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New probe aims to cover up CIA tortures

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

By John Catalinotto

In an attempt to limit political damage and protect the highest officials, the new U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has ordered a special investigation of the decision in 2005 to destroy tapes of CIA interrogations made in 2002 of two alleged high-level Al-Qaeda officials. The investigation is limited to how the decision was made and who made it. It is not supposed to probe the content of the tapes, which are said to show brutal interrogations using torture.

Washington often claims to be the champion of “human rights” and uses an alleged lack of human rights to attack or impose sanctions on those it considers its enemies. Since the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, however, Washington and especially the CIA have become identified with torture of prisoners, from Baghram in Afghanistan, to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, to Guantánamo on the U.S.-occupied eastern tip of Cuba.

Since torture is illegal within the U.S.—at least on paper if not in practice—the CIA has even outsourced interrogations to client states, a process called “rendition.”

The tapes destroyed involve hundreds of hours of interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Both were captured in 2002 and are now being held at Guantánamo Bay among the 275 remaining prisoners of the 800 who had been held there since 2001. Zubaydah was captured in a firefight in Pakistan in March of 2002 and interrogated then at a CIA safe house in Thailand. Al-Nashiri was captured in the United Arab Emirates.

Zubaydah confessed to being a high-ranking al-Qaeda official. Al-Nashiri said he planned the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemeni waters, which blew a hole in the side of the guided-missile destroyer and killed 17 sailors. The U.S. authorities classified both as “enemy combatants.”

Since U.S. interrogators admittedly used extreme sensory and sleep deprivation, along with waterboarding—and who knows what else—to get these confessions, it is possible that in 2002 the two prisoners told their interrogators anything they believed might stop the punishment. Both have since challenged the confessions, saying they were obtained under torture.

By the end of 2002, the CIA says it stopped taping interrogations. For the next three years, CIA legal counsels, CIA heads George Tenet and Porter Goss, discussed among themselves and with White House counsel whether or not the CIA could get away with destroying the tapes. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter advising the CIA not to destroy the tapes.

Bush gang promotes torture methods

Despite legal advice that destroying the tapes might interfere with future investigations, the CIA kept pushing to destroy the tapes. The Bush administration, whose Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had provided a legal defense of brutal interrogation techniques (while refusing to call them torture), at the very least failed to order the CIA to desist from destroying the tapes.

In June 2005, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay,” which would include the above tapes. Nevertheless, in November 2005, the CIA destroyed the tapes, under orders from Jose Rodriguez, who headed the National Clandestine Service.

The CIA claimed it destroyed the tapes to protect the safety of the interrogating officers from retaliation from al-Qaeda. Other observers said it was also to protect these officials’ careers.

But most suspect the CIA destroyed the tapes with the blessing of the White House because public exposure of the torture would make Washington even more hated than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did.

The New York Times wrote: “Interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. [U.S.] American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first al Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing [U.S.] Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.” (Dec. 30)

Mukasey, while being questioned by Congress before his appointment as attorney general, refused to say if he believed that waterboarding was torture. The tapes would leave no doubt that it is.

While the Justice Department is attempting to limit the investigation, a popular revulsion against the Bush administration makes it possible that the probe will go further than expected. Already, progressive organizations of attorneys like the Center for Constitutional Rights—which has taken the lead in organizing legal defense of the prisoners in Guantánamo and elsewhere—have raised protests against the Bush gang’s attack on constitutional rights and have called on Congress to act. The last word on the CIA tapes is yet to be spoken.

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VIDEO: Demonizing 9/11 Truth

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Research = Terrorism

“We Are Change” has 26 chapters around the country and the world.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is an affiliated group.

What is the mission of these groups?

To get to the truth of what happened on 9/11.

The government would like to criminalize this activity.

Why?

Because the movement is too big, too well organized and its fact base is too compelling.

How will the government turn patriotic action into a crime ?

They’re going to do it with “education” sessions like this:

“Using the web as a weapon: The Internet as a tool for violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism.”

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US Navy withdraws claims against Iran

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

The US Navy withdraws the allegation that Iranian patrol boats had threatened to blow up a three-ship US convoy in the Hormuz Strait.

“It could have been a threat aimed at some other nation or a myriad of other things,” The Washington Post quoted US Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Frank Thorp IV as saying on Friday.

This is while senior US Navy sources have told the BBC that an alleged threat to blow up the US warships ‘may not have come’ from Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Pentagon alleged five Iranian boats belonging to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) had harassed three US Navy warships by threatening to ‘blow them up’ on Sunday.

“No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

However, President Bush characterized the incident as ‘provocative’ and ‘dangerous’, warning Iran of serious consequences if it happens again.

Iranian officials have dismissed the allegation saying the incident was a routine maritime identification check, which is common between vessels in the Persian Gulf.

MD/RE

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‘Bush violates Palestinians’ rights’

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

A Palestinian lawmaker has said that Bush’s proposal of denying refugees’ right of return to their homeland violates UN resolution 194.

The resolution 194 calls for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes they were forced to flee in 1948.

US President George W. Bush said Thursday that Palestinian refugees should receive compensation for the loss of homes they were forced to flee during the establishment of the Zionist regime.

“Bush believes he has made progress in his new approach, but he never accounts for Palestinian rights in this new initiative,” Basam al-Salehi told Iran’s Alalam network Friday.

He also urged all Palestinian groups to insist on their right of return to their homeland and on all the related UN resolutions.

MRI/DT

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Protests mark 6th anniversary of Gitmo

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

On the sixth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay, protesters took to the street worldwide, with over 80 people arrested in the US capital.

On Friday, around 200 demonstrators in prisoner-style orange jumpsuit marched from Congress in Washington DC to the nearby Supreme Court building, calling for the shutdown of the prison where the US military put terrorist suspects in detention.

In addition, a petition signed by 1,100 parliamentarians from across the world, and 100,000 other signatures from US citizens, was to be handed in to the White House.

People also staged protests in the Philippines, Sweden, Paraguay, Bahrain, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Greece.

The US Supreme Court is to rule in the coming months on whether prisoners at Guantanamo Bay can challenge their detention in civilian courts. Currently they face special military tribunals at the base, outside the US soil.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, despite hundreds who have been released from Guantanamo to various countries, there are still 275 remaining in the prison.

SG/GM

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‘British spies bugged Diana, leaked tapes to smear her’

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

British intelligence was spying on Princess Diana and recording embarrassingly private conversations, which were later leaked to the world, three years before she separated from the heir to the throne, her former bodyguard has said.

Ken Wharfe, Diana’s former bodyguard, told the long-running inquest into her death that the infamous “Squidgygate” tapes of Diana talking in an intimate fashion to an alleged lover were recorded by the British intelligence listening station GCHQ.

They were later deliberately leaked to embarrass the Princess, he said, in a damaging suggestion the royal family was “jealous” of Diana’s “popularity” and aides to the British Queen and her husband were “sharpening their knives” against her.

The revelation, splashed as the front-page lead story of the traditional and generally monarchist Daily Telegraph newspaper, has transfixed royal-watchers. Many believe it gives ballast to 10-year-old conspiracy theories about Establishment involvement in Diana’s death in Paris, alongside Dodi, the playboy son of Egyptian millionaire grocer Mohammed al-Fayed.

But Wharfe, the beefy, thickset, veteran royal protection officer who formerly cashed in on his association with Diana by writing a book about the six years he served her, added the caveat that British security services also regularly bugged other members of the royal family and cabinet ministers in the 1980s and 1990s, ostensibly to help protect them against assassination by the IRA.

On the ‘Squidygate’ tapes, which were relayed to a prurient world three years after Diana’s 1989 conversation with childhood friend and alleged lover James Gilbey, the man is heard repeatedly telling her “I love you”. The half-hour conversation had Gilbey, heir to the eponymous gin empire, calling Diana “Squidgy”, a pet name, 53 times.

The allegation that the tapes were made at the British government’s top secret monitoring station had Wharfe claiming that “Diana Diana did say to me on a number of occasions she felt she and other members of the family were being monitored.”

Wharfe’s account is seen to square with long-held suspicions the tapes were leaked to smear Diana at a time her relationship with Prince Charles was at its most acrimonious.

Barely a year after the tapes were leaked, Diana hired electronic surveillance experts to sweep her apartments for bugs, the bodyguard claimed.

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Diana ‘believed she would be bumped off’

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

By Nick Allen

Diana, Princess of Wales believed she was going to be “bumped off” by MI6 because of her high profile campaign against landmines, the inquest into her death has been told.

Her friend Simone Simmons said the Princess was about to “name names” and publish a dossier called Profiting Out of Misery.


	Diana, Princess of Wales, ‘believed M16 were out to kill her’

“Top of her list of culprits was the Secret Intelligence Service which she believed was behind the sale of British landmines that were causing so much misery to so many people,” Miss Simmons said.

On one occasion the Princess sent her a note which said: “If something happens, MI5 or MI6 will have done it.”

Miss Simmons said the Princess gave her the landmines dossier, which was up to six inches thick, and she kept it for several months under her mattress along with the note.

Later, she burned them. She said: “I was more than nervous. If I had the material, I might have been bumped off as well.”

At Kensington Palace in February 1997, the Princess asked her to listen into a phone call she was on in which she was threatened over the landmine campaign, Miss Simmons said.

“This person was saying to her that she shouldn’t interfere in matters she knew nothing about,” she said.

The caller told the Princess “Well accidents can happen” and she was “very pale” after the conversation.

Miss Simmons said the Princess told her the caller was Conservative MP Nicholas Soames.

Mr Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, has previously told the inquest that the suggestion was “grotesque and preposterous”.

According to Miss Simmons, the Princess had secret meetings with Tony Blair in the months before he became Prime Minister about becoming a roving ambassador in relation to landmines.

“That’s what he promised her and she thought he was going to announce it when he was elected.

“She was very disappointed,” Miss Simmons said.

The testimony of Miss Simmons, who describes herself as an “energy healer”, provided an insight into the world of the Princess, including her belief in alternative therapies.

From 1993 she went to Miss Simmons up to three times a week at a complementary medicine clinic.

They later became friends and she would go to Kensington Palace up to five times a week and was teaching the Princess how to be a healer herself, Miss Simmons said.

The Princess’s flat had “bad energy” which Miss Simmons had to clear it of in an “exhausting” procedure.

The two women once spent 10 hours on a single phone call to each other, the inquest heard.

“We talked about everything and if she was upset I would calm her down reassure her,” Miss Simmons said.

“I believed her calls were being listened to and every time there was a click on the phone she used to say ‘hello boys, time to change the tape’.”

In November 1996 she had a premonition the Princess would be one of four people in an accident in a Mercedes.

When she told the Princess, she replied: “Oh my God, Charles”.

The inquest also heard about an “Arab conspiracy”.

Miss Simmons said: “She wasn’t paranoid, somebody had told her there was a fatwa on her head because the Arabs liked Charles.”

The inquest continues.

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Man dies after police Taser him

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

BY DAVID OVALLE

A man in his 20s died after a Coral Gables police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue him Friday morning.

He was identified Friday afternoon as Xavier Jones, 29.

Jones had been disruptive at a party and resisted arrest, according to Miami-Dade police, whose homicide bureau is investigating the death.

About 2 a.m., police officers responded to a call about a scuffle at University Inn Condominium, 1280 S. Alahambra Cir., near the University of Miami. The building is across the street from the university and borders on U.S. 1.

After the man became disruptive inside the apartment, a security guard attempted to remove him from the property. The confrontation spilled outside.

Miami-Dade police said Jones displayed ”aggressive and combative behavior” so a police officer used a Taser stun gun to restrain him.

After the discharge, Jones became unresponsive, and paramedics took him to Doctor’s Hospital in Coral Gables, where he was pronounced dead.

The investigation by Coral Gables and Miami-Dade police closed an area of U.S. 1 between Red Road and South Alhambra Circle until 7 a.m.

A cause of death will be determined by the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office.

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