The Ghorbanifar Meetings Timeline

/134 Comments/in /by

The SSCI report on the Rome meeting has a really funny footnote.

Mr. Franklin is currently awaiting direction from the Department of Justice to report to prison on matters unrelated to those discussed in this report. He was indicted in August 2005 along with two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for conspiring with each other to unlawfully disclose classified national defense information. Mr. Franklin subsequently pled guilty, and was sentenced in January 2006 on three felony counts: conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it; conspiracy to communicate classified information to an agent of a foreign government; and the unlawful retention of national defense information.

The footnote is funny (in addition to the fact that it misstates when Franklin was first indicted) because Franklin pled guilty to dealing information about Iran to AIPAC. The reason Franklin did so was not because of money or blackmail, but because he disagreed with US policy on Iran, and was happy to work with AIPAC to pressure the government into a more hawkish policy on Iran. Which is pretty much what was happening with the Ghorbanifar information. As DOD’s own Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) report suggested,

Ghorbanifar or his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. Government.

Along with a lot of other crappy "intelligence," Ghorbanifar was floating plans to overthrow the regime in Iran, so the end goal of both the AIPAC effort and Ledeen and Ghorbanifar’s efforts was regime change in Iran.

The suggestion that Franklin’s indictment is unrelated to the Ghorbanifar meetings is also funny because, while Franklin claimed he did not know Ledeen in 2001 when Ledeen selected him to attend the Rome meeting, by fall 2004, Ledeen was intervening to get Plato Cacheris to represent Franklin in the AIPAC scandal. Thus, while there’s no reason to believe the Israelis were involved in the Rome meeting, the same group of Neocons were involved in parallel efforts to undercut US efforts to establish closer relations with Iran.

Now, as Laura Rozen revealed, it appears that this thing is not over–she reports that Harold Rhode has lawyered up. Rhode refused to cooperate with the SSCI’s most recent efforts to investigate this meeting last fall, which suggests he has gotten much more reluctant to talk about what happened (and DOD says he has forgotten what he said in 2004, displaying the forgetfulness all Bush Administration criminals seem to share). But if you think about it, there are only two logical explanations for why–two and a half years after Larry Franklin pled guilty to sharing defense information–he is still "awaiting direction from DOJ to report to prison." Either someone high up in the Administration intervened to keep Franklin out of the pokey (OVP is named in the SSCI report, and we know Dick Cheney has prevented allies from going to prison before), or Franklin has been cooperating with investigators for two and a half years. (His docket just shows a "delayed reporting date."

With all that said, I decided to look more closely at the timeline involved. What follows combines several timelines: the timeline of both the meetings and the investigations into those meetings from the SSCI report, key details from Franklin’s indictment, and details of attempts to foster closer relations with Iran detailed in this Flynt Leverett op-ed. I’ll say more about what this timeline shows in follow-up posts.

Read more →

The FISA Shaft Is Underway

/122 Comments/in , , , , /by

As you know, the FISA Amendments Act has been being negotiated behind closed doors by Steny Hoyer, Kit Bond and friends for some time now. See here and here. Well, the action is coming a little faster than we all anticipated.

It now appears quite clear that either the House will vote on the War Funding Supplemental and then go to the FISA Amendments ACT or, and it is not clear at this time what the odds on this are, link the two bills and vote on both at the same time. Here is what we do know. House has finalized their war supplemental bill, and it appears to be a go for a vote tomorrow (Thursday). So, the best evidence is that the vote on FISA will be on Friday June 20, and may be as early as Thursday night. There is precious little time left to make our voices heard.

Here is what Liz Rose from the ACLU gave me for publication:

One thing bugging me is that we do not have the Hoyer draft and neither do reporters; and yet some reporters are believing every single word Hoyer says. Feingold, Leahy, Conyers do not have the draft; the only people who do have it are Rockefeller, Bond, and Hoyer. People who are for the proposal. And yet I have not yet heard anyone question why that is. No sunshine and no one demanding to see the details.

Plus, even if leadership will vote with us, and act like they are on our side, the truth is they control the calendar. Nothing happens unless they want it to. It is so cynical and calculating. And it seems that the unwritten story is that this whole FISA cave in is really all about the DCCC and their worries about freshmen dems getting re-elected. They are not afraid of terrorists — they are afraid of ads about terrorists. If they were really afraid of terrorists they would just extend the orders. But all they really want is to reward the big telco contributors and get more checks for their campaign coffers. It is all political.

But I think they are wrong. Fear mongering did not help Guiliani win. And remember how good the House Dems were when they stood up on FISA and said no to the senate bill?. I will keep you up Read more →

The FISA Fix and Obama’s Profile In Courage Leadership Moment

/73 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

Whether by design or random chance, there is so much information, on so many and diverse subjects, flooding the politically astute citizen currently that it is hard to keep track. It seems like we are drawn from one crisis and seminal issue to another with the passing of not every day, but with the passing of every hour. And yes, they are all pretty much that important; but there are some that portend not just how we do in our lives, but who we are and what we stand for in the first place. Chief among those is the question of whether we are a nation of men freelancing in the public trough of goodwill, or a nation of laws in which men operate within the rule of law and under the edicts and guidance of our founding fathers and the Constitution they bequeathed us.

One of these issues has been at the forefront of out conscience for nearly a year now; the issue of how to improve the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) for the future we face and how to address the criminal violations of FISA we have suffered in the past. How we resolve FISA will go a long way indeed in indicating whether we are a nation of admirable laws or, alternatively, of mere opportunistic men.

The three critical parts of FISA that are the subject of the heated and protracted fight over reform are exclusivity, minimization and retroactive immunity. Simply put, exclusivity refers to the relative degree in which the resulting FISA law will control this area of the law. The original FISA statute was designed to be the

…exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.

As Marcy Wheeler has pointed out however, the Bush Administration performed a terminally disingenuous end run around the exclusivity mandate of FISA via one of John Yoo’s made to order faux legal opinions. The exclusivity provisions must be made impervious to such sophistry and with sufficient teeth to insure future compliance by the executive branch.

Minimization is the word for the procedures the government uses to

remove and (eventually) delete any data from US persons collected incidentally in the course of surveilling someone overseas. If we could be guaranteed that minimization procedures are sound, then the whole debate over Read more →

Whitehouse: Bush’s Lies “Rot the Very Fiber of Democracy”

/57 Comments/in /by

Updated with YouTube from Selise. 

If you’re reading the SSCI Phase II reports, go to this thread to discuss what you’re finding.

But if you want to know what Senator Whitehouse thinks about it, you can see his speech here.

Or you can read it below:

Mr. President, five years ago, President Bush and this administration misled this country into a war that should never have been waged, a war that has cost our nation the lives of more than four thousand courageous men and women, squandered many hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and diminished the world’s faith in our country.

This morning, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by our distinguished chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, released a report confirming what many have long feared: that the Bush Administration ignored or swept aside substantial, reliable intelligence that portrayed something other than what the President and his political allies wanted America to see.

Mr. President, the decision to take a nation to war, as Chairman Rockefeller indicated, is among the gravest and most momentous that a leader can make. In our democracy, we expect and deserve to be sure that when our troops are sent in harm’s way, when their families are made to watch and wait through sleepless nights, when our security and national welfare is put on the line, that that decision has been taken for the right reasons. This is a sacred compact, an article of faith, between our people and their government.

This Administration broke that compact, betrayed that faith.

For years, the evidence has mounted that this Administration’s reasons for war were a sham. And just this week, the President’s own former spokesman indicated that the White House ran a "political propaganda campaign" building the case for war.

This morning’s report is a chilling reminder of the Bush Administration’s willingness to overlook or set aside intelligence that did not conform to its pre-ordained view of the world. Over and over again, the Committee documented instances in which public statements by the President, the Vice President, and members of the Administration’s national security team were at odds with available intelligence information.

By leading the American people to believe that the situation in Iraq was significantly more drastic than it actually was, the Bush Administration took this country into an unnecessary war – a war it still refuses to end.

Read more →

Phase II Report Working Thread

/118 Comments/in /by

The SSCI has released (finally) the remaining reports on Iraq intelligence. I’m printing them out and beginning to read. If you want to read, too, use this thread to talk about what you’ve found.

(Update: Go here for text files–thanks tw3k). For a background, here’s McClatchy.

The Chinese Turned Out My Lights (Maybe)

/29 Comments/in /by

Remember that terrible blackout in 2003, that took power out from MI to NY and in between?

It was great fun here in Ann Arbor, for a little while. You could walk down the streets of the city and sushi merchants would come out and pretty much give their sushi away. We had an "apocalypse" barbecue that night, where everyone brought all the meat from their freezer or fridge and any alcohol that was cold, and consumed it in one big gluttonous barbecue. I had a non-electric land-line at the time and a gas stove and it was summer time, so I was pretty comfortable for the whole two-day affair. But it quickly turned our freeways heading west (where there was still power) into parking lots and those with electrical phones lost their communication and aside from the gluttony it was a big expensive mess.

Apparently, the Chinese did it.

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.

One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.

Read more →

“The Waterboard”

/18 Comments/in , , , /by

The ACLU has a bunch of new documents on water-boarding posted–including a very heavily redacted draft of the 2004 CIA OIG report on the CIA’s interrogation methods. The report is interesting for three reasons:

  • The way they refer to water-boarding
  • The timing
  • The rationale

The Waterboard

One of the very few things they’ve left unredacted (in all these heavily redacted documents) are the references to water-boarding. But they don’t use it as a verb, "to water-board." Rather, they almost always refer to it as "the waterboard."

The water board technique

interrogators administered [redacted] the waterboard to Al-Nashiri

interrogators used the waterboard on Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

Cables indicate that interrogators [redacted] applied the waterboard technique to Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

waterboard session of Abu Zubaydah

waterboard on Abu Zubaydah

The waterboard has been used on three detainees: Aby Zubaydah, Al-Nashiri, and Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it does. It really emphasizes the clinical and bureaucratic nature of this practices, and pretends that human beings are not the ones inflicting it.

The Timing

The ACLU refers to this as a "draft document," though there is nothing on what is visible on the cover page to suggest this wasn’t a final draft–so we can’t be sure whether the date on the report is the date when it was finally released.

Still, I find the date worthy of note: May 7, 2004. Read more →

How Is Rick Renzi Like a Gitmo Detainee?

/53 Comments/in , /by

A tiny bit of me (okay, miniscule) wishes that Rick Renzi were sticking around as a Congressman. That’s because, now that the government has tried to use wiretaps of conversations between him and his attorneys in his trial, Renzi might be motivated to champion legislation reaffirming the importance of attorney-client privilege.

Attorneys for Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who has been indicted on 35 federal corruption charges, filed a motion today asking a federal judge to exclude from trial a series of "at least 50" cell phone calls by Renzi that were recorded by FBI agents.

Renzi’s legal teams says that the calls should be privileged under attorney-client privilege, as well as the Speech or Debate Clause, a constitutional privilege that protects lawmakers and aides from legal action for legislative activities. Renzi is not raising a Speech or Debate claim on these intercepted calls yet.

"These privileged calls include conversations between Congressman Renzi and his criminal defense counsel and an attorney representing him in a Federal Election Commission (‘FEC’) proceeding. The privileged calls reflect discussions regarding legal strategy and core work product, including the direction of the investigation, witness interviews, DOJ strategy, Congressman Renzi’s recollection of relevant issues, and legal advice regarding theories of prosecution and applicable defenses," Renzi’s lawyers wrote. They are asking that the audio files and transcripts of the calls should be returned to Renzi’s control and a protective order should be granted to prevent prosecutors or anyone else from reviewing the calls.

It’s a problem that extends beyond corrupt Congressmen. Many of the lawyers defending detainees at Gitmo believe they are being wiretapped.

One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.

In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.

“I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time,” said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.

[snip]

Read more →

Foggo’s New Charges

/14 Comments/in /by

Note: see the update below for issues relating to the accuracy of this post as originally posted. I’ve retained what seems to be supported by other data: mostly that the CIA is trying to spin Foggo’s additional charges as proof of the Agency’s own ability to investigate itself, spin that the timing involved seems to belie.

A number of you have pointed out that Dusty Foggo got some charges slapped onto his existing indictment.

A federal grand jury has accused a former top CIA official of pulling strings to get a high-level CIA job for his mistress, as part of a new indictment against the official in an existing corruption case.

The new indictment against Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, a former No. 3 official at the spy agency and a onetime senior CIA ethics officer, alleges that he pressured CIA managers into hiring the woman after she was turned down for a position in the CIA’s general counsel office. He also allegedly made false statements about her qualifications, the indictment states.

Foggo, the CIA’s executive director from 2004 to 2006, specifically told agency officials he had a "special interest" in seeing the woman hired, and he later berated them when they initially rejected her application. "When the ExDir has a special interest, you had better take notice," Foggo told the general counsel’s staff, according to an indictment filed late Tuesday by the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria.

[Update: RJ Hillhouse has deleted the post that I linked to substantively here and–at her request, I’m removing the citation of her blogpost. Her note on why she deleted her blogpost is here. The substance of the text–which Hillhouse does not stand by any longer–included some history on earlier events potentially related to these new charges.]

What’s so hilarious about this is that–in Joby Warrick’s article–the CIA is spinning that Foggo’s additional indictments prove how good CIA is at policing itself.

The initial filing of criminal charges against Foggo in 2006 prompted questions about internal security at the CIA, which is supposed to have an elaborate system of checks to limit the risk of malfeasance by agency insiders. But agency officials insisted yesterday that the system works and said that the CIA has played a key role in investigating Foggo.

"It demonstrates a willingness by the CIA to investigate itself," said an official who declined to be identified by name because the charges have not been tried in court.

[text deleted, see above]

But that was, presumably, over two years ago, back before Foggo had to resign from the CIA and back before–over a year ago–Foggo was indicted for bribery.

And it has taken up until now–[text deleted]–to get added to Foggo’s indictment? Read more →

FISA Update (And Why Is John Boehner Crying Again?)

/63 Comments/in , , , , , /by

The week starts off with Main Core, Glen Fine’s much anticipated IG Report has been released, today is another state election (Kentucky) in the most hotly, and closely, contested primary that many of us can remember, and, now, the tragic and deflating news that Senator Ted Kennedy has a malignant brain tumor. Oh yeah, and an extended holiday weekend and Congressional recess is at hand in a couple of days. This type of situation can mean only one thing – FISA is bubbling back to the surface. Heck, the only thing missing from this equation is a terror alert; but then again, the week is still young.

First off, where we stand. The news is not all bad, but it sure isn’t all good either. From the National Journal (subscription required-sorry):

House Majority Leader Hoyer had previously said he wanted to reach a compromise on FISA by the Memorial Day recess. GOP and Democratic aides cited several reasons why that has not happened. Late last week, Hoyer sent Senate Republicans a list of provisions that House Democrats want included in a final bill, aides said. Hoyer’s proposal took Senate Republicans by surprise. A Republican aide called the proposal "a step backward."

Before Hoyer’s proposal, Senate Republicans believed that only two main issues needed to be resolved, and that they were close to reaching an agreement on them with House Democrats. One issue dealt with having the secret FISA court determine if the telecom firms should be granted retroactive immunity from lawsuits for their role in the administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance activities since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The second issue centered on allowing the FISA court to review the administration’s procedures and certifications for surveillance operations. "We’re basically there on those two," an aide said.

But Hoyer’s proposal included other provisions, some of which had already been defeated during votes in the Senate, aides said. One provision, for example, would allow the FISA court to assess if the government is complying with so-called minimization procedures, which limit the amount of information collected and stored on Americans incidental to the surveillance target. Another provision contains language making FISA the exclusive means under which the government can conduct electronic surveillance.

The good news is that it appears that there is little chance that Read more →