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Iraqi Petroleum privatization, CIA MK-Ultra, PYSOPs

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

The upcoming petroleum privatization of Iraqi oil reserves is being watched by international community, never a better time for PSYOPS military brainwashing campaigns here in north america. distract the media from Iraqi oil heists by Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, etc.. while promoting culture of police state mass hysteria at US universities. Brilliant timing Herr GW Bush, Der Fuhrer of US Empire!!

Britain becoming a Big Brother society, says data watchdog

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Sophie Goodchild

Britain is in danger of “committing slow social suicide” as such Big Brother techniques as surveillance cameras and recording equipment spread into every aspect of our lives, the nation’s information watchdog will warn this week.

A new report from Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, will say that the public needs to be made more aware of the “creeping encroachment” on civil liberties created by email monitoring, CCTV and computer tracking of our buying habits.

It is understood that one of the concerns in Mr Thomas’s report is the use of special listening devices which can be placed in lamp posts, street furniture and offices. These are already widely used in the Netherlands to combat crime and anti-social behaviour.

More than 300 of the cameras with built-in microphones have been fitted in benefit offices and city centres. The equipment can pick up aggressive tones on the basis of decibel level, pitch and speed at which words are spoken.

Westminster council has already started piloting the listening devices, but experts say the use of these microphones raises questions about how surveillance can be used to intrude into the private lives of citizens.

He will also call for greater regulation of companies that supply surveillance technology which provides “convenience or safety for the more affluent majority”, but not for the vulnerable such as children, immigrants and the elderly.

His warning comes as MPs launch their first inquiry into the impact of surveillance in Britain. The Home Affairs Select Committee will investigate the use of video cameras to monitor high streets and residential areas as well as the holding of personal information on both government and commercial databases.

On Tuesday, Mr Thomas, who last year warned that Britain was “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”, will tell the committee at its first hearing that new safeguards must be introduced to protect the public from the increasing intrusion of surveillance into their daily lives.

Civil liberty campaigners have already warned that Britain is becoming a Big Brother society where its citizens are increasingly being watched. There are more than four million CCTV cameras in this country, one for every 14 people, and the national DNA database which was set up by police to combat crime now holds 3.5 million profiles.

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Guantanamo: A Long Train of Congressional, Executive, and Now, Judicial Abuses

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

P. Gardner Goldsmith

In a stunning contradiction of the principles enshrined in the Unites States Constitution, the US Supreme Court on April 3 denied petitions of certiorari to two plaintiffs who have been held in legal limbo for five years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By doing so, the justices have added another burdensome car to the long train of abuses the federal government has sent barreling down the tracks at US citizens.

The cases were named al Odah v. United States and Boumedienne v. United States, and in both instances, the court declined to hear the plaintiffs’ requests for habeas corpus hearings. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals had already ruled against the plaintiffs, citing the habeas-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress and signed into law by the president in 2006.[1]

In ruling to deny certiorari, and, hence, habeas corpus hearings for the plaintiffs, the US Supreme Court might appear to some observers to be upholding a long-held power of the Congress to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress has done so numerous times in United States history, including a recent law restricting federal courts from hearing liability cases brought against gun manufacturers. But there are other principles at stake here, ones which the majority on the court, and many reporters, do not seem willing to discuss.

Missed in the Odah and Boumedienne rulings are the principles of the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal government, and the constitutional stricture against Congress ceding any of its granted powers to any other body. While these points may seem esoteric to some, especially during this time of so-called “war,” they are essential and fundamental to insuring our liberties against government attenuation.

The roots of the April 3 ruling trace back to events just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales approached Congress and asked the representatives to do something not allowed under the US Constitution. He asked them to grant the president the power to use the military without a formal declaration of war. Such a declaration is the only power granted to Congress to facilitate the president’s use of the US military. Instead, the Bush administration wanted Congress to grant him a “resolution for the use of military force”, which seems an awfully cumbersome term when one could just, well, declare war.

The reason Gonzales and the Bush Administration did not want a formal declaration was obvious: the United States government is a signatory to the Geneva Accords. According to the treaty, which is easily found by utilizing a simple web search, all uniformed and non-uniformed enemies captured during wartime in any signatory state (Iraq and Afghanistan are both signatory) would have to be treated according to Common Article Three of the Accords. This insures certain standards of behavior for those holding prisoners of war, prohibiting torture, and insuring that all signatory nations will afford humane treatment of their POWs.

According to US law prior to 2006, if the individuals captured on the battlefield in this undeclared “war on terror” were not going to be treated as POWs, then they would have to be tried under US criminal code, just like other terrorists in the past. This, of course, would require the courts to provide habeas corpus hearings to the arrested parties, unless Congress utilized its constitutional power to broadly suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus for all Americans and those being tried under US law.[2]

Instead, what US citizens saw between late 2001 and 2004 was a federal government operating outside both the Constitution and the Geneva Accords, with the executive branch apprehending and holding suspected terrorists for long periods of time, without treating them as either POWs or criminals under US codes.

Enter the Supreme Court case Hamdan v Rumsfeld. In 2004, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the captured and detained former driver for Osama bin Laden, filed suit for a habeas corpus hearing in US court. Held without trial, and as an “enemy combatant” without protection of the Geneva Accords, Hamdan requested what other terrorism suspects had typically received in US history: a hearing bound by US law, in which the evidence against him was presented. The Bush Administration fought the request, on the grounds that to reveal certain evidence against Hamdan could put intelligence operatives and soldiers at risk. Such an argument was valid to a point, but it overlooked the necessity to abide by the Constitution and the constitutional treaties agreed to by the US government.

In 2005, the Supreme Court found in favor of Hamdan, setting in motion a number of troubling and revealing actions by the executive branch and Congress that ought to alert even the most disinterested Americans that the “train of abuses” is getting longer and longer.

First, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the administration had to either treat the “detainees” as prisoners of war or as criminals under US Code, and thus afford them the protection of habeas corpus hearings, the president, vice president, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that if they had to abide by the Geneva Accords, they would not be able to derive the valuable information from their “detainees” that had helped “save American lives.” As powerful as such statements were, they contradicted Bush Administration claims of a year before, in which the same men repeatedly stated that the “detainees” were being afforded all the protections of the Geneva Accords in Common Article Three.

The two positions are incompatible. If the Supreme Court ruling that Hamdam should be tried under US criminal code or as a POW under the provisions of the Geneva Accord meant that the Bush Administration could no longer carry out the interrogations it had been conducting at a time when Administration members claimed they were affording the protections of the accords, then, clearly, the Bush Administration was not acting in accordance with the accords prior to the Hamdan ruling. If employees of the executive branch had been conforming, the ruling would have had no effect on their interrogation procedures.

To many Americans this might not sound like such a big deal. After all, the “detainees” or “enemy combatants,” as they are called, are all foreigners suspected of terrorist activities against American citizens. But what needs to be remembered is that we have a system under which this country is supposed to operate, and that system is set down in the US Constitution. Avoiding it without trying to amend it is an injustice to the Founding Fathers who wrote the rule book for the operation of the United States, and to those of us who were under the mistaken impression that we operated under the rule of law.

Those abuses aside, there is another aspect of the Supreme Court’s actions that might resonate even more strongly with some Americans. Under the 2006 Military Commissions Act established by Congress in response to the Hamdan case, and upheld by the Supreme Court on April 3, 2007, anyone can now be labeled an “enemy combatant.”

As a result, US citizens can now be designated “detainees” and held indefinitely without trial, or habeas corpus hearing, and if they are brought to trial, they can be put on the stand in quasi-federal courts created by the executive branch, not the legislative branch.

Unfortunately, Congress responded to the Hamdan ruling in precisely the wrong manner. It did not pass laws intended to stop the administration from creating its own “military tribunals”, and it did not actually declare war, thus setting the US military on the proper track and arranging a POW system for capture, imprisonment, and trial under the Geneva Accords. It responded by codifying what the Supreme Court had just ruled against. Congress recklessly passed the Military Commissions Act, allowing the Bush administration to set up military courts not sanctioned by the accords, prohibiting federal courts from hearing any more cases requesting clarification as to the status of “detainees” as either POWs or criminals under US law, and ceding Congress’s constitutionally provided power to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

There once was a time when Congress would not have been so quick to hand its powers over to other bodies. But we now have self-managing agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the FDA, and most Americans think they are justified, so why fuss over yet another hand-off to the executive branch, this time involving trials and the suspension of habeas corpus?

There are plenty of reasons to fuss. As it stands under the law, and the recent court rulings, American citizens can now be arrested by the federal government, held indefinitely without trial, questioned under standards we would not allow for our own soldiers if captured by other nations or subordinates of those nations, and never have a hearing to find out the evidence being presented against them. This is shameful and stunning, and is all derived from a legislative branch that is unwilling to do what the Constitution allows it to do: declare war.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the “train of abuses” by the Crown that he cited filled half a page. Today, Jefferson’s quill could fill volumes, and every abuse is being perpetrated by the very politicians and bureaucrats who swore an oath to uphold the government he helped establish. It is a sad commentary on the likelihood that any constitutional republic can long endure without growing to infringe on individual rights, and makes one wonder why anyone ought to put his trust in even the most limited of governments in the first place.

Gardner Goldsmith is a screenwriter and journalist living in New Hampshire and the founder of www.libertyconspiracy.com. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.

Notes

[1] In favor of the Circuit Court ruling were Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts, while Justices Breyer, Ginsberg and Souter dissented.

[2] Article One, Section Nine: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

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CIA boss warned Bush on UK intelligence

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Philip Sherwell

America’s former spy chief has revealed how he warned the White House that Britain had “exaggerated” reports that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger - claims that President George W Bush later made central to his case for war.

George Tenet, who quit as CIA director in 2004, details in a new book how White House hawks were determined to use British intelligence that the Iraqi regime had sought “yellowcake” for a suspected atomic bomb programme.

The President’s reliance on the allegation, which he cited in his key State of the Union speech in January 2003, emerged last week as the focus of newly launched investigations by the Democrat-controlled Congress into the pre-war use of intelligence.

Mr Tenet’s long-awaited book, the first tell-all account from the President’s inner circle in the tumultuous years of the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion, is being read avidly by Democrats keen to pursue the Bush administration’s handling of those events.

The ex-CIA chief, who has been invited to testify before Congress this week, is scathing about the roles of Vice-President Dick Cheney and the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State), before the invasion.

In another damning claim, he says he and a senior CIA colleague told Miss Rice in summer 2001 that a significant terrorist strike on the US was in the works, but that their warnings went unheeded until the September 11 attacks.

The White House is playing down the broadside from Mr Tenet, who received a $4 million (£2 million) publishing advance. Officials are privately portraying At the Centre of the Storm as the score-settling exercise of an embittered man, and are emphasising that Mr Tenet believed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

During Mr Tenet’s tenure, relations between the CIA and the Bush administration reached a record low point. The Cheney camp made no secret of its contempt for the agency, which it believed was conducting an anti-administration guerrilla war of media leaks. The book is to be published tomorrow, but The Sunday Telegraph has seen key extracts about the role of British intelligence on “yellowcake”.

In October 2002, Mr Tenet says, he told the White House that a reference to Saddam’s regime being caught trying to buy uranium ore in Africa had to be dropped from a speech by Mr Bush.

In a follow-up memo, a senior CIA analyst added that the evidence backing the British claim was “weak” and “the Africa story is overblown”. Mr Tenet’s executive assistant also outlined his boss’s concern in another memo, noting: “We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue.”

On the question of how US intelligence differed from British findings, Mr Tenet writes that there were two points of disagreement - over the yellowcake reports, and over how quickly Saddam could make a nuclear bomb.

The White House reluctantly dropped the Niger reference from Mr Bush’s October speech. But in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, the President told Congress: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

The ex-CIA chief also says that his MI6 counterpart, Sir Richard Dearlove, believed the hawks around Mr Cheney were “playing fast and loose with the evidence”. He added: “In his view, it was never about ‘fixing’ the intelligence but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used”. Sir Richard told Mr Tenet that he had a “polite but significant disagreement” with Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice-President’s closest aide, “who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda”.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday’s fourth anniversary of Mr Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier in the Gulf, the Senate will send the White House its bill tying funding for the Iraq war to a US troop withdrawal deadline of next March.

The President has pledged to veto the legislation. Indeed, White House officials said yesterday that they expect the extra troops sent to Iraq under the “surge” strategy will remain there well into next year.

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82 Inmates Cleared but Still Held at Guantanamo

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

By Craig Whitlock

More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers.

Since February, the Pentagon has notified about 85 inmates or their attorneys that they are eligible to leave after being cleared by military review panels. But only a handful have gone home, including a Moroccan and an Afghan who were released Tuesday. Eighty-two remain at Guantanamo and face indefinite waits as U.S. officials struggle to figure out when and where to deport them, and under what conditions.

The delays illustrate how much harder it will be to empty the prison at Guantanamo than it was to fill it after it opened in January 2002 to detain fighters captured in Afghanistan and terrorism suspects captured overseas.

In many cases, the prisoners’ countries do not want them back. Yemen, for instance, has balked at accepting some of the 106 Yemeni nationals at Guantanamo by challenging the legality of their citizenship.

Another major obstacle: U.S. laws that prevent the deportation of people to countries where they could face torture or other human rights abuses, as in the case of 17 Chinese Muslim separatists who have been cleared for release but fear they could be executed for political reasons if returned to China.

Compounding the problem are persistent refusals by the United States, its European allies and other countries to grant asylum to prisoners who are stateless or have no place to go.

“In general, most countries simply do not want to help,” said John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Countries believe this is not their problem. They think they didn’t contribute to Guantanamo, and therefore they don’t have to be part of the solution.”

A case in point is Ahmed Belbacha, 37, an Algerian who worked as a hotel waiter in Britain but has been locked up at Guantanamo for five years. The Pentagon has alleged that Belbacha met al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden twice and received weapons training in Afghanistan. His attorneys dispute the charges and say he was rounded up with other innocents in Pakistan in early 2002.

On Feb. 22, without explanation, the Pentagon notified Belbacha’s lawyers in London that he had been approved to leave Guantanamo. Despite entreaties from the State Department, however, the British government has refused to accept Belbacha and five other immigrants who had lived in the country, because they lack British citizenship.

This month, Clint Williamson, the State Department’s ambassador for war crimes, visited Algiers to discuss possible arrangements for the return of two dozen Algerians who remain at Guantanamo, including Belbacha, but no breakthroughs were reported. That country has been slow to accept its citizens.

Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer who represents Belbacha and several other prisoners who have been cleared, said defense attorneys have tried to speed up the process by contacting foreign governments to see if there are any specific obstacles to the return of their clients. In many cases, he said, the prisoners and officials in their home countries are willing to approve the transfer, but the delays persist.

“The holdup is a mystery to me, frankly,” said Katznelson, senior counsel for Reprieve, a British legal defense fund. “If the U.S. has cleared these people and they want to go back, I don’t understand why they can’t just put them on a plane.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042801145_2.html Cont..

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