Some companies helped the NSA, but which?
By Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache
CNET News.com
February 6, 2006,
Under federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication"-- unless specifically authorized by law-- could face criminal charges. Even if cooperation is found to be legal, however, it could be embarrassing to acknowledge opening up customers' communications to a spy agency.
Even after the recent scrutiny of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance project approved by President Bush, an intriguing question remains unanswered: Which corporations cooperated with the spy agency?
Some reports have identified executives at "major telecommunications companies" who chose to open their networks to the NSA. Because it may be illegal to divulge customer communications, though, not one has chosen to make its cooperation public.
Under federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication" --unless specifically authorized by law--could face criminal charges. Even if cooperation is found to be legal, however, it could be embarrassing to acknowledge opening up customers' communications to a spy agency.
A survey by CNET News.com has identified 15 large telecommunications and Internet companies that are willing to say that they have not participated in the NSA program, which intercepts e-mail and telephone calls without a judge's approval.
Twelve other companies that were contacted and asked identical questions chose not to reply, in some cases citing "national security" as the reason.
Those results come amid a push on Capitol Hill for more information about the NSA's wiretapping practices. On Monday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is expected to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and President Bush and his closest allies have been stepping up their defense of the program in preparation for it.
To be sure, there are a number of possible explanations for the companies' silence. In some cases, a company's media department could have been overworked. Another possibility is the company's lawyers were unavailable or chose not to reply for unknown reasons.
Also, some survey recipients, such as NTT Communications, responded with a general statement expressing compliance "with law enforcement requests as permitted and required by law" rather than addressing the question of NSA surveillance.
A lawsuit that could yield more details about industry cooperation is winding its way through the federal courts. Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco, sued AT&T after a report that the company had shared its customer records database--though not its network--with the NSA.
AT&T would not respond when asked whether it participated. An AT&T spokesman, Dave Pacholczyk, said: "We don't comment on matters of national security."
The News.com survey, started Jan. 25, found that wireless providers and cable companies were the most likely to distance themselves from the NSA. Cingular Wireless, Comcast, Cox Communications, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile said they had not turned over information or opened their networks to the NSA without being required by law.
Companies that are backbone providers, or which operate undersea cables spanning the ocean, were among the least likely to respond. AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, Level 3, NTT Communications, SAVVIS Communications and Verizon Communications chose not to answer the questions posed to them.
The New York Times reported on Dec. 24 that the NSA has gained access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. But "the identities of the corporations involved could not be determined," the newspaper added.
At the water's edge
Analysts and historians who follow the intelligence community have long said the companies that operate submarine cables--armored sheaths wrapped around bundles of fiber optic lines--surreptitiously provide access to the NSA.
"You go to Global Crossing and say...once your cable comes up for air in New Jersey or on the coast of Virginia, wherever it goes up, we want to put a little splice in, thank you very much, which NSA can do," said Matthew Aid, who recently completed the first volume in a multiple-volume history of the NSA. "The technology of getting access to that stuff is fairly straightforward."
Aid was citing Global Crossing as an example, not singling it out. Global Crossing describes itself as an Internet backbone network that shuttles traffic for about 700 telecommunications carriers, mobile operators and Internet service providers. According to the International Cable Protection Committee, the company has full or partial ownership of several trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables.
Global Crossing spokesman Tom Topalian said "99 percent of wiretapping is done at a local phone company level" instead of at backbone providers. Topalian declined to answer questions about NSA access, and added: "All U.S. carriers have to comply with the CALEA act, and Global Crossing complies with CALEA." (CALEA is a 1994 federal law requiring certain telecommunications providers to make their networks wiretap-friendly for domestic law enforcement, not intelligence agencies.)
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., last month sent a letter (click for PDF) to companies including Google, Yahoo, EarthLink, Verizon and T-Mobile asking them if they cooperated with the NSA. News.com asked similar questions, but expanded the number of companies to include backbone and submarine cable providers.
Among the companies that responded, some offered far more detail than others. Les Seagraves, EarthLink's chief privacy officer, said: "We've never even been asked to give information without the benefit of a subpoena or a court order behind it. And our policy is to require a subpoena or court order, basically to require a court of law behind the inquiry."
"We're very interested in protecting our customers' privacy and balancing that with our duties to comply with the law," Seagraves added. "Our way to balance that is to definitely make sure we have a valid legal request before we release any information."
Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick said the company "will only provide customer information pursuant to a valid court order and only if Comcast's records contain information sufficient to identify the customer account on the (date or dates) listed in the court order."
A representative of Cox Communications, David Grabert, said: "Cox has never received a request for information or a wiretap that was not accompanied by a warrant."
NSA's history of industry deals
Louis Tordella, the longest-serving deputy director of the NSA, acknowledged to overseeing a similar project to intercept telegrams as recently as the 1970s. It relied on the major telegraph companies including Western Union secretly turning over copies of all messages sent to or from the United States.
"All of the big international carriers were involved, but none of 'em ever got a nickel for what they did," Tordella said before his death in 1996, according to a history written by L. Britt Snider, a Senate aide who became the CIA's inspector general.
The telegraph interception operation was called Project Shamrock. It involved a courier making daily trips from the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., to New York to retrieve digital copies of the telegrams on magnetic tape.
Like today's eavesdropping system authorized by Bush, Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people in the U.S. whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes.
Then-President Richard Nixon, plagued by anti-Vietnam protests and worried about foreign influence, ordered that Project Shamrock's electronic ear be turned inward to eavesdrop on American citizens. In 1969, Nixon met with the heads of the NSA, CIA and FBI and authorized a program to intercept "the communications of U.S. citizens using international facilities," meaning international calls, according to James Bamford's 2001 book titled "Body of Secrets."
Nixon later withdrew the formal authorization, but informally, police and intelligence agencies kept adding names to the watch list. At its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Details about Project Shamrock became public as part of a Senate investigation of the NSA. Telegraph companies participating in the program initially balked when questioned by Senate investigators. But documents turned over by the NSA "cast doubt on the veracity of the companies' claims that they could find no documentation pertaining to Shamrock," wrote Snider. "After all, this had concerned the highest levels of their corporate management for at least four years."
Another apparent example of NSA and industry cooperation became public in 1995. The Baltimore Sun reported that for decades NSA had rigged the encryption products of Crypto AG, a Swiss firm, so U.S. eavesdroppers could easily break their codes.
The six-part story, based on interviews with former employees and company documents, said Crypto AG sold its compromised security products to some 120 countries, including prime U.S. intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia. (Crypto AG disputed the allegations.)
"Only a very few top executives"
The extent of the NSA's surveillance project in operation today remains unclear. Attorney General Gonzales has stressed that the program intercepts e-mail and phone conversations only when "one party to the communication is outside the United States."
In his book titled "State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen wrote: "The NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships."
Tapping into undersea copper and fiber-optic cables where they make landfall would be one way to create a virtual web of surveillance that can snare Internet packets or voice communications when they traverse U.S. borders. One benefit for the government is that one participant in the conversation is likely to be overseas--permitting Gonzales and the NSA to stress the interception's international nature.
Another method would be to seek the cooperation of backbone providers with networks entirely within the United States. That could be done with a tap hooked up to the switches at a telephone company or backbone provider, said Phill Shade, a network engineer for WildPackets who is the company's director of international support services. WildPackets sells network analysis software.
"The tap essentially splits off a copy of the traffic--it would literally take a copy of all the traffic as it moves through the wire," Shade said. "Picture a capital letter 'Y' in your head...One copy goes back out the regular wire on the right side of the wire, and the copy you're interested in splitting goes off the left side of the Y to you. These are very common networking devices, used in networks all over the world."
The tap's exact location may matter. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is convening Monday's hearing, has asked Gonzales to respond to a series of questions about the legality of the program. One question Specter is posing: If intercepted calls are "routed through switches which were physically located on U.S. soil, would that constitute a violation of law or regulation restricting NSA from conducting surveillance inside the United States?"
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Bush to say terrorist attack thwarted
AFP
9 Feb 06
US President George W. Bush was to say in a speech that international cooperation helped thwart a terrorist attack on the US west coast, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
McClellan did not provide any details about the plot, or the way it was prevented, but told reporters the purpose of Bush's remarks was to "show the kind of international cooperation that is required" to defeat terrorism.
He also said the goal was not to justify Bush's controversial order, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to allow spying on Americans without getting a warrant, in a break with past practice.
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Reversing course, White House provides details of surveillance to Congress
AFP
9 Feb 06
The White House has provided details of a controversial domestic eavesdropping program to members of the US Congress, reversing its earlier adamant refusal to do so, legislative officials said.
The decision came as US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence General Michael Hayden held a closed-door briefing for members of the House Intelligence Committee about its secret program to intercept domestic communications without court approval.
The secret electronic wiretapping by the National Security Agency was put in place to intercept terrorist communications, but provoked a storm of opposition from civil libertarians who say the program violates Americans' privacy rights.
The White House about-face came after a leading House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency called for a full congressional inquiry into the domestic spying program.
Republican Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said said she was pleased that the George W. Bush administration had reconsidered it position.
"The checks and balances in our system of government are very important, and it's those checks and balances that are going on and are being executed now," Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday.
"I had serious concerns and questions about this program when it was initially reported," she said. "We must conduct a complete review of this program.
In a statement, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra called the briefing "a positive first step."
"I appreciate the White House's willingness to inform more members on aspects of this vital NSA program," he said.
Meanwhile, Republican US Senator Arlen Specter said on the floor of the Senate that he soon would introduce legislation requiring the White House to seek approval from a special federal court in order to continue the eavesdropping program.
"The thrust of the legislative proposal that I am drafting ... is to require the administration to take the program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," said Specter, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which held hearings into the legality of the program earlier this week.
"We want to be secure and we want to have the military -- and the administration and the president -- have all the tools he needs to fight terrorism, but we also want to maintain our civil liberties," he said.
"What is involved is the equilibrium of the constituional system, and that's a very weighty concept," Specter said.
Comment: Notice that the decision came after a "closed door briefing." In other words, they mapped out a strategy so they would appear to be "investigating" and "cooperating," but nothing significant will ever be revealed.
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Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.
The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.
The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush's program. The president's secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.
James A. Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government's failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.
Yet another problem in a 2005 warrant application prompted Kollar-Kotelly to issue a stern order to government lawyers to create a better firewall or face more difficulty obtaining warrants.
The two judges' discomfort with the NSA spying program was previously known. But this new account reveals the depth of their doubts about its legality and their behind-the-scenes efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence. The new accounts also show the degree to which Baker, a top intelligence expert at Justice, shared their reservations and aided the judges.
Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.
It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court, the secret panel created in 1978 in response to a public outcry over warrantless domestic spying by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The court's appointees, chosen by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, were generally veteran jurists with a pro-government bent, and their classified work is considered a powerful tool for catching spies and terrorists.
The FISA court secretly grants warrants for wiretaps, telephone record traces and physical searches to the Justice Department, whose lawyers must show they have probable cause to believe that a person in the United States is the agent of a foreign power or government. Between 1979 and 2004, it approved 18,748 warrants and rejected five.
Lamberth, the presiding judge at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Kollar-Kotelly, who took over in May 2002, have repeatedly declined to comment on the program or their efforts to protect the FISA court. A Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment.
Both presiding judges agreed not to disclose the secret program to the 10 other FISA judges, who routinely handled some of the government's most highly classified secrets.
So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.
According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.
Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly derived significant comfort from the trust they had in Baker, the government's liaison to the FISA court. He was a stickler-for-rules career lawyer steeped in foreign intelligence law, and had served as deputy director of the office before becoming the chief in 2001.
Baker also had privately expressed hesitation to his bosses about whether the domestic spying program conflicted with the FISA law, a government official said. Justice higher-ups viewed him as suspect, but they also recognized that he had the judges' confidence and kept him in the pivotal position of obtaining warrants to spy on possible terrorists.
In 2004, Baker warned Kollar-Kotelly he had a problem with the tagging system. He had concluded that the NSA was not providing him with a complete and updated list of the people it had monitored, so Justice could not definitively know -- and could not alert the court -- if it was seeking FISA warrants for people already spied on, government officials said.
Kollar-Kotelly complained to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and her concerns led to a temporary suspension of the program. The judge required that high-level Justice officials certify the information was complete -- or face possible perjury charges.
In 2005, Baker learned that at least one government application for a FISA warrant probably contained NSA information that was not made clear to the judges, the government officials said. Some administration officials explained to Kollar-Kotelly that a low-level Defense Department employee unfamiliar with court disclosure procedures had made a mistake.
Kollar-Kotelly asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to ensure that wouldn't happen again, government officials said.
Baker declined to comment through an office assistant, who referred questions about his FISA work to a Justice Department spokesman. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith also declined to comment and referred questions to Justice officials. Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department could not discuss its work with the FISA court.
"The department always strives to meet the highest ethical and professional standards in its appearances before any court, including the FISA court," Roehrkasse said. "This is especially true when department attorneys appear before a court on an ex parte basis, as is the case in the FISA court."
Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said.
So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush's assertion that the court was not "agile" or "nimble" enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court's actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.
On Sept. 12, Bush asked new FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in a Cabinet meeting whether it was safe for commercial air traffic to resume, according to senior government officials. Mueller had to acknowledge he could not give a reliable assessment.
Mueller and Justice officials went to Lamberth, who agreed that day to expedited procedures to issue FISA warrants for eavesdropping, a government official said.
The requirement for detailed paperwork was greatly eased, allowing the NSA to begin eavesdropping the next day on anyone suspected of a link to al Qaeda, every person who had ever been a member or supporter of militant Islamic groups, and everyone ever linked to a terrorist watch list in the United States or abroad, the official said.
In March 2002, the FBI and Pakistani police arrested Abu Zubaida, then the third-ranking al Qaeda operative, in Pakistan. When agents found Zubaida's laptop computer, a senior law enforcement source said, they discovered that the vast majority of people he had been communicating with were being monitored under FISA warrants or international spying efforts.
"Finally, we got some comfort" that surveillance efforts were working, said a government official familiar with Zubaida's arrest.
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Do You Know What They Know?
by Bob Herbert
The New York Times
February 6, 2006
Has the National Security Agency referred your name to the F.B.I. as a result of information it picked up from its illegal domestic eavesdropping program?
You don't know, do you? And the Bush administration, which has linked its mania for secrecy with its fetish for collecting data on Americans, is not saying.
The big problem related to this program, as far as the administration is concerned, is not its metastasizing threat to constitutional government, the rule of law, the privacy of innocent Americans, the venerable system of checks and balances, and the American way of life as we've known it.
No, the big problem for Bush & Co. -- the thing that makes the president and his apologists apoplectic -- is the mere fact that this domestic spying program has come to light. Investigations are under way to determine who might have leaked information about the supersecret program to The New York Times, which disclosed its existence, and others.
This is not a time for Congress or the media to bow before the intimidation tactics of a bullying administration. This is a time to heed the words of a federal judge named Damon Keith, who reminded us back in 2002 that "democracies die behind closed doors."
The attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is scheduled to testify about the N.S.A. program today at a public hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Here are some of the questions that need to be asked:
Who is being spied upon, and why?
How many Americans here in the United States -- or others who were lawfully in the country -- have had their phone conversations or e-mails intercepted without a warrant?
Who determines what calls or e-mails are to be monitored in the U.S. without warrants, and what are their guidelines?
How many of those who were spied upon were found to have been involved in terror-related activities? How many were referred to the F.B.I. or other agencies for further investigation?
Of those who were referred, how many were cleared of wrongdoing?
What kind of information is being collected about people who are spied upon without warrants but are not referred to law enforcement agencies? How is that data being used, and how is it stored?
Is the government collecting information about the political views of the people who are being spied upon? With whom is that information being shared?
What has been the nature and the extent of the objections from people inside the government to the warrantless spying?
Until recently, no one was above the law in the U.S., not even the president. Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment and run out of town for thumbing his nose at the Constitution. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his sex life.
The Bush administration, by exploiting the very real fear of terrorism, and with the connivance of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, has run roughshod over constitutional guarantees that had long been taken for granted. The prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment? Habeas corpus? The right to face one's accuser? When it suits the Bush crowd, such protections are simply ignored.
The president would have you believe that the warrantless N.S.A. spy program is a very limited operation, narrowly focused on international communications involving "people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
If that were true, there would be no reason not to get a warrant from the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The most logical reason for not getting a warrant is that the president's intelligence acolytes, who behave as though they graduated from the Laurel and Hardy school of data mining, have not been able to demonstrate that the people being spied upon are connected to Al Qaeda or any other terror organization.
The National Security Agency sent so much useless information to the F.B.I. in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that agents began to joke that the tips would result in more "calls to Pizza Hut." The Times reported that thousands of tips a month came pouring in, virtually all of them leading to dead ends or innocent Americans.
The American public needs to know what's really going on with this spy program. "Liberty," said John Adams, "cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."
Comment: Herbert sez, "The most logical reason for not getting a warrant is that the president's intelligence acolytes, who behave as though they graduated from the Laurel and Hardy school of data mining, have not been able to demonstrate that the people being spied upon are connected to Al Qaeda or any other terror organization."
Do not for a moment fall into the trap of thinking that the Neocons are Laurel and Hardy. Fact is, the most logical reason for not getting a warrant is that the individual being spied upon is a member of congress, the military, the judiciary, or the media, and that that the reason for spying is not to discover terrorists, but to blackmail political opponents, thus gaining total control over the political process.
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Rothbard on the Fall and Rise and Fall of Liberty
By Ryan McMaken
Lew Rockwell
8 Feb 06
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that those who control the present control the past. It would be difficult to prove Orwell wrong, for surely it is not a mere coincidence that the dim picture of history taught in the government schools and the even more vague history repeated incessantly by the public intellectuals, just happen to create a worldview in which governments through the centuries have made possible everything that is good and decent in the world today.
The myth goes something like this: Prior to the rise of the modern States in the modern world, all had been darkness. A backward feudal system existed with bloodthirsty warlords and tyrannical bishops spreading war and despotism across Europe. Then, one day, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, breaking the power of the superstitious and ignorant Old Order, and establishing in its place, a rational, enlightened system of States. The States of this new Age of Reason were admittedly not democratic, but they were certainly a vast improvement on the old State of affairs. Over time, the kings gave way to democracy for a few people, and eventually, to democracy for everyone, making the State, at long last, the benevolent servant of "the people." At the same time, the Industrial Revolution took hold, but capitalism exploited the workers and polluted the environment. Fortunately, the State was able to bring the capitalists under control and bring an end to mistreatment of workers, long hours of toil, and widespread environmental degradation. The 20th century provided some challenges to the spread of democracy, but those were conquered, just as we knew they would be, and today, justice, equality, and protection from all enemies of the great democratic order is provided for but a meager sum of tax funds. Civil rights and economic prosperity are improving all the time while foreign enemies are being cleared away, and the day will surely come when the end of history itself arrives, and we will all be thankful that we had such just and powerful governments at our disposal.
Murray Rothbard called this theory of history the State’s "Great March Upward into the Light," and much of his work, especially his newly republished History of Economic Thought, is devoted to debunking it. Always at the center of this march to perfection is the State. For the socialists and the left, the State will bring the society of perfect equality. For the neoconservatives and the right, the State will bring the millennial Pax Americana and the End of History. Few believers of the myth will deny that there have been some minor setbacks, yet they are firm in their contention that there can never be true progress without the State. Without the armies, and agencies, and weapons of the State, humanity would degenerate back into superstition, war, ignorance, and want. Depending on one’s point of view, a world without the State holds the prospect of capitalists, or terrorists, or communists, or Christian theocrats returning humanity to the presumed lowly State of the pre-modern world. The modern defenders of the State never speak in terms of "the State," and they may not even think in such explicit terms. Yet, the end result is the same whether one is explicit about it or not. States are at the center of their world, providing the necessary means to combat the evils of our time, destroying the oppressions of the past, and securing a safe and just future.
Rothbard had little patience for this pat view of human history. The myth of the modern State as freeing mankind from a dark past was particularly insidious to Rothbard. Whether discussing the American Revolution, the Great Depression, or the history of economic thought, we find in Rothbard’s work a thorough insistence that the political and intellectual history of modernity is the history of a battle against the State.
Rothbard’s view of history revolves around at least three central assertions. First, the history of liberty does not begin with the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or any other modern era claiming to be born out of an earlier, darker age. The foundations of liberty are established much earlier, in an era of increasingly free trade and of weak and decentralized medieval States. The intellectual birth of liberty begins with the foundations of natural law and natural rights laid down by the medieval scholastics. Second, the industrial revolution must be regarded as a good thing. In fact, it should be regarded as one of the best things to ever happen in human history. Third, the material prosperity made possible by the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the ancient ideas of natural law and natural rights, is a potent enemy of the State and the reason that liberty is likely to prevail in the long run.
In his essay "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Rothbard sums up his view of the "Old Order":
The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.
Contrary to the myth, the rise of modernity did not make the State more just or more enlightened. It just became bigger, stronger, and more likely to abuse its power. The States of the Middle Ages had been decentralized, weak, and couldn’t even qualify as "sovereign States." Thanks to overlapping political jurisdiction and the influence of the Church, no king of this era could claim total control over internal affairs. Yet, the absolutist States that heralded the arrival of the modern era were exactly the opposite. They were centralized, vast, powerful, and their rulers could indeed claim total internal sovereignty over their subjects
The political theory of the Middle Ages also constrained the power of the States. In The History of Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Rothbard focuses on the influence of scholasticism. Associated closely with Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism revolved around theories of natural law that governed all men and all institutions which were in turn expected to adhere to immutable divine laws of justice and governance. Kings and rulers who did not rule according to natural law were subject to morally justified rebellion and even regicide.
Scholasticism, of course was closely associated with the Catholic Church, and as the power of the Church declined in the Late Middle Ages, so did scholasticism and the intellectual rigor it relied on. The rise of the modern State accelerated with the Reformation and with efforts to overturn scholastic critiques of political power. From the German princes in the north to the rulers of the Italian city-states in the south, kings and princes seized on the Reformation as an opportunity to increase their power.
Having abandoned the scholastic tradition, the original Reformers were forced to fall back on proof-texting scripture for guidance on political affairs, concluding that "absolute obedience and non-resistance" was what scripture commanded. At the same time, Niccolò Machiavelli would add to the assault on reason arguing that States and princes should not be restrained by natural law, reason, or any other external force, but only by the arbitrary and often irrational will of the prince himself."
In the wake of this intellectual and political revolution came Absolutism. The new absolute monarchs went to war against the merchant classes that had arisen during the High Middle Ages. Kings used their new bureaucracies to impose taxes, enforce regulations, and wage large-scale wars against their enemies. It was the age of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and it was a great step backward for liberty. Yet, even as the new vast modern States were consolidating their power, theories of natural law and natural rights continued to be developed. Theorists like John Locke and Richard Cantillon would reclaim the natural law tradition and go on to use "rational scholastic methods" and forward compelling defenses of private property, commerce, and human freedom. Thus, by the 18th century, the natural law theories of the scholastics had been revived and were being reworked into liberalism, the new ideology of individualism, liberty, and capitalism.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe in spite of State attempts to control trade, knowledge, and even the movement of capitalists themselves. The great enemy of the Industrial Revolution, of course, has always been the State, and mercantilism ruled the day with its price controls, tariffs, taxes, regulations, and endless favors for friends of the ruling regime. The "intellectual" justifications for mercantilism were never anything more than irrational appeals to nationalism and privilege, while the liberals maintained that mercantilism was not only despotic and contrary to natural law, but inefficient and crippling to the economy. Naturally, those who ruled also happened to benefit from the largesse of the mercantilist despotism. But slowly, throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, liberalism gained ground. In "The Meaning of Revolution," Rothbard outlines the struggle:
Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent "revolutions" that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution.
Eventually, liberalism swept Europe as a mass movement putting forth the natural rights of men against the State. Yet, by the early 20th century, liberalism had retreated. Various forms of nationalism and socialism had begun to overtake liberalism in the 19th century, and by World War I, liberalism had disappeared as the dominant ideology of Europe. Liberalism’s intimate connection with capitalism and the industrial revolution was particularly damaging. Communists, socialists, nationalists, romantics, and primitivists all denounced the Industrial Revolution for being exploitive, for corrupting the morals of society, and for breaking down the alleged virtues of the distant past. The drive against the Industrial Revolution was thoroughly anti-intellectual as well, with the opponents of capital pining for the days of yesteryear when men could live by their wits in the wilderness and not be constrained by the evils of the modern industrial world. Rothbard’s writings exhibit particularly enthusiastic scorn for arguments such as these, unleashing a rhetorical torrent of contempt on the romantics and primitivists who had conveniently forgotten that the real history of subsistence farming and the pre-industrial age was one of famine, toil, and death.
In spite of the political revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing acceptance of natural rights as an immutable restraint on the power of States, the 20th century was a disaster for liberalism. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, Communism in Eastern Europe, and the militarized welfare-warfare State in America did much to destroy the liberalism that had expanded throughout the previous century. Serious talk of global nuclear war, the continued rise of socialism in Europe and the Americas, and the marginalization of liberal intellectuals had all but relegated liberalism to the dustbin of history.
Yet, even in 1965, before the fall of Soviet communism, before the internet, and before the Chinese government decided it preferred industrial revolutions to cultural revolutions, Rothbard was optimistic. In "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," he writes:
"What the Marxists would call ‘objective conditions’ for the triumph of liberty exist everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals."
In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and "Enlightenment" intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although "the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire."
Ryan McMaken teaches political science in Colorado.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
Comment: "Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction."
- Thomas Jefferson
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Deluded Believers in Government
by Bill Bonner
February 8, 2006
On paper, people are a lot richer than they were 20 or 50 years ago, but it doesn't seem as though the money has done them much good. Maybe our memory is giving out, but we don't ever remember the area looking so shabby, so crowded, or so disagreeable.
We returned from the United States this morning feeling low. Maybe it was just the effect of so much traveling. It could the delayed effect of attending a memorial for a dear friend. Perhaps it was our drive down to the family farm... or the result of the book we were reading on the plane.
We had not seen the family farm in Maryland in a few years. As we drove to it, we wondered again about this extraordinary period of prosperity in the United States. By the gross numbers, Americans added more to their wealth in the last 20 years than in any equivalent period in history. But something seems wrong. What kind of wealth is this, we wondered? All we could see on our drive was a wealth of opportunities to spend money badly. The countryside is being junked up with strip malls and highways.
You can barely throw a beer can out the window without hitting a collection of Chicken Fil's, WaWas, and Mr. Noodle's...not to mention muffler shops and car dealers. There are more cars and more roads to drive on, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere worth driving. And driving down the road itself is depressing. We remember as a child that our grandparents would get in the car on Sunday afternoon to "go for a drive." It was fun just to drive around and take in the sights. We can hardly imagine doing that now.
On paper, people are a lot richer than they were 20 or 50 years ago, but it doesn't seem as though the money has done them much good. Maybe our memory is giving out, but we don't ever remember the area looking so shabby, so crowded, or so disagreeable.
When we finally got to the farm, we were disappointed to find that even our own place seemed to have fallen into the same junky disrepair as the rest of the neighborhood. The fences are broken. Trees have fallen down and lay on the ground like unburied soldiers. Shutters bang in the wind. We worked for 10 years building it up; now, it seems like a lot of time and effort for nothing.
But maybe that was only our mood and who really knows what causes moods or what our moods cause?
That we have moods, no one denies. They react to the world around us, and then cause us to change the way we think and act.
And they affect entire nations. Of course, we see this in the markets. Sometimes people are buoyant and upbeat about the future. Other times, people are downcast and gloomy.
Sometimes a dollar's worth of earnings can be sold for $20. Other times, investors will turn up their noses even at a $10 price.
Sometimes moods sink – even deeper than stock prices – deep into the heart and soul of a people. Our reading on the flight was a book we found in an airport kiosk. It was a "social history" of the Soviet Army in World War II. Rarely has any group of people been so roughly handled as the Soviet soldiers in the '30s and '40s. If a soldier escaped being slaughtered by the enemy, it was only to be annihilated by his own government. Sometimes he managed to get lucky and get shot or he died from sheer incompetence...with neither proper gear...nor proper food...sans sleep....and sanitation.
And yet, why did these millions of armed men still not turn on their tormentors? Ah, that's where mood – the zeitgeist – of the country plays its part. The people of the Soviet Union were, for the most part anyway, believers. They believed in the Soviet ideology, in rational materialism, and in Stalin himself. That is to say, they believed in things most people today regard as delusions. Even those who survived Stalin's mass murders often still say his name with reverence...as if he were a national saint.
"You know what, I think the mood in the U.S. has changed a lot in the last decade," said a friend at breakfast. "I remember when I went to West Point, we were taught to respect the enemy. He was a worthy opponent. If captured, he should be treated as well as you could treat him. In World War II, that's what we did. That's probably part of the reason so many Germans surrendered to us at the close of the war. They wouldn't surrender to the Russians, because they knew they would be killed. And it's probably why we had a relatively easy time reconstructing our enemies after the war.
"But I have a friend with a son at West Point now. What I hear is that they regard the enemy as though he were inferior...and no longer deserves either respect or the courtesies of the Geneva Conventions. Of course, that could be just his opinion. I don't know...but I can't imagine that we would have put burlap bags over the head of our prisoners in World War II, or had WACs stripping them down and kicking them in their private parts."
How much has the mood of America changed in these last 20 years? In what direction? We know the average American will pay nearly three times as much for the same dollar of earnings. Why does he think it so much more valuable? What else has changed?
We don't know.
• The war in Iraq costs $150 million a day, according to a recent USA Today report. Afghanistan adds another $27 million.
Meanwhile, fears over Iran sent the oil price up last week. And then came Venezuelan President Chavez, with a helpful remark. He said he'd shut down U.S. oil installations in the country and sell his oil to China and India, if America got on his nerves.
And these tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions didn't only affect oil prices...gold, the "safe-haven metal" traded near 25-year highs today.
"It might even be a calm before the storm. I think we're going to see some further tests higher this week," said James Moore, analyst at TheBullionDesk.com.
"The market is going to remain a bullish trend and we will continue on towards the $600 (an ounce) level, probably over the course of the year," he said.
• "The debt is exploding and the president isn't facing up to it," said Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.
Dubya may not be facing it, but well-respected bond guru, Bill Gross, certainly is.
At a financial conference at UCLA last week, Gross "expressed concern that the game might be up – that foreign investors would decide that U.S. bonds and other securities weren't worth the money, leaving the American economy suddenly desperate for capital," notes the LA Times.
"In any case, the extent of foreign investor control over the U.S. economy's fortunes is a cold reality," Gross said.
Savings rates are at a 72-year low. Of course, back in the '30s people had lost their jobs. They couldn't save; instead they had to draw down savings simply in order to eat and pay the rent. Now, we just heard that employment is near a record high. So, now people don't save for another reason – because they think they no longer need savings.
There will always be jobs, ATM machines, and home equity lines, right? What a strange public mood! It's almost delusional. People cannot imagine that times could ever get so bad that they would need to draw on their own savings. There will always be someone ready to lend them money, won't there? What they don't consider is where the money will come from. If Americans no longer save, who will have savings to lend?
Well, that must be why God made foreigners.
• Due to soaring deficits, the Bush administration will be forced to ask Congress to raise the national debt limit, which is now at $8.2 trillion...and counting.
But never fear – Bush has made a pledge to cut the U.S. deficit in half by the end of his term in 2009...and how exactly does he plan to do that? After reading a bit about his new proposed budget, to start October 1 of this year, your guess is as good as ours, dear reader.
In his budget proposal, Bush is asking Congress for $120 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of 5 percent increases in the Pentagon and Homeland Security budgets.
With these increases, to meet his goal of cutting the colossal deficit in half in the next three years, the budget plan calls for $36 billion in Medicare cuts over five years, as well as putting "the squeeze on the one-sixth of the budget that funds the nonsecurity operations of government – everything from running the national parks to buying paper clips," CNN.com reports.
• At the memorial service for our friend Thom, we got together as many surviving members of the old 'Ouzilly Band' as we could. Even at its best, the Ouzilly Band was pathetic. Without Thom in the lead, it was worse. Still, it was a time for music, laughter and tears; that's what Thom would have wanted. A performance of the Ouzilly Band accomplished all three. When people heard us play, they laughed, unless they were real music lovers...in which case, they cried.
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US Capitol nerve agent scare a false alarm
AFP
9 Feb 06
Washington authorities said a nerve agent scare, which forced the evacuation of a Senate office building, was a "false alarm" after white powder found in the building was found benign.
Scores of senators and Senate staffers were rushed from their offices after a sensor in the building's attic set off an alarm indicating the suspected presence of a dangerous nerve agent in the building, said Capitol Police sergeant Kimberly Schneider.
"All the test results are actually negative, so that's very good news," Schneider told reporters about three hours after the Russell Senate Office Building was evacuated.
"We have a good outcome tonight, so we are all very happy about this," she said.
The alarm, which was sounded around 6:30 pm (2330 GMT), saw scores of emergency vehicles and hazardous materials teams descend on the building. Police within the congressional complex evacuated senators' offices and ushered workers into a holding area located within a garage. The building is linked by an underground tunnel to the Capitol, which houses the US Congress.
Police said workers, including some senators, had been directed to the garage for their own safety as further tests were being conducted.
"There was an alarm to immediately leave the building," Eileen McMenamin, a spokeswoman for Senator John McCain, told CNN television from the garage area.
"There are guys down here testing the air," she said. "They just used the words 'nerve agent'."
Schneider said no one reported any symptoms that would be consistent with a chemical or biological attack, but could not say what the white powder was that set off the sensors.
Comment: US Congressmen fleeing for their lives... and they don't even stop to think that they have created the world where this humiliating behavior is accepted.
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The terror of President Bush - How one word granted one man so much power and control
By Mike Adams
Counter Think
8 Feb 06
Following accelerating criticism that the Bush Administration's domestic spying program violated every possible U.S. law and Constitutional amendment, the Bush Administration has now renamed its blatantly illegal domestic spying program the "terrorist surveillance program." Fox News has already adopted the moniker, resorting to classic Orwellian Newsspeak to convince viewers that since this illegal government operation contains the word "terrorist," it must be okay.
Where would George Bush be today without the word "terror," by the way? That single word, it seems, is solely responsible for Bush's continued popularity among simple-minded Americans. Without the word "terror," Bush would have no war, no foreign policy, no justification for decimating the Constitution, and nothing to talk about in his speeches. His entire presidency since 9/11, a few observant people are realizing, is really based on just two things: terror and tyranny. And he's using the former to achieve the latter.
One word can do a lot for a politician, especially if it is repeated like a political mantra. I'm not exactly sure how many times Bush has used the word "terror" or its derivations, because that would require actually listening to all the Bush speeches -- an act that would almost certainly cause the permanent IQ reduction of anyone foolish enough to engage in such activities.
Without question, Bush has invoked the "terror" word with near religious zealotry in his campaigns to simultaneously overthrow foreign nations and domestic civil liberties. Never before has so much evil sprung from the repeated invocation of a single word.
The Terror of the Masses
The outright evil of one man is not nearly as surprising (nor frightening) as the collective evil of the people who go along with him. Dumbfounded Conservatives all across the country blindly stroll into history along the same well-trodden path followed by Hitler's fascist supporters.
It's a well-worn path: First you create an imaginary enemy to justify war. Then you strip away the civil liberties of your own citizens and launch domestic spying programs to keep everyone in a constant state of fear. Next you manipulate the propaganda to tell everyone what to think. The torturing of "enemy combatants" is already underway, and it won't be long before the clockwork arrest of "dissenting" Americans begins.
None of this talk is even in the realm of conspiracy theories anymore. It's practically a play-by-play account of exactly what the Bush Administration is doing. Under the Clinton Administration, a secret domestic spying program being discovered would have been Conservatives' call to hang the poor man from a tree, but under Bush, Conservatives go right along with any liberty-destroying action, no matter how ludicrous or illegal.
That all this is happening right before our eyes, with such obvious historical parallels to the rise of Hitler, is practically unbelievable. The rhetoric is almost exactly the same, except it's in eighth-grade English rather than German. But warmongering and global imperialism need no language translations, because the message communicated by an imperial soldier shoving a rifle in your face is pretty much universal. Both Hitler and Bush call it "freedom," and both explained their invasions of foreign nations as "liberating their people," but students of history know better. (Does anyone read history anymore?)
Like nearly every empire in the history of human civilization, the Bush empire will eventually fall. And in its wake will be left the horrors of American imperialism. One day the mass hallucinations of the Bush supporters will disappear, and they will wake up and ask themselves, "What have we done?" It will be like the citizens of Germany seeing the Nazi concentration camps for the first time following Hitler's suicide. They could not believe what they had supported. They could not imagine what evils they had tolerated, if not downright participated in.
And after the fall of the Bush empire, the American people will have to get down to the business of repairing what's left of the Constitution. They will have to roll back government powers, pursue criminal prosecutions of the active war criminals currently operating throughout the Bush Administration, and reestablish the rule of law.
The King of Terror
It is precisely the rule of law, by the way, that Bush now imagines does not exist. In an astounding act of tyrannical defiance, Bush actually admitted he not only supported the high crimes of secret domestic spying on American citizens, but he actually intended to EXPAND such actions in direct violation of every law upon which this nation was founded. On that day, King George declared his kingship of the land, and effectively announced that he was now above all laws.
Astoundingly, there was no marching in the streets. Members of Congress did not call an emergency session and impeach the President. Even the press hardly mentioned the unprecedented transition that had just taken place, because of course they were too busy high-fiving each other with the word "terror" to actually say anything useful.
The people, the lawmakers and practically the whole country just went along with King George! Consider the irony. The United States of America, a nation that was founded by revolutionaries who insisted on self-rule and freedom from the tyranny of kings, had just crowned its own new king, with hardly a whimper from the masses. It's as if Americans have no knowledge whatsoever of their own history.
Even now, no one seems to notice. We are marching full-force into history's Hall of Shame, with our new king, our new media, and our new imperial wars. Never has so much been evil achieved by the invocation of a single word: TERROR.
And the terror is by no means over. Americans will be kept in a constant state of fear (by chance or by design) for as long as the Bush family can get away with it. Because terror, after all, is very, very profitable for certain industries and power brokers, most of which happen to be strong supporters of the Bush Administration.
Remember, Americans. Remain afraid. Imagine Islamic enemies in your head when you go to sleep at night. Support your new King and his troops. And tune in to Fox News to be told what to do next.
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Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps
by Peter Dale Scott
February 6, 2006
Pacific News Service
A little-known $385 million contract for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants" is another step down the Bush administration's road toward martial law, the writer says.
A Halliburton subsidiary has just received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to provide "temporary detention and processing capabilities."
The contract -- announced Jan. 24 by the engineering and construction firm KBR -- calls for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when.
To date, some newspapers have worried that open-ended provisions in the contract could lead to cost overruns, such as have occurred with KBR in Iraq. A Homeland Security spokesperson has responded that this is a "contingency contract" and that conceivably no centers might be built. But almost no paper so far has discussed the possibility that detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.
For those who follow covert government operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Department. The concerns persist.
"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."
Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history, going back to fears in the 1970s of a national uprising by black militants. As Alonzo Chardy reported in the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987, an executive order for continuity of government (COG) had been drafted in 1982 by FEMA head Louis Giuffrida. The order called for "suspension of the Constitution" and "declaration of martial law." The martial law portions of the plan were outlined in a memo by Giuffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff.
In 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, one of a series of directives that authorized continued planning for COG by a private parallel government.
Two books, James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans" and James Bamford's "A Pretext for War," have revealed that in the 1980s this parallel structure, operating outside normal government channels, included the then-head of G. D. Searle and Co., Donald Rumsfeld, and then-Congressman from Wyoming Dick Cheney.
After 9/11, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security.
Then in April 2002, Defense Dept. officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-NORTHCOM) for the continental United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called this "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946."
The NORTHCOM commander, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, is responsible for "homeland defense and also serves as head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).... He will command U.S. forces that operate within the United States in support of civil authorities. The command will provide civil support not only in response to attacks, but for natural disasters."
John Brinkerhoff later commented on PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."
Then in response to Hurricane Katrina in Sept. 2005, according to the Washington Post, White House senior adviser Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get." The White House tried vigorously, but ultimately failed, to compel Gov. Blanco to yield control of the state National Guard.
Also in September, NORTHCOM conducted its highly classified Granite Shadow exercise in Washington. As William Arkin reported in the Washington Post, "Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
It is clear that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about martial law.
Many critics have alleged that FEMA's spectacular failure to respond to Katrina followed from a deliberate White House policy: of paring back FEMA, and instead strengthening the military for responses to disasters.
A multimillion program for detention facilities will greatly increase NORTHCOM's ability to respond to any domestic disorders.
Peter Dale Scott is author of "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He is completing a book on "The Road to 9/11." Visit his Web site .
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America's Kremlin
Stephen Pizzo
February 8, 2006
Yes boys and girls, the US Government has been remodeled, trimmed down, made more efficient. Now there's the Executive branch, which runs the show – the whole show. Then comes the Judiciary branch, which has been turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Executive branch.
The Legislative branch has been reduced to a facade of democracy, a show, a dog and pony show -- often entertaining, but much sound and fury signifying nothing.
If you doubt this you haven't been paying attention.
Did you catch the Attorney General Gonzalez pretend hearings before the pretend Senate Intelligence Committee? Where pretend legislators vowed to get to the bottom of Executive branch spying on Americans, but refused to insist that the witness be put under oath?
And did you listen as the Attorney General of the United State of America responded to pointed questions from the pretend legislators with a curt, “I am not going to answer that.” To which the pretend legislators responded, “Okay,” and moved on to the next pretend question that would also go unanswered.
The first thing we oldsters learned in school about our government was that it was comprised of three, co-equal branches; Executive, Legislative and Judicial.
Thanks to the GOP revolution, and in particular this current administration, future social studies books will have and easier time of explaining how Americans are governed. Because they've trimmed the three branches down to two branches, of which only one has any real power.
Yes boys and girls, the US Government has been remodeled, trimmed down, made more efficient. Now there's the Executive branch, which runs the show – the whole show. Then comes the Judiciary branch, which has been turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Executive branch.
The Legislative branch has been reduced to a facade of democracy, a show, a dog and pony show -- often entertaining, but much sound and fury signifying nothing.
If you doubt this you haven't been paying attention.
Did you catch the Attorney General Gonzalez pretend hearings before the pretend Senate Intelligence Committee? Where pretend legislators vowed to get to the bottom of Executive branch spying on Americans, but refused to insist that the witness be put under oath?
And did you listen as the Attorney General of the United State of America responded to pointed questions from the pretend legislators with a curt, “I am not going to answer that.” To which the pretend legislators responded, “Okay,” and moved on to the next pretend question that would also go unanswered.
Or how about VP Dick's interview with Jim Lehrer? Jim asked the VP Dick if the Executive branch would be willing to entertain legislative changes to domestic spying laws, changes that could make what they are already doing legal. VP Dick, (summoning up the sneer he considers a smile, responded,) “We feel we already have all the authority we need.”
And indeed, they do. How so? Because they say they so. You got a problem with that?
And if you do have a problem with that, don't take it to court, at least not a federal court. Over the past five years the Executive Branch -- with the enthusiastic obediance of the Legislative branch -- has packed the federal judiciary with judges who share the view that the Executive branch should decide which rules should apply to them and which rules were simply too inconvient to be worthy of compliance.
It's hardly an accident that in five year Chief Executive George W. Bush has not vetoed a single piece of legislation. He didn't have to. The GOP-controlled House and Senate have become his Politburo. Remember those old black and white videos we used to see during
the 1960s of sycophantic members of the Soviet Politburo mechancially raising their red voting cards in to pass Kremlin crafted laws? We don't have the same red cards, but we sure as hell have the same stuffed-shirt, pampered breed of lapdog legislators.
Here's a pop quiz: When was the last time either the House or Senate held real investigations into executive branch misbehavior? The kind of hearings where everyone is put under oath? Forget about it.
And, in the best tradition of Kremlin hardball, we learned yesterday that Karl Rove has warned GOP legislators of certain doom should any of them speak harshly of, or support real hearings into executive branch spying on Americans.
"According to Insight, which is published by the Washington Times, Karl Rove & Co are pressuring GOPers to make sure they vote the White House's way on this issue that most assuredly is far more than partisan football:
The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration's unauthorized wiretapping.
Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November. (More)
The silence you hear on this subject is the sound of pretend GOP legislators coming to heel.
Oh sure there are Democrats in the legislative branch too, though you'd hardly know it. If the French resistance had been made up of American Democrats the French would eating bratwurst cordon bleu today. Democrats are our pretend loyal opposition party. When we point to the mess being made by this administration Democrats respond that they are “the minority party.” Okay, then at least be the mouse that roars rather than the rat that scurries.
Nope. Get used to it. The American government is now comprised of two branches, not three. And of those two branches, one makes the rules and the other sanctifies them.
The good news is that none of this is yet set in cement. There's a chance next November to revived our currently moribund legislative branch. But time is in short supply. A worthy opponents, Democrat or Republican, are in even shorter supply.
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Guantánamo: A life sentence of suffering and stigmatization
Amnesty International
6 Feb 06
In a new report published today, Amnesty International revealed how the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is condemning thousands across the world to a life of suffering, torment and stigmatization.
The report “Guantánamo: Lives torn apart – The impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families”, contains testimonies of a number of former detainees and their relatives and assesses the current state of those who continue to be imprisoned at Guantánamo, including developments in relation to the ongoing hunger strike and suicide attempts.
Five-hundred men from around 35 nationalities are detained in Guantánamo. Dozens are currently on hunger strike and there have been numerous suicide attempts. None of them have had the lawfulness of their detention reviewed in a court of law. Nine continue to be held despite no longer being defined by the US government as “enemy combatants”
“For the detainees and their family members, Guantánamo remains a harsh reality. Despite widespread international condemnation, the US authorities continue in their attempts to strip all detainees of their right to challenge their detention in US courts,” said Susan Lee, Amnesty International Americas Programme Director.
“The demands of the Guantánamo hunger strikers are not controversial, they are asking for their rights under international law to be respected, they are asking to be released if they are not to be charged with internationally recognized criminal offences and they are asking that organizations such as Amnesty International be granted access to them,” said Susan Lee.
According to testimonies collected by Amnesty International, some families, who know that their relatives are or have been detained by the, USA have received little or no communication from Guantánamo. Some do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones, or even if they are alive.
Amnesty International’s report also reveals that the torment and stigma doesn't end in Guantánamo. For some, transfer from Guantánamo has meant nothing more than a move from one place of indefinite, unlawful detention to another. For others it has meant continual harassment, arbitrary arrest and ill-treatment. Even for those who have been returned to their home country to be reunited with their families and friends, the physical and psychological reminders of their time in Guantánamo will remain, and the stigma of having been labelled an ‘enemy combatant’, and ‘the worst of the worst’ by President George W. Bush will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Nina Odizheva, the mother of former Russian Guantánamo detainee Ruslan Odizhev has described how the time spent in US detention had irrevocably affected her son: “It changed him…he is completely ill…he lives on pills for all his major organs…he tries not to show it or tell me details so I don’t get upset...he has no appetite…he is a different person now…”
“The US administration cannot simply ignore the consequences of its actions on those detainees who have been returned home only to face more abuse, illegal detention and the stigma of having been labelled as ‘the worst of the worst’ by US government officials.”
Amnesty International is calling on the US authorities to:
* Publish a list of all those detained by the US in Guantánamo and elsewhere;
* Try or release all Guantánamo detainees;
* Close Guantánamo and open up all US detention facilities to independent scrutiny;
* Investigate all allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees in US custody.
For a full copy of “Guantánamo: Lives torn apart – The impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families”
Cruel. Inhuman. Degrades us all. Stop torture and ill-treatment in the "war on terror". For more information on AI's campaign
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US straps down Guantanamo hunger strikers: report
Reuters
9 Feb 06
NEW YORK - U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, strapped hunger-striking prisoners into restraint chairs for hours to feed them through tubes and isolated them in cold cells, The New York Times said on Thursday.
A Pentagon official said there was no one immediately available to comment on the report.
The Times, citing unnamed military officials, said tougher measures came in recent weeks after authorities concluded some of the prisoners were determined to kill themselves.
The apparent result has been a sharp drop in the number of inmates refusing to eat. Only four hunger strikers remain, down from 84 at the end of December, the chief military spokesman at Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, told the newspaper on Wednesday.
But lawyers called the treatment abusive.
"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, told the newspaper.
"It is a disgrace," said Wilner, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents.
Guards began strapping the detainees into chairs for hours to feed them through tubes and prevent them vomiting afterwards, the Times said, citing unidentified military officials.
Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. He gave no details.
Hunger strikers have also been put in isolation for extended periods, in highly air-conditioned cells and deprived of such comforts as blankets and books, according to lawyers who visited clients in recent weeks, the newspaper said.
Prisoners began a round of hunger strikes in August to protest their indefinite detention at Guantanamo, which was set up in 2002 to hold foreign terrorism suspects and houses about 500 inmates. Only 10 of them have been charged with a crime.
The number of inmates refusing to eat peaked on September 11, the fourth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on America, when 131 prisoners -- more than a quarter of the total -- took part.
A Navy doctor in January told Reuters prisoners were not strapped down during feedings. Martin told the Times in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was used but he would not answer questions about restraint chairs.
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'Free the forgotten prisoners'
News24
6 Feb 06
London - Amnesty International called on Monday for the release of nine British residents it says are held prisoner by United States authorities in Guantanamo Bay.
Nine British citizens were freed from the Cuban camp for terrorist suspects after pressure from the British government, but Amnesty said another nine people with ties to Britain were still being held. Five have been officially identified as Omar Deghayes, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil al-Banna, Jamal Abdullah and Shaker Aamer.
Kate Allen, director of Amnesty's British wing, said the government's reluctance to act on behalf of British residents was "shameful".
"These men have become forgotten prisoners," she said.
The prison on the US Navy base in Cuba opened in January 2002 and now holds about 500 prisoners from some 40 countries, many captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan after the September 11 2001 attacks. Many have been held for several years without charge or trial.
Amnesty highlighted the case of Libyan-born Deghayes, 35, who was granted refugee status in Britain with his family in the 1980s. The group said he had been held at Guantanamo for more than three years, and has alleged abuse by his captors. Last year he was identified as one of dozens of inmates holding a hunger strike to protest their detention.
Disappointed
"I'm not looking for any special treatment for my brother. I just want his basic human rights to be respected," said his sister, Amani Deghayes.
"What disappoints me most is the unwillingness of the UK government to lift a finger for my brother."
The British government has said it cannot represent people who are not British citizens.
Amnesty, which was releasing a report on Monday on the effects of detention on prisoners' families, renewed calls for the prison camp to be closed.
"After four years Guantanamo has become a byword for abuse and an indictment of the US government's failure to uphold human rights in the war on terror," Allen said.
"The US authorities should immediately close down Guantanamo and either release prisoners or bring them before proper courts on the US mainland."
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Who Is at Guantanamo Bay?
By Corine Hegland
National Journal
3 Feb 06
As a result of the habeas corpus petitions filed by attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees, the Defense Department has had to file court documents on 132 of the enemy combatants, or just under a quarter of the prison's population. National Journal undertook a detailed review of the unclassified files to develop profiles of the 132 men. NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314 prisoners who pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information provides a picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in the war on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S. military prison on an island belonging to one of America's bitterest enemies.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush issued a military order that authorized the Defense Department to detain noncitizens suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda or other terrorists. As a result, hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" were rounded up and taken to prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since early 2002, lawyers working on a volunteer basis have filed papers with U.S. courts asking the government to explain why it is holding individual prisoners. These habeas corpus petitions have forced disclosures by the Defense Department that shed light on some of the details surrounding the estimated 500 prisoners currently in U.S. captivity.
The Defense Department declined a request to release comparable statistics for all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans -- nor were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by American troops at all. Most are from Arab countries, and most were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.
Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are -- like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National Journal's accompanying story -- not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. (The 75 include 10 detainees whom the U.S. government "no longer" considers enemy combatants, although at least eight of the 10 are still being held at Guantanamo.) Typically, documents describe these men as "associated" with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda -- sometimes directly so, and sometimes through only weak or distant connections. Several men worked for charities that had some ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated with the Taliban.
Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended jihadist training camps before September 11, an accusation admitted by some and denied by others. The U.S. government says that some of the suspected jihadists trained in Afghanistan, even though other records show that they had not yet entered the country at the time of the training camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan.
The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.
One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a Briton, is said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City. Both men were released to their home governments in January 2005. Neither one is facing charges at home.
The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was watching him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but has said it lacks sufficient information to press terrorism charges against him. The British man was cleared after a few hours of questioning in London.
The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the American Embassy there; the charge was investigated and dismissed by a judge. The country's human-rights chamber issued an order prohibiting the men from being taken out of the country. The Americans seized them anyway.
The Defense Department accusations fall into only two categories -- those who participated in hostilities and those who did not. But the boundaries between the two categories can be fuzzy. In the nonhostile category, for example, is a suspected Qaeda financier picked up in Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the other hand, are a few men whose most direct link to hostilities appears to be getting wounded by one of the thousands of American bombs dropped on Afghanistan.
One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by Pakistani forces in Pakistan.
At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the border region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian Afghan refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out of the country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the war. Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead. Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two, or three Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans.
Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders between January and September 2002. The senior suspects captured in these raids immediately disappeared into CIA custody -- they are not at Guantanamo. But their lesser companions, or others arrested in the same town on the same night, were delivered to Cuba.
Also in this group are at least three men who were picked off Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for foreigners, and one man who says he answered a knock on the door of the apartment next to his.
The 314 transcripts released to the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit give similar results. The 314 men described there included 97 Afghans who were arrested in Afghanistan. But they also included 211 foreigners, 152 of whom -- or more than 70 percent -- were arrested outside of Afghanistan. And 145 of those men were captured in Pakistan.
Copyright 2006 by National Journal Group Inc
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Guantanamo: Empty Evidence
By Corine Hegland
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006
"If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 27, 2005
The lawyers representing Guantanamo prisoners say the evidence against their clients is weak, indirect, and often based on lies from other detainees. Defense Department documents suggest they are right.
Some of the men Rumsfeld described -- the terrorists, the trainers, the financiers, and the battlefield captures -- are indeed at Guantanamo. But National Journal's detailed review of government files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, didn't turn up very many of them. Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world.
Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.
Thomas Wilner, a partner at the Washington law firm Shearman and Stearling who is representing six Kuwaitis at Guantanamo, summarized the evidence against them: "Bullshit hearsay.... The information in some cases is, at best, hearsay allegations [obtained] long after capture."
One thing about these detainees is very clear: Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.
Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.
Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers -- not lawyers -- who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man -- the aforementioned accuser -- had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.
The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.
Guilt by Wristwatch
"It's the Salem witchcraft trials," said Marc Falkoff of Covington and Burling's New York City office, who represents 17 Yemenis, several of them fingered -- falsely, according to Falkoff -- by different accusers. "You get one guy to start making accusations, and whether it's believable or not doesn't matter." Front-line military interrogators might know that the accusations are false, but their superiors reading the files later do not.
The government has given Falkoff access to the complete files for 16 of his clients. Of those men, he says, "you bring them into any court of law right now, and a judge is going to release them. It doesn't matter what the standard of review is going to be -- I'm not even talking about guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
At least eight prisoners at Guantanamo are there even though they are no longer designated as enemy combatants. One perplexed attorney, whose client does not want public attention, learned that the man was no longer considered an enemy combatant only by reading a footnote in a Justice Department motion asking a federal judge to put a slew of habeas corpus cases on hold. The attorney doesn't know why the man is still in Cuba.
"The people you've been going up against in court have been saying he's the worst of the worst, Osama's right-hand man," said Anant Raut, an attorney with the Washington firm of Weil, Gotshal, & Manges. "Then you go in there, and it's a guy who is as confused as you are as to why he is there." Raut has one client, a Saudi, who is classified as an enemy combatant largely because he spent a couple of weeks on a Taliban bean farm. The man says the Taliban imprisoned him there because they thought he was a Saudi government spy.
National Journal could review only the unclassified parts of detainee files, consisting of memos, a summary of the evidence, and a transcript of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal proceeding. But federal courts ordered the Defense Department to give the volunteer lawyers the classified evidence by which their clients were found to be enemy combatants. The lawyers cannot discuss specifics of that evidence, but they uniformly say that nothing additional is there, just details and sourcing relating to the unclassified evidence.
"There is no smoking gun," said John Chandler, a partner in the Atlanta office of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. One of his Guantanamo clients, picked up in Pakistan, is designated an enemy combatant in part because he once traveled on a bus with wounded Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan. The prisoner denies it, saying it was only a public bus. But then there's the prisoner's Casio watch. According to the Defense Department files, his watch is similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda has used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine other detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world and is worn by one National Journal reporter. The primary difference between Chandler's client's watch and the Casio in question is that the detainee's model hasn't been manufactured for years, according to the U.S. military officer who was his personal representative at the tribunal.
Guilt by Association
Baher Azmy of Seton Hall Law School represents Murat Kurnaz, a Turk who is at Guantanamo. "The government has no case against him," Azmy says. Kurnaz was plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In March, Kurnaz's file was accidentally, and briefly, declassified: According to the Washington Post, it consisted of memos from domestic and foreign intelligence sources stating that Kurnaz posed no threat. The file, however, contained one anonymous memo contradicting the rest and claiming he was connected to Al Qaeda. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on the single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Julia Tarver Mason, a partner with Paul, Weiss, a firm based in New York City, represents a number of detainees, including a Saudi -- an amputee -- whom Afghanistan's Northern Alliance turned over to the Americans. The alliance had taken him from a hospital. She says that the classified evidence against the men she represents has "details, but no meat." The evidence might say, for example, that somebody said someone was a member of an aid group, and that aid group has been known to have some links to Al Qaeda, Mason says. "It's all 12 steps removed."
George Brent Mickum, a partner with Washington law firm Keller and Heckman, represents two British residents held at Guantanamo. "I can tell you what's not there," Mickum said of the classified evidence against his clients. "What's not there is any evidence that any of my clients was associated with Al Qaeda in any way." The men were arrested on a business trip to Gambia. According to press reports, British intelligence suspected at the time that the two men intended to establish a terrorist training facility there. But today, the accusation against both men is only that they were associated with Abu Qatada, a radical but popular London cleric who is now in prison in Britain.
Neither man denies the friendship with Qatada: One of the detainees, Bisher al-Rawi, says he served as a liaison between Qatada and British intelligence at the request of the MI-5 domestic intelligence agency. The tribunal for the other man, Jamil el-Banna, met four times before deciding that he was an enemy combatant. Even so, el-Banna's personal representative, who had access to the classified files, objected. The British government was well aware of el-Banna's actions on British soil, the officer wrote, and the record is "insufficient to show [the detainee] should be classified as an enemy combatant for his actions in Gambia."
To Protect the Soldiers
If many of the men held at Guantanamo were not caught in battle, and have not been tied directly to hostilities against the United States, why are they there?
"I think the standards for sending someone to Guantanamo in 2002 and early 2003 were not as high as they should have been," said Mark Jacobson, who was an assistant for detainee policy in Rumsfeld's office from November 2002 through August 2003. When National Journal described some of the men in this story to Jacobson, he said he suspected that there was more information that was not referenced in the classified or the declassified files. But if the files were accurate, he said, "then it's reasonable and likely" that those men were in the batches taken to Guantanamo early on in 2002.
The filtering process for deciding who was sent to Guantanamo wasn't perfect, Jacobson said, nor should it have been. To protect U.S. soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan it was better to err on the side of caution and to send more, rather than fewer, men to Guantanamo. "If it's the other way around, then you're doing it wrong."
But nuance didn't exactly survive the air convoys to Cuba. The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were terrorists. They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But the CIA didn't see it that way. By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004. Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best, he said, who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of these guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer, Scheuer said.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license.
The questions to the detainees about 9/11 and Al Qaeda and about each other were so constant, so repetitive, so oppressive that some prisoners, out of exasperation or fatigue or fear, just gave in and said, sure, I'm a terrorist. False confessions and false accusations are rampant, according to the lawyers and the Defense Department records.
One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as evidence against him: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist" reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so outraged that they sought out the detainee's personal representative to explain it to him that the statement was not a confession.
A Yemeni, whom somebody fingered as a bin Laden bodyguard, finally said in exasperation during one long interrogation, "OK, I saw bin Laden five times: Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." And now his "admission" appears in his enemy combatant's file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden."
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense report leaked to the New York Times. The report called the operations "tantamount to torture."
Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism."
Wrong Questions, Wrong People
The one question nobody seemed to ask at Guantanamo was whether they were asking the right questions of the right people in the first place. After all, despite the rhetoric, most of the men at Guantanamo, or at least the 132 with court records and the 314 with redacted transcripts, came into American custody by way of third parties who had their own motivations for turning people in, including paybacks and payoffs.
In Afghanistan, from late 2001 through the early months of 2003, local and tribal informers played on America's naivete by reporting their enemies as Qaeda members, according to a former intelligence operative there. The Americans, upon investigating, would find that a man did have weapons and assume that he was, indeed, Al Qaeda. "They wouldn't know the factions," the operative said, "and they wouldn't think, 'This is Afghanistan. Of course he has weapons.' "
Ignorance of local politics might explain how, for example, an Arabic-speaking Iraqi Shiite ended up at Guantanamo accused of serving as the regional intelligence director for the Pashto-speaking Sunni Taliban.
Some of the men at Guantanamo came from targeted, U.S.-guided raids in Pakistani cities, and the cases against those men tend to be fairly strong. But the largest single group at Guantanamo Bay today consists of men caught in indiscriminate sweeps for Arabs in Pakistan. Once arrested, these men passed through several captors before being given to the U.S. military. Some of the men say they were arrested after asking for help getting to their embassies; a few say the Pakistanis asked them for bribes to avoid being turned over to America.
Others assert that they were sold for bounties, a charge substantiated in 2004 when Sami Yousafzai, a Newsweek reporter then stringing for ABC's "20/20," visited the Pakistani village where five Kuwaiti detainees were captured. The locals remembered the men. They had arrived with a larger group of a hundred refugees a few weeks after Qaeda fighters had passed through. The villagers said they had offered the group shelter and food, but somebody in the village sold out the guests. Pretty soon, bright lights came swooping down from the skies. "Helicopters ... were announcing through loud speakers: 'Where is Arab? Where is Arab?' And, 'Please, you get $1,000 for one Arab,' " one resident told Yousafzai.
"The one thing we were never clear of was where they came from," Scheuer said of the Guantanamo detainees. "DOD picked them up somewhere." When National Journal told Scheuer that the largest group came from Pakistani custody, he chuckled. "Then they were probably people the Pakistanis thought were dangerous to Pakistan," he said. "We absolutely got the wrong people."
The sweeps in Pakistan did pick up a few Qaeda members, but most of them were low level. People familiar with Pakistani politics agree that in the chaos of the war, simple foot soldiers or innocent bystanders were more likely to wind up in American custody than were senior operatives. "It was helter-skelter, and it was perfectly possible innocents were arrested, while a lot of guilty guys knew how to evade [capture] and had the means to do so," said Husain Haqqani, an adviser to three former Pakistani prime ministers who now teaches international relations at Boston University.
Tribes in the border region and operatives in Pakistan's intelligence service were historically sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Almost certainly, they aided senior Qaeda and Taliban members fleeing Afghanistan. At the same time, Islamabad was eager to strengthen its new alliance with Washington. The Americans wanted prisoners, and nobody was looking too closely at who those prisoners were.
Add a healthy dollop of cash spread around by both hunters and prey, and a U.S. military bureaucracy dedicated to protecting Americans against a threat from an unfamiliar corner of the world, and you have an unsettling formula for determining who got caught and who got away. It was "win-win," Haqqani said. "The Americans get their prisoners, Pakistanis get their praise, the guy who captures the prisoners gets his reward, and Al Qaeda gets its escape."
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Many Guantanamo detainees not tied to 'hostile acts'
AFP
9 Feb 06
[O]nly eight percent of the detainees were characterized in the documents as Al-Qaeda fighters, while 60 "are detained merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the (US) government asserts are terrorist organizations".
More than half of the US "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison camp never committed any "hostile acts" against the United States, two lawyers said in a report.
Based on an analysis of government documents regarding the more than 500 people held at the US naval prison facility, lawyers Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux estimated that 55 percent "are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies".
Moreover, they said that only eight percent of the detainees were characterized in the documents as Al-Qaeda fighters, while 60 "are detained merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the (US) government asserts are terrorist organizations".
The lawyers, who represent two Guantanamo detainees, noted that only seven percent of the 500 detainees had been captured by US and coalition forces.
Of the rest, 47 percent were turned over to the United States by Pakistan and Afghan Northern Coalition forces, and the captors of another 44 percent held were unknown.
The study suggests that at least some of these detainees were turned over to US forces by bounty hunters and reward-seekers without verification of the detainee's status.
In the wake of the October, 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, US forces offered "millions of dollars" for the capture of Al-Qaeda and Taliban members.
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War Pimp BLAIR: 'BRITISH TROOPS IN IRAN? WE CAN NEVER SAY NEVER'
By Bob Roberts
Deputy Political Editor
Mirror
8 Feb 06
TONY Blair yesterday refused to rule out a British military invasion of Iran.
He told MPs the rogue Middle Eastern state was helping to spread the "virus" of Muslim fanaticism across the world.
It was a problem which needed "sorting", the Prime Minister said.
And asked if the British military option was on the table, he admitted: "You can never say never in any of these situations."
The warning is a significant increase in the language the PM has used against the Tehran-based regime which is also accused of developing nuclear weapons. American military experts have already said war-planes are on standby to attack.
Mr Blair said he would prefer to resolve disputes with Iran through "peaceful and diplomatic means".
But he attacked the regime which has threatened to wipe Israel off the map.
He said: "The concern about Iran is growing very, very substantially - and the more the President of Iran carries on using this type of language and saying what he says about the state of Israel, the more people get worried."
The PM warned the Tehran government would be making a "very serious mistake" if it defied international calls to stop making nuclear weapons, adding: "When they try to export terrorism, it's a problem. When they are trying to meddle in Iraq, it's a problem."
TONY BLAIR YESTERDAY
Blair went on: "There is a virus of extremism which comes out of the cocktail of religious fanaticism and political repression in the Middle East which is now being exported to the rest of the world.
"We will only secure our future if we are dealing with every single aspect of that problem. Our future security depends on sorting out the stability of that region."
The warning comes as an Iranian newspaper announced a contest for cartoons satirising the Holocaust in response to the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed which appeared in Denmark.
Iran said it was cutting trade ties with the Danes - but the EU warned that attempts to boycott Danish goods or stop trading with European countries would lead to further deterioration in relations.
During his session in front of senior MPs on the Commons Liaison Committee, Mr Blair also pledged a police crackdown on Islamic fanatics who brandished hate-filled placards in the UK last week.
DEFENCE Secretary John Reid last night said there could be "significantly fewer British forces" in Iraq within a year - but only if threats from insurgents are reduced and the country has effective local government systems.
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War Pimping: Iran Greatest Threat, Most Americans Think
KWTX TV
9 Feb 06
A new poll finds Americans now think Iran is the biggest threat to the U.S.
As recently as October, Iraq, China, and North Korea ranked as the most threatening.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which did the poll, says among people who've been following recent news about Iran, there's even greater concern.
President Bush has been warning about Tehran's nuclear program, which also worries many other countries.
The UN Security Council is taking it up, which prompted Tehran to order UN surveillance gear and seals be removed.
The poll found two-thirds or more of Americans think if Iran develops nuclear weapons, it's likely to attack Israel, Europe, or the U.S.
There's even greater concern Iran would pass nuclear weapons to terrorists.
“The public is clearer in its view of the potential threat posed by Iran than in what to do about it,” the Pew Center said.
“More Americans worry that we will wait too long than act too quickly in dealing with Iran's nuclear problem. However, far more Americans say the United Nations or the European Union rather than the U.S. should take the lead in dealing with the crisis.”
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War Pimps: Iran's missile tech suppliers named
By Louis Charbonneau
Reuters
8 Feb 06
BERLIN - Two German businessmen, a former Russian military officer and North Korea are among those helping
Iran develop missiles that the West fears could one day carry nuclear warheads, diplomats and intelligence officials say.
Last month German federal prosecutors formally charged two German citizens with espionage for helping a foreign intelligence agency acquire dual-use "delivery system" technology. The prosecutors announced the charge of espionage last week but did not name the country involved.
The two German men have been accused of "having sold a vibration testing facility in 2001 and 2002 on behalf of a foreign military intelligence procurement entity," the prosecutor's office said in a statement posted on its Web site.
A German official familiar with the case, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation, said the country involved was Iran.
"These missile technology dealers ... appear to have been acting alone and were not part of any organized gang," he said.
The state prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe, Germany did not name the men or the German company they worked for.
The involvement of German citizens in what U.S. and European officials believe is Iran's covert nuclear weapons program will be embarrassing for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has vowed to prevent Tehran from getting nuclear weapons.
"You really can't separate Iran's nuclear activities from its missile program. The missiles are the delivery system," an EU diplomat familiar with the case said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for
Israel to be "wiped off the map" and publicly doubted that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War Two.
Recent U.S. intelligence recovered from a stolen laptop computer suggests that Iranian missile experts are trying to develop a missile re-entry vehicle capable of carrying a relatively small nuclear warhead, EU and U.S. officials say.
Last week the governing board of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog, voted to report Iran to the
U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions, due to fears it is developing atomic weapons.
Iran says it does not want weapons, only nuclear energy.
NORTH KOREAN MISSILES
With the exception of Russia, China and North Korea, few countries sell Iran weapons or dual-use technology that could be used to make atomic, chemical or biological weapons.
To the annoyance of the United States and
European Union, Russia has made it clear that it is willing to sell small-scale defensive missiles to Iran. Late last year, Moscow agreed to sell Iran tactical surface-to-air missiles that could be used to shoot down low-flying aircraft or guided missiles.
However, even Russia says it will not sell medium- and long-range missile technology to the Islamic republic.
But a European and a non-European intelligence official told Reuters that Russian middlemen were helping Iran get missile technology from North Korea that could bring central Europe within the range of Iranian missiles.
An EU diplomat, citing his country's intelligence, said Iran had purchased 18 disassembled BM-25 mobile missiles with a range of around 2,500 km from North Korea. He was confirming a German newspaper report from December that cited Germany's BND foreign intelligence service.
One of the intelligence officials said a former Russian military officer with the first name Viktor had helped Iran get Soviet-made SSN6 missile technology from Russia and North Korea, which Iran could use to improve the accuracy of its newly-bought BM-25s and increase their range to as much as 3,500 km.
"The Russian authorities either don't know about him or don't care," the official said, adding that there was no evidence that Moscow approved of Viktor's activities.
Iranian and Russian officials declined to comment.
Iran's Shahab-3 missiles have a range of some 2,000 km. With a range of 3,500 km, the missiles could reach central Europe.
In December, the United States imposed sanctions on six Chinese, two Indian and one Austrian firm for selling missile or chemical weapons-related supplies to Iran.
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War Pimp Diplomats: Suspected drawings of nuclear test site found in Iran
mediacorp/AFP
9 Feb 06
VIENNA : Iran has design drawings for building a 400-metre (more than 1,300 feet) deep shaft that is clearly for underground, possibly nuclear, weapons testing, diplomats told AFP.
But the diplomats said there were no indications that Iran, which experts believe is years away from being able to build an atomic bomb, has constructed or plans to build such a site.
The document was part of US intelligence which has been made available to the UN nuclear watchdog and which has been presented to Iran, said a diplomat, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Officials from the Vienna-based watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency refused to comment but an IAEA report on January 31 said the UN watchdog had presented Iran with "information that had been made available to the agency" and which concerned work related to high explosives.
Iran has dismissed this information as "related to baseless allegations," according to the report which did not provide details about the high explosives data.
The report said the IAEA was also looking into "alleged undeclared studies" to build a secret plant for converting uranium, a step in making nuclear reactor fuel that can also be bomb material, and "the design of a missile re-entry vehicle, all of which could have a military nuclear dimension."
A Western diplomat said the design for the underground shaft, with sensors in it to be connected "to a control center 10 kilometres (six miles) away" was "clearly designed for some underground testing," and that this could be nuclear although the design did not indicate that this was for atomic weapons testing.
The diplomat said the IAEA had asked the United States for permission to show the classified document to the Iranians.
The information was part of extensive Farsi-language computer files and reports which the United States has obtained and feels is the best sign yet that Iran seeks to make nuclear weapons.
The IAEA was first briefed on this last July.
US officials are confident the data is genuine, diplomats said, even though some analysts have criticized it as unreliable since it is believed to come from only one source.
The data concerns a program called Project 111 under which the Iranians have also studied how to design a ballistic missile to handle a load that is not named as a possible nuclear warhead. The word "nuclear" is not mentioned in any of the Project 111 documents.
But the "package" could only be for this purpose due to the height at which the missile is set to explode on re-entry, diplomats said.
"The shaft design was part of Project 111," the Western diplomat said.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran for three years after US allegations that it is carrying out secret atomic weapons development under the guise of a nuclear program which Tehran says is a peaceful effort to generate electricity.
The IAEA's 35-nation board of governors voted last week to report Iran to the UN Security Council over unresolved issues in a move that opens the door to punitive action.
The IAEA report of January 31 also said that Iran had handed over a document on how to make uranium hemispheres whose only use would be in making nuclear weapons.
Iran claims not to have used the information for weapons work as it says it was given the document without asking for it by an international nuclear smuggling network which offered it technology and parts in 1987.
The IAEA has also "shared with Iran" new information it has that Iran may have taken deliveries of sophisticated P-2 centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, despite Tehran saying it has on