect of the Elite propaganda machine with the reality it is trying to control; that is, the very effectiveness of the media con job causes many to believe that it doesn't matter, that "we, the people" don't care, (precisely what the Elite want us to believe).

In reality, the political establishment goes to enormous expense to massage the public mind, (because they have to [5b] ) and the colonic-collusion of the corporate press makes this manipulation seem almost natural.

Strategists in the corridors of power are certainly not unaware of the need to maintain the facade; so let us keep this element of secrecy clearly in our mind.


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Even more so than the secret allegiances of individual politicians, we must be most-concerned here with organized secrecy: that is, networks of people, united in the commitment to carrying those decisions out.

In corporate America [6] , for example, people are paid to lie and swindle. There's a profit to be had in exploiting others; and so, in the interest of furthering the common need/greed, people follow orders.

It is within this institutional culture where "following orders" prevails that secrecy is able to expand its reach most-fully.

In government, this becomes expressed in the corruption of the political parties as a whole; yet of all our public institutions, it has traditionally been the military which has most-clearly been governed by the principle of "following orders."

As we all know, in times of war: what residues of fair-play, civil liberty and common sense that exist in civil society often go flying out the window in the name of necessity, "patriotism," "honour," "helping our boys," etc.

Here, secrecy and don't ask questions is the norm; whereas, with the elected (and other bureaucratic) branches of government, there is often at least a paper trail showing the decisions that were made; and, the elected officials can be voted out of office.

What has traditionally kept the military somewhat (and only periodically) in check has been the difficulty -the sheer enormity- of getting the apparatus of government into a position to declare war, along with the cultural conditions necessary to convince the public to accept it.

This has kept the American military (at least partially) in a place where it, (and its code of secrecy) continued to act in service to the public, rather than as ruler [7] .

For all those with the eyes to see, the military is now moving close to the time when it will be so integrated with the powers of the federal government as to become the lead agency [8] in the promotion/enforcement of public policy.

There's no question but that we are moving towards a police state -where the essence of secrecy contained within the "private tyranny" of the corporation, (formerly held in check by the various separation of powers) is "coming out" to the public in the form of a uniformed, armed guard on Main Street America.

Yet the key element which is making all this possible is another reservoir of secrecy, operating at a whole other level of subtlety and sophistication... which has developed steadily (and massively) over the last sixty years, serving as a "plausibly deniable" bridge between the agenda of the military and the administrative levers of civilian government.

Principally with the creation of the CIA in 1947, you have a (largely invisible) intelligence bureaucracy which has increasingly come to have more and more influence over the Executive branch of office, (National Security Council, Daily Intelligence Brief, etc.) while simultaneously using its Executive position to access funds, resources (and positions within other areas of both, government and civilian life) to further an un-written agenda... all under the rubric of "don't ask questions... national security."

The power of the CIA (and the various "intelligence" gathering agencies) goes WAY BEYOND the thirty-billion/year that we are told they are allotted by Congress. The true power of "The Company" lies not in its administrative/clerical (i.e. "public") side, it lies in the realm of covert operations, by which it has penetrated into the core of the stock-market, banking and finance, the media, the arms trade, illicit drugs, and so on.

It is absolutely essential for every thinking American to grasp the significance of this. To do so requires some study. There are numerous good books [9] on the subject. In particular, I recommend the vantage-point of someone who was there [10] from its inception, who saw it grow and change the face of the political landscape... and who has chronicled that development in exhaustive detail.


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So the existence of this intelligence bureaucracy takes the element of secrecy within government to a whole other level of sophistication.

Imagine, for a moment, beyond the usual rank of influence-peddling, (i.e. The White House/Pentagon offering access to only those reporters who say the right things, or Republican Party money helping to finance publications and programs that appear on Fox news) that there's another, unnamed layer of organization that can withhold or "leak" classified information at will, stage events, plant stories, to which the compromised or unaware press, politicians, and public must then respond. The power of this bureaucracy is not absolute; but because it is, by its very nature, a hidden power [10] , it has a flexibility to influence events that no other institution has, while appearing to be un-involved.

Now, it is the nature of this creature that it serves neither the civilian nor military command, directly; for it is, in essence, an instrument designed to subvert the mechanisms of public accountability; it answers only to itself [10c] ; yet "the self" that it answers to is bound by an allegiance to Elite control, which it must share [10d] with the political, military, financial and industrial Elite as a whole. Thus, while there may be many times when various leaders in the political or military wings are embarrassed or provoked into action by the dirty doings of the CIA, etc. the CIA is protected from serious scrutiny; because, to expose the CIA would expose the degree to which the various political and military elites had colluded in the betrayal of their duty to the general public; and secondly, these Elites recognize, as a whole, that the intelligence-community is a key element to the advancement of America's imperial interests.

In effect, the military, elected, and judicial branches of government have learned to tolerate and work with a loose canon in their midst, preferring not to know the whole truth -knowing that it is their ignorance of the whole story which will, (in most cases, they believe) protect them from any possible prosecution.

It's called "plausible deniability" and it takes the secrecy of self-serving government and military collusion to a whole other level: providing another layer of control, (away from public scrutiny) by which the "news" may be managed.

It's political deception gone amok.

Conversely, it may also be described as smart-fascism: a methodology developed from the general desire amongst the ruling Elite to by-pass the democratic process -in favour of rule by decree; but here, the appearance of democracy has been maintained. Rather than a mass movement which arouses the passions of the people, (and is ultimately difficult to control) here the critical device is an administrative one. A zone of influence, carved between the elected and appointed branches of government, gains access to credit from a fraudulent banking system [11] , its influence spilling over into the public sphere. Its influence grows, taking on the unseen mantle of a parallel power, while the populace remains largely passive.

It is precisely because the various elected and appointed elites already recognize the value of doing things in secret, that they can be so easily blackmailed and manipulated into schemes far beyond the realm of their own, narrow imaginations, then help to cover them up. Many an ambitious, cynical, and diabolical "public" official may fancy them self to hold extraordinary power in their hands, and be unaware of how much assistance they are getting from unseen forces which can just as easily turn on them.


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For example, it was the CIA which initially used its intelligence-gathering resources in Southeast Asia, (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) to provoke incidents [13] which justified an increasing military presence. Then-CIA Director Allen Dulles would make up some story (to the National Security council) about how the North Vietnamese had attacked the South, get permission for an increased military response, and then request a much bigger response from the military than was asked for.

Throughout the Vietnam war, bloodthirsty generals and lickspittle politicians eagerly swallowed every scintilla of justification. They were the ones who went on record, or who had a paper trail chronicling their deeds. Only when it became clear that the war could not be won, did the CIA cover its involvement in the affair by blaming first the military, (through the leaking of the so-called "Pentagon Papers" [16] ) then "outing" the hated Executive branch (Nixon) via a relatively minor infraction, ("Watergate") [17] . Almost no one clued in that the CIA had been cooking the books at both ends of the spectrum to both, further the war and protect its own ass.

The loss of Vietnam was a huge blow to American imperial prestige; yet the CIA managed to emerge from it shining. A few generals and politicians retreated to their corners, skulking; but the critical mechanism for creating new wars was left unscathed; and that is precisely what the CIA began to do, in Angola, in 1975.

What is essential to grasp here is this: the most-visible exponents of the policy can always be sacrificed, but the means of maintaining the secrecy must be kept secret. The intelligence bureaucracy itself must not come under scrutiny.


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So yes, of all the institutions involved in the promotion of the war machine, it is usually the intelligence community which is the most-hawkish, over-the-top-crazy-for-it because, on the one hand, they are not subject to the constraints of the public eye, (such as the military) they get far more leverage in choosing the character and timing of their operations, (don't have a lot of "higher-ups" telling them what to do). They experience a "freedom" to blow things up, kill, destroy such as few fascist-minded people can, (referred to in "trade-speak" as "fun and games"); and, if they play their cards right, they never have to be held accountable for any mistakes they make; because they're always one step ahead of their partners in crime, (the military, politicians) upon whom they can shift the blame.

This does not mean that there is a complete absence of honest analysts within the CIA etc. (dedicated to tracking down "Islamo-terrorists," or "commies," as they used to be called); it means that these people are not the core of the community; they are a peripheral instrument of what is, essentially, a criminal, subversive, anti-democratic organization.


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So lets follow the logic:

1) if the reason for going into Iraq was (and is) clear, (oil, power, military addiction) and,

2) if the intelligence community was committed to seeing the invasion occur, and,

3) if they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and

4) if they knew the heads of state were going to have to lie like baboons to get this war going, then they also knew that someone, eventually, (i.e. the ones who uttered the lies) was going to have to take the fall... so that the occupation/control of Iraq could continue, and the capacity for invasions elsewhere not be impeded.


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So given all that, and given what we know about the character of the "intelligence community," how then might we have expected them to behave?

First, they'd make sure that the heads of state had access to the necessary package of lies to place before the American people, and that those heads of state had confidence [17b] that the intelligence community would back them up in those lies; otherwise, the performers would not have been able to put on a half-way believable performance.

Second, only after the invasion was clearly in the bag would they then start to slowly "leak" their alibi.

Then, within the few months it would likely take for it to become clear that there were no WMD's in Iraq, they'd have to move to contain the debate .i.e. provide a juicy leak about only part of the package of lies... and make sure that the debate is then drawn out over a long period of time so that by the time charges were finally being laid, no one but the politicians and CNN commentators gave a "expletive deleted" anymore.

So what then happened?


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The CIA allowed the yellowcake-WMD claims into the State of the Union address. The Yellowcake claim also appeared in the President's Daily Brief [18] , (PDB) "one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system."

In other words, at the top of the CIA hierarchy, they were giving credence and support to the lies: i.e. where it counts. CIA Director George Tenet sat in the Congressional Chamber as Bush gave his address, and he said nothing to contradict it.

Now let's recall the timing of events:

Bush gives his speech in early January;

by late January, the troops and convoys are already amassed, (and it's obvious to everyone in the know about these things that the invasion is on).

On Feb. 5 the largest anti-war demonstration in human history takes place, over 25 million people worldwide.

In mid-February, the first of the "leaks" from the CIA start to appear, contradicting the claims of a Saddam/Al Queda connection; but these are lower-level reports and don't get much attention in the face of the media blitzkrieg.

Three months after the invasion began, it's obvious that there were no WMD's, and Washington politicians predictably spout their outrage.... the volume of hot air causing an early summer heat-wave in Washington.

Then frmr. ambassador Joseph Wilson appears on the scene, talking about the falseness of the "yellowcake" claims. Curiously, he gets tons of mainstream press coverage, and even coverage from the "alternative/left" press.

By this time, "leaks" are appearing all over the place, showing how many CIA analysts didn't buy into the claims -and who were thwarted by Cheney, Libby, and the "Office of Special Plans."

By July of 2003, CIA Director Tenet moves to take responsibility for the "yellowcake" claim, in what some observers describe as the attempt of a "loyal" lieutenant to take a "hit" for his boss. (Some months later, Tenet resigns and removes himself from the scene).

Then out of the blue, CNN j-urinalist Robert Novak claims that "someone" in the White House told him that Wilson's wife, (Valerie Plame) is a CIA agent, and the story unfolds from there.


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So what's the result of all this?

Two years after the invasion, a single member of the Bush administration is indicted, not for lying to Congress, but for the obstruction of justice in the "outing" of a CIA agent. (Special prosecutor Fitzgerald makes clear that the indictment has nothing to do with the war in Iraq).

The issue at hand has gone from WMD's, to "yellowcake" to the 'mis-treated' CIA. No one is talking about the "5,000 gallons of VX nerve agent, anthrax, and botulinim toxin" that Bush described in his speech to Congress. No one is talking about whether America lacks any moral right to have forces in Iraq. Even voices on "the left" are talking as if a few rogue elements inside the Bush Cabinet were responsible for the lies; and all of it amounts to nothing, as the American war machine emerges unscathed, sympathetic even, ("as our boys struggle heroically in the absence of the best equipment and reinforcements").


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If you were wanting to invade a country, and you had to lie to do it, I'd say this was a pretty successful campaign for getting away with it. No?

Now, some coincidence-theorists out there might say that things just unfolded this way; but let's take a closer look at the players involved.


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Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Rove, etc: yes, there's little doubt that these creeps are pathological liars, who would stoop at nothing to expand the prime directive of imperial power. It's no surprise that they worked to cook the evidence. So what? Does that mean that the CIA et all didn't collude in the deception? Is it not possible that the Agency was playing a double game? -encouraging Rumsfeld and Libby to be aggressive, saying there's support, (a "deal") while not telling some of the analysts whom Rumsfeld and Libby would work with... causing them to get aggressive? The Agency ensured that the bogus material got into the most sensitive and important documents: is it not possible that Rumsfeld etc. were led to believe they were all on side? [18b]

George Tenet played the idiot-savant masterfully, blindly over-seeing the inclusion of garbage in both, the PDB, the State of the Union Address, (and who knows where else?). Three months after the invasion, (when it no longer mattered) he says it was "a mistake," appears loyal and unconvincing at the same time, appearing to take responsibility, (in word only, taking no specific actions) leaving the door open as to who was the real motivating force behind it. Then he resigns some six months later, (a tacit admission of failure) temporarily taking some of the pressure off Bush; yet far more importantly, taking himself out of the picture to make it less likely that he would be called to testify.

Joe Wilson Turns out Joseph is no ordinary former Ambassador [19] . Oh no, he has a very colourful past indeed, as a point-man in innumerable bloody, covert operations carried out by the CIA. Well, surprise, surprise. Let's look at the long list of "achievement's" on uncle Joe's resume.

Well, he was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Iraq, in the build-up to the first Gulf War... the second in Command to Ambassador April Glaspie. In Glaspie's absence Joe is on record as being a very "active" ambassador.... selling weapons to the Iraq regime in a meeting in Paris... (this, when they were still gassing Iranians and Kurds). Then comes the time when the Americans sell the Kuwait government the slant-drilling facilities for cutting into Iraq's oil fields. America then encourages Saddam Hussein to "settle his grievance" in his own way. The trap had been set.

This is all a matter of record; and for anyone who has read Agee's "Dirty Work" (or otherwise knows how The Agency works) the American Consulate is the CIA's standard focal point in the coordination of intelligence work, coup d'etats, and invasions. Yes, uncle Joe was very busy it seems, (and good at his job too, cause he got lots more work after the war).

It seems that Joe then went on a long tour of Africa, going from mission to mission in various consulates; and wherever Joe went, insurrection, massacres, civil war and coup d'etats seemed to follow.

By all honest accounts, this man is a serious war-criminal; but today, we hear nothing but praise for him -even in the so-called "alternative press". Funny that, no?

At present, he's a member of the National Security Council for African affairs. The guy is pure Intel. A liar extraordinaire. He should be indicted (along with the rest of them).

Lock him up, people.

Valerie-Plame Wilson [20] : notwithstanding the attempts by Vanity Fair magazine (in its latest issue) to turn her into some glamorous "New Avenger," "Mrs. Peel," etc. it seems our gal Val has not had quite as colourful life of late as our lackadaisical, stooge press would have us believe. Yes, you've heard all the whining and complaining, the bleating of concern for the "annihilation" of her "team" that supposedly took place once she was "outed" by Libby; (some Intel freak masquerading as a journalist on the normally thoughtful "Counterpunch" website even equated the act to the betrayal of Jesus); well, it turns out that she was actually "outed" back in 1994 by the defector Aldrich Aims. She was ready for retirement, (for God's sake).

Disgruntled CIA agents, current and former and the press-corps which squeaks with every "leak" that flows.

Truly, an intelligent person has to ask them self: just how much of what some intelligence "insider" is saying is honest opinion or fact, how much of it is a con, and/or how much of it is sincere belief in the midst of being conned themselves? That is, maybe this "insider" doesn't know the whole story, and they've simply been allowed to make an acquaintance with someone in the press, (while still being monitored, of course). More likely, they're just appearing to know only so much. At any rate, we just don't know; and that is precisely the point. This is the nature of the business, the "trade-craft" of the covert community. Who is "handling" whom?

Anytime there is a "leak" we must assume the possibility that it is a planned release of information -of a very specific and limited kind, at a very specific time, to achieve certain ends.

We, as citizens, in fact, have a responsibility to be suspicious because this is the only way we can maintain some kind of watchdog role over a very elusive (and dangerous) social institution.

Sure, there may be some relatively honest analysts who are sincerely trying to keep tabs on "Islamo-terrorists" (or "commies" in ye olden days) or Khadaffi, or Raffi, (now, don't laugh-y); but we cannot know that, save that we place what they are saying in the context of the larger con that's constantly going on.

There are the officials who felt "intimidated" by Dick Cheney visiting headquarters in Langley.(Possible conversation: "Say, Mr. Vice President, why don't you come down here and pay us a visit. It would really show your commitment to what we're trying to do, and be a big boost to morale.")

There's the officials who felt "pressured" by Libby and the "Office of Special Plans." There's Col. Karen K., who seems to have become the exclusive copyright of Mother Jones magazine and the 7-11 "left" ("no one seems to want to hear her story" Awwwwww....).

There's mainscream presstitutes Novak and Miller: Novak "outs" CIA agent Valerie Plame, (supposedly because her front organization used a phoney address, something the CIA is not supposed to do). Is this vapid show of Novakian diligence credible? And Miller, the front-runner in the regurgitations of WMD lies on the front pages of the NY Times, board-member of The American Enterprise Institute: she goes to jail, for what? For refusing to reveal her source? How nobly irrelevant. How about revealing her source for learning how to "deep-throat" government pronouncements as if they are fact? Why would these two even put Plame's flame to print? They didn't suffer any recriminations for supposedly "annihilating" an entire undercover battalion. Curious law, that.

Then there's people like nominally-decent "investigative" reporter Seymour Hersh... who has "insider" information that "disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together... and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.... so pissed at Cheney." Herein lies the so-called explanation for why ""Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.... The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting."

The article goes on to say that some operators felt CIA Director "was too eager to please his boss" -reinforcing the facade of Tenet's phoney "admission" and early exit from the scene. (Another article by Hersh reveals that the same "yellowcake" nonsense appeared in the all-important President's Daily Brief).

Mr. Hersh writes a good yarn, provides important clues, and I'm sure his intentions are decent; but he's being played.

How about "ex" CIA "analyst" Ray McGovern? nominal leader of "Intelligence Professionals for Sanity," vocal opponent of the war, and darling of the "left" media, (and even of some amongst the "conspiracy" crowd). This guy reeks of high clearance; apparently, he was sometimes called to deliver the PDB, arguably the most-sensitive and important device for manipulating the President's agenda that the CIA has. Anyone who rises to that position within the apparatus is spooky indeed, especially if they say something that sounds "libera"; like, uh, referring to Patrick Fitzgerald as a "noble prosecutor" [22] .

It's donkey dung a la carte, every time the man's lips doth part.

Special ProsecutorPatrick Fitzgerald [23] : described as the knight in shining armour by the presstitute gallery, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, CNN and sin-dicated affiliates; "a non-partisan warrior" "speaking truth to power."

Well, it turns out that Prosecutor Fitzgerald is the go-to guy in the cover-up (I mean) prosecution of "terrorists" who weren't guilty of any crimes -such as those supposedly involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, (which any informed person knows was instigated and led by the FBI as a supposed "sting" operation).

He has intelligence ass-et written all over him.

Next case.

Ah yes, and last but not least, we have the legendary "Protection of Intelligence Identities Act," that "noble" piece of parchment upon which so much of this facade doth rest. Well, it turns out that this "law" makes it a crime to "out" an agent even if that agent is doing something illegal.

Think about that for a moment: even if a CIA agent assassinates someone, launders drug money, even if they may have participated in some "false-flag" terrorist operation, killing innocent people in order to blame it on OSAMA, it's a crime to expose them to the light of day.

Is this a law worth defending?

Obviously not.

Is it treasonous to expose an agent who's doing something illegal? Absolutely not. It's treasonous not to expose them.

This f-LAW should be referred to as the "Lou Wolf" Act, after the courageous investigator who, along with former agent Phillip Agee, realized the scope [24] of the CIA's criminal behaviour, and made it their patriotic duty to "out" as many agents as possible. It was due to their success in publishing those names and exposing the patterns that the Washington status quo was compelled to make such endeavours a crime.


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So to sum up:

an American President goes before the American people and lies his face off to justify the invasion of Iraq;

the Congress, the big media, and the intelligence bureaucracy all abrogate their responsibility to question and investigate the truth; they play dumb, and buy into the lie, (and we know exactly why);

then the Congress, the media, and the intelligence bureaucracy all claim they were "duped" or "prevented" from countering the lies -with various intelligence leaks providing the focus for who to blame.

The "blame" then becomes narrowly localized/contained when one of the "culprits" commits another, related "crime" for which they may face "tough" justice.

The intelligence community emerges, once again, shining like a new car.


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For all intents and purposes, the invasion of Iraq and the WMD claims are, as White House Chief of Staff Andy Card put it way back in Dec. of 2003, "a moot point."

It's a done deal. A non-issue.

So is there anything to be gained from this?

Yes, if we use it to gain a deeper insight into how the system works and apply it to contemporary events; for while we may add the invasion of Iraq to a long list of historical infamies which shall go unpunished, the occupation of Iraq is another matter.

Let us recall that the military-industrial-complex (otherwise known as the monopoly-capitalist state) is in crisis [25] . As such, the "state" is going to reflect contradictions in its behaviour. It's going to attempt to do something [26] to put out one fire, which then causes another. Into this mix, there are going to be arguments, battles between the different factions within the Elite apparatus; who, at one point or another, propel a certain perception forward, only to find it rich with unforeseen repercussions; and beneath it all, the covert intelligence apparatus is attempting to guide, correct, manipulate those different factions through the course of unfolding events, from the safety of its shadowy lair.

Even here, the adage, "those who play a rigged game get stupid" applies.

Take the occupation of Iraq. Intelligent investigation on the ground could have foreseen that the common Iraqi citizen was well-armed... that the invasion would not be the hard part. The intelligence community helped Bush steal two elections, they helped form his policy on Iraq, (daily!!!). The occupation is something they supported because monopoly-capital wanted it; yet now that it's going badly, they're feeding the ground of dissent against Bush and co. -not as an "exit" strategy, but as a domestic diversion, in the interests of managing the occupation.

Oh yeah, some politicians are beginning to speak of an "exit strategy." Others look straight in the camera and say, "we do not retreat."

It's all a show folks; or rather, while some politicians may actually believe some of their own rhetoric, the real game is this: Imperial America wants the oil, (and the middle east). They don't want the people who live there, (besides those who work the oil pumps); and above all, they don't want the American people to get pissed off with the increasing number of body-bags being sent home. So they're attempting to start a full-scale civil war in the most-populated non-strategic areas such as Baghdad, to eliminate the civilian (i.e. insurgent) population, keeping the American troops engaged only so long as they have to; and the key to this is keeping the American public distracted with debates about "exit strategy," giving the impression that some movement is happening.

There is no "movement" as such, (just as there is no "peace process" between Israel and Palestine). There will be no "exit" until the American people say "Enough!!" (just as we did with Vietnam).

The Bush-it artists have taken a lot of "hits" over the past six years: from the leaked PDB [21b] which showed that Bush had been warned about Al Qaeda a month before 9-11, to Enron, Hurricane Katrina, the WMD fiasco and the situation in Iraq, (not to mention the state of the American economy). With his dunce cap slightly askance, and overworked smirk, Curious George makes an easy target, if they want to take him out. Yet it's unlikely that Bush will be hit with any serious, de-throning scandal unless the situation in Iraq causes citizen America to finally wake up.

If that happens, the line from a song by the rock band, "The Who" may become an appropriate battle-cry: "we don't get fooled again."

Good friends, conscientious citizens, let us not be distracted by this ongoing charade. The system is not correcting itself. It is protecting its infamy from reaching the true light of day. Defend not the intelligence bureaucracy, the epicentre of secrecy, deception, and criminality.

Let us keep our eye on the shadow-power of the corporate-intelligence cabal which cloaks our politicians like an oily ooze. Let us build a resistance movement, with our eye clearly on the prize.

Ciao


******* # # # ********

Appendix
For those of you who want to further investigate the nature of the CIA, I provide a few samples of the info. I have come across... to help get you started, (i.e. besides the sources I listed below notes 9&10).

As mentioned, I think the single-best online source of information on the CIA is the Fletcher Prouty website.... The reason being, that he is able to show us how this bureaucracy was slowly (yet exponentially) built up under the watchful (and murderous) eye of "the company's" architect, Allen Dulles.

Baby fascism grows up:

Prouty's "The Secret Team" and "Understanding Special Operations" offer excellent descriptions of this, showing how things started small, then got to the point where whole air-bases were being operated covertly... sometimes with the soldiers, marines etc who were operating the vehicles having no clue who they were actually working for, or alongside.

He also shows how the CIA was able to gradually establish itself at various posts within the civil service (and private business community).

i.e. the CIA might approach a supervisor within the FAA, for example, or the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Post Office, or the media, and openly say, 'we're conducting an intelligence-gathering operation having to do with national security. We'd like to place someone in your office, temporarily, to serve as the contact person for an agent we have doing work in a related department.... can't go into any greater detail.... thanks.' Years may go by, and the agent remains at the post, performing a task like all the other employees. Perhaps the supervisor is transferred or retires. Now, it may be that no one in the office knows that an undercover agent is working there.; and on it goes.

You may be surprised to discover who within the civil service was once (and/or still is, for once... ) an agent with the CIA; such as: the Director of the London Transit Authority.

In regard to the Joint Chiefs, one of the moments Prouty liked to recall was when he was briefing Joint Chiefs Chairman Lemnitzer on various operations; when Lemnitzer grows quiet, pauses to ask, "Prouty, about how many [covert] operations are we involved in."

Prouty estimates in the hundreds. "Really?" says Lemnitzer, incredulous. "I had no idea."

A Lawyer Loves his Loopholes:

Prouty also goes into great detail showing how Dulles was able to manipulate loopholes in the National Security Act to sequester for himself increasing powers.

For example, the National Security Act of 1947 gives the CIA no legal basis for undertaking covert operations, nor even for gathering intelligence; it's legal role is simply to coordinate the intelligence of the other intelligence agencies.

It is the National Security Council alone, which has the legal mandate to undertake such operations. Via a vague loophole in the wording of the above "Security Act," founding CIA-director Allen Dulles was able to manipulate the National Security Council into a posture of "approving" clandestine plans brought to it by the CIA, rather than directing such operations itself; and by a process of erosion, the NSC ceased even to become an effective watchdog over the CIA's (illegal) activities.

For President Harry Truman, the nominal creator of the Security Act, (and, by extension, the CIA) it was clear that the NSC was an advisory institution only -that ultimate responsibility for decisions lay with the President. Under President Eisenhower, this sense of ultimate responsibility remained; yet by this time, the unaccounted-for activity of Allen Dulles and his agents had grown to such an extent that a private, parallel power grew in strength as the NSC's oversight duties became diluted in expanding numbers of sub-committees.

By the time of the Kennedy Administration, he was led to believe that the NSC was irrelevant. This "left the door wide open for the CIA" to assume far greater responsibilities, and "helps to explain why Henry Kissinger's role became so dominant in the Nixon years."

So the essence of the CIA's role -in relation to both the NSC and the President- is that the President does not know, (and, in a very real sense, does not want to know) what the CIA is up to, or what it's role should be.

A brief word on a total turd:

Allen Dulles was a unique character amongst human beings: an exceptionally calculating, greedy, amoral (and therefore successful) lawyer on Wall Street, he played a central role in the financing of the Nazi military machine, (alongside Prescott Bush); then, during World War 2 he somehow got himself ensconced at the highest level of American Intelligence (OSS) while simultaneously living in Switzerland, taking care of all the banking needs of the looters and pillagers (on both sides, of course). Then after the war, he was instrumental in rescuing a great number of Nazi spies (the Gehlen organization) who had been operating in Eastern (communist) Europe.

Only someone with his personal talent and dedication for self-promotion, vulturism, and hatred for democracy could have created something like the CIA.

And hey, he's even got an airport named after him.

A Few Important Facts:

Perhaps we should also recall that the CIA (amongst others, notably the FBI) was the lead agency in the assasinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and a host of other regional and world leaders.

For anyone who takes the time to investigate, the evidence is clear.

Now some readers may not know this or want to believe it; if so, you need to do your homework. Other readers may acknowledge the evidence of past misdeeds, yet fail to recognize their significance in the light of ongoing events.

Think about it: if the intelligence community could orchestrate, in broad-daylight, the murder of such prominent public figures and sufficiently cover it up (so as to confine it to the back pages of history and/or the corridors of "conspiracy-theory") do you think this organization, (and the "community" itself) has shrunk in its thirst and capacity for influencing public events.

Not a chance.

The evidence clearly reveals that they've gotten smarter, more sophisticated, brazen, more integrated into the bureaucratic fabric of private and public power than ever before.

For those who wish to investigate the assassination of JFK, I recommend the Fletcher Prouty website. (There's also a new book out expanding upon the case made by Jim Garrison. See takingaim.info for a three-hour audio interview). By the far the best and most-entertaining way to absorb a lot of the facts in this case is to watch the movie, "JFK" by Oliver Stone. For a Hollywood film, it's extremely well-researched.

For the assassination of both JFK, Robert Kennedy, (and a host of resources on many other dirty deeds) I recommend www.blackopradio.com. For the assassination of MLK, I recommend William Pepper's book, "An Act of State." (and you can also access numerous audio interviews of William Pepper at the blackop address).


******* # # # ********
And finally, a brief word about who "they" are.

"They": i.e. the CIA, the intelligence community, the real brains behind it.

Since the very essence of deceptive, self-serving elite rule is secrecy, and the intelligence bureaucracy is the very embodiment of the secrecy-germ, it makes little sense, (at this point) for us to try and figure out exactly who in the CIA etc. is ultimately responsible for the creation of this or that particular campaign of deception; that is, simply to have confidence that "they" exist... and that this level of manipulation is occurring.

For, on the one hand, the denial of responsibility is built-in to the "intelligence" campaign. Those responsible for saying something to a more-publicly visible official, or not saying something (when they should have) may themselves have been "handled," provided only so much information on a "need to know" basis; furthermore, the true scope of the power being exercised flows from the intelligence to the corporate and banking institutions and back again; its tentacles are ultimately very elusive and difficult to discern. Only when the full weight of an awakened citizenry begins to press for answers, only as the quality of the public dialogue rises sufficiently to shed light on this hidden network of power, will it make sense to track the really big boys down, identifying all the bit players along the way; and the simple fact is that we are not going to raise the quality of our social dialogue until we have first shaken off the illusion of power which the "plamegate" affair represents; and which this article is primarily concerned with.

So for the moment, let's not get distracted by the built-in duplicity contained within this house of mirrors. Let's keep our eye on the ball, and simply refer to "them" as "they."

Also, a word about how this power "works." Generally-speaking, the ones exercising the key decision-making powers within the intelligence community are not the ones most visible to the public eye; i.e. the Director. The real power tends to flow from the second-tier of command, or from the advisors to those supposedly "in command." The reason for this is that power and authority (within such hierarchical systems) does indeed flow from the top, and so the decision-makers must have a hand close to the helm; yet that hand has a lot more room to manoeuvre if it isn't pre-occupied with making statements to the public; furthermore, the manipulation and exchange of information has now gotten so complex these days, that those in public positions of leadership are extremely dependent upon their advisors for the content of their policy. This is painfully obvious in relation to a baboon like Bush; but it's just as true for a snake like Cheney, Powell, or Rice-crispy.

This is not to say that the real, underlying power (to make long-term policy/military moves) flows from the second-in-command or advisor them self. They are merely serving as the conduits for the collective intelligence of the larger community -applying the rather subtle, hands-on manipulation of those in front of them, knowing that the weight of the resources that can be brought in from other sectors of the apparatus, (in support of the "handling") may be all the "hard-ball" needed.

It also seems that the flow of power changes as the agency and the social/political landscape changes. It used to be, under Dulles, that the Director had all the power; but now that the CIA has developed a more home-spun image, the Director is more of a figurehead. In Kennedy's day, (and with Kissinger under Nixon) it was the National Security Advisor who had his finger on the President's "golly gee" spot. Now I would suspect the National Security Advisor is being advised by some nameless slug who knows a whole lot more than them.

Good luck in your investigations; and thanks for your time.


************

Foot Notes
1.http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/10/cia-set-them-up.html

2.takingaim.info Click on "Program Audio Archive" then The Hidden Agenda of the Libby Indictment, Pts 1 & 2. Also check out, "Outing the Gentlemen Killers of the CIA," and "Porter Goss and the CIA."

3. No, I'm not expressing my negligence for the use of "spell-check," dear reader. T'is a play on words, giving expression to the tendencies of the liars in question, to suckle at the teat of the beast.

4. For a great (and highly readable) expose of America's historical addiction, see "Addicted to War," (available for purchase here).

Nor is it a simple matter of addiction; for the capitalist system, itself, is fatally flawed, (as are all class societies). Marx correctly analysed this 150 years ago when he noted that the process of mechanization brought to the capitalist-investor great increases in wealth, but only temporarily; and it permanently eliminated from the production process the only ongoing source of profit, cheap labour. As each branch of production, (beginning with agriculture) becomes mechanized, the labour force dwindles, as does the long-term profit-margin per item. The capitalists attempt to counter this through larger and larger economies of scale, monopolies, "free trade" abroad in search of cheap labour, but there is only so much that can be done to stave off the inevitable crisis and crash. This inherent instability within the Elite capitalist economy is driving America's addiction to war forward. (Nor is it a financial crisis alone, of course; it is social, moral, and now environmental on a global scale; the financial realm simply drives all others).

5. An excellent source of information on this is Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

5b. As our class-economy is an inherently contradictory one, contradictions are reflected in the policies and behaviour of the ruling Elite, as well. On the one hand, the Machiavellian power specialists along the Republican campaign/polling/Jesus-on-the-nail trail recognize the need to bamboozle the voting, tv-toting public; at the same time, they have a need to come out loud and proud and say in ever-clearer language, "let's screw 'em blind because we can....."

In other words, fascist-minded parasites in positions of great power have a need to identify themselves to their own kind, so as to consolidate their network and class position. The depth and degree of their honesty (in expressing their complete lack of any) is an expression of how powerful they think they are. Hitler was a very good example of this; and the denial of the German people in ignoring what they didn't want to hear must bring great comfort to neo-cons everywhere.... that they can shoot their mouth off like idiots and still be referred to as " conservative" on CNN.

6. Noam Chomsky is correct to describe the modern corporation as "private tyranny."

7. Again, the founding fathers were compelled to recognize the right of the individual states to defend themselves. The standing federal army was intended to defend against foreign armies only. This was further enshrined after the Civil War, with the passage of the so-called posse comittatus act, limiting the capacity of the Federal forces to intervene in States affairs. There is now, on the part of the Federal government, a growing campaign to overcome this state sovereignty, using natural and terrorist disasters as the pretext for the expansion of military control.

8. This is happening on many levels: the re-organization of "Northern Command," the passage of laws pertaining to biological warfare, forced vaccination and mandatory re-location, the "patriot act," and so on.

From the evidence thus far obtained (see takingaim.info, for their well-researched expose) it's quite clear that the Federal government and FEMA intentionally sabotaged their ability to both, prevent the collapse of the Levees surrounding New Orleans, and respond to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. This was to show the ineffectiveness of the federal agencies, and the necessity for the Army to assume direct control, (which it did, to near-unanimous approval, with Hurricane Rita, some three weeks later). Clearly, the military-industrial complex is using the possibility and likelihood of natural disasters, (not to mention "false flag" operations) in order to warm the American people to the idea of direct military control.

9. In particular, I would recommend "Dirty Work" by Phillip Agee, works by John Stockwell, Stan Goff, "Dark Alliance" by Gary Webb...

10. I speak here of L. Fletcher Prouty, (now deceased) who was the focal-point liaison officer between the CIA and the Joint Chiefs during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. On this site, you will find an enormous reservoir of important audio and text material to choose from.

Also, you may access two of Prouty's most important written works, online: "The Secret Team" and "Understanding Special Operations".

To make your investigation a little easier, I provide a brief review of some of this analysis in the appendix at the end of this essay.

10b. Even if it's only partially-hidden, you often don't know what part is hidden, you don't know what is being withheld, edited, taken out of context.

10c. In other words, the CIA is the administrative manifestation of the fascist prime directive: raw, unchecked power; yet because it was, initially, an administrative instrument, it was dependent upon the many other more-public Elite institutions for its existence; and so, we have the ongoing, dynamic tension which exists between the two.

10d. This is changing to an extent, as the process continues to unfold; for what we see happening behind the headlines is the confluence and re-organization of Elite power built on a covert foundation; that is, the banking, military and industrial Elites organizing themselves into a parallel command structure with the intelligence community at its core -the intention being that, one day, to by-pass the feeble public ranks of authority and assume direct military control (rule by decree). Increasingly, crisis and emergency-management is the cornerstone of the process.

11. As always, it is impossible to truly grasp the character of any significant social institution today without also understanding the fraudulent nature of the modern banking system, (see www.communitycurrency.org for details).

In brief, let us recall that our government is thoroughly and permanently bankrupt. It has been sold to private banking interests by some five generations of politicians. The banks cannot "foreclose" on us, because that would cause the complete collapse of the system, yet they can use our indebtedness to squeeze every ounce of taxable income and concession out of us; and at the same time, they can allow the "government" (and/or whatever private "company" that serves it) to go ever deeper into debt, in the financing of whatever projects the Elite deem worthwhile, (weapons manufacture, military campaigns, vaccination programs, covert operations). Beginning with the architect of the CIA, (Alan Dulles, who was a powerful Wall Street banker) "the company" has long been able to integrate itself into the stream of money manufactured out of thin air.

13. No doubt, Dulles and co. were involved in the Gulf Of Tonkin incident/fabrication which led to the full-scale invasion of Vietnam. Latest update here:

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20051106212304989
As an aside, one of the most well-known examples (these days) of a planned, staged event (though it never got off the ground) was called "Operation Northwoods." Supposedly, this was orchestrated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff; yet as the documents clearly show, it was none other than CIA uber-"operations" specialist General Ed Landsdale who presented the plan to the joint chiefs for approval. This is the same Landsdale who, according to L. Fletcher Prouty, (reviewing some of the evidentiary photographs) was one of the "hobos" in and around Dealey Plaza on the day JFK was assassinated.

16. According to Prouty, (see below) the "Pentagon Papers" were selective transcripts of meetings between, (amongst others) the Joint Chiefs and the Agency, showing how the agency disputed the claims of how "winnable" the war was, and what the conditions were like on the ground; but the "papers" do not show how the Agency was saying many different things at the same time; and how, the higher echelons of the Agency were pushing positive expectations right up until the end, constantly looking to expand their operations... yet keep the armed forces in the limelight.

One of the editors of the "Pentagon Papers" was E. Howard Hunt, a CIA agent who was later caught leading the "break-in" at the Watergate Hotel.

17. Watergate: for those too young to remember, it goes something like this....

President Nixon is furious over the leaks which result in the "Pentagon Papers."

He gives the go-ahead to a team (known as "the plumbers") to do some "investigative" work, break-ins, etc.

A couple of "ex" CIA/FBI agents (one of whom is E. Howard Hunt, the other is G. Gordon Liddy who somehow goes on to become some kind of iconoclast pop culture hero aka Ollie North) lead a group of anti-Castro Cubans (few of whom can speak English) into a botched burglary of Democratic campaign headquarters. Some of the burglars predictably return to the scene after the police arrive and get apprehended. Others leave an address book with a phone number to someone's desk in the Nixon White House. The "idiocy" of the "bungling" burglars is lampooned in the press.

"The Press," by the way, is being led by the nose through the labyrinth of details, by some unknown informer known as "deep throat."

The Vietnam war was endin

CIA scandal highlights split between Europeans/Americans on war on terror Sun Dec 4, 8:56 AM ET



Outrage in Europe over alleged CIA torture camps and covert flights across the continent exposes a wide gap between Americans and Europeans on how they view the war on terror, analysts say.

While many Americans came to believe in the wake of the September 11 attacks that terrorists were at their doorstep, ready to strike anytime, Europeans have a different perception, they say.

"On the US side there is a sense of imminent threat, that we cannot waste time by going through courts, finding evidence," Simon Serfaty, an expert on European affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told AFP.

"On the European side there is a sense that the threat is not so very imminent so that you can take your time thinking through the issue and not make compromises between ends and means."

Dieter Dettke, an expert on German politics at the Washington office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, said the uproar in Europe over the prison camps reflected the differing approaches to terrorism.

"We do have a more legalistic perspective on the war on terror and America is far less concerned about legalities," he said.

Allegations that the CIA set up secret prisons, or "black sites", in several eastern European countries to interrogate terrorist suspects and that it had used airports across the continent to transport these suspects in the wake of the September 11 attacks first surfaced last month.

The existence of the prisons would be in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights and the European Union's justice commissioner has warned that any EU country found to have hosted a secret CIA jail would have its voting rights suspended.

Washington initially refused to address the issue, but faced with mounting fury in Europe and a formal EU request for an explanation it has vowed to provide a forthright response.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be flying smack into the storm when she visits Europe this week and the row is likely to dog her at every public appearance she makes in Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Belgium.

Rice said Friday she planned to speak about the controversy before leaving on Monday on her five-day trip to Europe.

"What you are likely to hear from the secretary is that the US is entitled to take whatever measures it feels are necessary in order to protect itself from terrorism," Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told AFP.

"And the simple truth is that many Americans, not all, agree with that and the sentiment in Europe is very different."

Michael Calingaert, an expert on Europe with the Washington-based Brookings Institution, lamented the fact that the scandal comes at a time as countries on both sides of the Atlantic try to mend relations that were strained by the US-led war in Iraq.

"I think unfortunately this does not help the US image and it certainly adds fuel, ammunition to those who have been critical of the US for having carried out the war in Iraq," he said.

He added that it was in the interest of both the United States and Europe to contain the row and not let it get in the way of broader issues on their agenda.

Preble noted that while Rice may be put on the spot about the CIA torture prisons during her public appearances in Europe, it may not figure high on the agenda during her private meetings with leaders.

"I would not be surprised if the conversation in private does not dwell on this issue," he said.



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Bush seeking compromise on CIA torture ban: aide By Mohammad Zargham
Sun Dec 4, 1:23 PM ET



The White House is seeking a compromise with a leading Senate Republican over its efforts to exempt the CIA from a proposed ban on torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners, President George W. Bush's national security adviser said on Sunday.

"We are working hard in good faith on both sides to come up with an approach that can be supported by the president and the Congress, to both find a way to be aggressive in the war on terror and still comply with U.S. law," national security adviser Stephen Hadley said on "Fox News Sunday."

Republican Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona, whose proposal for a ban on "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees was passed by the Senate in October over White House objections, said he would not compromise on torture.

Hadley's comments appeared to indicate the White House has softened its strong opposition to the blanket ban on degrading and inhumane treatment, which was passed by a 90-9 vote as an amendment to a $440 billion Pentagon funding bill.

The legislation was widely seen as a rebuke to the White House and an effort to repair the damage to the U.S. image caused by reports of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Vice President Dick Cheney led a White House bid to exempt the CIA from the ban, arguing that it would hamper the U.S. war on terrorism. Bush last month defended the effort to stop the Congress from imposing rules on the handling of terrorism suspects.

"What the president has said is that we do not torture," Hadley said. "And he said that while we need to be aggressive in the war against terror, we also have to do it in a way that complies with U.S. law, with U.S. treaty obligations and with the Constitution."

'FRANK AND OPEN DISCUSSIONS'

He said on ABC's "This Week" he had had "good conversations" with McCain, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and a major backer of the Iraq war, and White House staff had been in contact with other congressional officials to hammer out a deal.

McCain said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he and Hadley had met three times and held "frank and open discussions" without any agreement yet.

McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam War, said "I won't. We won't," compromise on torture, but said he was in talks with the White House about other aspects of the matter to try to reach an agreement.

Hadley said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during a European tour this week, will address European concerns about reports that the United States secretly transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be tortured.

"We comply with U.S. law, we respect the sovereignty of the countries with which we deal, and we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured," he told Fox.

Hadley said Bush was troubled by revelations last week that the U.S. military secretly paid Iraqi newspapers to print pro-American articles.

He said the administration did not know all the facts, but would stop the practice if the reports turn out to be true.

"The Pentagon is looking into them. To the extent that kind of behavior is inconsistent with our policy, it will be stopped," Hadley said.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Kenen)




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CIA given 'full access' to British airports Sat Dec 3,10:18 PM ET

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted "full access" to Britain's military airfields to transport terrorist suspects, the Mail on Sunday reports.

The newspaper published photographs taken by aircraft enthusiasts apparently showing three US aircraft at three Scottish airports -- Edinburgh, Prestwick and Glasgow -- on June 20, 2004, November 13, 2004 and September 16 this year.

"Our investigation has found proof that a series of aircraft linked to the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' programme have been flying in and out of Britain unchecked by the authorities," it claimed.

The Mail on Sunday said one of the planes -- a CASA turboprop -- had also been photographed at Kabul airport, Afghanistan, and was suspected by human rights groups to have been used to move terror suspects for interrogation.

Another -- an unmarked civilian Hercules C-130 -- is also at the centre of a European Union probe about the alleged illegal use of EU airspace, it added.

The newspaper claimed to have unearthed flight logs from the Royal Air Force base at Northolt, northwest London, "which suggests top-level Government complicity in the CIA's secret operation".

It said the logs give no explanation about why a number of planes, including one allegedly used to transport some high-profile suspects, were granted landing rights and did not record who was on board.

CIA flights had stopped at British airports "on at least 210 occasions", the paper said.

"Nearly 20 British airports have been used, with Prestwick and Glasgow among the top destinations," it added.

"Prestwick has received 75 CIA rendition flights and Glasgow 74."

The United States has been accused since the beginning of last month of having operated CIA flights using European airspace or airports carrying terrorism suspects to countries practising torture.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last Wednesday confirmed he had written to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of the mounting claims.

On the same day, British human rights group Liberty threatened legal action if it were proved that British airports were used.

Rice is due to visit Germany this week where she is expected to face intense questioning over the claims and the alleged existence of US detention centres in eastern Europe for suspected Islamist extremists.

On Saturday, news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that its edition to be published Monday would report the Berlin government has a list of at least 437 CIA flights in German airspace.




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Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake

By Dana Priest

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA's Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

While the CIA admitted to Germany's then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of Masri's case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri's claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained publicly silent. Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week.

Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

The CIA declined to comment for this article, as did Coats and a spokesman at the German Embassy in Washington. Schily did not respond to several requests for comment last week.

CIA officials stress that apprehensions and renditions are among the most sure-fire ways to take potential terrorists out of circulation quickly. In 2000, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said that "renditions have shattered terrorist cells and networks, thwarted terrorist plans, and in some cases even prevented attacks from occurring."

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."

Thousands of tips and allegations about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior intelligence official said.

J. Cofer Black, a professorial former spy who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden, was the CTC's director. With a flair for melodrama, Black had earned special access to the White House after he briefed President Bush on the CIA's war plan for Afghanistan.

Colleagues recall that he would return from the White House inspired and talking in missionary terms. Black, now in the private security business, declined to comment.

Some colleagues said his fervor was in line with the responsibility Bush bestowed on the CIA when he signed a top secret presidential finding six days after the 9/11 attacks. It authorized an unprecedented range of covert action, including lethal measures and renditions, disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks against the al Qaeda enemy, according to current and former intelligence officials. Black's attitude was exactly what some CIA officers believed was needed to get the job done.

Others criticized Black's CTC for embracing a "Hollywood model" of operations, as one former longtime CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.

The person most often in the middle of arguments over whether to dispatch a rendition team was a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC's al Qaeda unit, according to a half-dozen CIA veterans who know her. Her name is being withheld because she is under cover.

She earned a reputation for being aggressive and confident, just the right quality, some colleagues thought, for a commander in the CIA's global war on terrorism. Others criticized her for being overzealous and too quick to order paramilitary action.

One way the CIA has dealt with detainees it no longer wants to hold is to transfer them to the custody of the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, where defense authorities decide whether to keep or release them after a review.

About a dozen men have been transferred by the CIA to Guantanamo Bay, according to a Washington Post review of military tribunal testimony and other records. Some CIA officials have argued that the facility has become, as one former senior official put it, "a dumping ground" for CIA mistakes.

But several former intelligence officials dispute that and defend the transfer of CIA detainees to military custody. They acknowledged that some of those sent to Guantanamo Bay are prisoners who, after interrogation and review, turned out to have less valuable information than originally suspected. Still, they said, such prisoners are dangerous and would attack if given the chance.

Among those released from Guantanamo is Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, apprehended by a CIA team in Pakistan in October 2001, then sent to Egypt for interrogation, according to court papers. He has alleged that he was burned by cigarettes, given electric shocks and beaten by Egyptian captors. After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo Bay and let go earlier this year without being charged.

Another CIA former captive, according to declassified testimony from military tribunals and other records, is Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada resident, who says he turned himself in to the Mauritanian police 18 days after the 9/11 attacks because he heard the Americans were looking for him. The CIA took him to Jordan, where he spent eight months undergoing interrogation, according to his testimony, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Another is Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian imprisoned by Indonesia authorities in January 2002 after he was heard talking -- he says jokingly -- about a new shoe bomb technology. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation and returned to CIA hands four months later, according to one former intelligence official. After being held for 13 months in Afghanistan, he was taken to Guantanamo Bay, according to his testimony.

Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year's Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview from Germany.

The police treated Masri firmly but cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al Qaeda and about his hometown mosque, he said. When he pressed them to let him go, they displayed their pistols.

Unbeknown to Masri, the Macedonians had contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday. But the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight, current and former intelligence officials familiar with the case said.

"The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al Qaeda unit.

In the first weeks of 2004, an argument arose over whether the CIA should take Masri from local authorities and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition operation.

The director of the al Qaeda unit supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.

Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.

The unit's director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.

On the 23rd day of his motel captivity, the police videotaped Masri, then bundled him, handcuffed and blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport, Masri said. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his blindfold, "I saw seven or eight men with black clothing and wearing masks," he later said in an interview. He said he was drugged to sleep for a long plane ride.

Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.

Back at the CTC, Masri's passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.

At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. "There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him," one former official said. "There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over."

Once the mistake reached Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.

"You couldn't have the president lying to the German chancellor" should the issue come up, a government official involved in the matter said.

Senior State Department officials decided to approach Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.

The CIA argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology, according to officials.

Meanwhile, Masri was growing desperate. There were rumors that a prisoner had died under torture. Masri could not answer most questions put to him. He said he steadied himself by talking with other prisoners and reading the Koran.

A week before his release in late May 2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who called himself Sam. Masri said he asked him if he were from the German government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not answer either question.

"Does my wife at least know I'm here?" Masri asked.

"No, she does not," Sam replied, according to Masri.

Sam told Masri he was going to be released soon but that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner, Sam added, according to Masri.

On the day of his release, the prison's director, who Masri believed was an American, told Masri that he had been held because he "had a suspicious name," Masri said in an interview.

Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."

He said he was quickly met by three armed men. They drove all night, arriving in the morning at Mother Teresa Airport in Tirana. Masri said he was escorted onto the plane, past all the security checkpoints, by an Albanian.

Masri has been reunited with his children and wife, who had moved the family to Lebanon because she did not know where her husband was. Unemployed and lonely, Masri says neither his German nor Arab friends dare associate with him because of the publicity.

Meanwhile, a German prosecutor continues to work Masri's case. A Macedonia bus driver has confirmed that Masri was taken away by border guards on the date he gave investigators. A forensic analysis of Masri's hair showed he was malnourished during the period he says he was in the prison. Flight logs show a plane registered to a CIA front company flew out of Macedonia on the day Masri says he went to Afghanistan.

Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this article.




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from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday
5 December 2005 01:46 Home > News > World > Americas

The torture files
CIA agents have broken ranks to reveal the 'cruel and inhuman' interrogation techniques they are ordered to use at secret prisons around the world, including freezing and near-drowning. By Raymond Whitaker
Published: 04 December 2005
Amid a growing row in the US over torture, a list of "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by CIA agents in secret prisons - including near-drowning, freezing, sleep deprivation, shaking and slapping - has been leaked. In at least one case, a prisoner has died.

The techniques have been authorised for use at CIA "black sites" abroad, at which top terror suspects are held. Last week the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said "ghost detainees" were held at two military bases, in Poland and Romania. Similar sites in half a dozen other countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand and the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia, leased from Britain, are now said to have been closed.

The existence of these detention facilities, and what happens inside them, are the most secret aspect of America's "war on terror". In contrast to military-run camps and prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where it was impossible to shield all CIA activity from outside scrutiny, the location of the "black sites" and the identities of those held there are made known only to a handful of senior officials in the US. In the host countries, only the president and top intelligence officials are aware of them.

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know "the direction their agency has chosen". They broke ranks amid a furore in Washington over an amendment to the White House military spending package going through Congress. Senator John McCain (Republican), a former US navy pilot who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, wants an unequivocal ban on all "cruel and inhuman" treatment of prisoners in US custody, including those held by the CIA.

Eighty-nine of Mr McCain's fellow senators voted for his amendment, rejecting attempts by the CIA and Vice-President Dick Cheney - who said after 9/11 that "we have to work ... the dark side" - to exclude prisoners held at the "black sites". For the first time President George Bush has threatened to exercise his veto on any defence bill that has the amendment attached.

The CIA prisons contain only the 30 or so most senior al-Qa'ida captives. They include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, another prime 9/11 suspect, and the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, accused of masterminding the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. Only the merest hints have emerged about their treatment, but according to the most graphic account, given to ABC News in the US, Khalid Sheik Mohammed won the admiration of his interrogators by enduring "waterboarding" for up to two and a half minutes before begging to confess. CIA officers who subjected themselves to the same technique lasted an average of 14 seconds.

ABC's sources said that just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the "enhanced interrogation" techniques. At least three had declined involvement. The use of each technique on each prisoner had to be approved, stage by stage, up to the use of the "water board". About a dozen "high-value" al-Qa'ida targets had been interrogated in this way, and, as one put it: "All of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated."

At least one death has been reported elsewhere, however. In a CIA facility in Kabul known as the "Salt Pit", an officer, described as young and inexperienced, used the "cold treatment" on a detainee, who was left outdoors, naked, throughout a freezing Afghan night. He died of hypothermia. The case is being investigated, along with several others in Afghanistan and Iraq where interrogators - CIA officers, civilian contractors or members of the special forces - went well beyond the guidelines and suspects died as a result.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of "rendition": flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. "If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria," one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.

Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America's covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: "After 9/11, the gloves were off." At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.

The normal justification is that such methods could help avert a terror attack in which thousands might be killed. But are there any cases to prove it? Claims that the "waterboarding" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced details of planned attacks on the US were sceptically received by one CIA official, who said: "What we got was probably not truthful. And there's no way of knowing whether what good information they got could not have been obtained by more traditional means."

THE CIA'S SIX 'ENHANCED' TECHNIQUES

CIA interrogators say they are allowed to use six "enhanced interrogation techniques", each progressively tougher, on top al-Qa'ida detainees. Their superiors have to give separate approval for every prisoner and every method, all claimed to be legal.

THE ATTENTION GRAB: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. Israel, the only democracy to have openly debated coercion of prisoners, declared this legal in 1987, but the Supreme Court ruled it out in 1999

THE ATTENTION SLAP: Interrogators may deliver "an open-handed slap", which is "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear"

THE BELLY SLAP: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage

STANDING FOR HOURS: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to a ring bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are claimed to be effective in yielding confessions

COLD TREATMENT: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10C, and constantly doused with cold water. Misapplication of this technique is blamed for the death of a detainee in Kabul

WATERBOARDING: The prisoner is bound to a board, head slightly below the feet. Plastic is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him, or his head is lowered into a bath. The gag reflex is automatic; few can endure more than a matter of seconds

Amid a growing row in the US over torture, a list of "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by CIA agents in secret prisons - including near-drowning, freezing, sleep deprivation, shaking and slapping - has been leaked. In at least one case, a prisoner has died.

The techniques have been authorised for use at CIA "black sites" abroad, at which top terror suspects are held. Last week the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said "ghost detainees" were held at two military bases, in Poland and Romania. Similar sites in half a dozen other countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand and the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia, leased from Britain, are now said to have been closed.

The existence of these detention facilities, and what happens inside them, are the most secret aspect of America's "war on terror". In contrast to military-run camps and prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where it was impossible to shield all CIA activity from outside scrutiny, the location of the "black sites" and the identities of those held there are made known only to a handful of senior officials in the US. In the host countries, only the president and top intelligence officials are aware of them.

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know "the direction their agency has chosen". They broke ranks amid a furore in Washington over an amendment to the White House military spending package going through Congress. Senator John McCain (Republican), a former US navy pilot who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, wants an unequivocal ban on all "cruel and inhuman" treatment of prisoners in US custody, including those held by the CIA.

Eighty-nine of Mr McCain's fellow senators voted for his amendment, rejecting attempts by the CIA and Vice-President Dick Cheney - who said after 9/11 that "we have to work ... the dark side" - to exclude prisoners held at the "black sites". For the first time President George Bush has threatened to exercise his veto on any defence bill that has the amendment attached.

The CIA prisons contain only the 30 or so most senior al-Qa'ida captives. They include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, another prime 9/11 suspect, and the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, accused of masterminding the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. Only the merest hints have emerged about their treatment, but according to the most graphic account, given to ABC News in the US, Khalid Sheik Mohammed won the admiration of his interrogators by enduring "waterboarding" for up to two and a half minutes before begging to confess. CIA officers who subjected themselves to the same technique lasted an average of 14 seconds.

ABC's sources said that just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the "enhanced interrogation" techniques. At least three had declined involvement. The use of each technique on each prisoner had to be approved, stage by stage, up to the use of the "water board". About a dozen "high-value" al-Qa'ida targets had been interrogated in this way, and, as one put it: "All of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated."

At least one death has been reported elsewhere, however. In a CIA facility in Kabul known as the "Salt Pit", an officer, described as young and inexperienced, used the "cold treatment" on a detainee, who was left outdoors, naked, throughout a freezing Afghan night. He died of hypothermia. The case is being investigated, along with several others in Afghanistan and Iraq where interrogators - CIA officers, civilian contractors or members of the special forces - went well beyond the guidelines and suspects died as a result.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of "rendition": flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. "If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria," one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.

Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America's covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: "After 9/11, the gloves were off." At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.

The normal justification is that such methods could help avert a terror attack in which thousands might be killed. But are there any cases to prove it? Claims that the "waterboarding" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced details of planned attacks on the US were sceptically received by one CIA official, who said: "What we got was probably not truthful. And there's no way of knowing whether what good information they got could not have been obtained by more traditional means."

THE CIA'S SIX 'ENHANCED' TECHNIQUES

CIA interrogators say they are allowed to use six "enhanced interrogation techniques", each progressively tougher, on top al-Qa'ida detainees. Their superiors have to give separate approval for every prisoner and every method, all claimed to be legal.

THE ATTENTION GRAB: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. Israel, the only democracy to have openly debated coercion of prisoners, declared this legal in 1987, but the Supreme Court ruled it out in 1999

THE ATTENTION SLAP: Interrogators may deliver "an open-handed slap", which is "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear"

THE BELLY SLAP: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage

STANDING FOR HOURS: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to a ring bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are claimed to be effective in yielding confessions

COLD TREATMENT: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10C, and constantly doused with cold water. Misapplication of this technique is blamed for the death of a detainee in Kabul

WATERBOARDING: The prisoner is bound to a board, head slightly below the feet. Plastic is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him, or his head is lowered into a bath. The gag reflex is automatic; few can endure more than a matter of seconds

CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan
Italy Allegedly Misled on Cleric's Abduction

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; A01



MILAN -- In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, the CIA's tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

The strategy worked for more than a year until Italian investigators learned that Nasr had not gone to the Balkans after all. Instead, prosecutors here have charged, he was abducted off a street in Milan by a team of CIA operatives who took him to two U.S. military bases in succession and then flew him to Egypt, where he was interrogated and allegedly tortured by Egyptian security agents before being released to house arrest.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

"The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism efforts in Italy and Europe," said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in Milan. "In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison, subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other accomplices."

Spataro declined to comment on any specifics of the investigation because the case is pending in the Italian courts. The CIA declined to comment.

Since July, prosecutors and judges in Milan have issued arrest warrants charging 22 alleged CIA operatives, including the head of the CIA Milan substation, with kidnapping and other crimes. In interviews and court documents, Italian investigators said they now believe the abduction was overseen by the CIA's station chief in Rome and orchestrated by officials assigned to the U.S. Embassy there.

The case marks the first time that a foreign government has filed criminal charges against U.S. operatives for their role in a counterterrorism mission. In addition to jolting relations between the United States and Italy, normally a strong ally of Washington in the fight against terrorism, the case is fueling a growing chorus of European complaints that the Bush administration has crossed legal and ethical lines in dealing with Islamic extremists.

As investigators in Milan gradually unravel what happened to Nasr, 42, who remains in custody in Egypt, disclosures about the covert operation are causing political problems for both the U.S. and Italian governments.

Italian officials have firmly denied playing any role in the abduction or knowing about it beforehand. But current and former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation, said the CIA briefed its counterparts at the Italian military intelligence agency ahead of time.

After the case became public, CIA officers involved in the decision to apprehend Nasr told their superiors that the Italian intelligence agency cleared the operation with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But there appears to be no documentation that would support the claim that he was aware of the case should a public dispute erupt between Italy and the United States, according to two U.S. sources.

Several former intelligence officials said such documentation, on such a sensitive subject, would probably not exist. "The price of doing business is if you get caught, you're on your own," said one former intelligence official.

There are signs that Berlusconi's government has become increasingly uncomfortable with the criminal investigation, which is being carried out by independent judicial authorities in Milan. Prosecutors and judges signed papers last month seeking to compel the United States to extradite the alleged CIA operatives, but Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, a member of Berlusconi's cabinet, so far has not given his approval -- a step that is usually a formality.

After meeting with U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in Washington in early November, Castelli questioned whether the prosecution was politically motivated, calling the lead prosecutor a leftist "militant" whose work needed to be reviewed carefully. Prosecutors have denied any political bias and said they continue to work closely with the FBI on terrorism investigations.

Warnings Are Delivered

One enduring mystery surrounding the case is why the CIA would want to abduct Nasr in the first place.

Italian anti-terrorism police said they were close to arresting Nasr at the time he disappeared. They had him under regular surveillance, with wiretaps on his home telephone, as part of an investigation into a network of Islamic extremists in northern Italy. His disappearance meant that Italian authorities lost a valuable window into the Islamic underground, prosecutors say.

Moreover, Nasr's actions in Egypt complicated their investigations, they say. In April and May 2004, the cleric was heard from briefly when he made a series of telephone calls to family members and acquaintances in Milan. He told them that he had been kidnapped by foreign agents and taken to Cairo, but that he had been released under house arrest after spending more than a year in prison, according to wiretaps of the calls recorded by Italian investigators.

During the telephone conversations, Nasr also warned religious colleagues at a Milan mosque that his Egyptian interrogators wanted to abduct three other people as well, transcripts of the wiretaps show. He was taken back to prison shortly thereafter when Egyptian security officials discovered that he had been in contact with the people in Italy, according to court records.

Mohammed Reda, an Egyptian exile who lives in Milan, told Italian investigators that Nasr warned him on the phone that he was next on the Egyptian government's list of kidnapping targets.

"They told him that sooner or later the same fate would befall the three of us, that they would catch us as soon as possible," Reda told investigators, according to court documents. "They said they had agreements with the Italian authorities that could easily ensure our capture. If we didn't turn ourselves in voluntarily they would kidnap us."

Court records and interviews with Nasr's acquaintances and investigators in Milan suggest that the Egyptian government had wanted for years to capture Nasr, who had been part of an Islamic opposition group. Egyptian authorities had been prevented from capturing him because he had been granted asylum in Italy.

Nasr was wanted by the Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, a network of Islamic extremists that had sought the overthrow of the government. The network was dispersed during a government crackdown in the early 1990s, and many leaders escaped abroad to avoid arrest. Nasr fled to Albania but also sought refuge in Germany and Bosnia before settling in Italy in 1997.

Arman Ahmed Hissini, the director and imam of the Viale Jenner mosque and cultural center in Milan, was also sought by the Egyptians, court records show. Hissini said Nasr had been afraid for years that the Egyptian security services would come after him even though he was living in Europe.

"He was even afraid to go to Mecca after he got asylum in Italy," Hissini, who is known locally as Abu Imad, said in an interview at the mosque. "He couldn't go out because he was afraid they would catch him."

Scattered Clues

The CIA has an especially close relationship with the Egyptian security and intelligence services.

In May, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch estimated that since 2001, Egypt had worked with other countries to apprehend more than 60 Islamic militants living abroad and return them to Egypt. Soon after, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told the Chicago Tribune that the CIA alone had handed over to Egypt between 60 and 70 terrorism suspects captured from around the world.

This relationship has led some European counterterrorism officials and outside experts to speculate that Nasr was abducted as a favor to the Egyptian government. But former U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that the operation was carried out at the behest of the CIA, not Egypt.

They said the kidnapping was the inspiration of the CIA station chief in Rome, who wanted to play a more active role in taking suspected terrorists off the street. CIA officials in Italy came up with a list of three people "they wanted to look at to grab," said one agency official. It is not clear whether Nasr was on the list.

"It was definitely not a favor to the Egyptians," said another intelligence official. CIA officials "had their eye on him."

The Egyptian government has declined to comment on the case. Italian prosecutors said in court documents that they have repeatedly requested information from Egyptian officials but have received no reply.

Investigators said they had uncovered no hard evidence that Egyptian or Italian agents were involved in the abduction, although Nasr later told his family that the two men who seized him spoke "perfect Italian." According to the wiretapped telephone conversations, Nasr claimed that he was tortured by his captors in Egypt -- subjected to freezing temperatures and electric shocks, among other forms of abuse.

Italian police said there were signs that the CIA's substation chief in Milan, identified in court records as Robert Seldon Lady, flew to Cairo shortly after Nasr's disappearance, a trip that many counterterrorism analysts take to mean he took part in the initial interrogation. He spent three weeks there. Lady's attorney has acknowledged in court papers that he is a former CIA officer who worked in Italy for four years while posted at the U.S. Consulate in Milan.

Investigators have seized computer disks from Lady's home outside Milan that show he made travel reservations on a Web site to fly from Zurich to Cairo five days after Nasr disappeared, with a return flight scheduled for three weeks later. Cell phone records also show that calls were placed from Cairo on a telephone believed to be used by Lady during that period, court documents show.

During their search of Lady's home, police found a disk with a digital photograph of Nasr, showing him walking along the same block in Milan where he was abducted a month after the picture was taken.

Lady, who retired from the CIA a year later, is one of the 22 alleged CIA operatives who have been charged with kidnapping in the case. He has hired an Italian defense attorney, who recently filed a motion to have the charges against him thrown out.

The attorney, Daria Pesce, argued that the evidence seized at Lady's home was obtained illegally. She said he has not admitted or denied playing any role in the case but is actively contesting the charges. She said in a telephone interview that naming him publicly would not jeopardize his former status as an undercover officer or pose security concerns.

"We're just telling the judge that they don't have any evidence that he could have kidnapped" Nasr, Pesce said. "There could never be a trial against him in the United States with such lousy evidence."

Last week, Italian Judge Enrico Manzi disagreed with Pesce. In a written opinion upholding the arrest warrant, the judge wrote that the evidence taken from Lady's home "removes any doubt about his participation in the preparatory phase of the abduction."

Staff writer Dana Priest in Washington and special correspondent William Magnuson in Milan contributed to this report.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

FBI Bungled Florida Terrorism Investigation, Justice Department Finds

By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; A12



FBI agents botched a terrorism investigation in Florida and tried to cover up mistakes, said Justice Department investigators, who also concluded that a high-ranking official retaliated against the longtime undercover agent who pointed out the problems.

The findings were included in a draft report by the Justice Department's inspector general on a complaint made by former agent Michael German about an investigation in Orlando that he believed showed promising signs of a link between terrorism financing and the sale of illegal drugs.

The inspector general's office "substantiated German's allegations that the Orlando case was mishandled and mismanaged by the FBI's Tampa Division," the report said. German, who left the FBI in 2004 after 16 years, received the Nov. 15 draft and made it public.

But the inspector general did not back up German's contention that the agent in Orlando and FBI supervisors missed the chance to unravel a terrorism financing operation, concluding that there was no evidence to undermine earlier reviews that the suspect had no link to terrorists.

German said yesterday that the inspector general gave too much credence to those reviews, especially after documenting other significant problems.

Among the most serious issues investigators found in an inquiry that began in January 2004 was the use of correction fluid to alter dates on three FBI forms to obscure an apparent violation of a federal wiretap law. But the investigation did not determine who made the changes.

The agent who handled the terrorism investigation in 2002 misdated reports to make it appear he completed them much earlier than he had. One account of a key meeting between an informant and the main subject of the investigation was not entered into the FBI database for 10 months, the report said. FBI policy says such reporting normally should be done within five days.

German sought protection as a whistle-blower in September 2002, by which time he believed his complaints were being ignored. Government employees who report allegations of wrongdoing are supposed to be shielded from retaliation.

Yet the report found that Jorge Martinez, then chief of the FBI's Undercover and Sensitive Operations Unit, excluded German from serving as an instructor in undercover training programs in response to German's persistent questions about the case.

Martinez told another FBI official he would not use German in the training programs -- despite his previously regular participation in such training -- because he lacked confidence in him, the report said. Martinez said that he did not recall saying that, but that if he did, it was a "knee-jerk reaction but did not mean to indicate I was retaliating against him."

The FBI had no comment on the report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11, is among those allegedly being held in secret prisons. (AP Photo)
By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO

Dec. 5, 2005 — Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.


Related: List of 12 Operatives Held in CIA Prisons
Related: ABC News Investigations: Complete Coverage

CIA officials asked ABC News not the name the specific countries where the prisons were located, citing security concerns.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA's secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

The CIA has used a small fleet of private jets to move top al Qaeda suspects from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Eastern Europe, where Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as the countries that housed secret sites.

But Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: "My president has said there is no truth in these reports."

Ross asked: "Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?"

Sikorski answered, "I think this is as much as I can tell you about this."

In Romania, where the secret prison was possibly at a military base visited last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new Romanian prime minister said today there is no evidence of a CIA site but that he will investigate.

Sources tell ABC that the CIA's secret prisons have existed since March 2002 when one was established in Thailand to house the first important al Qaeda target captured. Sources tell ABC that the approval for another secret prison was granted last year by a North African nation.

Sources tell ABC News that the CIA has a related system of secretly returning other prisoners to their home country when they have outlived their usefulness to the United States.

These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some "unlawful combatants" to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.

According to sources directly involved in setting up the CIA secret prison system, it began with the capture of Abu Zabayda in Pakistan. After treatment there for gunshot wounds, he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small disused warehouse on an active airbase. There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor especially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after .31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

While in the secret facilities in Eastern Europe, Abu Zubaydah and his fellow captives were fed breakfasts that included yogurt and fruit, lunches that included steamed vegetables and beans, and dinners that included meat or chicken and more vegetables and rice, sources say. In exchange for cooperation, prisoners were sometimes given hard candies, deserts and chocolates. Abu Zubaydah was partial to Kit Kats, the same treat Saddam Hussein fancied in his captivity.

"One of the difficult issues in this new kind of conflict is what to do with captured individuals who we know or believe to be terrorists," Rice said. "The individuals come from many countries and are often captured far from their original homes. Among them are those who are effectively stateless, owing allegiance only to the extremist cause of transnational terrorism. Many are extremely dangerous. And some have information that may save lives, perhaps even thousands of lives."

Sources tell ABC News that Jordanians, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Saudis, Pakistanis, Uzbekistanis and Chinese citizens have been returned to their nations' intelligence services after initial debriefing by U.S. intelligence officers. Rice said renditions such as these are vital to the war on terror. "Rendition is a vital tool in combating transnational terrorism," she said.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

A Weak Defense Washington Post
IN AN ATTEMPT to quell a growing storm in Europe over the CIA's secret prisons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday issued a defense based on the same legalistic jujitsu and morally obtuse double talk that led the Bush administration into a swamp of human rights abuses in the first place. Ms. Rice insisted that the U.S. government "does not authorize or condone torture" of detainees. What she didn't say is that President Bush's political appointees have redefined the term "torture" so that it does not cover practices, such as simulated drowning, mock execution and "cold cells," that have long been considered abusive by authorities such as her State Department. Ms. Rice said, "It is also U.S. policy that authorized interrogation will be consistent with U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." What she didn't explain is that, under this administration's eccentric definition of "U.S. obligations," cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is not prohibited as long as it does not occur on U.S. territory. That is the reason for the secret prisons that the CIA has established in European countries and other locations around the world, and for the "renditions" of detainees to countries such as Egypt and Jordan: so that the administration can violate the very treaty Ms. Rice claims it is upholding. Ms. Rice did offer some persuasive arguments, including that "captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice"; that's one reason we believe congressional action to regulate those detentions and interrogations is overdue. It's hard not to sympathize with the secretary of state, who has seen 10 months of meticulous and until now successful work to repair transatlantic relations undermined by a policy not of her making. Yet the Bush administration surely cannot expect that the uproar in European countries, including staunch allies such as Britain, will be contained through such hairsplitting spin. The political backlash is still growing, and the damage could be considerable. For example, the plans of the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to rebuild close relations with the United States have been seriously threatened by emerging reports of German participation in CIA renditions. The only way to remedy the damage is to change the underlying policies. Such a change would help rather than hurt the fight against terrorism. By now the administration should recognize that, whether or not its abductions of terrorist suspects from European countries have been legal or justified, they have surely been counterproductive: The blowback against questionable renditions from Italy, Sweden and Germany has damaged the ability of those countries to support future collaboration with the CIA. If CIA prisoners are still being held in Europe, they probably won't be staying much longer; Washington's Eastern European friends stand to suffer severe censure from the European Union. One simple step by President Bush would resolve much of the controversy over prisoner abuse, and ease Ms. Rice's journey through Europe this week. The president could accept Sen. John McCain's amendment to the defense appropriations bill, which prohibits "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" for all prisoners held by the United States. The legislation has overwhelming support in Congress, as the White House recognizes; already, the administration has shifted from threatening a veto to bargaining with Mr. McCain over granting immunity to CIA personnel involved in abuses. Once a clear ban on inhuman treatment is in place, the administration will have no legal reason to hold al Qaeda suspects in secret foreign prisons. Even better, Ms. Rice will have more credibility the next time she declares that the United States does not engage in torture.
CIA terror flight reports dog US-German talks New Zealand Herald
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9/11 Panel Issues Poor Grades for Handling of Terror New York Times
The members of the Sept. 11 commission gave dismal grades to the Bush administration and Congress on Monday in measuring the government's recent efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, concluding that the government deserved many more F's and D's than A's.

Three relatives of Sept. 11 terrorist victims, Frank Fetchet, Mary Fetchet and Kathy Wisniewski, listened Monday to members of the 9/11 commission criticize the government's efforts to prevent future attacks.
The commissioners awarded the grades in a privately financed "report card" that found that four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation remained alarmingly vulnerable to terrorist strikes, including attacks with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. "While the terrorists are learning and adopting, our government is still moving at a crawl," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have not been. Our leadership is distracted." The new report by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a private group established by the commission's five Republicans and five Democrats when the panel formally went out of business last year, graded the government's response to the 41 recommendations made in the commission's final report 17 months ago. There were 17 F's or D's - including an F to Congress for its failure to allocate the domestic antiterrorism budget on the basis of risk and a D for the government's effort to track down and secure nuclear material that could be used by terrorists. There was only one A - and it was an A minus - awarded for the government's efforts to stem the financing of terrorist networks. With the release of the report, the commissioners announced that they were shutting down the Public Discourse Project, which had represented an unusual private effort by members of a federal commission to retain some political viability and lobby for their recommendations. The White House, which often tangled with the Sept. 11 commission during its official investigation, defended its performance in dealing with terrorist threats, insisting it had acted on most of the panel's recommendations. "We have taken significant steps to better protect the American people at home," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "There is more to do. This is the president's highest responsibility." To the likely disappointment of the White House, however, the commission's Republicans voiced some of the strongest criticism of the administration and Congress on Monday at a news conference held to release the report. "The American people ought to demand answers," said James R. Thompson, a Republican commissioner and a former Illinois governor. "Why aren't our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives? What's the rationale? What's the excuse? There is no excuse." Mr. Thompson joined with other commissioners in offering special criticism of Congress as having failed to ensure that the billions of dollars in domestic security money distributed by the federal government each year are divided up on the basis of risk, instead of pork-barrel politics that often sends money to remote areas where there is little danger of terrorist attack. The new report noted that Congress and the Bush administration enacted the commission's centerpiece recommendation last year, the creation of the job of director of national intelligence to force the government's spy agencies to work closely together. The post went to John D. Negroponte, the former American ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations. "The framework for the D.N.I. and his authorities are in place," the report found, giving an overall grade of B to Mr. Negroponte's performance and to the government's effort to support him. The report gave a failing grade to the administration's development of common policies for treatment of terrorist suspects held abroad; human rights groups and some members of Congress have accused the administration of condoning practices that amount to torture. The administration has opposed legislation to prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment against detainees in American custody. "U.S. treatment of detainees had elicited broad criticism and makes it harder to build the necessary alliances to cooperate effectively with partners in a global war on terror," the report said. Mr. Kean said at the news conference that as a result of the controversy over the treatment of prisoners, the United States "is not viewed with the same respect we were just a short time ago." Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic commissioner and a former House member from Indiana, said inhumane treatment of prisoners was counterproductive and might breed a new generation of terrorists. "We should not go down the slippery slope of what other countries might do to terrorize detainees," he said. The new report was also strongly critical of the government's failures to tighten airline passenger screening, to provide adequate radio spectrums to allow police and fire departments to communicate in a terrorist attack and to push for political reforms in Saudi Arabia. There was sharp criticism of Congress as having failed to overhaul its methods of oversight on intelligence issues, and of the F.B.I. as moving too slowly to overhaul its antiterrorism operations.
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CIA agents break ranks to disclose brutal ‘black sites’


By Raymond Whitaker

The Independent

WASHINGTON — Amid a growing row in the US over torture, a list of “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by CIA agents in secret prisons — including near-drowning, freezing, sleep deprivation, shaking and slapping — has been leaked. In at least one case, a prisoner has died.

The techniques have been authorised for use at CIA “black sites” abroad, at which top terror suspects are held. Last week the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said “ghost detainees” were held at two military bases, in Poland and Romania. Similar sites in half a dozen other countries, leased from Britain, are now said to have been closed.

The existence of these detention facilities, and what happens inside them, are the most secret aspect of America’s “war on terror”. In contrast to military-run camps and prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where it was impossible to shield all CIA activity from outside scrutiny, the location of the “black sites” and the identities of those held there are made known only to a handful of senior officials in the US. In the host countries, only the president and top intelligence officials are aware of them.

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know “the direction their agency has chosen”. They broke ranks amid a furore in Washington over an amendment to the White House military spending package going through Congress. Senator John McCain (Republican), a former US Navy pilot who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, wants an unequivocal ban on all “cruel and inhuman” treatment of prisoners in US custody, including those held by the CIA.

Eighty-nine of McCain’s fellow senators voted for his amendment, rejecting attempts by the CIA and Vice-President Dick Cheney — who said after 9/11 that “we have to work ... the dark side” — to exclude prisoners held at the “black sites”. For the first time President George Bush has threatened to exercise his veto on any defence bill that has the amendment attached.

The CIA prisons contain only the 30 or so most senior Al Qaeda captives. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, another prime 9/11 suspect, and the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, accused of masterminding the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. Only the merest hints have emerged about their treatment, but according to the most graphic account, given to ABC News in the US, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed won the admiration of his interrogators by enduring “waterboarding” for up to two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess. CIA officers who subjected themselves to the same technique lasted an average of 14 seconds.

ABC’s sources said that just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the “enhanced interrogation” techniques. At least three had declined involvement. The use of each technique on each prisoner had to be approved, stage by stage, up to the use of the “waterboard”. About a dozen “high-value” Al Qaeda targets had been interrogated in this way, and, as one put it: “All of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated.” At least one death has been reported elsewhere, however. In a CIA facility in Kabul known as the “Salt Pit”, an officer, described as young and inexperienced, used the “cold treatment” on a detainee, who was left outdoors, naked, throughout a freezing Afghan night. He died of hypothermia. The case is being investigated, along with several others in Afghanistan and Iraq where interrogators — CIA officers, civilian contractors or members of the special forces — went well beyond the guidelines and suspects died as a result. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 “questionable deaths” of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of “rendition”: flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. “If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria,” one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.

Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America’s covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: “After 9/11, the gloves were off.” At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.

The normal justification is that such methods could help avert a terror attack in which thousands might be killed. But are there any cases to prove it? Claims that the “waterboarding” of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced details of planned attacks on the US were sceptically received by one CIA official, who said: “What we got was probably not truthful. And there’s no way of knowing whether what good information they got could not have been obtained by more traditional means.”

German sues CIA claiming torture in abduction case By David Morgan
2 hours, 37 minutes ago

A German man sued former CIA Director George Tenet and other U.S. spy agency officials for alleged wrongful imprisonment and torture on Tuesday in a rare legal challenge to the CIA's secret transfer of terrorism suspects to foreign countries for interrogation.

The lawsuit was lodged on behalf of Khaled el-Masri by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin amid a European uproar over the treatment of detainees in the U.S. "global war on terrorism."

The suit, filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, alleges that CIA officials violated U.S. and universal human rights laws when Masri says he became an innocent victim of a practice known as extraordinary rendition.

Masri, 42, said he was abducted in Macedonia on December 31, 2003, drugged, beaten and then flown to Afghanistan, where he faced more abuse.

The legal complaint describes his treatment as "constituting prolonged arbitrary detention, torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" and alleges that the CIA released him five months later by dumping him in Albania after realizing he had done nothing wrong.

"I want to know why they did this to me and how it ever came about," Masri said through a German interpreter in a satellite linkup from Germany. "I don't think that I am (the) human being, the man I used to be."

Under the Central Intelligence Agency's "rendition" policy, terrorism suspects are captured and flown to other countries for questioning.

Rights advocates say suspects often end up being tortured in countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Concern has also been fueled by a Washington Post report last month that the CIA operates secret prisons in eastern Europe.

President George W. Bush on Tuesday denied the United States transferred terrorism suspects to countries that used torture. Rice told reporters who accompanied her to Europe on Monday that "rendition" was a vital tool against terrorism.

NO COMMENT FROM CIA

A Kuwaiti-born German national of Lebanese descent, Masri is demanding an apology and an explanation of what happened to him from Tenet and U.S. officials.

The unemployed father of five spoke at an ACLU press conference via a televised link from Germany, after he was denied entry to the United States on Saturday in Atlanta.

The ACLU said Masri was returned to Germany without explanation. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it told Masri he was not allowed entry because a "law enforcement record" turned up under his name in an intelligence database.

Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Kristi Clemens declined to describe the document and could not say whether it might be linked to his alleged role as a former detainee. She said Masri could still apply for an entry visa.

"It adds insult to injury," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, who denied that Masri posed any threat to the United States.

"In a perverse way, they've already conceded he's innocent by returning him to Europe (in 2004) and abandoning him on an Albanian hilltop in the middle of the night."

Masri's lawsuit holds Tenet and 10 other current and former CIA officials responsible for what it called an illegal program under the U.S. Constitution and other statutes governing the treatment of foreign nationals by U.S. officials.

Tenet served as CIA director from 1997 to 2004. He resigned amid criticism about faulty intelligence on prewar Iraq and missteps that led to the September 11 attacks.

The lawsuit also names as defendants three corporations that the ACLU says owned or operated the private business jet used to fly Masri to Afghanistan.

Neither the CIA nor Tenet would comment on the lawsuit. Representatives for the three corporations were not immediately available for comment.

"KICKED AND STRIPPED NAKED" In Berlin, Rice declined to comment on the Masri case but acknowledged that the United States may commit errors in its war on terrorism and would put them right if they occurred.

Merkel said she and Rice spoke about Masri at a private meeting and that Washington agreed it had made a mistake. But senior U.S. officials later took issue with those remarks and said Rice had not admitted a U.S. mistake in the Masri case.

Masri said that he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, photographed naked and forced to live in a cement cell with a filthy blanket for a bed. He said he was given brackish water to drink and boiled chicken bones to eat.

"When the door was closed, I was beaten from all sides," Masri said in describing events he says occurred just before he was dragged aboard the plane to Afghanistan.

The lawsuit alleges the CIA kept Masri in appalling conditions for months after Tenet learned that his abduction and detention had been in error.



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CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan

By Craig Whitlock

MILAN -- In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, the CIA's tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

The strategy worked for more than a year until Italian investigators learned that Nasr had not gone to the Balkans after all. Instead, prosecutors here have charged, he was abducted off a street in Milan by a team of CIA operatives who took him to two U.S. military bases in succession and then flew him to Egypt, where he was interrogated and allegedly tortured by Egyptian security agents before being released to house arrest.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

"The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism efforts in Italy and Europe," said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in Milan. "In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison, subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other accomplices."

Spataro declined to comment on any specifics of the investigation because the case is pending in the Italian courts. The CIA declined to comment.

Since July, prosecutors and judges in Milan have issued arrest warrants charging 22 alleged CIA operatives, including the head of the CIA Milan substation, with kidnapping and other crimes. In interviews and court documents, Italian investigators said they now believe the abduction was overseen by the CIA's station chief in Rome and orchestrated by officials assigned to the U.S. Embassy there.

The case marks the first time that a foreign government has filed criminal charges against U.S. operatives for their role in a counterterrorism mission. In addition to jolting relations between the United States and Italy, normally a strong ally of Washington in the fight against terrorism, the case is fueling a growing chorus of European complaints that the Bush administration has crossed legal and ethical lines in dealing with Islamic extremists.

As investigators in Milan gradually unravel what happened to Nasr, 42, who remains in custody in Egypt, disclosures about the covert operation are causing political problems for both the U.S. and Italian governments.

Italian officials have firmly denied playing any role in the abduction or knowing about it beforehand. But current and former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation, said the CIA briefed its counterparts at the Italian military intelligence agency ahead of time.

After the case became public, CIA officers involved in the decision to apprehend Nasr told their superiors that the Italian intelligence agency cleared the operation with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But there appears to be no documentation that would support the claim that he was aware of the case should a public dispute erupt between Italy and the United States, according to two U.S. sources.

Several former intelligence officials said such documentation, on such a sensitive subject, would probably not exist. "The price of doing business is if you get caught, you're on your own," said one former intelligence official.

There are signs that Berlusconi's government has become increasingly uncomfortable with the criminal investigation, which is being carried out by independent judicial authorities in Milan. Prosecutors and judges signed papers last month seeking to compel the United States to extradite the alleged CIA operatives, but Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, a member of Berlusconi's cabinet, so far has not given his approval -- a step that is usually a formality.

After meeting with U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in Washington in early November, Castelli questioned whether the prosecution was politically motivated, calling the lead prosecutor a leftist "militant" whose work needed to be reviewed carefully. Prosecutors have denied any political bias and said they continue to work closely with the FBI on terrorism investigations.

One enduring mystery surrounding the case is why the CIA would want to abduct Nasr in the first place.

Italian anti-terrorism police said they were close to arresting Nasr at the time he disappeared. They had him under regular surveillance, with wiretaps on his home telephone, as part of an investigation into a network of Islamic extremists in northern Italy. His disappearance meant that Italian authorities lost a valuable window into the Islamic underground, prosecutors say.

Moreover, Nasr's actions in Egypt complicated their investigations, they say. In April and May 2004, the cleric was heard from briefly when he made a series of telephone calls to family members and acquaintances in Milan. He told them that he had been kidnapped by foreign agents and taken to Cairo, but that he had been released under house arrest after spending more than a year in prison, according to wiretaps of the calls recorded by Italian investigators.

During the telephone conversations, Nasr also warned religious colleagues at a Milan mosque that his Egyptian interrogators wanted to abduct three other people as well, transcripts of the wiretaps show. He was taken back to prison shortly thereafter when Egyptian security officials discovered that he had been in contact with the people in Italy, according to court records.

Mohammed Reda, an Egyptian exile who lives in Milan, told Italian investigators that Nasr warned him on the phone that he was next on the Egyptian government's list of kidnapping targets.

"They told him that sooner or later the same fate would befall the three of us, that they would catch us as soon as possible," Reda told investigators, according to court documents. "They said they had agreements with the Italian authorities that could easily ensure our capture. If we didn't turn ourselves in voluntarily they would kidnap us."

Court records and interviews with Nasr's acquaintances and investigators in Milan suggest that the Egyptian government had wanted for years to capture Nasr, who had been part of an Islamic opposition group. Egyptian authorities had been prevented from capturing him because he had been granted asylum in Italy.

Nasr was wanted by the Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, a network of Islamic extremists that had sought the overthrow of the government. The network was dispersed during a government crackdown in the early 1990s, and many leaders escaped abroad to avoid arrest. Nasr fled to Albania but also sought refuge in Germany and Bosnia before settling in Italy in 1997.

Arman Ahmed Hissini, the director and imam of the Viale Jenner mosque and cultural center in Milan, was also sought by the Egyptians, court records show. Hissini said Nasr had been afraid for years that the Egyptian security services would come after him even though he was living in Europe.

"He was even afraid to go to Mecca after he got asylum in Italy," Hissini, who is known locally as Abu Imad, said in an interview at the mosque. "He couldn't go out because he was afraid they would catch him."

The CIA has an especially close relationship with the Egyptian security and intelligence services.

In May, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch estimated that since 2001, Egypt had worked with other countries to apprehend more than 60 Islamic militants living abroad and return them to Egypt. Soon after, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told the Chicago Tribune that the CIA alone had handed over to Egypt between 60 and 70 terrorism suspects captured from around the world.

This relationship has led some European counterterrorism officials and outside experts to speculate that Nasr was abducted as a favor to the Egyptian government. But former U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that the operation was carried out at the behest of the CIA, not Egypt.

They said the kidnapping was the inspiration of the CIA station chief in Rome, who wanted to play a more active role in taking suspected terrorists off the street. CIA officials in Italy came up with a list of three people "they wanted to look at to grab," said one agency official. It is not clear whether Nasr was on the list.

"It was definitely not a favor to the Egyptians," said another intelligence official. CIA officials "had their eye on him."

The Egyptian government has declined to comment on the case. Italian prosecutors said in court documents that they have repeatedly requested information from Egyptian officials but have received no reply.

Investigators said they had uncovered no hard evidence that Egyptian or Italian agents were involved in the abduction, although Nasr later told his family that the two men who seized him spoke "perfect Italian." According to the wiretapped telephone conversations, Nasr claimed that he was tortured by his captors in Egypt -- subjected to freezing temperatures and electric shocks, among other forms of abuse.

Italian police said there were signs that the CIA's substation chief in Milan, identified in court records as Robert Seldon Lady, flew to Cairo shortly after Nasr's disappearance, a trip that many counterterrorism analysts take to mean he took part in the initial interrogation. He spent three weeks there. Lady's attorney has acknowledged in court papers that he is a former CIA officer who worked in Italy for four years while posted at the U.S. Consulate in Milan.

Investigators have seized computer disks from Lady's home outside Milan that show he made travel reservations on a Web site to fly from Zurich to Cairo five days after Nasr disappeared, with a return flight scheduled for three weeks later. Cell phone records also show that calls were placed from Cairo on a telephone believed to be used by Lady during that period, court documents show.

During their search of Lady's home, police found a disk with a digital photograph of Nasr, showing him walking along the same block in Milan where he was abducted a month after the picture was taken.

Lady, who retired from the CIA a year later, is one of the 22 alleged CIA operatives who have been charged with kidnapping in the case. He has hired an Italian defense attorney, who recently filed a motion to have the charges against him thrown out.

The attorney, Daria Pesce, argued that the evidence seized at Lady's home was obtained illegally. She said he has not admitted or denied playing any role in the case but is actively contesting the charges. She said in a telephone interview that naming him publicly would not jeopardize his former status as an undercover officer or pose security concerns.

"We're just telling the judge that they don't have any evidence that he could have kidnapped" Nasr, Pesce said. "There could never be a trial against him in the United States with such lousy evidence."

Last week, Italian Judge Enrico Manzi disagreed with Pesce. In a written opinion upholding the arrest warrant, the judge wrote that the evidence taken from Lady's home "removes any doubt about his participation in the preparatory phase of the abduction."

Staff writer Dana Priest in Washington and special correspondent William Magnuson in Milan contributed to this report.


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Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake

By Dana Priest

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA's Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

While the CIA admitted to Germany's then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of Masri's case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri's claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained publicly silent. Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week.

Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

The CIA declined to comment for this article, as did Coats and a spokesman at the German Embassy in Washington. Schily did not respond to several requests for comment last week.

CIA officials stress that apprehensions and renditions are among the most sure-fire ways to take potential terrorists out of circulation quickly. In 2000, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said that "renditions have shattered terrorist cells and networks, thwarted terrorist plans, and in some cases even prevented attacks from occurring."

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."

Thousands of tips and allegations about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior intelligence official said.

J. Cofer Black, a professorial former spy who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden, was the CTC's director. With a flair for melodrama, Black had earned special access to the White House after he briefed President Bush on the CIA's war plan for Afghanistan.

Colleagues recall that he would return from the White House inspired and talking in missionary terms. Black, now in the private security business, declined to comment.

Some colleagues said his fervor was in line with the responsibility Bush bestowed on the CIA when he signed a top secret presidential finding six days after the 9/11 attacks. It authorized an unprecedented range of covert action, including lethal measures and renditions, disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks against the al Qaeda enemy, according to current and former intelligence officials. Black's attitude was exactly what some CIA officers believed was needed to get the job done.

Others criticized Black's CTC for embracing a "Hollywood model" of operations, as one former longtime CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.

The person most often in the middle of arguments over whether to dispatch a rendition team was a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC's al Qaeda unit, according to a half-dozen CIA veterans who know her. Her name is being withheld because she is under cover.

She earned a reputation for being aggressive and confident, just the right quality, some colleagues thought, for a commander in the CIA's global war on terrorism. Others criticized her for being overzealous and too quick to order paramilitary action.

One way the CIA has dealt with detainees it no longer wants to hold is to transfer them to the custody of the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, where defense authorities decide whether to keep or release them after a review.

About a dozen men have been transferred by the CIA to Guantanamo Bay, according to a Washington Post review of military tribunal testimony and other records. Some CIA officials have argued that the facility has become, as one former senior official put it, "a dumping ground" for CIA mistakes.

But several former intelligence officials dispute that and defend the transfer of CIA detainees to military custody. They acknowledged that some of those sent to Guantanamo Bay are prisoners who, after interrogation and review, turned out to have less valuable information than originally suspected. Still, they said, such prisoners are dangerous and would attack if given the chance.

Among those released from Guantanamo is Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, apprehended by a CIA team in Pakistan in October 2001, then sent to Egypt for interrogation, according to court papers. He has alleged that he was burned by cigarettes, given electric shocks and beaten by Egyptian captors. After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo Bay and let go earlier this year without being charged.

Another CIA former captive, according to declassified testimony from military tribunals and other records, is Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada resident, who says he turned himself in to the Mauritanian police 18 days after the 9/11 attacks because he heard the Americans were looking for him. The CIA took him to Jordan, where he spent eight months undergoing interrogation, according to his testimony, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Another is Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian imprisoned by Indonesia authorities in January 2002 after he was heard talking -- he says jokingly -- about a new shoe bomb technology. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation and returned to CIA hands four months later, according to one former intelligence official. After being held for 13 months in Afghanistan, he was taken to Guantanamo Bay, according to his testimony.

Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year's Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview from Germany.

The police treated Masri firmly but cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al Qaeda and about his hometown mosque, he said. When he pressed them to let him go, they displayed their pistols.

Unbeknown to Masri, the Macedonians had contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday. But the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight, current and former intelligence officials familiar with the case said.

"The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al Qaeda unit.

In the first weeks of 2004, an argument arose over whether the CIA should take Masri from local authorities and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition operation.

The director of the al Qaeda unit supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.

Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.

The unit's director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.

On the 23rd day of his motel captivity, the police videotaped Masri, then bundled him, handcuffed and blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport, Masri said. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his blindfold, "I saw seven or eight men with black clothing and wearing masks," he later said in an interview. He said he was drugged to sleep for a long plane ride.

Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.

Back at the CTC, Masri's passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.

At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. "There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him," one former official said. "There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over."

Once the mistake reached Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.

"You couldn't have the president lying to the German chancellor" should the issue come up, a government official involved in the matter said.

Senior State Department officials decided to approach Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.

The CIA argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology, according to officials.

Meanwhile, Masri was growing desperate. There were rumors that a prisoner had died under torture. Masri could not answer most questions put to him. He said he steadied himself by talking with other prisoners and reading the Koran.

A week before his release in late May 2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who called himself Sam. Masri said he asked him if he were from the German government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not answer either question.

"Does my wife at least know I'm here?" Masri asked.

"No, she does not," Sam replied, according to Masri.

Sam told Masri he was going to be released soon but that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner, Sam added, according to Masri.

On the day of his release, the prison's director, who Masri believed was an American, told Masri that he had been held because he "had a suspicious name," Masri said in an interview.

Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."

He said he was quickly met by three armed men. They drove all night, arriving in the morning at Mother Teresa Airport in Tirana. Masri said he was escorted onto the plane, past all the security checkpoints, by an Albanian.

Masri has been reunited with his children and wife, who had moved the family to Lebanon because she did not know where her husband was. Unemployed and lonely, Masri says neither his German nor Arab friends dare associate with him because of the publicity.

Meanwhile, a German prosecutor continues to work Masri's case. A Macedonia bus driver has confirmed that Masri was taken away by border guards on the date he gave investigators. A forensic analysis of Masri's hair showed he was malnourished during the period he says he was in the prison. Flight logs show a plane registered to a CIA front company flew out of Macedonia on the day Masri says he went to Afghanistan.

Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this article.




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German Man Open to Settlement in CIA Suit Wed Dec 7, 5:44 PM ET



A German man suing CIA officials over his treatment by the spy agency in the war on terror is willing to entertain a settlement offer from the government if one is made, one of the man's lawyer's said Wednesday.

The lawsuit by Khaled al-Masri is the latest controversy surrounding the CIA's "rendition" program for terror suspects.

In a case of mistaken identity by CIA officers who thought he was an associate of the Sept. 11 conspirators, the agency subjected al-Masri to four months in a cell in Afghanistan, the German alleges in his suit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va.

"We're always willing to discuss settlement," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the lawyers representing al-Masri. "So far we've received no approaches from the State Department about the matter."

Beeson was responding to questions at a State Department briefing spawned by a German press report that the United States is negotiating with German officials for a packet of compensation for al-Masri.

State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli declined to address the al-Masri case when a reporter asked about it, saying he is constrained about what he can say because the matter is in the courts.

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Taken for a ride in the 'war on terror'
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Since the onset of the "war on terror", the US has detained more than 3,000 people worldwide in a network of secret prisons established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a number of regions, from Southeast Asia to North Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe.

Revelations of this policy have drawn a flood of criticism, with allegations that prisoners held in such countries at the CIA's behest could have been subject to unlawful interrogation.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in Germany, began her tour of Europe this week with the admission that the



US had made "mistakes" in the "war on terror". While insisting that the US did not "condone" torture, she said, "We recognize that any policy [such as rendition of prisoners] will sometimes result in errors."

She could well have been referring to Pakistan, a key ally in this endeavor.

Ever since signing on for the "war on terror", the administration of President General Pervez Musharraf has been under constant pressure to clamp down on the many al-Qaeda-linked and Afghan resistance figures known to have taken shelter in the country.

Pakistan has generally tried to please, at times a little too hard. In the past four years it has rounded up many thousands of suspects, most of whom had nothing to do with terrorism but were simply there to make up the numbers.

But US "intelligence" is catching on.

"The Americans are not fools [in this game] any more. They understand the gimmicks and now they do not take any interest in such pseudo al-Qaeda people," said Khalid Khawaja, one-time close friend of Osama bin Laden and also a former Inter-Services Intelligence official. He now operates the non-governmental organization Defense for Human Rights, which provides legal relief for families affected by the "war on terror".

The case of Abdullah Khadr is a good illustration. He was roughed up in Pakistani custody before being released and returned to Toronto, Canada, a free man. But only after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) refused to accept him.

The 24-year-old Canadian, whose brother is the only Canadian held in the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is the oldest of Ahmed Said Khadr's four sons. The senior Khadr, an accused terrorist financier, was killed in a 2003 shootout with Pakistani forces.

"Abdullah Khadr was questioned at the airport by RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigators, then dropped off at his grandparents' home in Scarborough [a suburb of Toronto] and told he was a 'free man', according to his relatives and lawyer," the Toronto Star reported.

Though US officials told the Star that they might seek to have charges laid against Khadr and have him extradited to the US to face trial, security sources in Pakistan revealed that Abdullah would only have been released from Pakistan after being thoroughly scanned, and the US refused to take him as there was no evidence against him.

According to security officials who spoke to Asia Times Online, there is now a long list of such detainees in Pakistani custody, held under various charges. They are carefully scrutinized by US intelligence, and if found clear they are sent back to their countries of origin.

"Pakistan has flooded CIA planes with hundreds of accused in the past several months. Of those hundreds, only a few dozen have been found guilty. The rest became a liability and were subsequently released," an official said.

These include Mohammed and Khalid, sons of Shiekh Essa, who leads a group in al-Qaeda that believes in violence against Muslim regimes that are allied with the US. Abdur Rehman, a Pakistani, was also recently handed over to Egypt after he was presented to the FBI, which found him a "waste of time".

Earlier, three Dutch-Pakistani brothers, Sajeel Shahid, Adil Shahid and Sohail Shahid, were kept in detention for a long period by Pakistani authorities, but when the US found them useless they were handed over to the Dutch government, and they now live in the Netherlands as free citizens. Sohail Shahid was chairman of the Software Control Board and Adil Shahid was a software advisor in the Pakistani armed forces. As Sajeel Shahid ran a madrassa , they all landed in trouble.

"This is a racket by Pakistani and all other Muslim governments to trade support for their dictatorships in the garb of al-Qaeda arrests. Most of them turned out to be pseudo and therefore exposed the intentions of these regimes. Every now and then they carry out operations in which they show hundreds of people rounded up, and then they present them to the FBI," said Khawaja.

"But now the Americans understand this. Western governments' behavior is far more humane than the so-called Islamic dictatorial regimes.

"I was interviewed by the Canadian media and they are telling me that Abdullah Khadr is moving around on the Canadian streets as a free man. On the contrary, when the US releases Pakistanis from its Cuban prison, even after much screening, they are immediately detained at the airport [in Pakistan] and locked in prisons for months," said Khawaja.

Arrests and operations have invariably preceded all of Musharraf's foreign trips, especially to the US. His present visit to the Middle East was also preceded by a major crackdown on militants in Pakistan.

The most interesting was the alleged killing of Hamza Rabia, said to be a senior al-Qaeda commander. Though the US doubted his killing and al-Qaeda denied it, the Pakistani interior minister termed Rabia's death "100% fact", while the minister of information said it was "200% correct". Not to be outdone, while in the Middle East for an extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Conference in Mecca, Musharraf said it was "500% certain" that Rabia was dead.

With such fluctuating odds, who's betting on Pakistan producing the goods for the US?

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

General gave OK for Able Danger

Former military chief confirms al-Qaida mission

By James Rosen

Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was the military's top commander during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, confirmed that four years before the tragedy he authorized a secret computer data-mining initiative to track down Osama bin Laden and operatives in the fugitive terrorist's al-Qaida network.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11244.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 9, 2005
Before 9/11, Warnings on bin Laden
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - More than three years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, American diplomats warned Saudi officials that Osama bin Laden might target civilian aircraft, according to a newly declassified State Department cable.

The cable was one of two documents released Thursday by the National Security Archive, a research organization at George Washington University that obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act. The other was a memorandum written five days after the 2001 attacks by George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, to his top deputies, titled "We're at War."

The June 1998 cable reported to Washington that three American officials, the State Department's regional security officer, an economics officer and an aviation specialist had met Saudi officials at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh to pass along a warning based on an interview Mr. bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of Al Qaeda, had just given to ABC News.

They said he had threatened in the interview to strike in the next "few weeks" against "military passenger aircraft," mentioning surface-to-air missiles. The cable said there was "no specific information that indicates bin Laden is targeting civilian aircraft," but added, "We could not rule out that a terrorist might take the course of least resistance and turn to a civilian target."

Part of the Tenet memo had been reported previously in Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush At War." The eight-paragraph Tenet letter was a call to arms, declaring "a worldwide war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations" and saying that the effort would require "our absolute and total dedication."

The 2001 document echoed an earlier memo about Al Qaeda that Mr. Tenet had sent on Dec. 4, 1998, to top C.I.A. officials and other intelligence agencies, stating: "We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort." But the national 9/11 commission concluded last year that the 1998 memo had "little overall effect" on mobilizing the agencies to fight terrorism.



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EU concealed deal with US to allow 'rendition' flights
By Justin Stares in Brussels and Philip Sherwell in Washington
(Filed: 11/12/2005)

The European Union secretly allowed the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport "criminals" in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document. The revelation contradicts repeated EU denials that it knew of "rendition" flights by the CIA.

The EU agreed to give America access to facilities - presumably airports - in confidential talks in Athens during which the war on terror was discussed, the original minutes show. But all references to the agreement were deleted from the record before it was published.

The issue of "rendition" flights - in which terror suspects are flown to secret bases and third countries for interrogation - overshadowed last week's fence-mending visit to Europe by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State.

Asked in Parliament last week about reports of 400 suspect flights passing through British airports, Tony Blair said: "In respect of airports, I don't know what you are referring to."

The minutes of the Athens meeting on January 22, 2003, were written by the then Greek presidency of the EU after the talks with a US delegation headed by a justice department official. EU officials confirmed that a full account was circulated to all member governments, and would have been sent to the Home Office.

The document, entitled New Transatlantic Agenda, EU-US meeting on Justice and Home Affairs, details the subjects discussed by the 31 people present. The agenda included the fight against terrorism, drug trafficking and extradition agreements.

According to the full version, "Both sides agreed on areas where co-operation could be improved [inter alia] the exchange of data between border management services, increased use of European transit facilities to support the return of criminal/ inadmissible aliens, co-ordination with regard to false documents training and improving the co-operation in removals."

But this section, and others referring to US policy, were deleted - as a "courtesy" to Washington, according to a spokesman for the EU Council of Ministers.

Tony Bunyan, of the Statewatch civil liberties group which obtained the original document, said: "What kind of facilities are these and how many people work there? That phrase suggests the US is being allowed to use airports in Europe to transport criminals from third countries."

Washington has been angered by EU protests about the movement and alleged abuse of terror suspects. Yesterday, John Bellinger, senior legal adviser to the US State Department, said the convention against torture, which the US has signed, "would generally apply" to prisoners held by the US.

He said on BBC radio: "Some of the allegations more broadly about all sorts of things are ludicrous. These allegations that we have these activities going on in the hundreds over Europe, and that we are going to take people off to be mistreated, are simply untrue."

--------------------
French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence
--------------------

The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say.

By Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writers

December 11 2005

PARIS; More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...0,3678379.story

Defense Facilities Pass Along Reports of Suspicious Activity
'Raw Information' From Military, Civilians Is Given to Pentagon

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 11, 2005; A12



Day after day, reports of suspicious activity filed from military bases and other defense installations throughout the United States flow into the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, a three-year-old Pentagon agency whose size and budget remain classified.

The Talon reports, as they are called, are based on information from civilians and military personnel who stumble across people or information they think might be part of a terrorist plot or threat against defense facilities at home or abroad.

The documents can consist of "raw information reported by concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents," said a 2003 memo signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. The reports "may or may not be related to an actual threat, and its very nature may be fragmented and incomplete," the memo said.

The Talon system is part of the Defense Department's growing effort to gather intelligence within the United States, which officials argue is imperative as they work to detect and prevent potentially catastrophic terrorist assaults. The Talon reports -- how many are generated is classified, a Pentagon spokesman said -- are collected and analyzed by CIFA, an agency at the forefront of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program.

The Pentagon's emphasis on domestic intelligence has raised concerns among some civil liberties advocates and intelligence officials. For some of them, the Talon system carries echoes of the 1960s, when the Pentagon collected information about anti-Vietnam War groups and peace activists that led to congressional hearings in the 1970s and limits on the types of information the Defense Department could gather and retain about U.S. citizens.

"I am particularly apprehensive about the expansion of our military's role in domestic intelligence gathering," said Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission at that panel's final news conference last week, noting that Congress has yet to pay attention to the Talon program. The Pentagon's collection of data, he said, was a "cause for concern," partly because little is known about it publicly.

"Programs such as CIFA, Eagle Eyes and Talon -- names unfamiliar to most Americans -- must receive robust scrutiny by Congress and the media," Ben-Veniste said.

CIFA, according to a Pentagon background paper provided to The Washington Post in response to inquiries, has established standards for Talon reports and handling that "meet intelligence oversight requirements." The statement said "U.S. person information" -- reports concerning people in the United States -- "is collected and retained only as authorized" by presidential executive order.

Spokesmen for the FBI, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and the National Counterterrorism Center all said their principals would not comment on CIFA's Talon activities.

Talon, which stands for "threat and local observation notice," captures raw information about "anomalies, observations that are suspicious . . . and immediate indicators of potential threats to DoD [Defense Department] personnel and or resources," according to an attachment to Wolfowitz's memo.

Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror," according to the program's Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a "neighborhood watch" program for military bases. The Air Force inspector general newsletter in 2003 said program informants include "Air Force family members, contractors, off-base merchants, community organizations and neighborhoods."

In the period after Sept. 11, 2001, an intelligence and security panel working under sponsorship of the Joint Staff adopted Talon to be the Defense Department reporting system "to assemble, process and analyze suspicious activity reports to identify possible terrorist pre-attack activities," according to the background paper.

CIFA, which was created in February 2002, was given responsibility for analyzing the Talon reports. CIFA was originally asked to coordinate policy and oversee the counterintelligence activities of the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Defense agencies such as the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. CIFA's initial role also included the establishment of the common standards for training and collection of data.

Since that time, under its director, David A. Burtt II, CIFA has rapidly expanded its mandate inside the United States as the Pentagon's domestic intelligence activities have grown since Sept. 11.

It is unclear how many Talon reports are filed each year. But just one of the military services involved in the program, the Air Force, generated 1,200 during the 14 months that ended in September 2003, according to the inspector general's newsletter.

Among the types of information worth recording, according to a Talon report guide that accompanied the Wolfowitz memo, are threats or incidents that "may indicate a potential for a threat . . . whether the threat posed is deliberately targeted or collateral." Another trigger for reporting would be attempts by individuals to monitor U.S. facilities, including the taking of pictures, annotating maps or drawings of facilities, use of binoculars "or other vision-enhancing devices" or attempts to obtain "security-related or military specific information."

Other categories for reports were attempts to acquire badges, passes or theft of materials that could be used to manufacture false identification cards or thefts of military uniforms.

A former senior CIA official with wide counterintelligence experience, who is familiar with CIFA's growth, said the agency's mandate is "ambiguous, but the Defense Department is using its assets in its broadest terms." He added that efforts such as Talon "could be a well-intentioned effort and it could develop important information." But, he said that in his view, "the Pentagon has chosen to err on the side of over-collection" of information.

His concern, he said, was who does the intelligence "go to, and what do they do with it."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10414514/site/newsweek/

Intel: Still No Connection

Newsweek
Dec. 19, 2005 issue - Evidence validating claims by the Bush administration of a pre-war relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda seems more elusive than ever. Counterterrorism officials familiar with some of the latest assessments of intel collected in Iraq, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitive subject matter, say that the more U.S. analysts pore through raw info, the less evidence they find of any significant connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's terror network.

Following the invasion of Iraq, U.S. operatives collected millions of documents generated by Saddam's regime. An intel unit run by the Pentagon is in charge of analyzing the material—a cache, two leading GOP legislators recently alleged, so voluminous that it will take years to sort through. Last month Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, suggested that one way to process the data more quickly would be for U.S. intelligence agencies to release large quantities of documentation to the public so people with certain skills (such as foreign-language or document-examining expertise) could help intel officials hunt for gems among heaps of slag. Most of the seized Iraqi material is unclassified, but current U.S. intel policy allows only people with security clearances to examine the material, which Roberts and Hoekstra claim "nearly guarantees that exploitation will take decades, if ever, to complete." A spokesman for Hoekstra said the congressman isn't concerned that making Iraqi documents public would either bolster or undermine the administration's arguments for war: "He just wants to know what they say." Judith Emmel, a spokeswoman for John Negroponte, said the intel czar's office was "carefully examining this very important proposal."

—Mark Hosenball

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051211/ts_af...py_051211183040

Ex-CIA disguise master helps disfigured people Sun Dec 11, 3:16 PM ET



He once created new faces for undercover CIA spies, but today Bob Barron has turned his talents to those really in need: making prosthetic ears, noses, fingers and nipples for people disfigured congenitally or by accidents or cancer.

For over two decades, Barron was a master of disguise who made the fake noses, chins, skin and ears needed to protect the identities of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in the Cold War.

He even created whole faces to make "doubles" -- people who pose as someone else.

That experience could have garnered Barron a million-dollar Hollywood career in movie makeup when he retired in 1993. But he chose a bigger challenge.

"I thought if I could put someone in hiding, which I did in the agency, then a prosthetic device will bring people out of hiding," Barron said.

"If I can change people's identity, I can also give a person his identity back."

Since he created his business, Custom Prosthetic Designs (www.prosthesis.com) 12 years ago, he has made hundreds of false noses, ears and eyes together with the orbits.

His creations abound in his laboratory in Ashburn, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters where he once worked in secret. Numerous casts and prosthetic pieces sit around, and he has two hefty photo albums filled with pictures of his work.

His spy years gave him the basis for his new career. "When I worked for the CIA I put people in hiding, I changed people's identities and also I made doubles.

"Agents depended on the realism of their disguise to keep them alive, this was my responsibility," he said, refusing to give any specifics of missions behind the communist Iron Curtain.

He made complete face disguises like that used by Tom Cruise in "Mission Impossible" -- a better-than-real face mask that took up to four hours to make and a few seconds to tear off when it served its use.

"It's very realistic ... but this kind of disguise is for a short period of time," Barron said.

Barron turned his attention to needy people in his last years at the spy agency.

"I was researching materials in the commercial field to make, maybe, my products better. So I went undercover to the Association of Medical Sculpture in New York, where they were doing a lot of prosthetic devices.

"I saw there so many people disfigured (and) I knew then I wanted to help those people... I knew at that time this will be my second career."

Barron was working on a false ear for five year old Peter Dankelson, who suffers from a birth deformity, when AFP interviewed him.

The Dankelsons drove nine hours from Michigan for a fitting, rather than going through reconstructive surgery which, Barron said, is never as satisfactory.

Barron had baked the new ear in an oven and, taking it from the mold, he applied a special glue and placed it on the left side of the boy's head, all the while explaining to Peter's mother Dede how to remove the ear at night and replace it in the morning.

He then took a palette of colors and a small paintbrush to color the prosthetic ear until it fit perfectly with Peter's face. It was a mirror image of the boy's other ear.

The Barrons broke out into huge smiles at the sight of the new ear, Peter, impatient to go back to school, saying he was proud to "have two ears like Dad".

"Peter is very excited, his glasses will stay on," beamed Dede.



Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.


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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING


Firms get scrutiny over CIA captures
Companies' roles in flights questioned
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | December 11, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Private American contractors who help the CIA capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them to secret jails are increasingly becoming the target of investigations in Europe and at home.

In Italy, Sweden, Germany, and the United States, lawmakers, public prosecutors, and human rights groups are scrutinizing the role of the US companies, which are far easier to track down and hold accountable than the CIA.

In some cases, inquiries focus on companies that appear to be thinly veiled CIA fronts. A lawsuit brought last week by the American Civil Liberties Union against three obscure companies accused of conspiring with the secret agency is seeking financial compensation for a German man who alleges he was wrongfully imprisoned and tortured by the CIA. But in other cases, scrutiny by European investigators and human rights advocates has focused on mainstream companies whose part-time work for the CIA now threatens to leave a permanent mark on their reputations.

The lawsuit and the European inquiries -- which have named a handful of private aircraft charter companies -- could help to peel back the veil of secrecy surrounding the ''rendition" operations, which have provoked widespread criticism and concerns that terrorism suspects are taken to countries where they might be tortured. Last week on a trip to Europe, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the practice as a necessary tactic in the war on terrorism, but underscored the need for secrecy.

In addition to the ACLU lawsuit, attention has also come from Amnesty International, which is investigating hundreds of flights made by private US companies, from an Italian prosecutor, and even from ordinary citizens who look for the private planes.

New-York based Richmor Aviation, one of the nation's oldest aircraft chartering and management companies, has borne the brunt of Europe's outrage over the secret CIA flights and detentions. In February 2003, according to flight records, it provided a private jet and a pilot for a trip from a US military base in Germany to Cairo.

European investigators now believe that flight was part of a CIA rendition mission in Milan that secretly captured Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric suspected of terrorism, and flew him via Germany to Egypt, where he alleged later that he had been tortured.

The case has prompted Italian prosecutors to charge 22 purported CIA operatives with kidnapping, although Italian prosecutors acknowledge they may never be able to find and arrest the agents.

Law enforcement officials in Germany, a newspaper in Portugal, and researchers with Amnesty have begun examining Richmor's flight records for signs that the flights may have violated local or international laws.

The Gulfstream jet that Richmor leased to the CIA, owned by Red Sox part-owner Phillip H. Morse,, is followed by plane-spotting hobbyists all over the world who report on the Internet when they spot the plane landing at airports and track its tail number -- originally N85VM -- in Federation Aviation Administration records. Every trip seems to spark scrutiny, said Mahlon Richards, a co-owner of the company.

''It has a very negative effect on our business," Richards said. ''It is getting out of hand."

Recently Swedish members of parliament announced an inquiry into a 2002 flight by a Richmor jet to Sweden, even though the company says the flight was just a private tour for a wedding party.

Specialists say the CIA uses private companies as a means of hiding agency involvement in secret operations. But those companies are far easier to punish than the CIA, as they are vulnerable to sanctions, crippling lawsuits, or simply bad publicity.

''People are starting to talk about what they are going to do. Are we going to recommend that these planes not be allowed to land?" said Anne Fitzgerald, a senior adviser at Amnesty International, who is helping to analyze the logs of thousands of flights -- including some by Richmor planes -- for a report on rendition due out next year. ''I guess if you are met by Germans waving placards, you are bound to think twice about traveling there."

On Friday, Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro, said in a telephone interview that he is ''very interested in pursuing" any private companies that might have been involved in Nasr's capture, but that he has no information so far about them.

Richmor was a subcontractor with little knowledge about the larger missions of the flights, Richards said in an earlier interview. He referred initial questions about the flights to Computer Sciences Corp., a large California-based federal contractor that provides a range of services, from managing facilities to information technology work. The company also has offices in Singapore, Australia, and Britain.

Last March, an employee for Computer Sciences Corporation who asked not to be named said that the company did not transport terrorism suspects but that it does transport senior US officials who want to keep a low profile.

On Friday, Michael Dickerson, spokesman for the company, said ''as a matter of policy, CSC does not comment on rumors or speculation regarding the existence of contractual relationships with the US intelligence community."

Government contracts involving intelligence matters are almost always kept from the public, said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a public policy, research, and advocacy organization.

''I don't even think you can get a copy of the CIA contract on janitorial services," he said. ''They consider that sensitive information."

The Associated Press reported in September that Richmor was one of 10 private aviation companies to be issued classified contracts in 2001 and 2002 by the Navy Engineering Logistics Office for the ''occasional airlift of [US Navy] cargo worldwide."

The Massachusetts-based Premier Executive Transport Services was also cited as having received a classified contract.

Last week, Premier was named alongside two other private companies in an ACLU lawsuit filed against former CIA director George Tenet and a host of ''John Doe" CIA operatives in another controversial rendition case. The suit was filed on behalf of Khaled al-Masri, a German man who says he was snatched from Macedonia in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he was then beaten and held incommunicado for five months before US officials determined they had captured the wrong man and let him go. Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that Rice had admitted that Masri's abduction had been a ''mistake."

Steven Watt, a lawyer working on the lawsuit, acknowledged that it will be difficult -- if not impossible -- to uncover the true identities of the ''John Doe" operatives he is seeking to sue, but says he is optimistic that he can hold the private companies accountable.

''At least with the corporations, they have agents, we know where these people are," he said.

Watt said that in the case of Premier, which allegedly owned the executive jet that transported Masri to Afghanistan, he will deliver the legal papers to the company's registered agent, the Dedham-based law firm, Hill & Plakias.

Premier has no other physical address. Neither do its officers, who can only be traced to post office boxes in Virginia and Maryland.

Hill & Plakias has become the only public face of the company, bearing the brunt of a public protest in front of its offices in December 2004, after the Globe published an article disclosing Premier's connection to another rendition case in Sweden.

A second company named in the ACLU lawsuit on Masri's behalf is the North Carolina-based Aero Contractors, which allegedly provided the pilot and crew that flew him from Macedonia to Afghanistan. The New York Times has reported that Areo appears to be controlled by the CIA.

The third company named in the Masri suit is Keeler and Tate Management, a Nevada corporation that bought the Gulfstream jet shortly after the plane's Massachusetts connection was brought to light. It has no listed telephone number or physical address, and no phone number or address for its manager, Tyler Edward Tate, could be found.

Watt said that even if Keeler and Tate do not have a phone number, offices, or any employees, the company still has at least one asset that a court can seize to pay off damages to Masri: a plane.



© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://news.amnesty.org/index/ENGAMR511982005

USA: 800 secret CIA flights into and out of Europe
press release, 12/05/2005


Amnesty International today revealed that six planes used by the CIA for renditions have made some 800 flights in or out of European airspace including 50 landings at Shannon airport in the Republic of Ireland.

The information contradicts assurances given last week by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, that Ireland's Shannon airport had not been used for "untoward" purposes, or as a transit point for terror suspects.

The organisation also rejected assertions by the US Secretary of State as she began a four-nation tour of Europe. In a statement today, Ms Rice argued that rendition -- transferring detainees from country to country without legal process -- was permissible under international law. Although the victims of rendition usually end up in countries known to use torture in their interrogations, Ms Rice added that the US government seeks assurances on treatment from receiving nations.

"Flying detainees to countries where they may face torture or other ill-treatment is a direct and outright breach on international law with or without so called "diplomatic assurances". These assurances are meaningless. Countries known for systematic torture, regularly deny the existence of such practices," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International's Senior Director of Regional Programmes.

Amnesty international has obtained flight records for six CIA-chartered planes from September 2001 to September of 2005. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration over this period, these planes landed 50 times in Shannon and took off 35 times, suggesting that some flights were kept secret. Although Shannon airport is used as a refuelling stop for the US military, none of the planes were military transport planes. In total for this period, the six planes made some 800 flights originating or landing in Europe.

The planes include:

Boeing 737-7ET, call sign N313P (Later re-registered as N4476S). The largest of the six planes, with 32 seats, is owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, a CIA front company that also owns N379P. N313P has been frequently seen at US military bases, including in Afghanistan.
Gulfstream V: call sign N379P (Later re-registered as N8068V and then as N44982): this plane, which has made more than 50 trips to the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, has been nicknamed "The Guantanamo Bay Express". It was also used in the CIA rendition of Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari from Sweden to Egypt.
Gulfstream III: N829MG (Later re-registered as N259SK). This plane took dual Syrian-Canadian national Maher Arar from the US to Syria where he was detained for 13 months’ without charge, during which time he was tortured. He was finally released in October 2003.
GulfstreamIV, call sign N85VM (Later re-registered as N227SV), the plane that took Abu Omar to Egypt from Germany after his kidnapping in Italy, turned around and flew to Shannon. The plane's flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

Amnesty International is publishing the information after a challenge by the Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern on Thursday last week. Asked about CIA planes using Shannon airport, the Foreign Minister said, "If anyone has any evidence of any of these flights please give me a call and I will have it immediately investigated." On 17 Feb 2003, for instance, the Gulfstream IV, N85VM took Abu Omar from Ramstein to Cairo, then turned around and flew to Shannon, arriving at 0552 on the 18th.

The latest information confirms other persistent and reliable reports in the media and by non-governmental organizations that CIA-chartered flights are used for renditions. Amnesty International only has partial flight logs for six planes whilst the CIA has been reported to use some 30 leased aircraft.

European countries have allowed these aircraft to land, refuel and take off from their territory. Under international law and standards, all States must cooperate to bring to an end any serious breach of the prohibition of torture and other peremptory rules of international law. They must also refrain from aiding or assisting those carrying out such breaches.

Amnesty International calls on European countries to investigate promptly and thoroughly allegations that their territory has been used to assist CIA-chartered flights secretly transporting detainees to countries where they may face “disappearance”, torture or other ill-treatment. Pending the results of such an investigation, all States must ensure that their territory and facilities are not used to assist rendition flights.

The organization urges all member States of the Council of Europe to provide full cooperation with the investigation carried out by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on allegations about secret detention centres, and provide complete information on their internal law and practices relating to secret rendition flights, as requested by the Secretary General of the Council of Europe.
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CIA secret prisons reports credible: investigator Reuters
A month-old investigation has reinforced allegations the CIA ran a network of secret prisons in Europe, abducted prisoners and transferred them between countries, a European human rights investigator said on Tuesday. Swiss senator Dick Marty, who is looking into the scandal for the 46-nation Council of Europe human rights watchdog, criticized the United States for failing to come clean over the allegations. But he said his main mandate was to look into the actions of European states and that it was hard to believe that certain governments and secret services in Europe had not cooperated with the CIA -- in breach of their human rights obligations. Pressure is growing on Washington and European governments to explain dozens of flights criss-crossing the continent by CIA planes, some suspected of delivering prisoners to jails in third countries where they may have been mistreated or tortured. "Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards," Marty said in a written statement after briefing the Council of Europe's legal affairs and human rights committee in Paris. "The ... information gathered to date (has) reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement, in European countries." Marty said in the statement that his findings justified continuing an in-depth inquiry, but he declined to give any details at a news conference. He urged all member governments to cooperate fully with the investigation, adding that not all -- including his home country Switzerland -- appeared to be doing so. The European Union and at least eight member states said last month they were seeking answers from the United States over the use of bases on the continent for secret prisoner transfers, known as "renditions". The Council of Europe has set governments a three-month deadline to reveal what they know about the mystery flights and about a Washington Post report saying the Central Intelligence Agency ran secret prisons in Eastern Europe. "I find it hard to believe these actions could have taken place without a degree of collaboration or passivity by governments or services operating under them. I am thinking of the secret services," Marty said. It was possible, he added, that the secret services had not informed their governments of any cooperation with the CIA. Marty said the United States had never formally denied the allegations and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had failed to reject them during a recent trip to Europe. "The rapporteur ... deplores the fact that no information or explanation had been provided on this point by Ms Rice during her visit to Europe," he said. Human Right Watch, an international watchdog, has named Poland and Romania as two countries where the CIA may have kept prisoners. Poland and Romania have denied the accusations. Marty said any prisoners held in Europe had now been moved elsewhere by the CIA, including to north Africa.
Illegal CIA transfer of individuals evident: investigator Xinhua
Swiss Investigator Details CIA Findings ABC News
Financial Times - EUobserver.com - CBS News - Forbes - all 228 related »

Kidnapping Study Tends to Fault US Agents New York Times
Preliminary evidence suggests that American agents kidnapped people in European countries, held them there temporarily, and illegally transferred them across the countries' borders, a European investigator said Tuesday. The investigator, Dick Marty, said he believed that the United States was no longer holding detainees in Europe, having transferred them to North Africa in early November, after The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. maintained prisons in at least eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe.
CIA secret prisons reports credible: investigator Reuters
Probe backs CIA prison allegations CNN International
Japan Today - International Herald Tribune - Guardian Unlimited - Muslim American Society - all 443 related »

Bush Admits Mistakes but Defends War Los Angeles Times
He accepts responsibility for acting on flawed intelligence but says the invasion was justified. Aides hope his candor will boost his ratings. President Bush said Wednesday that he accepted responsibility for deciding to wage war in Iraq in part on the basis of faulty intelligence, but that he remained convinced history would conclude he had done the right thing. Speaking hours before Iraqis began arriving at the polls to elect a new government, Bush acknowledged miscalculations and mistakes before and after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush told a group of political leaders and scholars at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson Center. "As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq, and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities." After the invasion, U.S. forces never found the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration had cited as a primary justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power. Even so, Bush said, "given Saddam's history and the lessons of Sept. 11, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat, and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power." Although Bush has previously cited flaws in prewar intelligence and defended his decision to enter Iraq, Wednesday's remarks were his most explicit statement that he bore responsibility for launching a war based in part on what turned out to be false claims. Bush's critics said they were not convinced that the president's original decision was justified, or that today's election would lead to changes that would make America or the Middle East safer. "The election could lead to a change for the better, which is everybody's hope, but it might be a step toward crisis and toward all-out civil war," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a news conference before the president's speech. Levin and other Democrats said the outcome would depend in part on the administration's willingness to pressure Iraq's new government to revise its constitution so that minority Sunnis would feel less excluded from the political process. Bush's speech was the last of four major policy addresses on Iraq, in which he has adopted a strategy of offering a more forthright discussion of some of the flawed assumptions and unexpected setbacks accompanying the war. In three previous speeches in recent weeks, Bush admitted that the training of Iraqi security forces had proved to be more difficult than anticipated, that postwar reconstruction had proceeded in "fits and starts," and that the initial U.S. plan for establishing a new government was not acceptable to Iraqis. In each case, he said, the United States had learned from its mistakes and had adapted to changing circumstances on the ground. This week, Bush also acknowledged for the first time that an estimated 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the war, in addition to 2,140 U.S. military casualties. White House officials hope the president's candor will help counteract a steep slide in his approval ratings, which have bounced about the 40% level for several weeks, as well as turn around declining public support for the war. A majority of Americans said in recent surveys that they considered the war a mistake. A poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center suggested that the president's bully pulpit campaign was producing mixed results. Although 61% of participants said Iraqi security forces were becoming more capable and 58% saw signs of progress in establishing a democracy, 53% thought the United States was losing ground in reducing civilian casualties. In his speech Wednesday, Bush characterized today's parliamentary elections as part of a "watershed moment in the story of freedom," as Iraqis choose 275 members from a field of 7,000 candidates to serve four-year terms in a national assembly. It will be the first permanent government since the U.S.-led invasion. But he cautioned that it might be weeks before the election winners were known, and that it would take more time to form a government. Meanwhile, he said, the insurgents were not likely to lay down their arms. "These enemies are not going to give up because of a successful election," Bush said. "They know that as democracy takes root in Iraq, their hateful ideology will suffer a devastating blow. So we can expect violence to continue." Bush expressed confidence that Iraq's Sunni Muslim population would become increasingly involved in the political process and less inclined to support insurgents' efforts. Many Sunnis initially declined to participate in the formation of an interim assembly and in the drafting of a constitution this year, fearing that the new government would be dominated by Iraq's two other major ethnic groups, the Shiites and the Kurds. Bush cited signs that Sunnis were more engaged in today's elections. "As Sunnis join the political process, Iraqi democracy becomes more inclusive, and the terrorists and Saddamists are becoming marginalized," Bush said. The president rejected demands by some congressional Democrats and other critics to set a firm timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. Doing so, he said, would be a "recipe for disaster" that would lead the Iraqi people to believe the United States no longer supported them, and it would convince the insurgents that they needed only to wait a little longer. He said such a move also would signal to other governments that America was an unreliable ally. In addition, he said, it would demoralize U.S. troops. Bush said he would consider America's mission to be complete when insurgents could no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when Iraqi security forces could protect the country, and when Iraq was no longer a haven for terrorists. Before Bush delivered his remarks, 40 Senate Democrats and one independent signed a letter asking the president to present a plan identifying the remaining political, economic and military benchmarks for achieving victory in Iraq, and to set forth a "reasonable schedule" for achieving them. "He hasn't leveled with the American people or laid out a strategy for success," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters. One of the lawmakers who signed the letter, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), predicted that unless changes were made to the constitution to address the concerns of Sunnis, "there is still a great danger that there will be continued violence and even the possibility of a civil war and a fragmentation of the country."
Speeches on Iraq Balance Resolve and Realism Washington Post
Bush Says Iraq War Justified Even With Faulty Data Bloomberg
Aljazeera.com - Monsters and Critics.com - CNN - Houston Chronicle - all 990 related »

OPEN SOURCE CENTER ANALYSIS: A SAMPLE

The Director of National Intelligence Open Source Center is busily
churning out products for government consumers who care to make use
of them.

"Many OSC products are purely internal analyses, not simply
translations," one registered user told Secrecy News. "Now they
even have a bunch of blogs. I have no time to look at any of it
anymore, but the system obviously has received an infusion of money
lately."

One recent publication, styled an "OSC Analysis," is a profile of Al
Manar, the Lebanese Hizballah television station.

"Al-Manar continues its negative treatment of the United States but
has dropped the more incendiary anti-US material seen in the
past.... Al-Manar's reporting on Iraq adopts a critical tone toward
US policies and actions but [also] condemns insurgent bombings
targeting Iraqi civilians.... Al-Manar refers to Iraqis killed by
both American forces and insurgents as 'martyrs' and highlights
popular Iraqi opposition to such acts."

See "OSC Analysis: Al-Manar Promotes 'Resistance,' Tones Down
Anti-US Material," Open Source Center, December 8, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/12/osc120805.html

Eliot A. Jardines, the new Assistant Deputy Director of National
Intelligence for Open Source, will speak January 17 at the annual
conference of Open Source Solutions (www.oss.net/iop).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 16, 2005
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
By JAMES RISEN
and ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Dealing With a New Threat

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy.

Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Concerns and Revisions

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping.

According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens."

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

The Legal Line Shifts

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

Barclay Walsh contributed research for this article.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Spying Scandal Draws Heat Los Angeles Times
Lawmakers call on Bush to explain his post-9/11 order allowing a secret agency to monitor US citizens without first getting a warrant. Members of Congress demanded Friday that President Bush and his administration explain his decision to permit the country's most secretive intelligence agency to spy on American citizens in the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks without first obtaining warrants. Democrats and some Republicans denounced the administration's action, describing it as an example of Bush's use of the threat of terrorism to assume new legal and intelligence powers and to limit civil liberties. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said he would call congressional hearings as soon as possible. Warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens is "wrong, and it can't be condoned at all," he said. According to former officials familiar with the policy, Bush signed an executive order in 2002 granting new surveillance powers to the National Security Agency — the branch of the U.S. intelligence services responsible for international eavesdropping, and whose existence was long denied by the government. "I want to know precisely what they did: how NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was … and we will go from there," Specter said. After the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the administration sought to ease the restrictions on wiretaps and e-mail surveillance to investigate U.S. citizens suspected of having ties to terrorists. Ordinarily, the government must gain permission from special courts to turn its surveillance on U.S. citizens, either domestically or overseas. The surveillance operation was first reported by the New York Times. "If this article is accurate, it calls into question the integrity and credibility of our nation's commitment to the rule of law," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees. The president and his aides moved quickly Friday to try to contain the controversy. Vice President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill to confer with the leaders of both chambers as well as the chairman and top Democrat on each of the intelligence panels. Those present refused to discuss the session. In a TV interview, Bush said he could not talk about the matter. "We do not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country, and the reason why is that there's an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we're trying to do to stop them," he said on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Bush said he understood that Americans were eager to learn the details of the post-Sept. 11 surveillance operations. But he's "just not going to do it," he said. U.S. intelligence officials also refused to confirm the account. The existence of the highly classified NSA program was confirmed by two former senior U.S. intelligence officials with firsthand knowledge of the effort. The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity. The program was launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was designed to enable the NSA to monitor communications between Americans in the U.S. and people overseas suspected of having ties to terrorist networks. One aim was to take swift advantage of fresh leads collected overseas by the CIA, especially in cases in which an agency raid led to the seizure of a laptop or cellphone containing logs of phone numbers. One of the former intelligence officials said it was designed to enable them "to follow up on anything and exhaust all possible leads" at a time when "the threat level couldn't be any higher." Much of the NSA's activity was driven by CIA operations. "We would say, any call from this number — whether it goes to Brooklyn or Tashkent — listen in on it," the former official said. "The freedom was needed to follow the traffic, the phone traffic, wherever it went." The former official, who defended the program, added: "You have to remember that up until the Patriot Act, [NSA eavesdropping experts] had to hang up even if they had Osama bin Laden talking to an American." The second former official said the program contributed to the apprehension of Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to collaborating with Al Qaeda in a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. The NSA effort was suspended at one point because of objections from a judge, but was subsequently resumed and was still active as recently as several months ago, one of the former officials said. One of the main concerns after Sept. 11, the former officials said, was that obtaining warrants took so long that there was little time to react to fresh intelligence. But, they said, there was concern from the very beginning in some quarters that the program might be overstepping 1970s-era laws protecting the civil liberties of Americans. "You can imagine a program like this was kept in the tightest of compartments," the second former official said. But even within those compartments, he said, there was "uneasiness among some folks, wondering whether this does have appropriate authorization." Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee at the time the eavesdropping program was launched, said in an interview Friday that he was never told about the program during his time on the committee. "I didn't learn about it until well after I was off the Intelligence Committee," said Graham, whose tenure as chairman began several months before the Sept. 11 attacks and ended in January 2003. Graham's statement raises questions about whether the Bush administration provided timely notice to congressional oversight committees, as is required by law. He recalled attending a meeting in early 2002 in Cheney's office about the NSA, but it focused on other operations, such as monitoring overseas e-mail traffic that flowed through Internet service providers based in the U.S. Federal law requires the president to keep Congress "fully and currently informed" of all significant intelligence activities. Legal experts and congressional officials said a program monitoring the electronic communications of Americans would be considered the type of program that would require immediate congressional notification. But some pointed to a loophole in the law that allows a president to withhold information under extreme circumstances. In comments to reporters, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that the administration had followed the law, including briefing lawmakers as proxies for the public. "I certainly respect and understand the need for the American people to understand what their government is doing," he said. "And, obviously, we respect that and we try to make information available to the American people, but we also have a corresponding duty to ensure that national security is protected." Feinstein said that informing a handful of members of Congress who are restricted from reporting or responding to the information in any way did not make the policy legal or constitute congressional oversight. "What is concerning me, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, is if eight people, rather than 535 people, can know there is going to be an illegal act and they were told this under an intelligence umbrella — and therefore, their lips are sealed — does that make the act any less culpable? I don't think so," Feinstein said.
Bush Gave US Agency Authorization To Spy On Americans MTV.com
Bush Approved Eavesdropping, Official Says Forbes
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http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_340.shtml

Commentary Last Updated: Dec 16th, 2005 - 00:54:11

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Ex-FBI translator's case may reveal Plame's crucial CIA role
By Mike Mejia
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Dec 16, 2005, 00:52

For over a year, speculation has run rampant in the U.S. media and in the blogosphere about the CIA leak investigation being conducted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The thought-provoking questions asked by journalists and bloggers alike are many and varied: Who, in addition to Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, was involved in leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media in order to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his refutation of President Bush's Niger uranium claim? What was the role of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in peddling Plame's name to the media? Who forged the Niger uranium documents? What secrets lay inside the eight redacted pages of material in Circuit Judge David Tatel's decision to overide his finding of a reporters' federal shield privilege "[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security"? Was Plame's role at the CIA as a weapons of mass destruction expert critical, as old CIA hands like Larry Johnson contend, or was she just a paper pusher, as the pro-Bush crowd proclaims?

Although many of these questions about the Fitzgerald investigation have yet to be answered, a pair of little noticed but explosive articles authored by Christopher Deliso of antiwar.com, "Plame, Pakistan a Nuclear Turkey and the Necons" and "Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame", go a long way to solving the mystery of Valerie Plame's mission at the agency and may henceforth reveal what likely lies in those mysterious eight redacted pages of Tatel's.

According to Deliso's two sources, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, the outing of Valerie Plame may have severely damaged a CIA operation to monitor a nuclear black market faciliated by the shadowy but well-connected Washington lobby group, the American Turkish Council (ATC). (Those familiar with the Sibel Edmonds case will know the ATC is the very same organization that the former FBI translator heard on wiretaps in connection with various alleged illegal activities, some connected to 9/11.) From Edmonds, Deliso obtained the following admission: "Plame's undercover job involved the organizations [the FBI had been investigating], the ATC (American-Turkish Council) and the ATA (American-Turkish Association) . . . the Brewster Jennings network was very active in Turkey and with the Turkish community in the U.S. during the late 1990s, 2000, and 2001 . . . in places like Chicago, Boston, and Paterson, N.J."

Such a stunning statement by the former FBI contract linguist could be dismissed by those not familiar with the whistleblower's well-established credibility were it not for the fact that Edmonds is, at least in part, corroborated by Ambassador Joseph Wilson himself. In his book the Politics of Truth, Wilson recounts on page 240 that he first met Valerie Plame in 1997, at a reception at the home of the Turkish ambassador which Wilson attended to receive an award from -- you guessed it -- the American Turkish Council. Wilson, of course, never explains in his book what brought Valerie Plame to attend this ATC-sponsored event, but since it is public information that Plame was an undercover CIA operative at the time, the simplest explanation is the most likely one: she was there as part of her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. Although U.S. law prohibits the CIA from conducting espionage operations against U.S. citizens on American soil, nothing would have prohibited Plame from attending such an event in Washington.

These revelations about Plame's surveillance of the American Turkish Council are significant because the ATC is connected to powerful neocons like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (and, to be fair, to powerful anti-Iraq War activists like Brent Scowcroft and Joe Wilson.) And Edmonds implies that at least some on the ATC neocon side of this scandal are heavily involved in the nuclear black market: Feith and Perle, along with former Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman, are fingered by Edmonds as figures of interest.

One only has to recall that Perle and Feith are close allies of Scooter Libby, one of the original leakers of Plame's identity to the media, to conclude that Libby may have had more than one motive in seeing Plame's career and the whole Brewster Jennings operation destroyed. While several Beltway journalists, including the liberal Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, have tried to virtually chase Patrick Fitzgerald out of town by peddling the GOP storyline that going after the Plame leaker(s) amounts to "criminalizing politics," this new evidence suggests that the leak may not have been done in the spirit of good, old fashioned Washington hardball after all: A good case could now be made that outing Plame was an intentional act pepetrated to protect real criminal activity. Casting the investigation in such a light may show that a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act could still be in play.

However much antiwar advocates might wish it, though, we should not expect any of these links between the Sibel Edmonds and Valerie Plame cases to come out in Fitzgerald's court filings any time soon. Ms. Edmonds testimony in her own civil lawsuits has been quashed by the Supreme Court, effectively making anything Edmonds knows a "state secret". And Fitzgerald, as an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, is unlikely to reveal the trail of nuclear secrets that leads from the U.S. through Turkey to Pakistan.

However, there is still hope in getting the truth of the Plame-Edmonds matter out to the public at-large and that hope lies with the alternative media outlets. Besides, Deliso, a recent interview of Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna may indicate at least one other journalist is following the same Brewster Jennings trail. Alexandrovna appears to be looking closely at Plamegate figure Marc Grossman, whom Edmonds claims is "very important" in her own case.

Regardless of what transpires over the next few months in the twin sagas of the CIA agent and the FBI translator, it now appears that those who have called the Plame affair "Treasongate" may have been more right then they knew. While U.S. troops are bogged down in Iraq, a country that had no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to terrorism, some of the very architects of that same illegal war may be implicated in the leaking of U.S. nuclear technology for personal profit. If such shenanigans do not qualify as treason what does?

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http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=8269

December 17, 2005
PATRIOT Act in Limbo Amid New Spying Flap

by William Fisher
A bipartisan majority of senators refused to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act Friday, which was hurriedly passed six weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and gave U.S. law enforcement agencies significant expanded powers to investigate suspected terrorists.

While in favor of most of the act's provisions, senators opposing reauthorization targeted several provisions that they said failed to protect privacy and liberty. These include some of the PATRIOT Act's most controversial provisions that will soon expire, along with the whole legislation.

The bill's Senate supporters, led by Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, were unable to muster the 60 votes needed to cut off debate and overcome a threatened filibuster by Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho. The final vote was 52-47.

The bill that was rejected was the product of a "conference committee" between the Senate and the House of Representatives that attempted to reconcile the different versions of the reauthorization produced by the two legislative bodies. If a compromise among senators is not reached, the 16 PATRIOT Act provisions will expire on Dec. 31.

Opponents of reauthorization appealed for a three-month extension to give House-Senate conferees further time to consider changes. But President George W. Bush, Majority Leader Frist, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have said they will not accept a short-term extension of the law.

Critics of the Act were handed new ammunition for their campaign by a report in Friday's New York Times alleging that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) – part of the Pentagon's intelligence apparatus – to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States.

Previously, the NSA limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders for such investigations.

"I don't want to hear again from the attorney general or anyone on this floor that this government has shown it can be trusted to use the power we give it with restraint and care," said Sen. Feingold, who was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act in 2001.

"It is time to have some checks and balances in this country," shouted Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "We are more American for doing that."

President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and Republican congressional leaders had lobbied fiercely to make most of the expiring PATRIOT Act provisions permanent, adding new safeguards and expiration dates to the two most controversial parts: roving wiretaps and secret warrants for books, records, and other items from businesses, hospitals, and organizations such as libraries.

Feingold, Craig, and other critics said that was not enough, and have called for the law to be extended in its present form so they can continue to try and add more civil liberties safeguards.

The central issue raised by Feingold, Craig, and their supporters is whether Congress has been rigorous enough in assessing how the PATRIOT Act – which the White House calls vital to its war on terror – has been implemented.

Many lawmakers were stunned by recent press reports, denied but not corrected by the Justice Department, that the FBI has issued as many as 30,000 "National Security Letters" (NSLs) since the law was passed. The letters order private and public entities to turn over records and other private data about U.S. citizens – and demand that they remain silent about it.

The government began issuing NSLs in the 1970s as "narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents." The PATRIOT Act expanded those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not necessarily alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The Washington Post reported that the FBI now hands out over 30,000 national security letters per year, "a hundredfold increase over historic norms," which are allowing the government to delve "as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans."

Sen. Specter said the 30,000 figure – first published in the Washington Post – was incorrect. However, he added that he could not disclose the correct number because the information is classified.

Expanded federal powers to seek library, business, and medical records have attracted considerable public and congressional concern. Under the House version of the law, those powers would be subject to judicial review. But, critics say, many other features of the reauthorization bill also deserve more congressional attention.

The controversial issue of library record searches intensified earlier this year, after an American Library Association (ALA) report found that "U.S. law enforcement authorities made more than 200 requests for information from libraries since October 2001."

The ALA said at the time, "What this says to us is that agents are coming to libraries and they are asking for information at a level that is significant, and the findings are completely contrary to what the Justice Department has been trying to convince the public."

The compromise sunsets the PATRIOT Act's infamous "library provisions" in four years, but will not tighten the standards the government needs to subpoena personal information. The government can still obtain personal data merely by showing "relevance" to a terrorism investigation.

Other changes in the law made by House-Senate conferees include allowing intelligence gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to be used as evidence in a criminal prosecution, and establishing a judicial review to determine whether the records are relevant to a terrorist probe before investigators can seize a company's business records.

They also limit the use of roving wiretaps to cases in which officials show that a target may thwart surveillance; establish a judicial review of "national security letters"; and require reports to Congress on how often National Security Letters are used.

Finally, they extend the duration of FISA surveillance of non-U.S. persons; require that people subjected to a "sneak and peek" warrant – in which their property has been searched without their knowledge – be notified within seven days of the search, unless law enforcement applies for an extension.

The Senate's action today will be gratifying to human rights groups. Typical is the American Civil Liberties Union, which has called on senators to reject the compromise agreement on reauthorization and urged that body to vote against a motion for cloture.

Said the ACLU, "Concerns about the lack of substantive reforms to the anti-terrorism law have come from an unusual set of allies, including former Republican Congressman Bob Barr, the American Conservative Union, librarians, and other moderate organizations."

(Inter Press Service)

Pentagon's Intelligence Authority Widens

By Walter Pincus

The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, according to a Pentagon fact sheet on the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, provided to The Washington Post.

CIFA is a three-year-old agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies, to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority.

Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States. The DX also provides "on-site, real time . . . support in hostile areas worldwide to protect both U.S. and host nation personnel from a variety of threats," the fact sheet said.

This is just one illustration of the growth of Pentagon activities in the United States and abroad as part of the terrorism fight. Last week, news accounts revealed that President Bush authorized secret eavesdropping on Americans with suspected ties to terrorist groups.

Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon.

CIFA manages the Pentagon database that includes Talon reports consisting of raw, unverified information picked up by the military services on suspicious activities that could involve terrorist threats. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that the Talon database contained reports on peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations that should have been purged long ago under Defense Department regulations.

A third CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion-dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to a government biography of its director, S. Scott Shumate. Shumate was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's counterterrorism center until 2003. His group has also provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees," according to his biography.

A Pentagon official said none of Shumate's team members questions detainees as part of their job of helping produce threat reports, though they may relay questions to the interrogators.

A former senior Pentagon intelligence official, familiar with CIFA, said yesterday, "They started with force protection from terrorists, but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything . . . where terrorists get their money, who they see, who they deal with."

He added, noting that there had been no congressional oversight of CIFA, that the Defense Department is "too big, too rich an organization and should not be left unfettered. They rush in where there is a vacuum."

A former senior counterterrorism official, also familiar with CIFA, said, "What you are seeing is the militarization of counterterrorism."

CIFA's authority is still growing. In a new move to centralize all counterterrorism intelligence collection inside the United States, the Defense Department this month gave CIFA authority to task domestic investigations and operations by the counterintelligence units of the military services.

The tasking authority allows CIFA to assign Defense counterintelligence organizations "to execute a specific mission or conduct a function falling within that organization's charter," according to a Dec. 1 memo signed by Robert W. Rogalski, acting deputy undersecretary of Defense for counterintelligence and security, that was provided to The Post.

CIFA's new authority will give the agency the ability to propose missions to Army, Navy and Air Force units, which combined have about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian investigators in the United States and abroad. For example, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) has 1,935 "federally credentialed special agents," according to its Web site. The military service agents investigate crime and terrorism.

By comparison, the FBI recently disclosed it has about 11,000 special agents overall, about 4,929 of whom are assigned to terrorism investigation. Of those, the FBI has 103 assigned to its Joint Terrorism Task Force. The Navy Criminal Investigation Service has reported that it has 34 of its operational people assigned to joint terrorism units.

The Air Force OSI special agents work on felony crimes and drug use, but threat detection has increasingly become a focus. "AFOSI manages offensive and defensive activities to detect, counter and destroy the effectiveness of hostile intelligence services and terrorist groups that target the Air Force," according to an official service Web site.

Anti-terrorism teams have been created "to meet the increasing challenges presented by worldwide terrorism," the service said. These groups "provide anti-terrorism, counterterrorism information collections and investigative services to Air Force personnel and units."


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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051220/negotiate_now.php
Negotiate Now
Robert Dreyfuss
December 20, 2005


Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

While President Bush insists that the only options in Iraq are “victory or defeat,” there is in fact a wide spectrum of options in between, most of which center around the idea of a negotiated settlement of the war. And the key to such a deal is to trade a pledge for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for a ceasefire and the participation of the nationalist, mostly Sunni-led resistance in a government of national unity. That’s the message from the resistance itself, which also pledges to guarantee the safe departure of U.S. forces from Iraq in the context of a truce. And they want to talk.

In an exclusive interview, a leading Baathist and former Iraqi ambassador to India and Vietnam has called for direct talks between the Iraqi resistance and the United States. The official, Salah al-Mukhtar, also denounced Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for that organization’s attacks on Iraqi civilians.

The comments by Mukhtar, a former Iraqi journalist and information ministry official close to Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s ex-foreign minister now in U.S. custody, came as preliminary results from the December 15 Iraqi election indicated that the coalition of Iranian-backed Shiite religious parties will land atop the permanent government that will be installed next year. If the Shiite religious coalition does emerge victorious, it is likely to mean an intensification of Iraq’s civil conflict and a reinvigorated Sunni resistance. A government led by the pro-Iranian parties will vastly complicate the possibility of talks with the nationalist resistance, since its main parties—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Al Dawa—are staunchly opposed to talks with the Baath Party and its allies, including former Iraqi military leaders and Sunni resistance groups.

In that case, the United States will face a choice between continuing to defend the militant, fundamentalist Shiite regime or clashing with it in support of all-party talks with the Baathists. Mukhtar, who is currently in Yemen, says that the time is right for the Bush administration to open direct negotiations between the United States and the Baath Party, which, he says, is the backbone of the Iraqi resistance movement. “In any war or major crisis, negotiation is the natural eventuality if the two parties to the conflict are willing to put an end to it by peaceful means,” he told me. “You have in the United States a proverb suggesting that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. … The only way out from the deadly situation in Iraq is to negotiate with the Baath Party and resistance leadership, not with any other party.”

He said the demands of the resistance include the full withdrawal of U.S. forces and the reconstruction of the Iraqi state and its armed forces. “In the context of accepting these demands, the peaceful withdrawal of the U.S. army from Iraq will be guaranteed.” (You can read the transcript of Mukhtar’s remarks at The Dreyfuss Report.)

“The leadership of the resistance has declared in many statements that it is willing to negotiate a peaceful solution for the war in Iraq,” he said. “So the ball is now in the court of the United States of America.”

Mukhtar’s offer of talks follows U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s repeated, recent statements in favor of opening talks with the insurgency—although, so far, his initiative has not been echoed by President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other top U.S. officials. Khalilzad made an important distinction between “insurgents” and “terrorists,” signaling that the U.S. embassy views the Baath- and Sunni-led resistance as distinct from Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda. But Mukhtar stressed that so far there have been no substantial contacts between the United States and the Baathists, and he warned that Khalilzad seems intent on splitting the resistance rather than talking with its chief representatives, by talking only with “minor resistance organizations.” He added that U.S. military commanders, on the other hand, “are fully aware that there will be no real solution for the crisis in Iraq without negotiating the major political and military power in Iraq.”

Mukhtar denounced Zarqawi’s forces for seeking to ignite sectarian strife in Iraq by attacking mosques and other civilian targets. “This is not the work of the resistance,” he said. “The armed resistance has condemned many times any attack on civilians, and repeatedly said that the attacks should be concentrated only on invasion armies and the Iraqi agents supporting the invasion.” His comments reflect growing anger and bitterness directed at Zarqawi’s forces in Iraq from the Sunni community. Over the past year, those tensions have erupted into gun battles and open political warfare between the secular Iraqi resistance and the jihadists allied to Al Qaeda.

The resistance inside Iraq, he said, was prepared as early as 2001, when it became clear to the Iraqi leadership that the United States was preparing to invade the country. The Iraqi government organized a vast clandestine force and stockpiled large quantities of weapons and supplies. According to Mukhtar, there is a well-organized underground Baathist central command, based entirely inside Iraq, led mostly by former Iraqi officials including Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who serves as field commander.

The fact that quiet talks between U.S. field commanders, CIA officers and State Department officials with Iraqi resistance groups have been underway since early this year could be a prelude to more serious, all-party talks on ending the war. But to make those talks lead to something productive, the president and the secretary of state have to call for them and endorse them. And they need to expand the proposed February meeting organized by the Arab League into an inclusive forum at which representatives of the Iraqi resistance can take part.

CIA's Goss Reportedly Warned Ankra Of Iranian Threat:

During his recent visit to Ankara, CIA Director Porter Goss reportedly brought three dossiers on Iran to Ankara. Goss also asked Ankara to be ready for a possible US air operation against Iran and Syria.
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=89033

Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program Washington Post
The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources. Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

U.S. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, expects officials from NSA and the Justice Department to explain the warrantless spying. (AP)
"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?" Such comments underscored the continuing questions among judges about the program, which most of them learned about when it was disclosed last week by the New York Times. On Monday, one of 10 FISA judges, federal Judge James Robertson, submitted his resignation -- in protest of the president's action, according to two sources familiar with his decision. He will maintain his position on the U.S. District Court here. Other judges contacted yesterday said they do not plan to resign but are seeking more information about the president's initiative. Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, told fellow FISA court members by e-mail Monday that she is arranging for them to convene in Washington, preferably early next month, for a secret briefing on the program, several judges confirmed yesterday. Two intelligence sources familiar with the plan said Kollar-Kotelly expects top-ranking officials from the National Security Agency and the Justice Department to outline the classified program to the members. The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court. The highly classified FISA court was set up in the 1970s to authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects within the United States. Under the law setting up the court, the Justice Department must show probable cause that its targets are foreign governments or their agents. The FISA law does include emergency provisions that allow warrantless eavesdropping for up to 72 hours if the attorney general certifies there is no other way to get the information. Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow. Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the White House had tried but failed to find a way. One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it. "For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap," said the official. "They couldn't dream one up." The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites. "There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States." The American Civil Liberties Union formally requested yesterday that Gonzales appoint an outside special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts and violations of laws as a result of the spying effort. Also yesterday, John D. Negroponte, Bush's director of national intelligence, sent an e-mail to the entire intelligence community defending the program. The politically tinged memo referred to the disclosure as "egregious" and called the program a vital, constitutionally valid tool in the war against al Qaeda. Benson said it is too soon for him to judge whether the surveillance program was legal until he hears directly from the government. "I need to know more about it to decide whether it was so distasteful," Benson said. "But I wonder: If you've got us here, why didn't you go through us? They've said it's faster [to bypass FISA], but they have emergency authority under FISA, so I don't know." As it launched the dramatic change in domestic surveillance policy, the administration chose to secretly brief only the presiding FISA court judges about it. Officials first advised U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the head of FISA in the fall of 2001, and then Kollar-Kotelly, who replaced him in that position in May 2002. U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days. "Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants. "I share the other judges' concerns," he said. But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it. "I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics." Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
US judge quits in protest against spying The Statesman
Judge quits special surveillance court KVOA.com
Eyewitness News - Monsters and Critics.com - Grand Forks Herald - Edmonton Sun - all 402 related »

Church Committee Reports:

These 14 published reports of the Church Committee contain a wealth of information on the formation, operation, and abuses of U.S. intelligence agencies.
http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/r...ts/contents.htm

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/arti...41&parent_id=23

US ‘must’ come clean about CIA secret prisonsPublished: Thursday, 22 December, 2005, 08:43 AM Doha Time

KABUL: Afghanistan’s main rights group demanded yesterday the US come clean about reported secret detention centres in the country while an Afghan official played down the existence of such facilities.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, citing inmates as sources, said in a report this week that the US operated a secret prison near the capital Kabul where detainees were abused and tortured as recently as 2004.

The watchdog’s Asia research director Sam Zarifi said at the weekend that US forces were indefinitely detaining and mistreating people without charge at various undisclosed bases around the country.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the allegations at a media briefing in Kabul yesterday with President Hamid Karzai, who, after translating the question for him, said: “I am sure you don’t have them, say you don’t have them.”

“If I had, then they would be secret,” Rumsfeld replied.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said the allegations were credible and shocking.

“The revelation of secret detention centres is very shocking and concerning,” commissioner and spokesman Nader Nadery said.

“We demand the Afghan government and US-led coalition force make public the name and locations of these detention facilities,” he said.

Nadery said the commission had not received complaints from released inmates about abuse in detention facilities but had been told by some prisoners that they had been held in places outside of known US bases.

“Some prisoners released from US detention said that they were held in places which were not in the known US fire bases in the provinces,” he said. He would not give further details.

A high-ranking Afghan intelligence official, however, cast doubt on the existence of secret detention facilities.

“I don’t think that the US - the coalition or the CIA - are running such facilities,” he said on condition of anonymity. “The CIA only gathers information and when they detain suspects, they hand them over to us for questioning.”

The US military in Afghanistan could not comment.

Human Rights Watch said its attorneys had been told by eight detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba that they were held at a site near Kabul which they called “Dark Prison.” – AFP




Gulf Times Newspaper, 2005 ©

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/...h/index_np.html

"Never have the freedoms we cherish seemed so imperiled"
In an impassioned speech, Sen. Byrd voices his shock and dismay over the Bush administration's practice of spying on U.S. citizens.

Editor's note: Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., gave the following speech on Dec. 19, 2005.

Dec. 21, 2005 | Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous president. It has become apparent that this administration has engaged in a consistent and unrelenting pattern of abuse against our country's law-abiding citizens, and against our Constitution.

We have been stunned to hear reports about the Pentagon gathering information and creating databases to spy on ordinary Americans whose only sin is to choose to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. Those Americans who choose to question the administration's flawed policy in Iraq are labeled by this administration as "domestic terrorists."

We now know that the FBI's use of national security letters on American citizens has increased 100-fold, requiring tens of thousands of individuals to turn over personal information and records. These letters are issued without prior judicial review, and provide no real means for an individual to challenge a permanent gag order.

Through news reports, we have been shocked to learn of the CIA's practice of rendition, and the so-called black sites, secret locations in foreign countries where abuse and interrogation have been exported, to escape the reach of U.S. laws protecting against human rights abuses.

We know that Vice President Dick Cheney has asked for exemptions for the CIA from the language contained in the McCain torture amendment banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Thank God Dick Cheney's pleas have been rejected by this Congress.

Now comes the stomach-churning revelation through an executive order that President Bush has circumvented both Congress and the courts. He has usurped the third branch of government -- the branch charged with protecting the civil liberties of our people -- by directing the National Security Agency to intercept and eavesdrop on the phone conversations and e-mails of American citizens without a warrant, which is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. He has stiff-armed the people's branch of government. He has rationalized the use of domestic, civilian surveillance with a flimsy claim that he has such authority because we are at war. The executive order, which has been acknowledged by the president, is an end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it unlawful for any official to monitor the communications of an individual on American soil without the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What is the president thinking? Congress has provided for the very situations which the president is blatantly exploiting. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, housed in the Department of Justice, reviews requests for warrants for domestic surveillance. The court can review these requests expeditiously and in times of great emergency. In extreme cases, where time is of the essence and national security is at stake, surveillance can be conducted before the warrant is even applied for.

This secret court was established so that sensitive surveillance could be conducted, and information could be gathered without compromising the security of the investigation. The purpose of the FISA court is to balance the government's role in fighting the war on terror with the Fourth Amendment rights afforded to each and every American.

The American public is given vague and empty assurances by the president that amount to little more than "trust me." But we are a nation of laws and not of men. Where is the source of that authority he claims? I defy the administration to show me where in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the U.S. Constitution, they are allowed to steal into the lives of innocent America citizens and spy.

When asked yesterday [Dec. 18] what the source of this authority was, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had no answer. Secretary Rice seemed to insinuate that eavesdropping on Americans was acceptable because FISA was an outdated law, and could not address the needs of the government in combating the new war on terror. This is a patent falsehood. The USA Patriot Act expanded FISA significantly, equipping the government with the tools it needed to fight terrorism. Further amendments to FISA were granted under the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002. In fact, in its final report, the 9/11 Commission noted that the removal of the pre-9/11 "wall" between intelligence officials and law enforcement was significant in that it "opened up new opportunities for cooperative action."

The president claims that these powers are within his role as commander in chief. Make no mistake, the powers granted to the commander in chief are specifically those as head of the armed forces. These warrantless searches are conducted not against a foreign power, but against unsuspecting and unknowing American citizens. They are conducted against individuals living on American soil, not in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is nothing within the powers granted in the commander-in-chief clause that grants the president the ability to conduct clandestine surveillance of American civilians. We must not allow such groundless, foolish claims to stand.

The president claims a boundless authority through the resolution that authorized the war on those who perpetrated the September 11 attacks. But that resolution does not give the president unchecked power to spy on our own people. That resolution does not give the administration the power to create covert prisons for secret prisoners. That resolution does not authorize the torture of prisoners to extract information from them. That resolution does not authorize running black-hole secret prisons in foreign countries to get around U.S. law. That resolution does not give the president the powers reserved only for kings and potentates.

I continue to be shocked and astounded by the breadth with which the administration undermines the constitutional protections afforded to the people, and the arrogance with which it rebukes the powers held by the legislative and judicial branches. The president has cast off federal law, enacted by Congress, often bearing his own signature, as mere formality. He has rebuffed the rule of law, and he has trivialized and trampled upon the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed to Americans by the U.S. Constitution.

We are supposed to accept these dirty little secrets. We are told that it is irresponsible to draw attention to President Bush's gross abuse of power and constitutional violations. But what is truly irresponsible is to neglect to uphold the rule of law. We listened to the president speak last night on the potential for democracy in Iraq. He claims to want to instill in the Iraqi people a tangible freedom and a working democracy, at the same time he violates our own U.S. laws and checks and balances? President Bush called the recent Iraqi election "a landmark day in the history of liberty." I dare say in this country we may have reached our own sort of landmark. Never have the promises and protections of liberty seemed so illusory. Never have the freedoms we cherish seemed so imperiled.

These renegade assaults on the Constitution and our system of laws strike at the very core of our values, and foster a sense of mistrust and apprehension about the reach of government.

I am reminded of Thomas Paine's famous words, "These are the times that try men's souls."

These astounding revelations about the bending and contorting of the Constitution to justify a grasping, irresponsible administration under the banner of "national security" are an outrage. Congress can no longer sit on the sidelines. It is time to ask hard questions of the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the director of the CIA. The White House should not be allowed to exempt itself from answering the same questions simply because it might assert some kind of "executive privilege" in order to avoid further embarrassment.