1 Boring Old Man

Congress and Waterboarding
Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to ‘torture’
Wall Street Journal
May 15, 2009
By KARL ROVE

Someone important appears not to be telling the truth about her knowledge of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). That someone is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The political persecution of Bush administration officials she has been pushing may now ensnare her.

Here’s what we know. On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee’s ranking Democrat, on EITs including waterboarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.

In December 2007, Mrs. Pelosi admitted that she attended the briefing, but she wouldn’t comment for the record about precisely what she was told. At the time the Washington Post spoke with a "congressional source familiar with Pelosi’s position on the matter" and summarized that person’s comments this way: "The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage – they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice – and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."

When questions were raised last month about these statements, Mrs. Pelosi insisted at a news conference that "We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." Mrs. Pelosi also claimed that the CIA "did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true." She had earlier said on TV, "I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used."

The Obama administration’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss have both disputed Mrs. Pelosi’s account. In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA’s 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed." Note the past tense — "had been employed."

Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were told at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission." He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi "questioned whether we were doing enough" to extract information.

We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi’s top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Mr. Sheehy was almost certain to have told Mrs. Pelosi. He has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings. So is the speaker of the House lying about what she knew and when? And, if so, what will Democrats do about it?

If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn’t she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA’s use of them? If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?…

Speaker’s Comments Raise Detainee Debate to New Level
By Dan Balz
Washington Post
May 15, 2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s extraordinary accusation that the Bush administration lied to Congress about the use of harsh interrogation techniques dramatically raised the stakes in the growing debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies even as it raised some questions about the speaker’s credibility. Pelosi’s performance in the Capitol was either a calculated escalation of a long-running feud with the Bush administration or a reckless act by a politician whose word had been called into question. Perhaps it was both.

For the first time, Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that in 2003 she was informed by an aide that the CIA had told others in Congress that officials had used waterboarding during interrogations. But she insisted, contrary to CIA accounts, that she was not told about waterboarding during a September 2002 briefing by agency officials. Asked whether she was accusing the CIA of lying, she replied, "Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States."

Washington now is engaged in a battle royal of finger-pointing, second-guessing and self-defense, all over techniques President Obama banned in the first days of his administration. Both sides in this debate believe they have something to prove — and gain — by keeping the fight alive. Both sides have champions and villains. Pelosi has become a lightning rod for criticism from conservatives, and a hero to the left, much as former vice president Richard B. Cheney has become a target of the left and the darling of many on the right.

The speaker’s charges about the CIA’s alleged deception and her shifting accounts of what she knew and when she knew it are likely to add to calls for some kind of independent body to investigate this supercharged issue, though Obama and many members of Congress would like to avoid a wholesale unearthing of the past at a time when their plates are full with pressing concerns…

We tortured to justify war

^{Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.}

Salon

By Joe Conason

May 14, 2009 | The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked – at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far – is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney’s direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence – the aims that he constantly emphasizes – but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida’s operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship [which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam’s Baath Party and Osama bin Laden’s jihadists]. Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA’s black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney’s assertions has come from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, Wilkerson says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become “compliant” – in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse – the vice-president’s office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration’s newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won’t be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson’s essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi’s capture, the vice-president’s office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled Dulaymi’s interrogation.

The same kind of demands were directed toward interrogators in Guantánamo, according to the testimony of former Army psychiatrist Charles Burney, who testified that he and his colleagues interrogating prisoners at the detention camp felt "pressure" to produce proof of the mythical link.

"While we were there, a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," he told the Army inspector general. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." In other words, they were instructed to use abusive techniques, as recounted in the investigation of torture by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions – and in particular the questionable assertions by al-Libi – were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell’s crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter – as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves – because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.

IRAQ: Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
Inter Press Service News Agency
Analysis – By Jim Lobe

Feb 20, 2004 | For those still puzzling over the whys and wherefores of Washington’s invasion of Iraq 11 months ago, major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were offered this week by two central players in the events leading up to the war. Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the Bush administration’s drive to war in Iraq had very little, if anything, to do with the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda – the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for the invasion.

Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and U.S. retired Gen Jay Garner, who was in charge of planning and administering post-war reconstruction from January through May 2002, suggest that other, less public motives were behind the war, none of which concerned self-defence, pre-emptive or otherwise. The statement by Chalabi, on whom the neo-conservative and right-wing hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office are still resting their hopes for a transition that will protect Washington’s many interests in Iraq, will certainly interest congressional committees investigating why the intelligence on WMD before the war was so far off the mark.

In a remarkably frank interview with the London ‘Daily Telegraph’, Chalabi said he was willing to take full responsibility for the INC’s role in providing misleading intelligence and defectors to President George W. Bush, Congress and the U.S. public to persuade them that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States that had to be dealt with urgently. The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. ”We are heroes in error”, he said.

”As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful”, he told the newspaper. ”That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants”.

It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretences they knew, or had reason to know, were false. Indeed, it now appears increasingly that defectors handled by the INC were sources for the most spectacular and detailed – if completely unfounded – information about Hussein’s alleged WMD programmes, not only to U.S. intelligence agencies, but also to U.S. mainstream media, especially the ‘New York Times’, according to a recent report in the New York ‘Review of Books’.

Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld – Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Feith’s office was home to the office of special plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a compelling threat to the United States.

OSP also worked with the defence policy board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend.

DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicising through the media reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.

Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion, according to the ‘Wall Street Journal’, was how 9/11 could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq.

The OSP and a parallel group under Feith, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, have become central targets of congressional investigators, according to aides on Capitol Hill, while unconfirmed rumours circulated here this week that members of the DPB are also under investigation.

The question, of course, is whether the individuals involved were themselves taken in by what Chalabi and the INC told them or whether they were willing collaborators in distorting the intelligence in order to move the country to war for their own reasons.
It appears that Chalabi, whose family, it was reported this week, has extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than 400 million dollars in reconstruction contracts, is signalling his willingness to take all of the blame, or credit, for the faulty intelligence.

But one of the reasons for going to war was suggested quite directly by Garner – who also worked closely with Chalabi and the same cohort of U.S. hawks in the run-up to the war and during the first few weeks of occupation – in an interview with ‘The National Journal’. Asked how long U.S. troops might remain in Iraq, Garner replied, ”I hope they’re there a long time”, and then compared U.S. goals in Iraq to U.S. military bases in the Philippines between 1898 and 1992. ”One of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights with [the Iraqi authorities]”, he said. ”And I think we’ll have basing rights in the north and basing rights in the south … we’d want to keep at least a brigade”…

Cheney’s MAD
Perrspectives
May 13, 2009

Dick Cheney’s MAD, just not in the way you think. As Time, the AP and virtually every pundit across the political spectrum debate the meaning of Cheney’s ubiquity on your television screen, it may be an old Cold War theory which best explains his strategy. The former vice president isn’t merely trying to rewrite history or work the jury with his repeated claims that torture "saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives" and that "nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or illegal about what was done." With his brinksmanship, Dick Cheney is threatening the political equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction to produce a stalemate he apparently believes he will win.

Cheney’s escalating campaign against the Obama administration began within days of the election. His charge that President Obama will "raise the risk to the American people of another attack" has reached a crescendo with appearances on CBS and Fox News this week. And while Cheney Tuesday blasted Obama’s approach on Iran as a "giant conspiracy" which is "bound to fail," next week at the American Enterprise Institute he will offer a full-throated defense of the Bush administration’s national security policies, including its regime of detainee torture.

All of which begs the question: why would a wildly unpopular figure who has proclaimed he has no future political ambitions mount such an unprecedented public campaign to criticize his successors?

Over on the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen ponders "is Dick running for something?" For its part, the AP explores the gamut of explanations, ranging from the sincere ("it could be that Cheney really sees a threat out there"), routine revisionist history ("He sees himself in a position where his legacy is called into question, and he wants to get his story out before history gels") to the Freudian:

"This is not the same level of control and discipline Cheney’s exercised over the last 40 years," said John Baick, professor of history at Western New England College. "I think it grows out of a deep sense of hurt and betrayal."

Time’s Michael Duffy joins in the burgeoning "meaning of Dick" cottage industry to explain why Angler is now "so chatty all of a sudden." Noting Cheney’s belief that "in politics as well the best defense is often a good offense," Duffy rightly concludes Cheney is seeking to "refocus the question about waterboarding and other interrogation techniques from whether they were legal to whether they worked."

But lost in these analyses is Cheney’s real objective and strategy is his twilight struggle against the Obama administration. For that, one need only look to Dick Cheney’s Cold Warrior roots and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

By raising the stakes over the torture issue with his repeated appearances, Dick Cheney isn’t merely daring Democratic Congress and the Obama administration to investigate him and other members of the Bush torture team. Cheney’s is a scorched earth game he believes he can win.

Cheney’s MAD strategy goes something like this. If the DOJ or Congress proceeds with torture probes or prosecutions, Republican retaliation will be massive and total. Nominees will be blocked, legislation filibustered and the gridlock in Washington permanent. The blame for the carnage, the theory goes, will go to the side (in this case, Democrats) which launched the first strike. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

With the prospect of an atomic political conflict assured of leaving both parties devastated, stalemate is the only alternative. And in Dick Cheney’s case, stalemate equals victory. By ratcheting up the public pressure, Cheney is forcing Obama’s hand: act on torture, or back down. And by backing down, Obama would in essence codify the Bush administration’s criminality. In the unsteady equilibrium which would endure, the Bush torture team would appear to be right, seemingly vindicated. Like the Soviet threat, the risk from torture prosecution would be successfully contained. In his eyes, Cheney’s omnipresence isn’t a nightmare for Republicans, but their path back.

As the Associated Press noted, "Cheney seemed even more exercised after Obama released memos detailing how ‘enhanced interrogation’ became a tactic used during the Bush administration."

Cheney’s MAD, all right. Just not in the way most people think.

But mostly, my impression of Dick Cheney right now is that he’s doing what Dick Cheney does. What I mean is that this is simply part of his character – his personality. An influential Psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, once remarked how astounding it is that people do the same things over and over. In psychodynamic circles, it’s called "character" or "the repetition compulsion" or "structure." Each of us has a set of tools we use when faced with problems or conflict, and we use them over and over. Cheney mounts campaigns. Remember the lead-up to the Iraq War? He was everywhere. It’s what my friend means when he says, "it’s his nature." He’s doing the exact same thing now that he did when he got us into this mess. Mounting a campaign, mobilizing evidence [true or false]. Attacking his enemies. Calling on friends. It’s "the Cheney Way." Discrediting Pelosi is the this-time version of discrediting Joe Wilson. All this speculation about his motive is moot. What matters is what he does [over and over]. It’s often called bully-ism…

Aristotle would call this a "fatal flaw." The very aspect of his Cheney-ness that got him [us] in this mess is running full bore again. What’s different? Last time, we listened to the content of his campaign. This time, all we can talk about is his methodology. We’re on to him now…

See Why the Caged Bird Sang for another rather macabre take on this story.
And Then there’s last night’s Rachel Maddow show interviewing the principals.

Cheney’s Role Deepens
The Daily Beast
by Robert Windrem
May 14, 2009

Former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reports that the vice president’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner who was suspected of knowing about a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam.

Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports exclusively in The Daily Beast that:

• Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.
• The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.
• Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.

“To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest,” Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels [not in the CIA],” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case…

Fog Finally Lifting On Torture-For-Iraq/9-11 Link?
by: Paul Rosenberg
Thu May 14, 2009 at 23:33

Downing Street Memos, Wilson/Plame and The Original Niger Forgeries

In the past, Olbermann has already covered the Downing Street Memos, including the one that describes Bush’s intention to invade Iraq no matter what and his willingness to stage a phony incident to justify the invasion.  Thus Olbermann is quite aware of at least some of the larger framework of obsessive devotion to constructing a fabricated case no matter what.  Whether he will proceed to draw that larger picture over the coming days remains to be seen.

However, at least two further connections seem obvious to make, at least in terms of demanding further examination.  First is the fact that these efforts took place after the invasion of Iraq, which puts them in the same time-frame as the outing of Valerie Plame, which in turn suggests a very different larger framework for Cheney’s activities at the time than had previously ever been considered.

It had always seemed somewhat strange how wildly Cheney seemed to have over-reacted to Joe Wilson, immediately suspecting an almost Illuminati-style conspiracy against him.  Sure, we knew that Cheney was almost psychotically paranoid, but why get so spectacularly bent out of shape at this point, over this issue so close on the heels of Bush’s triumphant "Mission Accomplished" moment.  But, of course, if Cheney were simultaneously trying to put the finishing touches on a manufactured case for war, then the reaction to Wilson and the outing of Plame no longer seem puzzling at all.  Indeed, they are exactly what we’d expect from Cheney if he were not simply sitting back in satisfaction, and scheming over who to invade next, but instead was trying to put the finishing touches on the Iraq fabrication.

The second connection that cries out for another investigative look is the origins of the Niger document forgeries, which were the impetus for Wilson’s investigations in the first place.  This has never been the focus of any sort of serious attention by anyone excepts us DFHs.  It would be very nice indeed to see that change, once and for all.

With President Obama doing everything short of switching parties to try to shut down any questioning of what went on during the last Administration, it seems clear that we need to mount an intense push in support of those, like Whitehouse, who still believe in the rule of law.  This may well be the most important single battle of Obama’s Administration, because all other progressive hopes may very well ride on the question of whether he can be forced to abandon his fast-growing attachment to the worst aspects of Versailles, by the only means that now seems feasible, which is, quite simply, making it radioactive for him to continue doing so.

The Truth About Richard Bruce Cheney
The Washington Note
by: Lawrence Wilkerson
[former Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, Secretary of State]
May 13 2009

This is a guest post exclusive to The Washington Note by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Lawrence Wilkerson is also Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor at the College of William & Mary.

Last night I was on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC at the top of the hour. But before I came on, through the earpiece I listened to the five minutes that Rachel sketched as a lead-in. Most of it was videotape from the last few days of former Vice President Dick Cheney extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership. I had heard some of it earlier of course but not all of it and not in such a tightly-packed package.

Let’s just say that five minutes of the Sith Lord was stunningly inaccurate. So, when I got home last night, I thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP’s office. Here it is.

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the "seven and a half years" after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.

There was absolutely no policy priority attributed to al-Qa’ida by the Cheney-Bush administration in the months before 9/11. Counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke’s position was downgraded, al-Qa’ida was put in the background so as to emphasize Iraq, and the policy priorities were lowering taxes, abrogating the ABM Treaty and building ballistic missile defenses.

Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11–much touted by Cheney–is due almost entirely to the nation’s having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to "the Cheney method of interrogation."

Those troops have kept al-Qa’ida at bay, killed many of them, and certainly "fixed" them, as we say in military jargon. Plus, sadly enough, those 200,000 troops present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qa’ida than the United States homeland. Testimony to that fact is clear: almost 5,000 American troops have died, more Americans than died on 9/11. Of course, they are the type of Americans for whom Cheney hasn’t much use as he declared rather dramatically when he achieved no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.

Third–and here comes the blistering fact–when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

My investigations have revealed to me–vividly and clearly–that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop. There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Less important but still busting my chops as a Republican, is the damage that the Sith Lord Cheney is doing to my political party. He and Rush Limbaugh seem to be its leaders now. Lindsay Graham, John McCain, John Boehner, and all other Republicans of note seem to be either so enamored of Cheney-Limbaugh (or fearful of them?) or, on the other hand, so appalled by them, that the cat has their tongues. And meanwhile fewer Americans identify as Republicans than at any time since WWII. We’re at 21% and falling–right in line with the number of cranks, reprobates, and loonies in the country. When will we hear from those in my party who give a damn about their country and about the party of Lincoln?

When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your 70 million. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Shoot quail with your friends–and your friends. Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you’ve done–to the country and to its Republican Party.

— Lawrence Wilkerson

Obama Pushes Broad Rules for Oversight of Derivatives
New York Times
By STEPHEN LABATON and JACKIE CALMES
May 13, 2009

In its first detailed effort to overhaul financial regulation, the Obama administration on Wednesday sought new authority over the complex financial instruments, known as derivatives, that were a major cause of the financial crisis and have gone largely unregulated for decades.

The administration asked Congress to move quickly on legislation that would allow federal oversight of many kinds of exotic instruments, including credit default swaps, the insurance contracts that caused the near-collapse of the American International Group.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, said the measure should require swaps and other types of derivatives to be traded on exchanges and backed by capital reserves, much like the capital cushions that banks must set aside in case a borrower defaults on a loan. Taken together, the rules would likely make it more expensive for issuers, dealers and buyers alike to participate in the derivatives markets. The proposal will probably force many types of derivatives into the open, reducing the role of the so-called shadow banking system that has arisen around them.

“This financial crisis was caused in large part by significant gaps in the oversight of the markets,” Mr. Geithner said in a briefing. He said the proposal was intended to make the trading of derivatives more transparent and give regulators the ability to limit the amount of derivatives that any company can sell, or that any institution can hold…

_{Wendy Graham, Phil Graham, and friends…}

It’s hard to imagine that they didn’t know what they were doing. She opened the door in the last days of her tenure at the FCTC, right before going on the Board of Enron. He poked his legislative part through Congress when Clinton was almost out of office avoiding any Congressional debate.

If Derivatives remains a meaningless term to you, there are a few articles that offer clarification. This one in the Village Voice is the first one that made any sense to me:

What Cooked the World’s Economy?
It wasn’t your overdue mortgage
By James Lieber
January 28, 2009

I think some of the terms used in this world must’ve been chosen to make what they were actually doing more opaque: Derivatives, "Complex" or "Exotic" Financial Instruments.  What is the difference between some legitimate investment, or a reasonable Insurance Policy, and these new financial toys?  In the Stock Market, one buys and sells actual Stock Certificates, paper representations that are directly "secured" by some incremental ownership in the enterprise named on the certificate. In the Derivatives World, there’s no connection to ownership. One is "placing side bets." Likewise, in the Commodities Market, somewhere down the line, there’s some actual object involved. So if you’re trading Onion Futures, real onions are involved. In the Derivative world, what’s being bought and sold are bets on the price of onions. In an Insurance Office, you insure your car. In the Derivative world, you can buy Insurance on somebody else’s car. So Derivative means "derived from." What you can buy is not limited by ownership, it’s only limited by what someone is willing to sell you. So, theoretically, in that world, I can buy auto insurance on the worst driver in North America [with no ownership in his car], and collect when he crashes [with no need to spend the money on getting anything fixed].

What fool would sell you such a Derivative? Apparently, there are plenty of such fools. In the housing market which was on a steady march upward, there were more than enough fools. In the past, people who defaulted on loans lost their houses which were then resold. The intrinsic value was maintained. That worked so long as the market value of houses either stayed the same or rose. It was a good bet. But the problem became a cycle. The availability of easy money, easy loans, drove the housing market to vastly falsely inflated values, way above any intrinsic value. The house value no longer assured that the loan could be retrieved. So, the Derivative Market destroyed "real value." At some inevitable point, the "sure bet" of the credit default swaps [insurance on these shaky, overvalued mortgages] became the worst bet in the world. It was like selling life insurance without factoring in the fact that , sooner or later, people actually die.

The clever names used to describe this market no longer hide the fact that it’s just a Casino, a betting parlor, where gamblers are drawn in by the lure of fast money. Problem is, it was your money. Retirement Plans, Foundations, any place money accumulated was being managed in this off-the-radar world. It was like sending our savings to Las Vegas to be managed by it’s denizens. Well, nobody insures gamblers against loss on the BlackJack tables. But that’s what happened. When the gamblers hit a losing streak, they cashed in their policies – and you ended up paying it off.

The Republicans and the financial industry are going to fight this kind of regulation. Why not? It’s their way of passing on the risk that is intrinsic to their world. It’s beyond ironic that the industry that specializes in risk management found a way to avoid dealing with it altogether. Effective regulation will either legitimize this market or destroy it. Either option is fine with me…

The Mystery of al-Libi
the left coaster
by Mary
May 11, 2009

One of the Bush desaparecidos has been reportedly found dead of a suicide in a Libyan prison. Awfully convenient that it was the one detainee that caused so much angst for the Bush administration that they effectively "disappeared" him even as they decided to bring the "worst of the worst terrorists," including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to Guantanamo so they could be given trials that would prove their guilt.

But Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, so important to their early case for war against Iraq, had simply fallen off the face of the earth (except an occasional question) after the Bush administration had to admit his "evidence" was fabricated. Yeah, fabricated just like John McCain’s confessions to the Vietcong were fabricated.

One open question I have: the Bush administration has been so blatant and so proud of their actions after 9/11 that it seems you can’t turn around without Dick Cheney or John Yoo declaring how patriotic they’ve been in the days since 9/11. There were only two cases that I know about where the Bush administration was thrown off track from the precept that their actions were all patriotic and their wars were all well and good. One case was the 16 Words that were put into the 2003 State of the Union speech which they had to take back and make George Tenet fall on his sword for letting Dear Leader say something obviously false.

The only other case where the Bush administration admitted they were wrong was in using the (coerced) testimony of al-Libi which had been strongly disputed internally even before Secretary of State Colin Powell used it to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein because he was in league with Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists. A number of reports after the start of the war show that the CIA also admitted that the "evidence" provided by al-Libi under duress was false. Although if you read the articles, it seems that the CIA was more than happy to blame al-Libi for giving false testimony. Obviously, even if you are being tortured, you must tell the truth and only the truth. Of course, in the Bush Kafka-esque world, if you don’t give the testimony they want to hear, you are obstinate and trying to mislead your interrogators. And, if Douglas Jehl was correct, the only reason that they rendered al-Libi was because he didn’t give them enough specific detail to make his reported link between Saddam and al Qaeda credible.

A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

So they sent him to Egypt to get more "detail" and started to use his testimony to make the case for war. And when he returned from Egypt where they were able to drag out the details they wanted from him using methods that would make even John Yoo blush (yet details the Bush administration was more than happy to use for making their case for war), he was blamed for giving bad intelligence because he kept lying under duress (or perhaps he was simply trying to tell them what they wanted to hear).

Tenet in his book also sought to defend the CIA’s use of the Iraq weapons claims made by al-Libi in the run-up to the Iraq war, suggesting that al-Libi’s later recantation may not have been genuine. "He clearly lied," Tenet writes in his book. "We just don’t know when. Did he lie when he first said that Al Qaeda members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true."

al-Libi timeline:

Dec 18, 2001: al-Libi captured in Pakistan and turned over to the Americans.

Dec 2001-Feb 2002: al-Libi reportedly working with FBI interrogators and providing lots of value.

Feb 2002: DIA reports they don’t find al-Libi credible. This is noted in Marcy’s torture timeline and the second Senate Report. (Did this help make the case that sending him to Egypt would show him whose boss?)

Feb 2002: CIA wins the battle against the FBI in interrogation policy and renders al-Libi to Egypt where he finally coughs up the information (in enough detail) that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden.

Feb 2004: Egypt returns al-Libi and when the CIA reviewed the testimony that connected Saddam and al-Qaeda it was retracted.

Nov 2005: Senate Report makes public that the "evidence" that al-Libi gave under coercion was fabricated and debunked months before Bush used it in his Cincinnati speech before the 2002 vote.

Aug 2006: Bush administration decides to bring the bad guys to justice by transporting them to Guantanamo. al-Libi is not with them.

Apr 2009: Red Cross questions the Guantanamo detainees and asks what happened to al-Libi and others that didn’t show up.

May 2009: al-Libi reported dead of suicide.

Timing and the Sheikh al-Libi Death
By: emptywheel
May 12, 2009

Since Andy Worthington reported on Sheikh al-Libi’s death over the weekend, a few more details on timing have come out.

Ibn Sheikh al-Libi Died in the Last Two Weeks

The first important point is that al-Libi died sometime after April 27, when a Human Rights Watch researcher spoke with him in a Libyan jail.

Human Right Watch researcher Heba Morayef told Reuters in London that she saw Fakhiri on April 27 during a visit to the Libyan capital’s main Abu Salim jail. She said Fakhiri appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard. He look well, but was unwilling to speak to the Rights Watch team, she said. "Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?" she quoted him as saying.

This makes his death all the more suspicious, as it occurs after it has become clear there will be an inquiry of some sort here in the US [to say nothing of international prosecutions]. The SSCI, remember, is conducting detainee by detainee reviews of treatment, and al-Libi is close to the top of the list in terms of seniority and brutality of treatment. Any reconsideration of Moussaoui’s sentencing given the treatment of evidence in his case may well point to al-Libi. Likewise, any contempt proceedings out of the ACLU case my bring attention to al-Libi’s treatment.

Most importantly, think of the people who would have an interest in having al-Libi – recently discovered by Human Rights Watch – silenced. If al-Libi had an opportunity to testify about how he fabricated the reports of al Qaeda ties to Iraq, it would focus intense attention on Dick Cheney’s lies to get us into war. And Egypt can ill afford to have the extent of their cooperation with the US on these matters exposed. So there are a lot of reasons why al-Libi’s recent death is all the more suspicious.

Ibn Sheikh al-Libi Was Turned Over to Libya in 2006

Then there’s the detail that al-Libi was rendered to Libya in 2006 [which had been reported by the WaPo in 2007]. Obviously, that would mean the US gave up custody of al-Libi before it moved the remaining High Value Detainees to Gitmo and ultimately made them available to the Red Cross. But it also means al-Libi’s return to Libya happened in the same year that the US restored relations with Libya, and Stephen Kappes – who had played a key role in restoring relations – returned to the CIA, both in May 2006. While the treatment of Maher Arar shows we don’t need great relations with a state [In his case, Syria] to render someone into their custody, al-Libi’s rendition was likely a more sensitive subject particularly given his role at the nexus of torture and false intelligence to trump up the Iraq War. Particularly given the suspicious timing of al-Libi’s death, it raises questions about what our understanding with Qadaffi was when we gave him custody over al-Libi.

One of my retirement activities is a project that involves the highways and byways of the Great Cherokee Nation that once occupied this part of the world. We’ve been involved in cataloging the culturally altered "bent trees" that dot our woods, and georeferencing the maps of the early settlers and explorers, hoping to produce accurate maps of the Trails and Roads the Cherokee left behind [see our Mountain Stewards Web Site for the Trail Tree Project and the Indian Trails Project]. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee people in May 1838.

The analogies between that story in the early part of our history and the piece of history we’ve just lived through are eerie. Andrew Jackson came into office with a determination to remove the Native Americans from their ancestral lands to the west. His early order of business was the Indian Removal Act that set the stage for what followed. The Cherokee Nation had shrunk to North Georgia with small pieces in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. The State of Georgia was determined to wrest the land from the Indians. The Cherokee had by this time adopted the ways of the settlers – farming their land, dressing in european clothes, and developing a government modeled on our own. When Georgia began to try to annex the Cherokee Nation, the State of Georgia declared that the land was "Cherokee County Georgia" and demanded all white settlers sign a loyalty oath to the State. A Missionary named Wooster refused and was jailed. His appeal lead to the Supreme Court. The Cherokee won. Justice John Marshall wrote that the Cherokee Nation was soveriegn and in no way bound by the laws of Georgia.

President Andrew Jackson refused to act on that decision and allowed Georgia to press forward with the pressure for removal. The Cherokee stood fast. However a group of the Cherokee leaders representing a small minority signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding the lands to Georgia in return for the Oklahoma Reservation. This dubious treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by only one vote. In May 1838, the sixteen thousand Cherokees on the land were rounded up and marched to Oklahoma, over a fourth of them dying along the way. In Oklahoma, those who signed the treaty were murdered.

Georgians quickly settled the new land [where I now live], and there’s little visible remaining of the Cherokee Nation that flourished here for centuries – the bent trees, the Indian names, and the unseen road system that underlies our modern highways. It was early America at its worst – a racially motivated piece of greed that continued on unabated in the African slave culture that persisted for a few more decades until the Civil War, flowing then into the racial segregation lasting another century.

The President [Andrew Jackson] came into office with an agenda. He pressed that agenda even though the High Court ruled against him, being the only President in our history to ignore the Supreme Court. He got something through Congress based on deceit [the Treaty of New Echota], and he then acted in a way that caused endless suffering and death to complete his plan. His racially driven cause was doomed but he just kept on. It wasn’t long before another kind of President finally took on the racism in the South.

Cutting Through Economic Obfuscation–A Reality-Based Narrative About The Economic Meltdown
Open Left
by: Paul Rosenberg
May 09, 2009

The Center for Public Integrity has issued a new report, Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown? The Top 25 Subprime Lenders and Their Wall Street Backers.

Why would anybody want to make "bad loans?" Since there were well tested ways of predicting who was a poor loan risk, why would anyone see making shaky loans as a way to make money? This Report from the Center for Public Integrity answers that question. Like the biblical character who built his house on sand, it worked out fine for them until it didn’t. I’ve focused most of my attention on the governmental forces that allowed deregulation and the resulting Derivative Market that allowed the process to fester, But that’s a bit like prosecuting the gun manufacturer when someone gets shot. This report is about the people who pulled the trigger.

As Tom Jones sang, "What goes up, must come down." In spite of Shiller’s warnings, the housing bubble continued until 2005-2006 when it "burst."

Then, everything that was profitable about the housing bubble became an extreme liability – and the house of cards fell down. A lot of this monopoly money had been "insured" by derivative "credit default swaps" – unregulated and unsecured:

The part that this CPI Report makes abundantly clear is that it is the Sub-Prime Lenders, the ones that cooked up this impossible scheme, the ones that made a killing on the upswing, are the very people we are now bailing out.