POLITICS-US: Bush Had No Plan to Catch Bin Laden after 9/11

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Sep 29 (IPS) - New evidence from former U.S. officials reveals that the George W. Bush administration failed to adopt any plan to block the retreat of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the first weeks after 9/11.

That failure was directly related to the fact that top administration officials gave priority to planning for war with Iraq over military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

As a result, the United States had far too few troops and strategic airlift capacity in the theatre to cover the large number of possible exit routes through the border area when bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the U.S. military had to turn down an offer by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to the border passes to intercept them, according to accounts provided by former U.S. officials involved in the issue.

On Nov. 12, 2001, as Northern Alliance troops were marching on Kabul with little resistance, the CIA had intelligence that bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border.

The war had ended much more quickly than expected only days earlier. CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, had no forces in position to block bin Laden's exit.

Franks asked Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, commander of Army Central Command (ARCENT), whether his command could provide a blocking force between al Qaeda and the Pakistani border, according to David W. Lamm, who was then commander of ARCENT Kuwait.

Lamm, a retired Army colonel, recalled in an interview that there was no way to fulfill the CENTCOM commander's request, because ARCENT had neither the troops nor the strategic lift in Kuwait required to put such a force in place. "You looked at that request, and you just shook your head," recalled Lamm, now chief of staff of the Near East South Asia Centre for Strategic Studies at the National Defence University.

Franks apparently already realised that he would need Pakistani help in blocking the al Qaeda exit from Tora Bora. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks "wants the [Pakistanis] to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what's going in and out", according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War".

Bush responded that they would need to "press Musharraf to do that".

A few days later, Franks made an unannounced trip to Islamabad to ask Musharraf to deploy troops along the Pakistan-Afghan border near Tora Bora.

A deputy to Franks, Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, later claimed that Musharraf had refused Franks's request for regular Pakistani troops to be repositioned from the north to the border near the Tora Bora area. DeLong wrote in his 2004 book "Inside Centcom" that Musharraf had said he "couldn't do that", because it would spark a "civil war" with a hostile tribal population.

But U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who accompanied Franks to the meeting with Musharraf, provided an account of the meeting to this writer that contradicts DeLong's claim.

Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, recalled that the Pakistani president told Franks that CENTCOM had vastly underestimated what was required to block bin Laden exit from Afghanistan. Musharraf said, "Look you are missing the point: there are 150 valleys through which al Qaeda are going to stream into Pakistan," according to Chamberlin.

Although Musharraf admitted that the Pakistani government had never exercised control over the border area, the former diplomat recalled, he said this was "a good time to begin". The Pakistani president offered to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India but said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States to carry out the redeployment.

But the Pakistani redeployment never happened, according to Lamm, because it wasn't logistically feasible. Lamm recalled that it would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region -- far more than was available.

Lamm said the ARCENT had so few strategic lift resources that it had to use commercial aircraft at one point to move U.S. supplies in and out of Afghanistan.

Even if the helicopters had been available, however, they could not have operated with high effectiveness in the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border region near the Tora Bora caves, according to Lamm, because of the combination of high altitude and extreme weather.

Franks did manage to insert 1,200 Marines to Kandahar on Nov. 26 to establish control of the airbase there. They were carried to the base by helicopters from an aircraft carrier that had steamed into the Gulf from the Pacific, according to Lamm.

The marines patrolled roads in the Kandahar area hoping to intercept al Qaeda officials heading toward Pakistan. But DeLong, now retired from the Army, said in an interview that the Marines would not have been able to undertake the blocking mission at the border. "It wouldn't have worked -- even if we could have gotten them up there," he said. "There weren't enough to police 1,500 kilometres of border."

U.S. troops probably would also have faced armed resistance from the local tribal population in the border region, according to DeLong. The tribesmen in local villages near the border "liked bin Laden," he said "because he had given them millions of dollars."

Had the Bush administration's priority been to capture or kill the al Qaeda leadership, it would have deployed the necessary ground troops and airlift resources in the theatre over a period of months before the offensive in Afghanistan began.

"You could have moved American troops along the Pakistani border before you went into Afghanistan," said Lamm. But that would have meant waiting until spring 2002 to take the offensive against the Taliban, according to Lamm.

The views of Bush's key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start. During the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld had refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan despite a National Security Presidential Directive adopted at the Deputies' Committee level in July and by the Principles on Sep. 4 that called for such planning, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9/11 Commission, at four deputies' meetings on Iraq between May 31 and Jul. 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have U.S. troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.

Even after Sep. 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.

Bush's top secret order of Sep. 17 for war with Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, according to journalist James Bamford's book "Pretext for War".

Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed for a quick victory in Afghanistan in NSC meetings in October, as recounted by both Woodward and Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith. Lost in the eagerness to wrap up the Taliban and get on with the Iraq War was any possibility of preventing bin Laden's escape to Pakistan.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan

Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

by MICHAEL HUDSON

Saturday’s $700 billion junk mortgage bailout is the largest and worst giveaway since a corrupt Congress gave land grants to the railroad barons a century and a half ago. If it goes through, it will shape the coming century by giving finance unprecedented power over debtors – homebuyers, industry, state and local government, and the federal government as well.

But what threatens to be even worse is the government’s move to let the financial sector make even higher, unprecedented gains by working its way out of negative equity to “make taxpayers whole” by repaying the government’s bailout by bleeding the economy at large. anticipating congressional capitulation in this license to engage in predatory credit, the latest Sunday evening surprise is that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s own firm, Goldman Sachs, is to become bank holding company picking up the financial wreckage now that the government is covering the bad loans and investment gambles Wall Street has made.

What Mr. Paulson did not say in his weekend TV interviews, organized as what he hoped would be a series of victory laps. Neither he nor Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke nor any other Wall Street spokesman has acknowledged that the government has helped promote today’s $46 trillion debt bomb. This enormous overhead consists of the product that banks are selling – interest-bearing debt that is being added to real estate, corporate industry and personal income to price the U.S. economy out of world markets.

We have heard nothing about how Wall Street lobbyists have succeeded in killing the financial cops on Wall Street – and done the same with the consumer cops on Main Street. There is no public recognition of the fact that more money in tax cuts went to the top 1% than the bottom 80% combined.

So how much credence should we give the newest proposals for the United States to commit economic suicide by turning over the powers of government in effect to Wall Street? When they talk about “making taxpayers whole,” what really is their game?

At first glance it may sound appealing to taxpayers for banks to be told to use their future earnings to pay back the $700 billion dollars in junk mortgages, bad hedge-fund bets and other gambles that the Treasury promised on September 20 to pick up at face value, no loss incurred. To provide a sense of proportion, this money could have funded the next forty or fifty years of Social Security. It could have funded health care for all Americans. It could have made a big step toward rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. But that is another story. For now the major question is just how the banks, insurance companies and financial conglomerates are to raise the money to pay off this bailout.

The last time the government let banks earn their way out of negative equity was in 1980. Interest rates to bank customers topped 20 percent, driving down prices for real estate, stocks and bonds so low that the leading U.S. banks saw their net worth wiped out. Their debts to depositors and bondholders exceeded the collateral they held in their reserves to back these deposit obligations. But as soon as Ronald Reagan led the Republicans back into office, the Federal Reserve began to flood the economy with free credit, driving down the interest rates that banks had to pay. They were allowed to act as a monopoly and keep credit-card interest rates high, at 20 percent, and above 30 percent with penalties, thanks to the fact that America’s high post-Vietnam interest rates led state after state to repeal anti-usury laws to keep credit flowing.

So the banks did “earn their way out of debt.” But if you were a taxpayer who needed to use a credit card, you paid through the nose. The banks earned their way out of debt at your expense. And by the way, if you really did pay an income tax, you probably did not own commercial real estate or significant financial assets. The Internal Revenue Service made commercial real estate and a large swath of finance (at least for the wealthiest investors) income-tax free by generating tax credits that could be applied against income across the board. The capital-gains tax was lowered to a fraction of the income tax, leading investors to pay out whatever income their investments generated as interest on loans to buy property they expected to sell at a markup. And with Alan Greenspan appointed the head the Federal Reserve Board in 1987, the age of asset-price inflation had arrived.

Cities and states vied with each other to slash property taxes, replacing them with income and sales taxes that fall mainly on labor and consumers. The upshot is that wealth has polarized to an unprecedented degree. According to statistics collected by the Congressional Budget Office, the wealthiest 1% now own 57% of the nation’s returns to wealth (interest, dividends and capital gains) and the richest 10% own no less than 77%.

With this background in mind, it looks like the Paulson-Bernanke plan for the Wall Street investment banks and other predatory lenders – and insurers such as A.I.G. – to “earn their way out of debt” will be at the economy’s expense. The bailout is to be achieved by letting Wall Street’s post-Glass-Steagall financial conglomerates charge their customers exorbitant financial charges. As Britain’s Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher put it in her favorite phrase, TINA: There is no alternative. And as Lady Macbeth said, if the deed is to be done, let it be done fast. After all, it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for every financial institution in America to cash out with a fortune!

For Mr. Paulson this means not giving Congress a chance to represent the public interest in designing the terms of this giant bailout. Sec. 8 of the Treasury plan bans any Congressional review, giving him unprecedented power by: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Under cover of emergency force majeur conditions, the plan is to take the money and run, preferably without permitting any Congressional debate.

It is bad enough for the government to buy $700 billion of bad bank investments at prices that no private-sector investor has been willing to approach. This itself is an undeserved giveaway to the financial institutions that caused the problem by living recklessly in the short run. But making them – and indeed, helping them – pay back this gift with the aid of favorable tax and deregulatory policies will simply shift the cost off their shoulders onto those of bank depositors, credit-card users, mortgage borrowers and hapless pension-fund contributors to the money managers who have taken most of the current income in the form of commissions, salaries and bonuses to themselves. This will sharply add to the price of doing business in the United States, and specifically to the economy’s debt overhead by the banks making even more predatory loans.

It gets worse. In order for the existing junk mortgages to be “made good,” real estate prices must be raised further above the ability to pay for this year’s five million homeowners in arrears and facing default. Is this a good thing? Is it good to raise access prices for housing even more, forcing new homebuyers to go further into debt than ever before to gain access to housing? Mr. Paulson has directed the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA (Federal Housing Authority) to re-inflate the real estate market. They are to pump nearly a trillion dollars into the mortgage market.

Fiscal policy is also to be brought to bear to turn the real estate market around by pressuring cities and states to “help homeowners pay their mortgage debts” by cutting property taxes. The idea is to leave more revenue available for property owners to pay mortgage bankers. Unfortunately, this will oblige cities to make up these cuts by taxing labor and sales, running deeper into debt than they already are, or cutting back their spending on basic infrastructure, education and public services and continue shortchanging their pension funds. This is the price to be exacted to “protect the taxpayer’s interest” by bailing out irresponsible banks. The solution is to let them make even more money by acting in a yet more predatory way.

This is not industrial capitalism; it is asset stripping. The closest analogy I can think of would be to give the Mafia free reign to start a new crime wave “in the taxpayers’ interest” so as to raise enough money to pay its fines to the Justice Department. Imagine how our world would look like if the economy had been turned over to Al Capone as head political capo and to Mafia financial manager Meyer Lansky as Treasury Secretary in the 1930s, with the pyramid schemer Carlo Ponzi heading the Federal Reserve and bank robber Willie Sutton as Attorney General.

The last thing the economy needs is a new real estate bubble. To prevent it, local property taxes need to be raised, not lowered. But this is not the Treasury’s plan. Instead of representing the national interest, it is representing the banking sector whose profits come from making more and bigger loans. This is just the opposite from what a well-run economy needs to recover its growth and competitive power. It needs debt write-downs to what homeowners can pay.

But Mr. Paulson has made it clear that aid for homeowners is not part of the Treasury’s plan. On Sunday, September 21, he resisted suggestions that his program be amended to include further relief for homeowners facing mortgage foreclosures. Because financial markets remain under severe stress, he claimed, there is an urgent need for Congress to act quickly without adding other measures that could slow down passage. “We need this to be clean and to be quick,” he said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” He expressed concern that debate over adding all of those proposals would slow the economy down, delaying the rescue effort that is so urgently needed to get financial markets moving again. "The biggest help we can give the American people right now is to stabilize the financial system," Mr. Paulson said.

If you doubt that this is the government’s ideal plan, just look at what it is rejecting. You hear no talk from Mr. Paulson or Mr. Bernanke about bailing out homeowners by writing down their debts to match their ability to pay. This is what economies have done from time immemorial. Instead, the Republicans – along with their allied Wall Street Democrats – have chosen to bail out investors in junk mortgages presently far exceeding the debtor’s ability to pay, and far in excess of the current (or reasonable) market price. The Treasury and Fed have opted to keep fictitious capital claims alive, forgetting the living debtors saddled with exploding adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and toxic “negative amortization” mortgages that keep adding on the interest (and penalties) to the existing above-market balance.

The question to be asked is just how much will the economy’s debt overhead grow, and what will it cost debtors (a.k.a. “taxpayers”)? And how will the economy look when the dust settles?

Economically the act gives a new meaning to the classical concept of circular flow. The traditional textbook meaning has referred to the circulation between producers and consumers, from wage payments by industrial companies to their employees, who use their wages to buy what they produce. This is why Henry Ford famously paid his workers the then-towering $5 a day. This was Say’s law: Income paid for production is finds its counterpart in consumption to maintain equilibrium in a way that enables the economy to keep on growing. The new circular flow runs from the Fed and Treasury to Wall Street in the form of bailouts, and then back to Republicans in Washington in the form of campaign contributions. The money circulates without having to go through the “real” economy of production and consumption at all.

The Treasury Department issued a fact sheet on the proposal on Saturday evening: “Removing troubled assets will begin to restore the strength of our financial system so it can again finance economic growth.” In everyday language the euphemism “removing troubled assets” means buying junk mortgages at way above current market price, as if the banks didn’t know all along that they were junk but hoped to pawn them off on their clients. The problem is that the banks have not been financing growth in the form of tangible capital investment, but have found their quickest profits to lie in a combination of asset stripping and asset-price inflation.

On Sunday a BBC World Service reporter asked me to list three things that the financial sector would like to see. Taking the open-ended question on the highest philosophical plane, I said, first of all, the banks would love to free themselves of all deposit liabilities – simply to keep the money for themselves. That is their objective when they see a client, after all: How much of the client’s earnings and money can they shift into their own pockets. Second, they would like to see politicians elected directly by the amount of money they could raise, thereby doing away with the actual problem of elections. If politics is going to be privatized, this is the way to do it. Rome’s voting system was organized along these lines. Third, the financial sector prefers not to have to report any data at all or pay any taxes. It has lobbied Congress to block collection of statistics, on the premise that what is not seen will not be taxed. And at present, banks and brokerage houses are still screaming to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley bill calling for full and honest accounting. For financial ideologues this is an equivalent watershed dragon to Rowe vs. Wade, now that they have repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that had separated banks from casinos.

Somewhat taken aback by the rawness of these principles, the reporter asked what outcome was most likely. If Congress does what it is supposed to do, there should be quite a showdown. But how unlikely to be achieved is the above scenario? A few hours earlier on Sunday my friend Eric Janszen of itulip.com sent me a note he had received from a fund manager attesting to the lack of care for clients of financial institutions, giving a flavor of the predatory spirit guiding the bailout’s planners and its beneficiaries:

RAIDS OF INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTS

This is so important a topic, that it deserves top billing!!! Hidden inside the AIG bailout funding package, surely hastily cobbled together, but carefully enough to include a totally corrupt clause, was a handy dandy clause that permits raids. The conglomerate financial firms are permitted at this point to use private individual brokerage account funds to relieve their own liquidity pressures. This represents unauthorized loans of your stock account assets. So next, if the conglomerate fails, your stock account is part of the bankruptcy process. ...

The actual evidence for legalized stock account raids by the financial firms can be found in recent articles in Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. So this is not a wild claim. The September 14th article on the Wall Street Journal entitled "Wall Street Crisis Hits Stocks" was the first exposure.

The runs on US banks are in progress. See Washington Mutual, where private email messages have been shared by WaMu bank officers. WaMu alone could deplete the entire Federal Deposit Insurance Corp fund for bank deposit coverage. Eventually the FDIC will compete for USGovt federal money for bailouts and nationalizations, which would be funded by the US Govt because they will not let FDIC run dry.

My Kucinich-campaign colleague David Kelley and I agree on how Wall Street’s action plan ideally would work. The Republicans will take the $800 billion of U.S. Treasury securities presently earmarked for the Social Security Administration accounts, and achieve the privatization that Pres. Bush and his backers have been pressing for so hard for the past eight years. Under emergency conditions – today’s 9/21 as the modern analogue to 9/11 just seven years ago (the well-known natural lifespan of locusts) – will swap these Treasury bonds for junk mortgages, at face value of course. Then, a few months from now (after the new president takes office in February, or perhaps a few days before to achieve the usual political clean slate) the government will tell prospective retirees and workers who have been suffering FICA withholding all these years,

“Oops, the government has just lost all your money. Well, that just shows how government planning is the road to serfdom. Next time save yourself by handling your own accounts – or at least choosing whether to consign your forced retirement savings to Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns or kindred predatory money managers. If only we could have done this a few months ago, there would have been no meltdown and Wall Street would have been doing just fine.”

If you are going to take such a step, you of course say you are doing it to “save” the economy. You even proclaim yourself to be a hero. This is how the nation’s newspaper and TV media responded after news of the bailout of AIG and, more to the point, the Wall Street gamblers and derivatives traders whose gains and losses – that is, the ability of trillions of dollars worth of computer-driven trading gambles – to collect their winnings and avoid losses.

Today’s financial markets are well personified in the classic Hollywood westerns. They typically are about towns taken over and run by a banker (“Wall Street” in miniature), for whom a retinue of outlaws and their gangs work (the boys in the back room). The banker runs the town, usually doing business from its biggest building, the local saloon or casino where most of the action occurs. It has a brothel upstairs (the usual Hollywood simile for Congress). The good-hearted prostitute (sometimes the madam) with a heart of gold usually is the movie’s only honest secondary character (a stand-in for one of the bleeding-heart Congressmen on the finance or mortgage-credit committees lisping well-scripted lines promising that all new legislation will benefit homeowners, not predatory mortgage lenders).

There also is a good-hearted investigative newspaper publisher-journalis. He almost always gets killed and his printing press destroyed. (Today his paper is simply bought out by a conglomerate and merged into the pro-Wall Street mass media.) The banker’s gang appoints the sheriff (on today’s larger scale, the Federal Reserve and Justice Department), and also the mayor (who rarely is seen except to sign papers). The sheriff’s job is the same as in today’s world: to evict debtors from homes and properties on which the land-greedy banker is foreclosing. This is the common theme of westerns, after all: They are all about the great American land grab – situated out West so as to protect the identities of the guilty here in the East on Wall Street.

Attentive readers will notice that I have left out of this script the hero. His role is to fight the banker/land grabber and the gang he has brought into town. Wearing a white hat, he rides into town to clean it up, and in the final showdown shoots the head gunslinger (or perhaps the banker himself, who is done for in any event). This is the position that Mr. Paulson portrays himself. But what the audience doesn’t see (at first) is that the bullets he is shooting are merely blanks. It is in fact only a movie after all! The showdown is staged! He works for the banker himself! Goldman Sachs turns itself into a big-fish bank and gobbles up all the little fish in a great financial squeeze.

An alien class of financial mock-heroic poseurs has taken over – land grabbers and banksters of various stripes. Almost unnoticed, an invasion of government snatchers, bank snatchers, money snatchers pretending to be Main Street, pretending to be “the economy” and now claiming to need to be rescued – at the cost of saying goodbye to public finance as we have known it, goodbye to Social Security, to peoples’ hope for upward economic mobility.

It looks like Wall Street will receive government support at Main Street’s expense. This is hardly surprising when you look at who the major campaign contributors are – to both parties. Understandably, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke are trying to muddy the issue for their financial constituency. Hedge fund traders and kindred banksters have metamorphosized into “the financial system to be saved” and hence “the economy” itself. As if it is necessary to save peoples’ savings deposits and bank accounts by rescuing the casino companies with which the banks have merged – the predatory mortgage brokers, the insurance companies with their fraudulent accounting, the crooked asset-management firms, all of which have merged into conglomerates “too large to fail.” If they are too large, simply un-merge them. Restore Glass-Steagall, which worked for 65 years to prevent this kind of problem from erupting.

The most egregious pretense is that the problem is only temporary, not structural. We are merely “freeing up” the market for new loans. This is precisely the opposite of what the classical economists meant by “free markets.” What America has is a bad debt problem, not a “liquidity” problem. There is no “illiquidity” when people refuse to buy a junk mortgage on a property worth only a fraction of the mortgage’s face value. Many of these bad mortgage loans are fraudulent. The Treasury bailout seeks to make $700 billion of fictitious financial claims “real” – that is, way overvalued as compared to their actual worth(lessness) .

What is reducing real estate and corporate stocks and bonds to junk is the exponential growth in the economy’s debt overhead. Debts that cannot be paid have little market value at any price. The nation must make a choice:

If the government bails out the large financial institutions for having made bad loans – or to be more precise, for not being able to pawn off these bad loans on foreigners or other financial prey in a timely fashion – then the only way in which the government (or other new creditors) can be paid back is by not forgiving the debts owed by strapped homeowners.

This would tighten the debt terms on debtors at the bottom of the food chain – those against whom the bank-sponsored new bankruptcy has been aimed. This is why I deplore the government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the junk mortgages it has been packaging from predatory lenders such as Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual and other deceptive lenders. The wrong parties have been gifted.

I should add that the solution does not lie simply in creating a new regulatory system, much less a single regulatory agency. After all, it was at Wall Street’s command that the Bush Administration installed deregulators in all the key regulatory positions. This meant that regulations didn’t matter at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), at the Fed under Alan Greenspan, at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Mr. Cox (after William H. Donaldson resigned when the White House would not let him regulate as much as he thought necessary) or at the Department of Justice under Bush yes-men such as Alberto Gonzales. Politics and people have turned out to be more important than the law. We have seen the Supreme Court scrap the Constitution in the 2000 election – with acquiescence from the Democrats, starting with Mr. Gore’s refusal to contest Florida.

To appoint a single regulator would prevent all other regulators – and law enforcement officers, attorneys general, the SEC and so forth – from enforcing honest financial policies in the event that an incoming president should appoint another Greenspan, Gonzales or other ideological extremist averse to the idea of applying existing regulations and honest laws. Under these conditions “consolidated regulation” would mean a free ride for crooks much like J. Edgar Hoover gave the Mafia under his tenure.

My alternative solutions are as simple as Mr. Paulson’s, but of course are quite different. The public interest does indeed call for maintaining the economy’s basic credit, money-transfer, credit card and depository checking and savings functions. But not under the current venal and predatory management practices. It is this management that has lobbied so hard for deregulation, and whose industry representatives have insisted so strongly to place extremist ideological deregulators into the economy’s major positions. Therefore, the Treasury only should buy junk mortgages at current market price. The losses should be taken in order to re-even out the wealth pyramid that has become so much steeper under the Greenspan-Bernanke ploys. The banks knew full well that these mortgages lacked underlying value. The price of making use of this borrowing facility is to forfeit all equity stock to the government. The Treasury should prohibit any financial institution that sells or swaps securities to the Fed from paying any dividends to shareholders or stock options and bonuses to managers. It also should give the government priority over other creditors. Otherwise, firms that have negative equity will benefit purely at public expense, using the money to pay dividends, bonuses and exorbitant salaries.

Second, we need to restore the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial banks from risk-taking investment banks, mortgage brokers and other financial-sector flotsam and jetsam. Break up the mergers between banks and casino sell-side financial and real estate institutions. Just the opposite is occurring: On Monday, Sept. 22, the financial universe was transformed by the announcement that Mr. Paulson’s Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs, was transforming itself into a bank holding company. The casinos are to take over the banking system as big fish eat little fish in the present financial emergency. It looks like new giants are emerging, already larger than the government in terms of the magnitude of the debts they have run up – and certainly in their earning power. Indeed, who is to say that extracting interest from the U.S. economy will not emerge as the new form of taxation?

Third, re-write the bankruptcy laws to favor debtors once again, not creditors. This means reversing the current bankruptcy code sponsored by lobbies from the credit-card companies. The interests of the five million mortgage debtors faced with foreclosure and expropriation this year should rightly be placed above the interest (literally) of predatory creditors.

Fourth, sharply increase property taxes, shifting them back off labor and sales. We need to return to the classical idea of taxing unearned and unproductive income instead of adding to the price of labor and industry. What has been freed from the tax collector by the shift of taxes off property has not lowered the cost of housing and other real estate, or corporate costs of doing business. The income “freed” has ended up being paid to the banks as interest. The government still has had to raise money – but in the form of taxes that fall on labor’s wages and industry’s profits. So labor and industry now pay twice for what they formerly paid only once. They still pay the same overall amount of taxes, but also pay an equivalent amount of interest. The financial system is crowding out the government.

In the fifth place, we need to start discussing whether we really need a banking system that behaves in the way the present one does. In recent decades banks have made loans mainly to inflate asset prices by loading real estate and industry with interest-bearing debt. What if all banks were to be organized along the lines of savings banks, with 100% reserves. This is the Chicago Plan from the 1930s (currently revived by the American Monetary Institute, which holds its annual meeting this week in Chicago, by the way). This at least would go back to basics to provide a foundation from which to re-begin to discuss just what kind of credit the economy needs and what would be the best terms on which to structure financial markets.

Any solution does indeed need to be radical. But it can be much less radical than Mr. Paulson’s power grab for his Morgan Stanley firm and the rest of Wall Street in the closing days of the Bush administration just before the Republicans look like losing power. The indicated solution is to reverse predatory finance, not bail it out at permanent taxpayer expense. Government funds are not unlimited. Is it worth wiping out hopes for Social Security and public health care, for renewed national infrastructure spending and industrial restructuring in order to bail out a banking and financial system that has not contributed to economic growth but has weighed it down with reckless debt regardless of the economy’s ability to pay?

Is it right to blame the five million homeowners now in arrears and facing foreclosure, but rewarding the irresponsible bankers and outright fraudulent institutions who have used Enron accounting to make a once-in-a-lifetime rip-off? That is what Mr. Paulson would do in insisting that Congress pass his legislation without taking time to discuss the issue and above all without “assigning blame.” But without such assignation, how do we know where to go from the current mess caused by financial deregulation, repeal of Glass-Steagall, the financial system’s Enron-style accounting and predatory mortgage lending?

Before leaving from his post as Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan’s speeches sounded like “Apres moi, le deluge.” We are living in a world whose economic and political pressures are much like those in the interregnum between Louis XIV and the French Revolution. Where are the revolutionists today?

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson. com

Dennis K on truth and reconciliation

9/11 War Crimes Tribunal: Rep Dennis Kucinich Proposes 9/11 National Truth & Reconciliation Commission (The Nation)

This article is significant, for its boldness and orginality, its ethical elevation, and the fact that it appears in what has heretofore been a left gatekeeper publication.

The Truth Can Move Us Forward

By Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich

September 10, 2008

America must move from the errant, retributive justice of 9/11 to a healing, restorative process of truth and reconciliation.

Before the Congress adjourns, I will bring forth a new proposal for the establishment of a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which will have the power to compel testimony and gather official documents to reveal to the American people not only the underlying deception which has divided us, but in that process of truth seeking set our nation on a path of reconciliation.

We suffer in our remembrance of 9/11, because of the terrible loss of innocent lives on that grim day. We also suffer because 9/11 was seized as an opportunity to run a political agenda, which has set America on a course of the destruction of another nation and the destruction of our own Constitution. And we have become less secure as a result of the warped practice of pursing peace through the exercise of pre-emptive military strength.

It is not simply 9/11 that needs to be remembered. We also need to remember the politicization of 9/11 and the polarizing narrative which followed, locking us into endless conflict, a war on terror which has wrought further terror worldwide and which has severely damaged our standing worldwide as an honorable, compassionate nation. As we were all victims of 9/11, so we have become victims of the interpretation of 9/11.

Our government's external response to 9/11 was to attack a nation which did not attack us. Indeed on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Bush Administration issued a well-publicized stern warning to Iraq, which was part of a campaign to induce people to believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11.

The deliberate, systematic connection of Iraq with 9/11 has led America into a philosophical and moral cul-de-sac as over one million Iraqis and over 4,155 US soldiers have died in a war that will cost over $3 trillion. Additionally, soldiers from twenty-three other countries have died in the Iraq war.

We attempt to unite Iraq by further dividing it. We talk about restoring Iraq while taking steps to place control of its vast oil wealth in the hands of US oil giants. And we intend to impose upon the Iraqi people the cost of rebuilding a country our government ruined, keeping a once-prosperous nation lashed to debt and poverty for a long, long time. Iraq has paid for 9/11. We all continue to pay for 9/11.

The heartbreaking loss of the lives and injuries to America troops further binds us to the Administration's illogic of the Iraq War: We remember our troops' sacrifice by demanding more sacrifice; we support our troops by continuing the war.

The dominant color of our new national security since 911 is neither red, white nor blue. Every day is orange. Every day, reminders of fear of 9/11 become banal. Yet we no longer hear the airport announcements nor see the orange-colored warnings because they have commonplace standards in our new national security state, as is the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and a host of invasions of privacy and diminution of civil liberties. The Constitution has been roundly attacked by the very people who took an oath to defend it.

There is a powerful desire across America for change, not necessarily from control by one political party to another, but a change from living with lies to living with truth.

Over two dozen nations, facing peril within and without, deeply divided by politics and war have travelled down a path of restoring civil society through a formal process of reconciliation. At some point within each of those countries it was understood that the way forward is shown through the light of truth. This process is not without pain because it requires a willingness to study evidence from which eyes had been averted and ears had been closed. But in the process of truth and reconciliation, nations found new strength, new resolve, and new commitment.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation enabled that nation to come to grips with its past through a public confessional, bringing forward those who committed crimes and having the power to grant amnesty for full disclosure of crimes against the people. Of course, our path may necessarily be different: High US government officials stand accused in impeachment petitions of violating national and international law. Our continued existence as a democracy may depend upon how thoroughly we seek the truth. I will call upon the America people to join me in supporting this effort.

The truth can move us forward, as a unified whole, so that we can one day become a re-United States. 9/11 is the day the world changed. It is the day America embraced a metaphor of war. If we are open to truth and reconciliation, we may one day be able, once again, to embrace peace.

Reminder!! Loose Change final cut info

Loose Change Final Cut

Loose Change Final Cut - 130 min - Nov 14, 2007

Loose Change Final Cut is the third installment of the documentary that asks the tough questions about the 9/11 attacks and related events. This movie hopes to be the catalyst for a new independent investigation, in which the family members receive answers to their questions, and the TRUE PERPETRATORS of this horrendous crime are PROSECUTED and PUNISHED.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3719259008768610598

Cry, Lady Liberty !: Countercurrents, Maryam Sakeenah

By Maryam Sakeenah

18 August, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Shortly after the disappearance of young Dr. Afia Siddiqui and her three minor children from Karachi in 2003, the American news channel NBC reported that she had been arrested in Pakistan 'on suspicion of facilitating money transfers for Al Qaeda.' Both Pakistani and US intelligence agencies, however, have since sworn an oath of silence over the issue. Senior Pakistani ministers have denied knowledge of her whereabouts. The Pakistani authorities have, however, insisted that Dr. Siddiqui 'was connected to Al Qaeda,' and that 'you will be astonished to know about her activities.' No evidence of these suspicious activities, however, has ever been shown the light of day.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, British MP, raised the issue in the House of Lords, highlighting the rampant human rights abuse the prisoner was subjected to. He held that this woman prisoner from Pakistan was 'physically tortured and continuously raped by the officers at the prison, to the extent that she had lost her mind.' Soon after, on July 6, British journalist and revert to Islam Yvonne Ridley who authored the book 'In the Hands of the Taliban', appealed to the Pakistanis to secure her release. She said: Today I am crying out for help – not for me, but for a Pakistan woman who you and I have never met, but she is our sister in Islam and she is in desperate need. She has been held in isolation by the Americans in neighbouring Afghanistan. As you know I was also held in Afghanistan, in prison for 10 days at the hands of the Taliban in September 2001. My story made international headlines, front page pictures and major stories on television. I was released on humanitarian grounds without charge even though I was guilty of entering the country without a passport or visa.But there has been not one word, not one paragraph about Prisoner 650 – the Grey Lady of Bagram … a murderous detention facility under the control of the US Military and intelligence services. I call her the Grey Lady because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."

Yvonne Ridley quoted from former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Beg who authored 'Enemy Combatant', in which he recounts: "I began to hear the chilling screams of a woman next door. My mind battled with questions I was too afraid to ask. What if it was… my wife? Eventually I did agree to say whatever they wanted me to say, to do whatever they wanted me to do. I had to finish it. I agreed to be their witness to whatever. At the end of it all, I asked them, "Why have you got a woman next door?" They told me there was no woman next door. But I was unconvinced. Those screams echoed through my worst nightmares for a long time. And I later learned in Guantánamo, from other prisoners, that they had heard the screams, too, and believed it was my wife. They had been praying for her deliverance." Other detainees from Bagram have attested to the same. In an interview on TV, a former Bagram detainee confirmed he had heard a woman's screams, and also that he had seen her. He told that the other prisoners in Bagram had gone on hunger strike for six days to pressurize those in charge to stop torturing the woman. Yvonne Ridley continued: "Today I am making a demand that the US military hands over the Grey Lady immediately. We do not know her identity, we do not know the state of her mind, we do not know the extent of the abuse or torture. What I do know is that this would never happen to a western woman – what is wrong with the US military? Don't they value a Muslim woman, is her life worthless, does she not deserve to be treated with respect? In truth I don't think any of us with a conscience can rest until she is released. Sadly, she is not the only one."

Weeks later, due to the overwhelming media attention on the issue, a frail, battered, badly wounded and immobilized Dr. Afia Siddiqui was produced in a US court. Her Lawyer Elizabeth Fink stated: "She is complaining of abdominal pain. She understands she lost part of her intestine, and suffers from continual intestinal bleeding. She has been here, judge, for one week and she has not seen a doctor, even though they (U.S. authorities) know she has been shot." In view of the fact that Dr. Siddiqui had a serious wound in her abdomen and stitches all the way up her torso, the judge ordered that she must immediately be seen by a doctor. The explanation offered for the enormous and untreated bullet wound in her abdomen was that she had been 'allegedly trying to fire on a group of U.S. troops who had come to question her in an Afghanistan prison.' How a woman who could not even move, let alone walk, talk or even lift a gun shoot straight at an armed security officer defies any explanation. Ridiculously, the U.S. prosecutor told the court in an effort to explain, that this was 'a complicated situation,' and because of her 'alleged attack on an American officer', the decrepit woman was considered a 'high-security risk.' The US authorities pull a straight blank regarding the whereabouts and condition of Dr. Siddiqui's three minor children. There have been conflicting statements about whether they are alive and if so, where. While the unforgivable brutality inflicted on 'Prisoner 650' has been shamelessly justified on the grounds of her 'suspected involvement with Al Qaeda', no amount of 'logical discourse' or 'legal argument' can ever attempt to justify how and why her baby and two toddler sons have been 'punished.' So much for America's commitment to fundamental Human Rights and basic justice.

And yet, there are those who would jump in defence of this naked viciousness and barbarism, those sitting on high seats in prestigious offices of the great and mighty empire of the United States of America. Ms. Anne Patterson, US ambassador to Pakistan writes: "Ms. Siddiqui is accused of seizing a weapon and firing_ unprovoked_ on US personnel during questioning… At no time was Ms. Siddiqui mistreated or abused in any manner whatsoever… The United States has no definitive knowledge as to the whereabouts of Ms. Siddiqui's children… She is charged in a criminal complaint filed in New York with one count of attempting to kill US officers and employees, and one count of assaulting US officers and employees. If convicted, she faces a sentence of 20 years in prison on each charge."

After 9/11, the United States granted exclusive powers to the Executive to detain suspected terrorists for indefinite periods, denying judicial review of evidence on the basis of which a suspect is detained. The appalling truth, however, is that despite years of detention, the investigating authorities have utterly failed to produce any tangible evidence about involvement in terrorism, except for a minuscule percentage. The evidence found, however, in most cases, only proved that a number of detainees were being held without having any past record of links to terrorism, on the basis of mere suspicion.

With the issuance of John Yoo's famous 'torture memos', certain methods of torture for interrogation of suspected terrorists were also licensed. These "torture memos," advocate enhanced interrogation techniques. They attempted to make these war tactics acquire legality by refuting the Geneva Conventions altogether, so that violating them was no longer required. The government has authorized coercive interrogation methods publicly for non US citizens detained outside the US. For this purpose, the State has sent foreign terror suspects to locations outside the US where coercive interrogation (even involving torture in most cases) can be carried out. The US government holds an undisclosed number of detainees (presumably over 2000) at undisclosed locations. The CIA and FBI as a matter of course hand suspects over to foreign intelligence services for intensive interrogation. One US official was reported to have said, "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."

In 2004, horrifying images from Abu Ghraib prisons in Iraq were released into the media showing humiliation and abuse of prisoners. Shortly after, similar information about widespread prison abuse at Bagram prisons in Afghanistan was revealed. It afforded a glimpse into the inhuman barbarity unleashed on suspects and detainees that had been going on unabated behind the scenes.

The fact remains, however, that the Geneva Conventions signed and ratified by the US prohibit torture of prisoners of war even if obtaining information can save lives. The evidence that torture has in fact been used in US prisons has steadily built up revulsion in the public mind regarding the USA's counter terror strategy and its unscrupulous conduct. President Bush, however, remained on denial amidst allegations of the use of torture: "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand."

Military lawyer Alberto J. Mora reported that policies allowing torture methods were officially handed down from the highest levels of the administration. ABC News reported on April 9, 2008 that "the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency."

According to the New York Times, "What happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations. The investigative file on Bagram showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs -- the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq."

Steven C Welsh writes: "Under the Geneva Convention it is the United States as a nation which must confront its responsibility for the actions of the men and women representing it in its prisons."

The horrendous exposition of unabated use of the vilest torture on detainees, the latest of which that has come to light is the nightmarish tale of Dr. Siddiqui has left ugly, deep scars reaffirming the image of the US as a state not befitting of its gigantic role in world politics. With leadership comes responsibility. Abu Ghraib, Bagram and the suffering of Afia Siddiqui has taught us that the 'saviours' are no better than the 'terrorists' they fight. The gaping black hole of moral depravity at the heart of the War on Terror stands exposed. Perhaps uglier still is the façade of a superior civilization that the US chooses to put up, and to which Ms. Anne Patterson chooses to play along: "The US justice system is based on the abiding principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty… We would encourage you to remain open-minded but skeptical of sensational allegations that have no basis in fact." Ms. Patterson's 'blind spot' towards the utterly miserable physical, emotional and mental state of Dr. Siddiqui who is as of yet legally unconvicted is only too obvious.

Prominent writer Bob Herbert rejects attempts at 'making over' the ugly face of the U.S like Ann Paterson has chosen to do: "... There is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of America's legacy -- the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals."

Abdul Malik Mujahid, understanding the degeneracy of a civilization represented through the horrors at US 'anti-terrorist' detention camps in an Islamic context, laments the loss of what Islam calls 'haya' in the West. 'Haya' implies an inner sensibility creating a sense of aversion from what is evil, obscene and indecent. It is a retraining influence that keeps the distinction between right and wrong, not letting it blur into a mishmash of confused morality. The Prophet of Islam (SAW) called it the 'distinctive feature of Islam.' Mujahid comments: "The photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners have stunned and disgusted the world. While such images shocked America, most Americans may not be able to comprehend what type of cultural threshold has been crossed in terms of dealing with Islam and Muslims. In a culture that sometimes values life less than honor, we have done the ultimate act of dishonoring people. May God forgive us. There certainly is a big cultural gap in the way people in the West deal with modesty and privacy of the body, and the way individuals in the Muslim world do, regardless of their level of Islamic practice. This Islamic sensibility of considering the human body part of a very personal realm is connected to the concept of honor, dignity and privacy. This should explain the deep pain, shock and horror over the nightmare of physical abuse and perverted sadism that went on in Abu Ghraib, (and that has victimized Dr.Afia Siddiqui and others like her). Unlike what some in America lead us to believe, no one hates America in the Muslim world because of democracy and freedom. It is the immorality of America (championed by Hollywood), along with American foreign policy which defines the conflict between the Westernized elite and religious elements in Muslim societies. Graphic images of this criminal behavior by some members of the most organized and educated army of the only superpower in the world are bound to become the most dominant images of this new "Crusade" in the collective psyche of Muslims."

Top 100 aerospace manufacturers: as good as it gets (not like right after 9/11)

By Murdo Morrison

[This is a pretty good article. I think people would find it very interesting. I do have some articles archived in emails about this industry following 9/11. That sure was a different story back then. You may remember the airline manufacturing crisis that occured.

I've put here enough to whet your appetite - and if it does, follow this link .. - V]

Last year could be as good as it gets for an aerospace industry giddy at its own success - for a while at least. A torrent of orders - particularly in the commercial aircraft sector - saw the world's largest 100 manufacturers continue to grow their businesses during 2007: revenues increased by 13% and profits by a massive 26% (after restatements and including acquisitions). This compares with equivalent growth rates of 12% and 8% respectively in 2006, and 8% and 17% the previous year.

That is according to the latest Flight annual Top 100 survey, compiled in association with PricewaterhouseCoopers and based on company returns for the previous financial year.

The survey also found that average operating margins of almost 9.4% in 2007 were the highest they have been since the previous peak in 2000, just before the World Trade Center attacks sent the airline and business aviation sectors into tailspin. By 2003, operating margins had sunk as low as 6.9%. They have been climbing more or less steadily since.

The reason for the upswing in revenues has been bulging orderbooks, with original equipment manufacturers and their supply chains enjoying near-unprecedented demand for their end products, particularly narrowbody airliners, but also widebodies such as the Boeing 787 and business jets, and the technologies and systems deployed on them. However, with manufacturers struggling to hit some of their delivery schedules last year, there were signs that the wheels on a seemingly unstoppable aerospace wagon were starting to wobble.

Capacity constraints, either through an inability or an unwillingness to ramp up too quickly, have almost certainly been the biggest brake on growth figures being even more impressive. OEMs and suppliers simply have not been in a position to recruit the skilled staff or add production infrastructure quickly enough without compromising quality. Bottlenecks in the supply chain have been the main cause of delays to a number of programmes, most notably the 787.

And these are the other sections you can read at that link ..

ARTIFICIALLY STRONG

CURRENCY EFFECT

DEFENCE SPENDING

More on Mary Beth Buchanan's (US attorney) improper legal behaviour

Improper FBI Access to Wecht Juror Files Taints Prosecutor Reviews of 9-11 Investigation

[Ethics, anyone? Not likely it seems when the US Department of Justice wants to defocus from its own crimes, as evidenced, in the Wecht case as well as the Seligman and the firing of US attorneys. They and the White House think they really are above the law. So here we go! Let's those of with an eye to justice keep investigating the official "investigators"/prosecutors in the US DOJ. - V]

By testing - from TPM Muckraker
Government Fails To Address Why FBI Agents Had Access To Wecht Jury Lists

The rest of the story behind the Wecht Jury lists relates to the emails and the files. The Western District of Pennsylvania was brought into conduct a review of a high profile terrorism case. The improper FBI access to those juror names would show the prosecutors -- providing an "independent" review of the District's attorneys -- were not impartial, as required.

The questionable FBI access is only part of the problem. The question is how long Buchanan has known about the questionable file access; and why she didn't ensure her office recused itself from the 9-11-related misconduct investigation. The public needs some assurances from the Buchanan-DOJ camp on what they were really doing with the files containing the Wecht Juror names.

There is no reasonable explanation for why the names of the prospective or seated jurors were released to anyone outside the counsel. There is no language permitting anyone other than the government counsel to have access to these seated juror names. Critics have said that the court orders permitted changes or disclosures. That language does not exist.

The 3d Circuit reminds us what legal standard applied to the Wecht Juror names: There was no provision to to permit anyone other than counsel to have access these lists:

3rd Circuit (Citations omitted):

"The order further provided that “any and all juror lists generated by this Court for use in the jury selection process shall be deemed confidential and property of the Court and shall not be removed from the Court at any time.” . . .

The jury selection lists used during the jury selection process were only available to counsel. Critics have provided no language permitting anyone other than counsel to have access to the prospective or seated juror lists:

3d Circuit: "The juror lists were available only to counsel who were required to execute a receipt for the list and to return it upon completion of jury selection."

There is no language permitting anyone other than counsel to have access to the lists. The 3d Circuit made changes to how the media would be notified of the jury names, but there were no changes to any rules in how the juror names were or were not available to counsel.

This language has no relationship to how the FBI agents got access to the seated or prospective juror names:

"Schwab, however, released jurors' names in a list that did not differentiate from those who actually served and those in the overall jury pool. He also redacted the actual jurors' names from the transcript of the jury selection process."

There is no adequate explanation for how the FBI agents got access to the information only provided to the counsel. Critics have pointed to no language or court order which specifically authorized non-counsel to get access to these prospective or seated juror names. We've shown the method to supposedly "derive" the names of the seated jurors from the list of prospective jurors is inadequate.

The FBI agents, in defiance of the court orders, had access to information they were not authorized access. The government's explanations have not provided a coherent reason why the FBI agents were doing what they were doing.

If the FBI agents were doing nothing wrong, then the government should not have said the FBI agents were "scheduling" appointments. There is no evidence the US Attorneys office was using the FBI agents for a scheduling function. The US Attorneys office has not explained why counsel did not participate in the FBI-Wecht Juror home meetings.

Jury polls are judicial actions. FBI agents are not part of the Judicial Branch. Whether a jury poll was or wasn't done during or after the Wecht trial is unrelated to whether executive law enforcement can or cannot access information the court has sealed from non-counsel. Even if the court "failed" to do a final jury poll, that has no relationship to whether that judicial failure would trigger an executive branch action or follow-up.

Critics have not adequately discussed how long the prosecutors have had a formal process to review systemic trends across general cases. The prosecution would have us believe that a focused review on a specific defendant, not case-type, was appropriate.

No one has provided a copy of the e-mail, policy, or other controlling language establishing these non-prosecutorial reviews; or justifying why the FBI agents should be involved with a specific case or specific defendant.

Critics have failed to point to a specific date when the prosecutors had either a formal or informal process to review general case trends with classes of case types. It is misdirection to argue that the jury polls are the same as post-trial prosecutorial assessments; or that these prosecutor reviews have always been done.

- How long have the prosecutors been doing these post-trial reviews; where is the copy of the email or policy which established this specific review procedure?

- Have the post-trial reviews always been mandatory; or were there some reviews which were discretionary?

- Was there a reason some classes of cases were not reviewed?

- Who said FBI agents gather information to do a risk assessment of adverse prosecution trends?

- Why is the Wecht-defendant targeted for this post-trial review; but other reviews have not focused on a specific case-defendant, but on a general class of cases?

The US Attorneys office has issued inconsistent statements. There problems were identified in the DOJ IG report, and raise doubts about Buchanan's credibility. The government and Buchanan have not adequately explained why Buchanan omitted important information, or why she was not investigated for deception through omission when she testified before Congress, and as reported by the DOJ IG into their investigation.

Critics have not adequately discussed the timing of the emails, or what risks there might be if the Western District of Pennysylvania's Attorney's Office was involved with any improper file transfers. It would be a problem, while the FBI agents were given improper access to the Wecht Juror names, for the government to use the US Attorneys office to investigate in a separate case the DC office for improper file transfers. The government has not adequately discussed the implications of improper file transfers in Pennsylvania; and how they might relate to required recusals for other investigations.

The public needs assurances about the file reviews the Western District did; and receive confidence Buchanan was not aware of any improper file transfers that would taint her office's investigations in other high profile cases. It would be a shame to learn, adding insult to injury, for the 9-11 victims to learn the government improperly conduct an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct related to the 9-11 prosecution.

- How long has Buchanan known about the problems with the file transfers; and the questions this would raise about whether her office was or was not adequately tainted on problems with file transfers?

Incomplete Buchanan Denials Mirror Rove

Critics have not adequately addressed the failure of the government to broadly deny that anyone was involved with any direction to engage in any politically-related prosecutions. As with Rove's incomplete denials, Buchanan's incomplete denials did not exclude the possibility the President was providing direction.

The public needs a definitive statement of complete denial from Buchanan -- in her own words, not coordinated with DOJ -- that she is not aware of anyone -- including the President, of -- providing any direction or leadership to prosecute anyone for political reasons. Her statement needs to adequately explain why, despite this denial, Republican lawyers have provided affidavits discussing what they overhead about White House influence.

Buchanan's denial must broadly include the DoJ-DoD military analyst program, and adequately deny that she was aware of any communication, discussion, or meeting involving the military analysts, DOJ personnel, or anyone else connected with the White House in making any prosecutorial decision related to Wecht.

Public Statement Shows Non-Independence of DOJ

Buchanan has failed to explain why the language within her denial -- supposedly evidence of her independence -- matches language within a DOJ press release. It would be a problem if the US Attorney, through outside counsel, issued a statement designed to mislead the public about who was directing the political prosecutions. The DOJ IG raised a similar concern.

It would also be a problem if her counsel, as a government attorney, had previously issued a public statement designed to show independence and a commitment to reform, but that public statement substantially matched language from a previous US prosecutor. This would show, contrary to Buchanan's assertions, that the public statements were not linked with one office, but driven from the Department of Justice.

Buchanan, when she provides the statement, must disclose who provided input to that final release; whether she had any help from outside counsel; and what input, if any, she had from the DOJ, White House, or GOP staff in crafting this statement of denial.

Buchanan's Conduct Subject To Similar Admonishments

It would be a problem if the US Attorney was connected with anyone who previously made statements about the responsibility of US prosecutors to do things, but Buchanan is not adequately showing she is fully complying with these reasonable requirements.

It would also be a problem if Buchanan would have us believe that her incomplete statements to the DOJ IG were acceptable; but her counsel was linked with earlier admonishments against uncooperative witnesses. Buchanan and her private counsel need to explain why something less than full cooperation with the DOJ IG is acceptable; but her counsel did not agree on another legal issue.

Buchanan must address why her counsel would have one standard of cooperation for one class of investigation targets; but a different standard when it comes to Buchanan appearing before Congress. Cooperation should require a cooperative agreement on what cooperation means; not selective parsing for one audience or administration over another.

- What do Buchanan and her counsel think "cooperation" means today?

- Why is there a moving target on where incomplete cooperation is or isn't admonished?

US Attorneys Office Tainted By Improper File Transfers

The objective of Buchanan and the FBI re the Wecht jury names is to deflect attention from the emails showing that there was a problem with improper file access. This is a smokescreen from the integrity problem of asking the Pennsylvania prosecutors to conduct an investigation of
misconduct in DC that the prosecutors in PA were engaged: Improper file transfers.

It would be a problem if, when the FBI had improper access to the Wecht Juror names, the US Attorneys office in Pennsylvania was conducting a review of the DC office on improper file transfers.

Buchanan must explain what her concerns are with the FBI improperly accessing information; which cases would be jeopardized if the US government improperly transferred key evidence or files during any prosecution; and how this misconduct would jeopardize other high profile cases of interest to the United States.

It does not follow, in this supposed "war on terror," for the US Attorney to do nothing about Geneva violations; but then claim she is concerned about judicial independence. Her actions do not match her words, as the DOJ IG warned us. It would be a sham, on top of the failed combat operations in Afghanistan, to discover the prosecutions are at risk because legal counsel decided to cross the line on what evidence or files should or should not be transferred in defiance of court orders.

- Which terror-related cases are at risk because of improper file transfers?

- Which audits did prosecutors do that need to be re-accomplished?

- Which reviews is Buchanan aware that must be reaccomplished because her office didn't follow the court orders, and this conflict taints her office on whether they can or cannot independently review other reports of prosecutorial misconduct?

- Why wasn't the DOJ OPR and DOJ IG, rather than the Pennsylvania office, brought into the nexus to review the prosecutorial misconduct and improper file transfer?

The Crime Behind the Criminal Wars!:

Why is Habeas Corpus Such a Threat to those in Power?

By Maher Osseiran

03/08/08 "TPP" -- Why is the Supreme Court's decision to uphold habeas corpus rights for the Guantanamo detainees so scary that Senator Lindsey Graham, with the support of McCain, will "explore the possibility, if necessary, of a constitutional amendment to blunt the effect of this decision"?

What is so fundamentally wrong with the Supreme Court's decision, whose members are conservative or Bush appointees, to warrant amending our constitution? Have Senators Graham and McCain lost their minds?

I just finished reading a lengthy "friend-of-the-court" brief to the Supreme Court in support of petitioner Boumediene v. responder Bush, et al., a case resulting in a decision that reinstate habeas corpus rights, not just for the detainees, but for all Americans.

As a brief to the Supreme Court, the argument and the conclusion were primarily based in constitutional law and precedent.

A similar brief to a habeas corpus court that would review the legality of detaining the Guantanamo prisoners would undoubtedly take a different form or approach what the writ of habeas corpus has always ensured: that an independent court can inquire into the legal and factual bases for the Executive's assertion of its power to imprison. This guarantee has always included a meaningful judicial evaluation of the law and facts that underlie the Executive's asserted basis to detain.

Other than the meaningful judicial evaluation of the law and facts, a non-military tribunal would make it easier for a detainee to produce exculpatory evidence, evidence that would exonerate him or her; actually, anyone can produce such evidence and anyone can inject it into the court proceedings simply by providing it to any party.

Such exculpatory evidence is abundant and has been in the hands of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, governors, members of congress such as Conyers and Graham, the judiciary committees to the House and Senate, and a variety of law authorities that have jurisdiction as early as 2005; I know that for fact since I placed it there but no investigations resulted.

In February of 2007, Dr. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute, after familiarizing himself with my work, found it imperative to contact Conyers directly and received assurances, conveyed to me by email, that an investigation would proceed in due course; Conyers is still missing in inaction.

The evidence was uncovered when I decided to authenticate the videotape released by the Pentagon on Dec. 13, 2001, a videotape in which bin Laden was confessing to 9/11. My suspicions about the tape quickly materialized but it took close to a year to distill the information in to a format that would stand in a court of law.

The authentication work, the only work of its kind put forth in the public domain, unveiled the most heinous crime ever committed by a sitting president whose victims not only include the detainees in Guantanamo except for a handful, but the untold number of dead and maimed Afghanis, Iraqis, American citizens and soldiers who have died in this fake "war on terror".

The authentication work revealed that the taping of the bin Laden confession was the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by U.S. intelligence with the help of Saudi intelligence and was taped on September 26, 2001, barely two weeks after 9/11 and ten days before the invasion of Afghanistan.

According to the UN charter, "

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."

Even though the Bush administration had the evidence that bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks as early as September 26, 2001, such evidence was only shared with those who were important for the execution of their war, such as NATO and Pakistan, and kept away from those sane entities who were looking for a just and peaceful outcome as the UN Charter dictates.

The Bush administration, with premeditation, ignored its international obligations in deference to war. If the Bush administration had supplied the evidence to the world and specifically the Taliban who were requesting such evidence in exchange for bin Laden, the war might not have taken place and bin Laden would very likely be in custody.

Not pursuing that route makes the Afghanistan war an illegal war under the UN Charter and The Geneva Convention; thereby, the majority of the Guantanamo detainees can no longer be classified as enemy combatants but victims of war crimes.

These findings, which were shared with various authorities, were summarized in the "The Crime Behind the Criminal Wars!".

The authentication work also shows that the Bush administration, with premeditation, aided and abetted bin Laden after 9/11 far beyond any aid your average Guantanamo detainee could have ever provided to Al-Qaeda or bin Laden. There are also very strong indications, worthy of serious investigation, that the Bush administration was very aware of the 9/11 operations beforehand and allowed them to happen or even helped in making them happen. This argument was summarized in "Is Bin Laden Responsible for the 9/11 attacks?"

As a consequence of these findings, those handful of detainees who are charged with the more serious crimes, after review and a proper fact finding by a habeas corpus court, would have those charges against them dismissed only to be re-arrested and appropriately charged with less serious offenses; the rest of the detainees would have to be released.

The same court, and the public at large, will reserve the more serious offenses to high-ranking officials in the Bush administration, including the president.

By not acting in 2005 on the information received, Conyers and congress dug themselves a hole that kept getting deeper as time went by. The implications of the findings are very serious and the remedies go beyond those implemented after Water Gate and might prove to be the remedies that would help us reclaim our democracy.

The fundamental and positive change in how our democracy functions is what Senator Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and others in power are afraid of; a fear worthy of a constitutional amendment.

Their fear is genuine because, unlike other evidence in the public discourse of the Bush administration's abuse of power, which the administration and its supporters have been able to duck, this evidence is solid, all in the public domain, the majority of which the administration mistakenly placed there, it cannot be taken back, it cannot be spun, it is intact and most importantly, will remain so.

I am told that proper investigations would start after Bush leaves office. I do think though that no one should be above the law and no criminal should be given special consideration, especially those who hold public office, otherwise we are simply a nation of outlaws.

Maher Osseiran is an Arab-American peace activist. As a close observer of the Middle East, Maher's geopolitical analysis is always ahead of many in big media. As an engineer who worked in research, he uses his technical abilities to write investigative articles exposing one of the most serious crimes of the Bush administration, his work is published in print in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, TX, and on the web at www.mydemocracy.net

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