WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Andrew Sullivan: "We Do Not Torture"

"We Do Not Torture"

18 Jun 2008 12:30 pm

The latest reality check on the gravest lie this president has ever told:

Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., that investigates abuse around the world and advocates for global health and human rights, did not identify the 11 former prisoners to protect their privacy. Seven were held in Abu Ghraib between late 2003 and summer of 2004, a period that coincides with the known abuse of prisoners at the hands of some of their American jailers. Four of the prisoners were held at Guantanamo beginning in 2002 for one to almost five years. All 11 were released without criminal charges.

Those examined alleged that they were tortured or abused, including sexually, and described being shocked with electrodes, beaten, shackled, stripped of their clothes, deprived of food and sleep, and spit and urinated on.

Or are you going to believe Dick Cheney? What's staggering to me is the moral relativism of these men who report to a fundamentalist Christian. You cannot compromise on the meaning of the word "marriage". But "torture"? No problem. The only outer limit is murder. John Yoo led the way:

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting...

The newly released documents show that in the summer of 2002, Pentagon officials compiled lists of aggressive techniques, soliciting opinions from the CIA and others, and ultimately implementing the practices over opposition from military lawyers who argued that the proposed tactics were probably illegal and could harm U.S. troops.

Lindsey Graham describes these actions as "irresponsible." I guess he can't yet quite believe that his president meant them. When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.

(Photo: War criminal John Yoo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

"We Do Not Torture"

Trackback: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/30305804

WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Salon article on WAR PROFITEERS (Hey! Follow the money!)

Former high-ranking Bush officials enjoy war profits

Now working inside America's "shadow" spy industry, George Tenet, Richard Armitage, Cofer Black and others are cashing in big on Iraq and the war on terror.

Editor's note: This article is adapted from Tim Shorrock's book, "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing," published this month by Simon & Schuster and reprinted with permission.

terrorism, News, Iraq, CIA, Spies, Salon News, National Security Agency, Homeland Security, Outsourcing, Tim Shorrock

Salon composite

From bottom: Former Bush officials George Tenet, Richard Armitage and Cofer Black

May 29, 2008 | Richard L. Armitage, who served from 2001 to 2005 as Deputy Secretary of State, was a rarity in the Bush administration: an official who delighted in talking to the press. Reporters loved him for his withering criticism of the neoconservative zealots around President George W. Bush and in part because he fed them tidbits about the White House they could obtain nowhere else. His accidental disclosure to conservative columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, was working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency remains one of the most notorious leaks of the Bush era.

But perhaps because of his cozy ties to the Washington press corps and the media's obsession with Plamegate, very little has been written about Armitage's extensive business dealings. In fact, Armitage is one of the most successful capitalists in Washington. He has successfully parlayed his experience in covert operations and secret diplomacy into a thriving career as a consultant and adviser to some of the biggest players in America's Intelligence Industrial Complex -- corporations that are working at the heart of U.S. national security and profiting handsomely from it.

Armitage, currently an adviser to presidential candidate John McCain, had once been Colin Powell's closest ally during the bitter disputes inside the Bush administration over the invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, Armitage advised Powell on more than one occasion to tell the neocons to "go fuck themselves," and, at one point, even refused to deliver a speech about Iraq drafted for him by Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

Yet, three years after those epic battles, Armitage is enjoying life as a stakeholder in a dozen private companies that are making money directly from the war started by his former nemeses.

Over the past decade, contracting for America's spy agencies has grown into a $50 billion industry that eats up seven of every 10 dollars spent by the U.S. government on its intelligence services. Today, unbeknownst to most Americans, agencies once renowned for their prowess in analysis, covert operations, electronic surveillance and overhead reconnaissance outsource many of their core tasks to the private sector. The bulk of this market is serviced by about 100 companies, ranging in size from multibillion dollar defense behemoths to small technology shops funded by venture capitalists.

Nearly every one of them has sought out former high-ranking intelligence and national security officials as both managers and directors. Like Armitage, these are people who have served for decades in the upper echelons of national power. Their lives have been defined by secret briefings, classified documents, covert wars and sensitive intelligence missions. Many of them have kept their security clearances and maintain a hand in government by serving as advisers to high-level advisory bodies at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the White House. Now, with their government careers behind them, they make their living by rendering strategic advice to the dozens of information technology vendors and intelligence contractors headquartered along the banks of the Potomac River and the byways of Washington's Beltway.

Ever since the 1950s, with the rise of America's modern military-industrial complex, high-level U.S. officials and military men have moved between the government and private sectors. But what we have today with the intelligence business is something far more systemic: senior officials leaving their national security and counterterrorism jobs for positions where they are basically doing the same jobs they once held at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies -- but for double or triple the salary, and for profit. It's a privatization of the highest order, in which our collective memory and experience in intelligence -- our crown jewels of spying, so to speak -- are owned by corporate America. Yet, there is essentially no government oversight of this private sector at the heart of our intelligence empire. And the lines between public and private have become so blurred as to be nonexistent.

Shortly after leaving government in 2005, Armitage was recruited to the board of directors of ManTech International, a $1.7 billion corporation that does extensive work for the National Security Agency and other intelligence collection agencies. He's also since advised two private equity funds with significant holdings in intelligence enterprises. Veritas Capital (V's note: here) where Armitage served as a senior adviser from 2005 to 2007, owns intelligence consultant McNeil Technologies Inc. and DynCorp International, an important security contractor in Iraq. For a time, Veritas also owned MZM, Inc., the CIA and defense intelligence contractor that was caught -- before the Veritas acquisition -- bribing former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

In 2007, Armitage, along with several Veritas executives, moved over to DC Capital Partners, an intelligence-oriented buyout firm with some $200 million in assets. One of its first acquisitions after Armitage came on board was Omen Inc., a Maryland company that provides information technology and consulting services to the NSA. The fund has since combined Omen with two other intelligence contractors to form a new company called National Interests Security Company LLC, which has 850 employees, more than half of them holding top secret or higher security clearances.

Through his own eponymous consulting firm, Armitage has lobbied on behalf of L-3 Communications Inc., one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, to help it sell anti-submarine surveillance systems to Taiwan. L-3, like ManTech, is also heavily involved in Iraq. (Further topping off Armitage's investment interests in the war: He sits on the board of directors of ConocoPhillips, which is aiming to become a major player in Iraq's energy industry through a joint venture with Russia's Lukoil.)

In these jobs, former high-level officials like Armitage continue to fight terrorist threats and protect the "homeland," as they once did while working in government. But by fusing their political careers with business, these former officials have brought money-making into the highest reaches of national security. They have created a new class of capitalist policy-makers that is bridging the gap between public policy and private business in ways that are unprecedented in American history.

Next page: With former CIA director George Tenet on the team, said one CEO, "a phone call gets us in to see whoever we want"

Take the case of George Tenet, who retired in 2004 from his service as President Bush's CIA director. As he was writing his memoirs and preparing for a new career as a professor at Georgetown University, Tenet quietly began cutting deals with companies that earn much of their revenues from contracts with the intelligence community. And, as I was the first to report a year ago in Salon, Tenet began to make big money off of the Iraq war. By the end of 2007, he had made nearly $3 million in directors' fees and other compensation from his service as a director and adviser to four companies that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq, as well as in the broader war on terror.

Those companies include L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., an intelligence and biometric conglomerate that holds a near-monopoly on software that identifies people by their fingerprints and facial characteristics; Guidance Software, a Pasadena, Calif., supplier of investigation and forensic software to the FBI and the Intelligence Community; and the Analysis Corp., a Fairfax, Va., intelligence contractor founded by Tenet's former chief of staff, John Brennan. Brennan himself went into the spy business after serving as chairman of the National Counterterrorism Center -- which is one of the Analysis Corp.'s biggest clients.

In Tenet's most prestigious position, he was the only American director of QinetiQ, the British defense research company that was privatized in 2003 and acquired by the well-connected Carlyle Group. Earlier this year, Tenet left QinetiQ's UK parent to join the board of QinetiQ North America, the company's U.S. subsidiary and one of the fastest-growing contractors in the U.S. intelligence market. There, Tenet is working with CEO Duane P. Andrews, a former assistant secretary of defense who was the chief intelligence adviser to Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense in the early 1990s. (Prior to joining QinetiQ, Andrews would have had plenty of contact with Tenet, as Andrews was a senior executive with Science Applications International Corp., a major CIA and NSA contractor.

In January, QinetiQ North America expanded its intelligence network by hiring Stephen Cambone, who was the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under Donald Rumsfeld, as its vice president for strategy. That appointment came just days after the company won a $30 million, five-year contract to provide unspecified "security services" to the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, a controversial domestic security agency that was created by Rumsfeld and Cambone in 2002 and later took heat from Congress for illegally spying on antiwar and religious activists.

One of the most spectacular transitions from intelligence to business took place at Blackwater USA, the security contractor infamous for its trigger-happy soldiers in Iraq. One of Blackwater's first major contracts, negotiated by founder Erik Prince, was a secret no-bid $5.4 million deal with the CIA signed shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Shortly thereafter, Blackwater hired as its vice chairman Cofer Black, the CIA's former top counterterrorism official who was dispatched by Tenet in the days after 9/11 to brief President Bush and his advisers on the CIA's plans for overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Rob Richer, the CIA's former Associate Deputy Director of Operations and, before that, head of its Near East division, became Blackwater's Vice President of Intelligence, and later went to work for a private intelligence company.

Appointments like this, observes intelligence expert Steven Aftergood, reflect the "incestuous" relationships that exist between former officials and private intelligence contractors. "It's unseemly, and what's worse is that it has become normal," he told me after the news broke about Stephen Cambone's move to QinetiQ. "The problem is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests -- the Intelligence Community and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical."

Former high-ranking officials bring tremendous value to a government contractor seeking new work or a private equity fund looking for companies to buy. "You understand the decision-making process inside the Beltway, and that is liquid gold," says Roger Cressey, who worked in President Clinton's National Security Council as deputy director of counterterrorism and is now a partner in Good Harbor Consulting, a company he founded with his former boss at the NSC, Richard Clarke. Cressey, who is a terrorism consultant for NBC News, adds that the influence of a retired official lasts only a limited period of time after he or she leaves office. "You have 18 to 24 months to translate your rolodex into real services," he says

But the value of a CIA director or national security official goes much further than a rolodex. Because high-ranking officials have been privy to classified and top-secret information for years -- and sometimes, in the cases of people like Armitage and Tenet, decades -- they have details about intelligence programs, classified operations and the internal affairs of other countries that few others can claim.

Armitage, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration, was deeply involved in covert operations in Vietnam as a Navy officer and, shortly after September 11, flew to Pakistan on behalf of the Bush administration to deliver a stark message to its military president, Pervez Musharraf, that drastic measures would follow if Musharraf did not support the war on terror. He also led an influential group of U.S. officials who quietly pushed the Japanese government to adopt a more militaristic role in global affairs over the last seven years.

In all of these tasks, Armitage would have had access to the most classified intelligence available to U.S. officials, including telephone intercepts provided by the NSA. That kind of experience is extremely valuable to a company like ManTech, which sells and operates signals intelligence systems to the NSA and provides "cyber and physical security" for U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. According to ManTech CEO George J. Pedersen, who also employed Armitage as an adviser during the 1990s, Armitage was brought on as a director for his "enormous insight into our corporation's capabilities and operations." (Armitage did not respond to a written request for an interview.)

Tenet is even more connected: With the former CIA director on board, L-1's CEO Robert LaPenta told analysts last year, "a phone call gets us in to see whoever we want." Tenet, of course, has extensive knowledge about intelligence services in Saudi Arabia, the UK and Pakistan as well as secret operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. His insights have already helped L-1 in its acquisition strategies. Shortly after Tenet joined L-1's board, the company acquired one of the CIA's hottest contractors, SpecTal, which has 300 employees with top-secret security clearances who work extensively in Afghanistan. Months before, during a 2006 meeting with L-1 executives about SpecTal's potential business in that country, Tenet urged company executives to "call the SpecTal guys" because "they know everybody in every one of these ministries that you need to go talk to," according to LaPenta. L-1 not only called them; it bought them out, and has since combined SpecTal with its latest acquisition, Advanced Concepts Inc., a systems engineering firm holding contracts at the NSA. Tenet, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

Next page: As one former top spook put it, America's "shadow" intelligence community has "more former secretaries of this and directors of that" than the entire government

Power also flows out of a former high-ranking official's presence as a policy-maker. During the 1990s, when Armitage was building his reputation as a private consultant and defense industry adviser, he was a member of President Clinton's Defense Policy Board. Although Armitage, like any board member, was prohibited from divulging contents of meetings with his clients, the internal discussions and access to classified documents helped shape the advice he gave his clients. That's certainly the impression one gets from officials at CACI International, a key intelligence contractor where Armitage served on the board of directors during that time. During his tenure as a director in the 1990s, CACI officials wrote in 2001, Armitage provided "valuable guidance on CACI's strategic growth plans and the federal government and Defense Department markets."

The same can be said of many of Armitage's contemporaries in the defense and intelligence industries who advise their clients while holding positions in government advisory boards at the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA. One of Armitage's fellow directors at ManTech, for example, is Retired Admiral David E. Jeremiah. He is a member of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a paid adviser to the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that manages the nation's spy satellites. A third ManTech director, Richard J. Kerr, a 32-year veteran of the CIA, led a 2005 study for the CIA into the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq and its weapons of mass destructionne of the most representative figures in America's new private intelligence elite is Joan A. Dempsey. She is currently a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, where for the last three years she has worked alongside former CIA director Jim Woolsey and more than 1,000 other former intelligence officers. Dempsey, a steely-looking blonde, began her career as a naval technician listening to Soviet bomber and submarine traffic at Misawa Air Base in Japan, a key NSA listening post. Over the years, she slowly worked her way up the intelligence chain of command at the Pentagon, from Naval Intelligence to the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1997, she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security in the Clinton administration, the highest civilian intelligence position in the Department of Defense at the time. There, she had responsibility over the NSA, the NGA and the NRO, the three national collection agencies controlled by the Pentagon, as well as the DoD's tactical command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) efforts.

By 1999, Dempsey had become George Tenet's representative to the rest of the Intelligence Community as the CIA's director of community management. In that position in 1999 she won the everlasting support of the Intelligence Community -- and its growing army of contractors -- when she led negotiations with the Republican-led Congress that added $1.2 billion to the intelligence budget. That figure still remains one of the largest single-year increases in the history of the National Foreign Intelligence Program. Five years later, partly in recognition of this feat, Dempsey was given the William O. Baker award for meritorious intelligence service by the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), which from 1979 to 2005 represented the largest prime contractors at the NSA and the CIA. Her remarks at that ceremony serve as a kind of leitmotif for the outsourcing phenomenon in intelligence.

In her acceptance speech, Dempsey paid effusive praise to the corporations she had known over the years, many of whom had purchased tables for the event: General Dynamics, Essex Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation, AT&T Government Solutions, ManTech and Lockheed Martin. She thanked her "Pentagon friends" from L-3 Communications, with whom she had worked "on my favorite program of all time, the U-2" spy plane. She spoke of her pride in working with the Boeing Company on the Future Imagery Architecture, a $4 billion project by the NRO and the NGA to build and operate the next generation of imagery satellites (the project was cancelled in 2005). At the CIA, Dempsey said, she had "benefited enormously" from her work with Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC.

Then she went slightly off-script: "I like to call Booz Allen the shadow IC," she said, using the common acronym for the intelligence community, because it has "more former secretaries of this and directors of that" than the entire government. That must have caused some chuckles at the lead table, where Woolsey was sitting. But Dempsey, of course, got the last laugh. Fifteen months later, she joined the "shadow IC" herself as a vice president. In her job at Booz Allen, she "provides strategy consulting services to the US government, including the national security and civil sectors, as well as commercial industry," according to company spokesperson George Farrar. Then, in January 2007, Dempsey's joke came full circle when Mike McConnell, her boss at Booz Allen, was appointed Director of National Intelligence. In the space of a few years, Booz Allen had been transformed from a "shadow" intelligence community player into the real thing.

It was most intriguing, then, to hear what Dempsey is actually doing in her new job at Booz Allen. In the spring of 2006, Dempsey was invited to speak to a seminar on intelligence reform at Harvard University. In a remarkably candid speech, Dempsey disclosed that her office at Booz Allen was evaluating the entire decision-making process within the intelligence community. Under her supervision, she said, Booz Allen was "studying the implications of the many decisions that are being made on a daily basis right now all over the intelligence community," including by the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "No one has thought through the implications of those decisions in a strategic or aggregate sense for the future," she added. So Booz Allen is helping out by "trying to forecast" what these decisions "mean for the intelligence community of the future -- what it's going to look like, how it's going to operate -- along a trend line."

It was a remarkable circumstance: Booz Allen was conducting a study for the DNI, a position that was about to be filled by one of the company's own -- Mike McConnell. The shadow IC was now helping the real IC prepare for an immediate future when the real IC would be led by the shadow IC. This was more than a revolving door: The private and the public sides of intelligence were now sharing the same room.

On the PBS revisionist history of the Irak war

PBS on Iraq: A Compilation of Deceit

By Morgan Strong in Consortium News
March 30, 2008

There have been five agonizing years of this war in Iraq. Five terrible years of bewilderment and rage.

Commemorating that anniversary, Frontline, the PBS investigative series, allotted four-and-one-half hours over two nights to an in-depth analysis of the war in Iraq and how it came about.

What the broadcast revealed was nothing new. Others have engaged the subject as thoroughly as did Frontline. What we did see in this broadcast, however, was a compilation of the deceit, pettiness, treachery, arrogance, ignorance and stunning callousness by those who took us into this vile war.

The key figures who promoted the war were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Lewis Libby. Those names were not new, but a new motive for the war was revealed: the recognition of Israel by a new democratic Iraq.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in an interview with Frontline, revealed this motive in the context of his suspicions about Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who was chosen by the Bush administration to run Iraq. The State Department was funding Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress.

Armitage: I couldn’t get any receipts from him, and he seemed upset about this—I no longer had the State Department fund him. The funding went to the Department of Defense. So it didn’t take me long to come to the belief that Mr. Chalabi was a charlatan.

Frontline: But he had real believers?

Armitage: Yes, he certainly did in the Vice President’s Office.

Frontline: Why?

Armitage: Well, he was very charming and smart. This was one smart cookie.

Frontline: He convinced them that this was the answer they wanted to hear?

Armitage: Well, perhaps when you’re telling people what they want to hear, and that you’ll recognize Israel and you can have bases in Iraq and this will be the new democratic bastion in the Middle East which can change the whole picture of the Middle East, maybe there’s a bit of a siren song there.

Those American officials who promoted the war hoped that a Chalabi-led Iraq would recognize Israel and a new era in the Middle East would begin. Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, and Cheney – along with Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld – endorsed the idea of Chalabi running Iraq and convinced a hopelessly befuddled Bush.

What is perhaps equally startling, and thoroughly depressing, is the common pettiness of the five – Libby, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld – as they fought desperately to launch this war in Iraq. They would let nothing and no one stand in their way.

It was Libby who provided the information to Secretary of State Colin Powell on the fabricated claims of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. This information, after some refinement by the CIA, was what Powell drew upon to make his dramatic speech to the U.N. Security Council.

The Frontline broadcast, through interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, showed Cheney and Rumsfeld acting as agents for their subordinates – Wolfowitz, Perle and Libby – all three of whom have had close historic ties to Israel.

In 1996, for instance, Perle joined a small group of researchers who advised Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu on his first steps as Israel’s prime minister. (That group also included Douglas Feith, who would be another key Pentagon figure pushing for war with Iraq.)

The working paper, entitled “A Clean Break,” included plans for ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, which was called “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” The paper also advocated an alliance with the United States to confront threats to Israel from Syria and Iran.

Six years later, the Perle-Wolfowitz-Libby tandem, aided and abetted by Cheney and Rumsfeld, implemented exactly that strategy inside the U.S. government.

As depicted by the Frontline documentary, Rice was isolated and demeaned by the five, so she presented no obstacle in the path to war even though her single responsibility was to tell the President of the United States that the war was not in this nation’s best interest and was premised on faulty intelligence. She was too cowardly to act.

There is great discussion in the broadcast of the role of faulty intelligence. Everyone, it seems, knew – or suspected strongly – that the claims about Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction were weak.

President Bush knew that these claims were tenuous at best. At one point, following a presentation of evidence by CIA Director George Tenet on the existence of these weapons, Bush pointedly asked: “Is that all you’ve got?”

Tenet replied: “It’s a slam dunk, sir.” In essence; don’t worry I’ll find you something.

Then Tenet went off to cook the intelligence that satisfied the President, enabling him to justify the war to the public.

By the time this sorry process was over, the five – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby and Perle – had in essence wrested the government from the American people. They controlled the mechanics of the state through lies, manipulations and intimidation.

They also isolated Powell, who was the only one in the Bush Cabinet who might have stopped them, but he did not – an act of transparent cowardice on his part.

Powell never raised his doubts to the American people or to their representatives. In truth, no senior official in the Bush administration did. Many government officials knew the information was highly suspect or completely false, but did nothing.

Bush is depicted in the broadcast as a passive incompetent controlled by Cheney, though whether or not the President was manipulated is largely irrelevant. As the chief constitutional officer of the United States, he bears the ultimate responsibility.

There have been 4,000 American men and women killed in Iraq so far. Estimates of Iraqi dead range into the hundreds of thousands, including many civilians and many children.

Beyond the lies, there also were the self-delusions. How in their right minds could the people who started this war believe that a new Iraqi government, with even modest democratic tendencies, would immediately recognize Israel?

And even more farfetched, that all of the Middle East states would rejoice and happily follow suit?

What would happen to the Palestinians? Would they simply be shoved aside in this glorious new era? Did the Bush administration really think that the people of the Middle East would forgive and forget so easily?

How did these people come to govern us? How did such incompetents and ideologues gain our fealty?

Morgan Strong was an adviser on the Middle East to CBS News “60 Minutes.” He is a former Professor of Middle Eastern History at MercyCollege and S.U.N.Y.

SIBELGATE: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

High Treason and Felonies

2/07/08

Ted Lang

The elephant that has been swept under the carpet to protect the Cheney-Bush regime could not go forever unnoticed by the American people. The unending laundry list of so-called “high crimes and misdemeanors” described in Section 4 of Article II, powers of the President, enumerates such treason that even the Founders and writers of the Constitution, in all likelihood, never had the capacity to either imagine or foresee. Section 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And Bush has gone on record as to what he thinks of the Constitution he swore to protect and uphold.

As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq and going after Saddam Hussein. We will probably never learn of the real reason behind his planned vendetta, but it seems that his need to do so can be summarized thus: Who will rid me of this meddlesome competitor?

Dick Cheney saw his opportunity to fill Bush’s burning need. Never being able to become the “top gun” in the White House, Cheney saw his chance to provide the solution for Bush’s burning quest. As David McCullough pointed out in his John Adams [© 2001, Simon & Schuster – New York]: “All the frustrations and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were to bemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President.” But with the advent of The Establishment’s New World Order launched in reality by the Bush-Clinton dynasties, strict adherence to the Constitution was seen as counterproductive to the agenda requiring the abrogation national sovereignty.

Vice President Al Gore was given specific solemn duties in terms of “re-inventing government” and strengthening airline security immediately prior to September 11, 2001. And Cheney saw his opportunity to lead and be an effective Vice President. For it was Cheney that started pressuring the Central Intelligence Agency at their Langley, Virginia headquarters on a seemingly regular scheduled basis seeking to induce the needed intelligence thereby providing Bush with the pretext to pull the trigger on Iraq and Saddam. It was in fact Cheney that initiated inquiries regarding “yellowcake” uranium solicitation by Saddam from South Africa.

These inquiries from the office of the Vice President must have been very disturbing for high-level CIA supervisors and managers necessitating immediate verification and a thorough investigation. The first level of inquiry would obviously be localized and be an in-house review, but then progress to where a possible direct investigation of the alleged clandestine activities were said to have been taking place. One of the closest readily accessible and knowledgeable operatives was undercover CIA supervisory operative, Valerie Plame. Plame’s cover was the use of her maiden name, and her “occupation” as an international energy trader with the CIA corporate front of Brewster Jennings Associates. The CIA had set up this phony front as far back as 1994. Plame would have had first-hand knowledge of WMD solicitations, especially nuclear ones centered in Africa.

Most of the information that follows is from the Wikipedia encyclopedia entry under the title of the “Plame Affair.” Having established the Brewster Jennings front, Plame was acknowledged by the CIA to have been a secret operative there from January 1, 2000 forward. She operated in this capacity until exposed by The Establishment’s Bilderberg-connected Washington Post and its reporter, Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003. Here is the opening excerpt from Novak’s article, entitled “Mission to Niger”: “The CIA’s decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet’s knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.”

But if Novak is being honest here when referring to a “routinely “and “low level” inquiry, why did he feel it necessary to investigate and approach high-level “senior officials” in the Cheney-Bush regime? Six paragraphs later, he offers this: “Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counterproliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ‘I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me. Novak hints at a Plame/Wilson-arranged vacation junket on the taxpayer, playing down the higher level CIA officials’ request to Plame and the fact that Wilson offered to pay for the trip himself.

Why was it necessary to elevate George Tenet’s position by Novak’s posturing of the Cheney-initiated inquiry as being routine and low level, yet denigrate former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s trip to Niger and his report as being less than definitive yet requiring comment from two high-level “senior administration officials” of the Cheney-Bush regime?

Consider Novak’s second paragraph: “Wilson’s report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly President Bush did not, before his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases to the British government. That the British relied on forged documents made Wilson’s mission, nearly a year earlier, the basis of furious Democratic accusations of burying intelligence, though the report was forgotten by the time the president spoke.” How does Novak know that “certainly President Bush did not” [see the report]?

Does Novak’s argument seem plausible? It totally disregards and omits the actual source from which the inquiry originated: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Why didn’t Novak start with the very origin of the Niger question? And Wilson’s report was regarded by high-level CIA officials “as less than definitive”? Here’s just the opposite view as cited in Wilson’s July 6, 2003 editorial piece in The New York Times and taken from the archives of CommonDreams.org:

“Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger’s uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.”

Now isn’t this a more plausible observation, and wouldn’t it go a long way to ending all doubt as regards the possibility of yellowcake from being secretly shipped to Iraq? Why did Novak choose to ignore this part of Wilson’s editorial? And why would the CIA regard Wilson’s findings as “less than definitive” given the unlikelihood of the huge and overarching coordinated conspiracy required to pull off a secret transfer of uranium to Iraq? And isn’t it possible, that if Tenet wasn’t interested, that it might be because such a possibility was so highly implausible and absurd? And who cares what British intelligence might have learned – what was our CIA’s take on the matter from the getgo?

As we all know today, there was intelligence uncovered through Italian media sources, with a somewhat undefined participation in some way by neocon war agitator Michael Ledeen. But Novak takes the neoconspirator approach in ignoring, for the most part, Cheney’s role, and plays down Bush’s use of those famous 16 words in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” But much more revealing than those 16 words, is the ENTIRE paragraph documenting Bush’s lie, as pointed out by Dennis Hans in his Counterpunch article of July 24, 2004, entitled, “Those 16 Words Still Smell.”

Here’s the entire paragraph taken from Hans citing Bush’s January 28, 2003 State of the Union address:

“The International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

What utter nonsense! What a pack of unadulterated lies! The CIA was clearly on board with Wilson’s findings and saw absolutely no threat from Niger. And as to those aluminum tubes, here’s Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting’s write-up on July 18, 2003, entitled, “Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg”:

“Aluminum tubes: In the State of the Union address and elsewhere, the White House has claimed that Iraq was seeking to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in processing uranium, tubes Bush said would be ‘suitable for nuclear weapons production.’ But a report in the Washington Post (9/19/02) months before Bush’s address noted that leading scientists and former weapons inspectors seriously questioned the administration’s explanation – pointing out that the tubes, which would be difficult to use for uranium production, were more plausibly intended for artillery rockets. The Post also noted charges that the ‘Bush administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence.’ Commendably, some reporters, like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell (7/14/03), have questioned the aluminum tubes claim in recent reporting about Bush’s State of the Union address.”

Clearly disenchanted with the “obstructionism” of the intelligence community, Cheney, along with the help of then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, set up an independent intelligence operation, Office of Special Plans headed up by neoconservative neoconspirator, Zionist Douglas Feith, that would fit cozily into Bush’ nebulous description of “our intelligence sources.”

Robert Novak, if for no other reason than his inborn curiosity tempered by years of balancing it against legal parameters in getting to the bottom of a story, should have known that attacking Wilson by exposing the latter’s wife as a “CIA operative” would blow her cover as well as that of Brewster Jennings, then a nine-year-old successful covert operation with a highly significant security mission. Here’s a segment from Wikipedia:

“According to Murray S. Waas in the American Prospect of February 12, 2004, the CIA source warned Novak several times against the publication: two ‘administration officials’ spoke to the FBI and challenged Novak’s account about not receiving warnings not to publish Plame’s name; according to one of the officials, ‘At best, he is parsing words .... At worst, he is lying to his readers and the public. Journalists should not lie, I would think.’ Novak's critics argue that after decades as a Washington reporter, Novak was well aware of Plame’s CIA status due to the wording he used in his column. A search of the LexisNexis database for the terms ‘CIA operative’ and ‘agency operative’ showed Novak had accurately used the terms to describe covert CIA employees, every time they appear in his articles.”

The primary sources of Novak’s supposedly new-found information on Plame were Richard Armitage and Karl Rove. It is now established that Armitage, Bush’s former Deputy Secretary of State, serving in that capacity from 2001 until 2005, was Novak’s primary “inside source.” Armitage was second in command at the State Department formerly headed by Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

The third ranking official at the State Department under the Cheney-Bush regime was Marc Grossman. Here’s the Wikipedia write-up of this Cheney-Bush character: “Ambassador Grossman was U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997. In Turkey, he promoted security cooperation, human rights and democracy, and a vibrant U.S.-Turkish economic relationship. Ambassador Grossman had previously served as the U.S. Embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission from 1989 to 1992.”

It was while at a Washington DC reception held at the residence of the Turkish Ambassador that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV met Valarie Plame. They later married in 1998, the marriage being his third and her second. The strong ties that Plame had developed with Turkish diplomats and government officials is precisely what made her a valuable US intelligence asset. It has now, once again been revealed recently by fired former FBI linguist and Turkish translator, Sibel Edmonds, that she had uncovered astonishing, incriminating evidence that Turkey, along with Pakistan, was seeking to acquire nuclear military secrets through the United States State Department. Edmonds, along with others, has pointed the finger at Grossman. Grossman was number three at State, while Douglas Feith was number three at Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

Contained in the Wikipedia entry under “Douglas Feith,” there is this revelation: “Upon leaving the Pentagon, Feith established the Washington, DC law firm of Feith & Zell. His law firm colleague, Marc Zell, was resident in Israel. Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government. Among other clients, his firm represented defense corporations Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Lockeed Martin and Northrop Grumman are among the largest defense corporations on the US government’s paid contractor list, Lockeed being the largest. And again, with Feith, we see the “Turkish connection.”

Is this why the FBI required a translator in Sibel Edmonds who was fluent in the Turkish language? In an article that succinctly articulates the situation concerning Sibel Edmonds and her gagging by the Cheney-Bush regime, Gary Leupp, in his January 29, 2008 piece for Counterpunch entitled, “We Can’t Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans,” offers:

“Over 120 Israelis were detained after 9/11, some failing polygraph tests when asked about their involvement in intelligence gathering. But they were not held or charged with any illegal activity but rather deported. As former FBI translator and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds has revealed, there was a curious failure of the government before 9/11 to act upon intelligence pertaining to an al-Qaeda attack. Most importantly Edmonds, defying the gag order that former Attorney General Ashcroft imposed on her in 2002, is implicating Marc Grossman, formerly the number three man in the State Department, in efforts to provide U.S. nuclear secrets to Pakistan and Israel. She suggests this was done through Turkish contacts and Pakistani contacts, including the former head of Pakistan's ISI who funneled funds to Mohamed Atta!”

Leupp continues:

“Edmonds claims that during her time at the FBI (September 20, 2001 to March 22, 2002) she discovered that intelligence material had been deliberately allowed to accumulate without translation; that inept translators were retained and promoted; and that evidence for traffic in nuclear materials was ignored. More shockingly, she charges that Grossman arranged for Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students to acquire security clearances to Los Alamos and other nuclear facilities; and that nuclear secrets they acquired were transmitted to Pakistan and to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father of the Islamic bomb,’ who in turn was selling nuclear technology to Libya and other nations.”

Leupp goes on:

“She links Grossman to the former Pakistani military intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad, a patron of the Taliban who reportedly arranged for a payment of $100,000 to 9/11 ringleader Atta via Pakistani terrorist Saeed Sheikh before the attacks. She suggests that he warned Pakistani and Turkish contacts against dealings with the Brewster Jennings Corp., the CIA front company that Valerie Plame was involved in as part of an effort to infiltrate a nuclear smuggling ring. All very heady stuff, published this month in the Times of London (and largely ignored by the U.S. media). She does not identify Grossman by name in the Times.”

Why is this blockbuster of a real conspiracy and proven treason against our nation not being reported by the American corporate mainstream media? We know why: the gatekeeper, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s full approval, is The New York Times, and as I pointed out in my earlier piece quoting news industry insider, Bernard Goldberg, “If the Times decrees a story important, by definition it is important. And when the Times ignores a story – or a book or a social trend or an idea – then it is invisible.”

The deliberate outing of covert CIA operative and a CIA front that had been effective for nine years was orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney. All of Novak’s sources came from that particular office of the Cheney-Bush operation. This occurred while Plame was probably as close as Sibel Edmonds was to exposing the sale of nuclear secrets by “our” State Department to Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. Turkey and Israel have very tight diplomatic and intelligence ties. Only a few months back, Edmonds revealed that in addition to the Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s direct and egregious involvement in the espionage case involving former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin that it was only the tip of the iceberg. She offered back then that at least FIVE espionage cases could have been made against Israel and its criminal lobby! How has our Zionist MSM handled this? By the way, Sibel Edmonds is Jewish!

So the Zionist New York Times is silent, as are the rest of the media in reverence to the Times’ dominating role over news and information in America. Isn’t it a lot easier to now see why co-traitor and Democrat Nancy Pelosi wants impeachment off the table? If Cheney is impeached, he could be arrested and tried for violating Title 18, Section 794, Part b, which covers espionage operations during time of war. Such a violation is punishable by either death or life in prison. Outing a covert CIA operative is precisely this kind of counter-espionage activity forbidden by this law, as well as is the selling of nuclear military secrets during a time of war. The State Department transfer of nuclear secrets to Turkey eventually found its way to Iran. Curious how Cheney-Bush are using the same approach as succeeded in igniting the war with Iraq towards Iran; yet, Cheney outed Plame who could have provided POSITIVE evidence that Iran DID at least receive nuclear secrets, albeit, however, from the Cheney-Bush crime machine’s State Department!

It is now easy to understand why there are no impeachment inquiries on the table; it is now also easy to see why there is in effect a “state’s secret” gag order on Edmonds; it is also easy to see why there is a gag order on former Lt. COL. Karen Kwiatkowski of Douglas Feith’s old office, and yet another on Valerie Plame. And Democrats Waxman, and Leahy, and Reid, and Pelosi, and Clinton all know the dirty, filthy treasonous secrets of the deadly, criminal Cheney-Bush regime. Virtually every member of this criminal dictatorship is guilty of one felony and/or capital offense or another. How asinine is it for US to attack Iran now, and also in light of the highly publicized negative NIE? And if the Cheney-Bush neoconspiracy is a treasonous operation, what about the complicit Democrats in Congress who are now accessories after the fact? And what of the continuing complicity of The New York Times and the rest of the “American” MSM? Our government, its political parties and our media are all corrupt, filthy cesspools in desperate need of a serious cleaning!

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February 7, 2008 © Theodore E. Lang 2/03/08 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.

How Bush Keeps Rendition Victims Out of Courts

MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOL OF LAW

Andover, Massachusetts

A MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOL OF LAW REPORT

“Thousands” Illegally Rendered By Bush Administration for Interrogation, Torture; How Bush Changed Rendition Policy

In violation of international and U.S. law, “thousands” of alleged terrorists have been victims of “extraordinary rendition” by the Bush Administration since 9/11, two legal scholars say.

“Instead of working to bring those committing crimes against the United States to justice in U.S. courts, the Bush Administration seems intent on doing exactly the opposite---keeping such individuals away from U.S. courts, hidden in a web of secret prisons, underground interrogation cells, and in the hands of cooperative governments,” write Margaret Satterthwaite and Angela Fisher.

Satterthwaite is an assistant professor of clinical law at NYU School of Law and Fisher served as assistant research scholar with the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

“Extraordinary renditions, whether originating in territories under U.S. control (actual or effective) or merely carried out by U.S. agents, are unlawful and in violation of international treaties to which the United States is a party,” the authors write.

“Despite this clear prohibition, the Bush Administration continues to engage in this practice, using it to transfer detainees out of the reach of U.S. courts and into the realm of secret detentions and brutal interrogations.”

“Having altered the procedure from a transfer sanctioned by U.S. courts to a transfer that is extralegal, this Administration completed the transformation of extraordinary rendition from transfer to justice to transfer out of the justice system,” the authorities contend in an article titled “Tortured Logic: Renditions to Justice, Extraordinary Rendition, and Human Rights Law” published in “The Long Term View,” a journal of informed opinion published by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(Volume 6, No. 4).

The authors explain that extraordinary rendition is an updated form of “rendition to justice,” first secretly authorized in 1986 by President Reagan in National Security Decision Directive 207, which formalized U.S. policy to fight terrorism. It came into being, they say, because the U.S. in the 1980s did not have valid extradition treaties with countries that commonly housed terrorists or because those nations refused to give the suspects up.

Under Reagan, they write, “it has never been suggested that the purpose of the program was to subject the detainees to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Once in the United States, the rendered individual would be treated like any other federal detainee awaiting trial.”

Satterthwaite and Fisher said President George H.W. Bush authorized specific procedures for renditions in 1993 through National Security Directive 77.

President Clinton, they noted, went further “emphasizing rendition as a key counter-terrorism strategy” and signing presidential decision directive PDD-39 on June 21, 1995, which stated, in part, “Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government…” One outcome of the Clinton policy, the scholars write, was the rendition of Tal’at Fu’ad Qassim, an Egyptian national that had been granted asylum in Denmark and seized by the U.S. in Bosnia and transported to Egypt, where he was reportedly executed---the first known rendition by the U.S. of a victim to a third country with a record of torture.

Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA rendered more than two dozen suspects, then-CIA Director George Tenet testified. In 2004, Tenet testified before Congress there had been more than 80 renditions prior to September 11, 2001.

Since 9/11, the scholars wrote, renditions have been used not to obtain jurisdiction over the suspects in order to prosecute “but instead to get an individual to talk.

” Previous renditions that required approval by an inter-agency group that included the Departments of Justice and State, were now placed in the hands of the CIA, which could render suspects “without consultation.”

Satterthwaite and Fisher write extraordinary rendition is prohibited by a number of international human rights treaties the U.S. has signed, including the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment(“CAT”), and the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights(ICCPR, or “the Covenant”).

Both prohibit the refoulement, or transfer, of an individual to another state where the person faces the risk of torture. Both treaties require ratifying states to institute domestic laws penalizing torture and CAT specifically requires states to criminalize conspiracy and aiding and abetting in torture.

Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for the City of Chicago and Nassau County, N.Y.,governments; as a news director for the National Urban League; as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News; as a workplace columnist for Reuters; as a media consultant to colleges, universities, law schools and more than 100 national magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Business Week, and Foreign Policy; as a speechwriter for mayors, governors and presidential candidates, and as a radio news reporter and talk show host at WOL, Washington, D.C. He holds an award for "best spot news coverage" for Chicago radio stations in 1963. His degree from the University of Miami was in race relations and he has written a book, "Gruening of Alaska," a number of national magazine articles and several plays, including "Baron Jiro," produced at Live Arts Theatre, Charlottesville, Va., and "Yamamoto's Decision," read at the National Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the Sermon on The Mount.