“And while you’re indicting Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress…”

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"…why not add another charge too?"

That seems to be the immediate message of Henry Waxman’s 11-page memo exposing Administration lies about the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. As he describes, when Congress approached her with questions about the Administration’s use of the uranium in Niger claim, Condi Rice had Alberto Gonzales answer on her behalf.

On January 6,2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter on behalf of Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, writing that "Dr. Rice has asked me to respond" to questions raised by the Committee about the uranium claim.

But the testimony the Oversight Committee has collected seriously challenges the veracity of Gonzales’ memo.

The information the Oversight Committee has received casts serious doubt on the veracity of the representations that Mr. Gonzales made on behalf of Dr. Rice.

Basically, George Tenet, former Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Miscik, and former NSC speechwriter John Gibson testified that Condi and other NSC staffers had received multiple warnings not to use the Niger uranium claim, in addition to the insistent warnings before the Cincinnati speech that we already knew about.

As I suggested, DOJ may well already be considering charges against Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress about the US Attorney firings (and, for that matter, about the illegal wiretap program). Waxman lays out one more instance where Bush’s Fredo appears to have lied about Administration activities.

Not that it’ll do much good: there’s a five year statute of limitation on lying to Congress, and the memo in question was written four years and eleven months ago. (The Administration didn’t turn over the memo in question until November 12 of this year.)

I’ll have more to say about the substantive details in Waxman’s memo after I do some Christmas shopping. But for now, if you needed any more proof that the SSCI report on prewar intelligence on Iraq was a whitewash based on Administration lies, now you’ve got it. 

The Thomas Tamm Legal Defense Fund

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images5.thumbnail.jpegAs Mike Isikoff has related in Newsweek, Tom Tamm was the critical tipping point behind Eric Lichtblau and Jim Risen’s New York Times expose the Bush Administration domestic surveillance program.

Marcy pointed out yesterday, the FBI/Justice Department has now been upending Mr. Tamm’s life for years now and, it appears, has been stringing out the matter seeking to get past Vaughn Walker’s consideration of the Constitutionality of the retroactive Congressional immunity grant in the consolidated cases in the Northern District of California (and, presumably, get past the five year statute of limitations on many of the Administration’s actions):

Delaying the decision until the Obama administration takes office would do more than dump the problem into Obama’s lap (just like the Gitmo detainees, of course). It would also delay the time when Tamm testified publicly about what he knows of the domestic surveillance program until after Vaughn Walker issues a ruling on immunity for the telecoms.

By coming forward now, Tamm has told Walker something–in no uncertain terms–that the government won’t tell him.

DOJ recognized that this program was illegal.

The bottom line is that Tom Tamm blowing the whistle is probably the linchpin behind us knowing what we do about the egregious unconstitutional and illegal actions of the Bushies. Tamm coming forward at this time may also prove to be critical in forming Judge Walker’s mind on his review of the immunity assertion.

A lot of readers have asked about how to donate to Tamm’s legal defense fund. In that regard, I contacted Mr. Tamm’s attorney, Paul Kemp and obtained the information; here is the response:

Hi [bmaz]. Thanks for your inquiry. The address of the defense fund
is:

Thomas Tamm Legal Defense Fund
Bank of Georgetown
5236 44th Street
Washington, DC 20015.

Tom appreciates your support and that of your readers. [Some
unrelated chit chat on another matter redacted]

Paul F. Kemp

Irrespective of his precise personal motivations, Tom Tamm has done the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, the rule of law and all of us a favor by exposing the rank lawlessness of the elected leaders of this country. If you see fit, send him a few bucks to lighten the load he has taken on.

I don’t know about you, but if the wingnuts can pony up hundreds of thousands for the traitor Scooter Libby, I am sure as heck going to ante up a little to thank Tom Read more →

Eyes On The Spies: What Obama Can Do About Illegal Surveillance

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With all the commotion and hubbub surrounding the personalities and gossip of Obama’s cabinet formation, and expression of everyone’s opinion on how that should proceed, little has been said about the actual policies and actions (other than Iraq) that should be implemented right out of the gate. One area that has been neglected is that of the illegal wiretapping and surveillance policies and practices that were instituted in the country’s name by the Cheney/Bush regime.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have some ideas for the incoming Obama Administration in this regard, and they are pretty good.

President Obama can end the immunity process. Consistent with his previous opposition to immunity — then-Senator Obama voted in favor of Senator Dodd’s amendment to strip the immunity provisions out of the FAA altogether — Obama could instruct his new Attorney General to withdraw the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuits based on the immunity statute. Or,

President Obama can temporarily freeze the immunity process until he has learned all the details about the NSA program. Read more →

Napolitano To DHS; Skeletor To Be Buried

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images.thumbnail.jpegAs most of you know, I firmly supported Janet Napolitano for Attorney General in the new Obama administration. It looks as if Eric Holder will be the Attorney General instead, but CNN has just announced that Napolitano will be the choice for Department of Homeland Security. Here is the Reuters headline:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s top choice to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, CNN reported on Wednesday, citing multiple sources.

The Democratic governor, a supporter and campaigner for Obama’s presidential campaign, had been reported to be on a short list of people to fill cabinet posts in the new administration.

Assuming she makes vetting and is confirmed, Janet will make a fantastic Secretary of DHS. Some of the skills and abilities I pointed out as qualifications for AG will serve her very well as Homeland Security.

Napolitano is well versed and experienced with constitutional law and civil rights, having been mentored as the hand picked protege of one of the country’s great Constitutional scholars and authorities, John P. Frank, one of the two legal fathers of the Miranda decision. She has sizable long term experience not only as the Arizona Attorney General (a huge office), but also as chief executive of an entire state government as Arizona Governor. Of critical significance, she was the US Attorney for the District of Arizona for six years under President Clinton, prior to her terms in state office as Arizona’s AG and Governor.

The job ahead is going to, in addition to the legal skills, require someone with Federal experience and the established ability to manage a giant bureaucracy. Janet Napolitano has a very rare combination of background and experience to fit that bill. The attention to bureaucratic detail, not just in Washington DC, but in all of the 93 US Attorney district offices is going to have to be immense. Wholesale institutional change needs to be implemented, and malefactors rooted out.

Janet Napolitano has this ability in droves over any other candidate discussed for AG. She is spectacularly good at bureaucratic detail and getting big entities working as an efficient team. Janet has an incredibly feel good aura around her, and it is contagious to those working with and for her. She is a master team builder, both in terms of efficiency and competence as well as morale and attitude. Janet has already exhibited her turnaround skills in her Read more →

Speaking of that Man-Sized Safe…

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JimWhite noted that Senators Leahy, Jello Jay, DiFi, and Whitehouse have written the White House to warn Cheney to stop shredding. The letter seems to be a response–at least in part–to this passage from Barton Gellman’s Angler.

The command center of "the president’s program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation’s largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] — in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington’s office. Cheney’s lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

In an interview, Card said the Executive Office of the President, a formal term that encompassed Bush’s staff but not Cheney’s, followed strict procedures for handling and securing presidential papers.

"If there were exceptions to that, I’m not aware of them," he said. "If these documents weren’t stored the right way or put in the right places or maintained by the right people, I’m not aware of it."

The Senators ask, 

Have you investigated allegations reported in the Washington Post on September 14, 2008, that the "staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of" presidential orders in the safe of the Counsel to the Vice President? If so, what were the results of your investigation.

In addition, they also ask specifically about Dick’s own notes (and those of Addington and Libby and Bush, if he actually ever kept notes)a.

Does the White House believe that any notes or documents created by the President, the Vice President or their respective staffs may be destroyed without consultation with the Archivist? If so, which notes or documents, and why?

Read more →

Surprise Surprise: “Laptop of Death” a Possible Forgery

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Almost four years ago today, Colin Powell presented some dodgy intelligence suggesting Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. Powell’s announcement had all the trappings of Bush propaganda: sketchy exiles, the pre-emption of IAEA counter-evidence, technical specs that make a known civilian application look like a nuclear weapon, and, of course, Powell himself.

Does it surprise you to learn, via Juan Cole, that that intelligence may well have been forged?

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.

The documents in question were acquired by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from a still unknown source — most of them in the form of electronic files allegedly stolen from a laptop computer belonging to an Iranian researcher. The US has based much of its push for sanctions against Iran on these documents.

Nope, it doesn’t surprise me either.

Still, even though none of us are surprised, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to figure out who forged all the evidence tailored to get the US involved in wars in the Middle East? Before Dick Cheney absconds with the evidence?

CIA & Foggo: It’s Hard On Spy Pimps Out There

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It’s getting hard out there on the pimps and cons in the CIA, first Director Goss goes down the tubes, and now his right hand man Foggo is headed to the slammer.

As reported Monday, Dusty Foggo has copped an incredibly lenient plea to one count of simple wire fraud. Foggo, formerly Number Three man in the Bush CIA, under Director Porter Goss who also resigned in disgrace, had been charged with 28 counts of sordid and sundry fraud, conflict of interest, bribery aiding and abetting, and false statements, all primarily related to the Duke Cunningham and Brent Wilkes criminal convictions.

Just how did Foggo get such a sweetheart deal?

It must have been the evidence that Foggo created a new deputy director of administration position and hired his mistress to fill it, the weekly poker games at Washington hotels with Congressmen such "Duke" Cunningham, lobbyists, House intelligence committee staff members and prostitutes. Or maybe Foggo’s assistance to childhood friend, Brent Wilkes, one of two defense contractors bribing House intelligence committee member Cunningham with tens of thousands of dollars in antiques, travel, fancy meals, house payments, and hookers in exchange for earmarks steering more than $100 million worth of government contracts to Wilkes’ San Diego-based firm, right?

As the always excellent Laura Rozen details in an article just out in Mother Jones:

No, what truly worried Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3. They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes, estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source familiar with Read more →

We Have Met The WMD Terrorists, And They Are US

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Well, here comes a new entry in the Captain Renault "I am shocked, shocked to hear of this" file. It turns out that Jose Rodriquez and the CIA are not the only ones that Cheney and Bush have ordered to destroy critical material evidence the subject of investigations into international terror cases. Nope; of course not. They have put their grubby little thumbs to the screws on the Swiss as well. From the startling new reporting in today’s New York Times:

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having deep associations with Dr. Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.
…
The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.
…
Yet even as American officials describe the relationship as a major intelligence coup, compromises were made. Officials say the C.I.A. feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners’ relationship with the United States — and perhaps raise questions about American dealings with atomic smugglers — but would also imperil efforts to recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran’s nuclear program.

So the prosecution and trial of the Tinner group, and related avenues into the depths of the spiderweb of influence and dealings of AQ Khan is lost. Good thing that our good allies against terror, the Pakistanis, have their thumbs on AQ Khan and are getting to the bottom of how Khan’s "rogue" network was able to operate. Eh, not so much. Now, we know that in the Bush Administration, all policy and interaction with Pakistan begins and ends with Dick Cheney. Kind of Read more →

The Strange Case of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul (Part 2)

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In part 1, I laid out the facts surrounding the detention and illegal transfer of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul. In this post, I want to demonstrate why this case matters. There is a pattern to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal usurpation of executive power. Because the pattern broke down in this case, the strategy behind that power grab is laid bare. The struggle within the administration over the disposition of Rashul and the way it was resolved helps to illuminate the true nature of the current regime. Perhaps this case creates an opening to unravel the authoritarian infrastructure that has been built within our country in the last eight years.

Part 2: Why it matters

In the grand scheme of things, focusing on this case might seem a little like busting Al Capone for tax evasion. The Bush/Cheney Administration has institutionalized the most egregious extralegal executive abuses in our nation’s history. As matters of policy, they’ve launched a war of aggression under false pretenses, violated the most basic human right treaties, trashed the Fourth Amendment, denied the right of habeas corpus to citizens and non-citizens alike, set up secret prisons, disappeared their presumed opponents around the world, tortured the innocent and presumed guilty alike, conducted sham military tribunals against the underage and the mentally ill, and, worst of all, claimed the power to indefinitely detain anyone in the world, including U.S. citizens, without any external check whatsoever. And that’s just the stuff they have admitted to.

If we want to undo all this, and I very much do, we’ll have understand how they were able to accomplish it. I’m not going to rehash the sociopolitical environmental conditions that the administration took advantage of. Folks here understand that the generalized fear and anger after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the fecklessness of the Democratic party, the docile and compliant traditional media, the tight discipline within the Republican party, and the latent authoritarian impulses of a sizeable minority of the country created the necessary conditions for what happened. I want to focus on how the administration manipulated secrecy, its own people’s psychology, and the instinct for institutional self-preservation to manage a shifting set of narratives that allowed them to follow a deliberate strategy of expanding executive power and upsetting the constitutional balance of government while evading responsibility and steam-rolling all opposition. Then, I hope to show how this case exposes some chinks in the rather substantial armor of these malefactors. Read more →

FISA Redux Again: The Slippery Slope Leads Down A Rabbit Hole

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Five days ago, in the post "FISA Redux: The Slippery Slope Becomes A Mine Shaft", we discussed the new set of domestic spying protocols that the Bush Administration is determined to entrench into law and practice before leaving office. The measures would:

…make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years. … would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies.

Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.

…also would allow criminal intelligence assessments to be shared outside designated channels … It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government.

As if that wasn’t enough fun for one post, we also learned that Attorney General Mukasey

…would release new guidelines within weeks to streamline and unify FBI investigations of criminal law enforcement matters and national security threats.

Well, that didn’t take long. Guess what; they’re here. It is amazing how when it comes to protecting the rights and privacy of American citizens, the health and stability of the environment, the education of our children, and the care and compassion to military veterans, the Bush Administration produces nothing but bad faith delay, obstruction and, often, outright refusal to act. They are imminently capable, however, of moving with breathtaking alacrity when they sense the opportunity to seize unheard of domestic police state powers that undercut the Constitution, solely by Administrative fiat, and that fundamentally alter the way the American public exists in relation to it’s government in terms of their privacy and, in an existential sense, if not physical, their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Here, courtesy of the New York Times, is the new joy the Attorney General is announcing to "protect yer freedums":

A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.
…
The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American Read more →