LadyBroadoak Visionary Planetary Healing Tutorial: William Fisher

Oh, those hits just keepa coming.

Thanx SO much Dubya and Dirty Dick!!

"Bring It On" Still Alive and Well
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 18 July 2006

The punditocracy has lately been waxing eloquent about President Bush's softer, more conciliatory tone and less hysterical, more humble rhetoric, which many have trumpeted as "the end of cowboy diplomacy."

Not on your Nellie. If you believe our cowboy in the White House has somehow morphed into world statesman, have a look at Dubya's two most recent choices for big promotions.

They are William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, tapped to be a Federal Judge, and General Bantz Craddock, who currently oversees "war on terror" detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, to be commander of US forces in Europe, as well as NATO.

Mr. Haynes has been a key player in shaping some of the Bush administration's most legally and morally reprehensible policies, notably on the use of torture. He is one of a small group of insiders who have developed the Bush administration's policies on questioning detainees and declaring American citizens to be "enemy combatants." The twisted legal reasoning of this group opened the door to the abusive treatment of US detainees at Guantanamo Bay and helped create the environment that led to the Abu Ghraib scandal. The Supreme Court has repeatedly had to step in to rein them in.

If confirmed by the Senate, Haynes would have lifetime tenure on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia. It is this court that has heard some of the most important cases about the constitutional limits on the war on terror. By what stretch of the imagination could anyone see Mr. Haynes as an impartial voice on these issues?

Of course, the administration lawyers who crafted the Bush "torture policy" and described the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" have a rich history of being rewarded.

In 2002, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to prepare a memo dealing with limits on "standards of permissible conduct" for interrogations conducted "abroad" as found in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The memo concluded that the restrictions were limited only to acts inflicting and "specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering," whether mental or physical. It said it was OK to allow severe mental pain not intended to have lasting effects and physical pain less than that which accompanies "serious physical injury such as death or organ failure."

The author of that infamous - and now rescinded - memo was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, one Jay Bybee. President Bush rewarded him with a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

And the man who requested that memo - and recommended it to the president - was then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who was then elevated to Attorney General of the United States - the "people's lawyer."

And it may be worth recalling that the Bybee memo was rescinded by the Justice Department virtually on the eve of Mr. Gonzales's confirmation hearing in the US Senate.

But take heart - all may not be lost. As a New York Times editorial reminds us,

"The administration likes to blame opposition to its judicial nominees on "liberal activists," but Mr. Haynes's most high-profile opposition comes from the military itself.

Twenty retired military officers, including a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote to the Senate to express their concern that the policies Mr. Haynes helped develop

"compromised military values, ignored federal and international law and damaged America's reputation and world leadership." T

he officers expressed their "deep concern" about his fitness for the court.

And during Mr. Haynes's confirmation hearing, some of the most pointed questioning came from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former military lawyer who takes the law of combat seriously.

So Democrats may not have to worry about filibustering this grotesque nomination. Enough Republicans in Congress may join with Democrats to actually take their "advise and consent" role seriously.

Then there's General Craddock. In a White House with a sterling record of PR over substance, only an extreme lack of oxygen inside the bubble can explain the special kind of chutzpah the president showed by nominating the current commander of GITMO to be our Supreme Allied Commander of anything.

As one of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's most trusted aides, Gen. Craddock has ordered investigations into allegations of abuse at the camp but has generally defended it against critics.

Last year, a team of military investigators looked into allegations by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who said they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. The FBI allegations were contained in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act.

The chief investigator into Guantanamo practices, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, told a Senate panel of the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Al-Qahtani was thought to be "the 20th hijacker" in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Schmidt said interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra and wear a thong on his head, told him he was a homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women, and to wear a leash and act like a dog.

These techniques were reportedly approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use on al-Qahtani, and were used at Guantanamo in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking him down.

Members of the military team that conducted the three-month investigation told the Senate Armed Services Committee they recommended a reprimand for General Geoffrey Miller, the officer widely reported to have been sent from Guantanamo to Iraq to "GITMO-ize" Abu Ghraib and other US detention facilities.

The Miller inquiry strongly supported the contention that Gen. Miller was the constant in the prisoner treatment equation, first at Guantanamo, and later at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, where similar interrogation techniques were employed.

Their recommendation for a Miller reprimand, however, was overruled by Gen. Miller's superior, the very same Gen. Craddock now about to be rewarded with yet another Bush promotion.

Gen. Craddock acknowledged that Gen. Miller had used "creative" and "aggressive" tactics, but did not practice torture or violate law or Pentagon policy. He concluded that Miller's techniques did not rise to the level of torture, and referred the matter to the Army's Inspector General - from whom, as far as we know, nothing has been heard since.

It might be reasonable to expect that, in light of the Supreme Court's recent Hamdan decision reining in the unfettered power of the president to ignore Congress and make his own law, a chastened White House might have given a tad of consideration to the public perception of these two nominations, even if it could care less about the Supreme Court's ruling.

But that would require some kind of major epiphany from our cowboy president.

Instead, we get more "Bring it on!"

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Fisher also served in the international affairs area during the Kennedy administration. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

THE PENTAGON'S REVOLVING DOOR

By William Fisher

The Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America – but is known to have spied on at least 186 peaceful anti-war protests in the U.S. – has just awarded a $30 million contract to a company whose senior management includes the former Defense Department (DOD) official who set up that office.

The former DOD official is Dr. Stephen Cambone, a trusted protégé of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Since his resignation as DOD’s Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence following Rumsfeld’s departure in November 2006, Cambone has been vice president for strategy of a company known as QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America, a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia.

Two months after QinetiQ hired Cambone to expand its North American operations, that company’ s Mission Solutions Group signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA. While at the Pentagon, Cambone was responsible for supervising CIFA and was deeply involved in the Pentagon’s most controversial intelligence programs at a time when DOD was making concerted efforts to marginalize the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by setting up its own parallel intelligence apparatus.

Formerly known as Analex, QinetiQ’s new contract expands work that Analex was providing to CIFA since 2003. CIFA manages a database of what it regards as "suspicious incidents" in the U.S. The database includes intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, and security reports, as well as raw non-validated information from DOD's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (TALON) reporting system of unfiltered information.

In 2006, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information request to inspect TALON’s documentation. It received and reviewed hundreds of TALON documents, among which was a 2006 memo listing 186 reports involving “anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S., several peaceful protesters identified as potential threats to the military, and 2,821 TALON reports relating to “U.S. person information” and “anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S.” These reports were entered into a DOD anti-terrorist threat database.

Pentagon documents released by the ACLU show that the DOD monitored the activities of a wide range of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and United for Peace and Justice.

The organization said the Pentagon’s misuse of the TALON database is just one example of increased government surveillance of innocent Americans.

“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 anti-war protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” said Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s Associate Legal Director. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”

And Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA, told IPS, “This is a prime example of how the U.S. government has created a broad definition of "domestic terrorism" that overreaches, and can have a chilling effect on our rights to free expression, free association, and privacy. Even in times of crisis, it is important to preserve our constitutional rights. As Benjamin Franklin said,

‘He who gives up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety’."

Telephone calls to QinetiQ’s offices seeking comment for this article were not returned.

TALON was created after the U.S. Congress in 2002 approved a proposal backed by Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney to create a new undersecretary slot at the Pentagon specifically for intelligence. Cambone was given the job. Under the law, Cambone exercised the Secretary of Defense’s “authority, direction and control” over all DOD intelligence, counterintelligence and security policy, plans and programs.

The mission of Rumsfeld and Cambone was to give the Pentagon greater authority in the area of human intelligence, traditionally the preserve of the CIA. Cambone’s deputy was Army Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, then a deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin was later reprimanded by the Army for “inappropriate” comments made in a series of speeches given in evangelical churches while in his military uniform, in which he described

the war on terrorism as a Christian battle against evil.

Civil libertarians and human rights activists have drawn parallels between CIFA’s collection and retention of data on peace groups and other activists and the domestic collection of data through such programs as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). COINTELPRO was a program of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the U.S. Its targets were organizations that were at the time considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from groups such as The Weahtermen, who advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government to such non-violent civil rights activist organizations as Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Such acitivites were later strictly regulated by laws such as the Privacy Act of 1974, which strengthened and specified a U.S. citizen's right to privacy as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

According to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine, Cambone was also involved in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. Hersh claimed the interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Cambone.

Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reported, where Cambone decided to begin using non-Special Operations personnel -- including military intelligence officers and other military personnel --to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief. He wrote that the CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.

The bottom line: Rummie may be gone, but the Bush Administration and its army of private contractors continues to be chockablock with his private armies and neocon sycophants. And most of the departed are re-entering, and earning a ton more money in the process.

If you were hoping that Bob Gates was going to change all that, get over it.

US Department of Defense response to Seymour Hirsch
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=7372

"To correct one of the many errors in fact, Undersecretary Cambone has no responsibility, nor has he had any responsibility in the past, for detainee or interrogation programs in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

"This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy.