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Lib Dems criticise gov’t over latest data losses

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

By Tom Espiner | The Liberal Democrats have taken the government to task following this week’s round of high-profile official data losses, suggesting the breaches show the government could not safely administer an ID card database.

The revelation on Tuesday of the loss of a personal computer from cabinet minister Hazel Blears’s Salford office, coupled with two instances of civil servants leaving top-secret documents on trains from Waterloo this week, calls into question the government’s ability to look after sensitive data, according to the Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary, Chris Huhne.

Huhne said the proposed National Identity Register behind the ID cards scheme could not be adequately administrated by the government.

“Three significant data losses in the space of a week have demonstrated just how lax this government’s attitude is towards data-security issues,” Huhne told ZDNet.co.uk on Wednesday. “Given that ministers continue to lurch from one data fiasco to another, it is hard to believe that they can be trusted with something as large and as invasive as the proposed National Identity Register.”

However, the Home Office claimed data controls for the National Identity Register (NIR) will prevent information leaks.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We understand public concern about security of personal data and one of the most important benefits of the scheme will be to improve the individual’s protection against fraudulent use of personal information. The link between your unique biometric information and limited data identity held will make it incredibly difficult for anyone to try to use your personal information fraudulently.”

“IPS will make the register as secure as possible, building on an excellent track record with the current passport database, which has 80 million records,” the Home Office’s spokesperson added. “The level of security classification will match some military databases.”

Blears had a personal computer stolen from her constituency office in Salford on Saturday. A spokesperson for the department of communities and local government, which Blears heads, said on Tuesday that while the PC contained “some restricted information” the data on it was not top-secret.

However, it emerged on Tuesday that the restricted documents on the stolen PC had been sent to Blears in an apparent contravention of government practice. Communities and local government permanent secretary Peter Housden said: “It is clear that papers have been sent to Hazel Blears in a way that is not fully consistent with the departmental guidance. I have instructed my officials that departmental procedures, guidance, and the awareness and accessibility of that guidance, are now strengthened to ensure this does not happen again. I take full responsibility for ensuring this is done.”

The Conservative Party called for the issue of the data loss from the department of communities and local government to be discussed in Parliament, and for the government to clarify what had occurred.

“The news that a government minister may have been directly responsible for the loss of data relating to extremism is extremely alarming,” said shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve. “It comes after a series of security breaches over which government appears not to have regained control. The government must urgently clarify what happened in this case. If Hazel Blears has breached security rules in relation to material she has handled, Parliament must be told exactly how and why this has occurred.”

Security vendors pointed out that password protection is easy to crack, and recommended that all organisations encrypt sensitive data.

“Once again this drives home the real risks of data losses and the impact these can have, even when you think the data is secure,” said Nick Lowe, Check Point’s regional director for Northern Europe. “It’s vital to go the extra mile and secure data not just with lock and key, but by cryptography.”

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VIDEO: Earthlings Documentary

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Have Your Say: VIDEO: Earthlings Documentary
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Blackwater is Still in Charge, Deadly, Above the Law and Out of Control

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

On June 3, Jeremy Scahill’s bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was released in fully revised and updated paperback form. The new edition includes reporting on the now-famous Nisour Square massacre on Sept. 16 of last year, in which Blackwater mercenaries opened fire in a Baghdad neighborhood, brutally murdering 17 Iraqi civilians. The killing spree, which the U.S. Army would label a “criminal event,” would reveal the extent of the lawlessnewss enjoyed by private contractors abroad and the lengths the Bush administration will go to protect its private army of choice.

Antonia Juhasz caught up with Scahill on the phone the day the new edition was released. A fellow at Oil Change International and author of The Bush Agenda, Juhasz is also the author of the forthcoming book The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do to Stop It. Juhasz and Scahill discussed, among other topics, the story behind Blackwater, congressional inaction, radical privatization, Barack Obama, corporate vs. independent media, GI resistance in the age of private mercenaries, getting real about challenging corporations and the power of dissent.

Antonia Juhasz: I first have to admit that, until now, I had not read Blackwater and that, as someone who had been reading your Nation articles, I had quite erroneously assumed that I knew what you had to say about this company. I could not have been more wrong. This is a fantastic, informative, insightful and critically important book.

Jeremy Scahill: Thank you. I started writing this book by accident. I’d been writing about Blackwater when my [Nation] editors Katrina vanden Heuvel and Betsy Reed sat me down and said, “We’ve published ten articles about one company and you’re doing great work, but you either need to write a book or get a new beat.” Once I began researching the company in the context of a book, I realized that, in many ways, it was a metaphor for so much that was happening with the country, particularly with the privatization agenda of the war machine. So, while there are some parts of the book that are based on reporting I did for the Nation, the vast majority is new investigative research.

AJ: What drew you to Blackwater?

JS: I was in Yugoslavia during the 1999 NATO bombing that Bill Clinton prosecuted … Halliburton and other war contractors, like Dyncorp, were very much present on the ground during the Yugoslavian civil war, primarily in Bosnia. And so that was really my first direct interaction with this sort of parallel army of contractors.

Then the [U.S. attack on] Iraqis in Falluja was very important to me as a reporter, because I had been there many times and had friends inside of Falluja. I remember watching on March 31, 2004, when those four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed inside Falluja, and my immediate response after seeing the way it was covered in the press — that they were “civilians” [or] “civilian contractors” — was “Oh my god, Bush is going to destroy that city.”

I began my reporting on Blackwater [in April 2004] based on a very simple question: “How were the deaths of these not-active-duty U.S. soldiers — not civilians, but four corporate personnel working for Blackwater, a mercenary company — how do their deaths warrant the destruction of an entire city?”

I realized that it was a story that spoke volumes to what we were seeing happening in this country with the export of this incredibly violent foreign policy, the connections of political allies of the president to the war industry… [So I began] an in-depth investigation of Blackwater: Who runs the company? What are their connections to the Bush administration and the national security apparatus of the U.S., etc.?

AJ: What did you hope that writing the book would accomplish — and has it?

JS: When I was writing, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of what I hoped to accomplish. What I was looking at was: Here is this company that was on no one’s map, basically, before March 31, 2004, and even in the weeks and months after that, was really just a blip on the media radar screen. I was hoping to expose this company as something much bigger than just its boots on the ground in Iraq, or its role in Falluja, Najaf and elsewhere — but to explain, in a readable way, that this is a very dangerous trend that has been put on a radical fast track almost overnight.

Once we started to realize just how deeply embedded in the occupation of Iraq Blackwater has been, and its connection to the Bush administration, then the point of the book (became) raising hell in Congress and in the public — saying to people, “We have to wake up and do something about this!”

Continue…

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Dems to OK Bush War Funds Without Conditions

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

By ANDREW TAYLOR | Democratic and GOP leaders in the House announced agreement Wednesday on a long-overdue war funding bill they said President Bush would be willing to sign. The agreement on the war funding bill, announced by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, also paves the way for a quick infusion of emergency flood relief for the Midwest, an extension of unemployment payments for the jobless and a big boost in GI Bill college for veterans.

It would also provide about $165 billion to the Pentagon to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for about a year. That’s enough time for Bush’s successor to set Iraq policy.

“This is an agreement that has been worked out in a bipartisan way that I think is acceptable to both most Democrats and most Republicans and to the White House,” Boehner said.

Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the agreement contains several priorities for Democrats in the Senate but stopped short of issuing a direct endorsement, saying Reid needed to consult with his colleagues.

The agreement would require that the Senate would agree to drop most of the more than $10 billion it added last month for programs such as heating subsidies for the poor, wildfire fighting, road and bridge repair and help for the Gulf Coast.

The House is slated to pass the measure Thursday, but the Senate won’t turn to it until next week, Manley said.

The agreement drops restrictions on Bush’s ability to conduct the war and gives him almost all of the funding he sought well over a year ago for Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also backed away from veto threats he issued earlier over Democrats’ insistence on using the Iraq funding bill to carry a generous boost in the GI Bill and a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for people whose benefits have run out.

Democrats dropped a provision to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 13 weeks in states with particularly high unemployment rates.

The war funding bill had bedeviled Democratic leaders for months. Its passage has become more urgent with looming furloughs next month of civilian employees and contract workers.

Conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats are upset that the new GI Bill benefits, with costs tentatively estimated at $62 billion over the next decade, will be added to the deficit instead of being “paid for” as called for under House rules.

But the White House and Republicans insisted that House Democrats’ offset — a one-half percentage point surcharge on wealthier taxpayers — was unacceptable.

Boehner and Hoyer would not immediately release details, saying the verbal agreement had yet to be written in congressional legalese.

The agreement came just a day after the Bush administration urged Congress to provide $1.8 billion in immediate disaster aid for the Midwest and elsewhere. Congress is likely to add a little more, though details had not been ironed out.

A dozen senators in both parties are pressing to add money for levee repair and help for displaced homeowners, among other pressing needs.

Democrats and governors across the country emerged the victors in a battle with the White House to block new Bush administration rules designed to cut spending on Medicaid health care for the poor and disabled.

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Letter to Ian Blair by George Galloway

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

I write in connection with the police operation surrounding the President George W Bush to Downing Street today. I am not a habitual complainer about the police, as a scan of the public record and my history of cooperation with Tower Hamlets police and the Muslim Support Unit will quickly show. But I must say I witnessed scenes today, some of them inches from my face, which were both deeply shocking and completely unnecessary.

I was asked by the chairman of the Stop the War Coalition as the only member of parliament present at the demonstration in Parliament Square to march to the police barricade in Whitehall symbolically to demonstrate the outrageousness of the government’s decision to forbid marchers to enter Whitehall . As one of the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition I felt it was my duty to comply with his request, although it was Fathers Day, I had my children with me and had intended to leave Parliament Square shortly after my speech.

I made my way to the front of the putative march and purely by chance found myself in the hottest spot of the confrontation which followed. I was trapped there for the best part of an hour and a half, unable to move forward, back or sideways. Consquently, I was both closer to and for longer exposed to the events as they unfolded.

A considerable line of uniformed officers were in full control of the situation for a substantial part of this time. Most of the officers were impassive throughout. Some did their best to defuse the situation, which was clearly the proper tactic in the circumstances. But a number of your officers behaved with a viciousness and lack of control such as I have not witnessed since the miners strike of 1984-85. Batons were drawn at least prematurely and were used with a level of aggression which frankly took my breath away.

These were not hardened trouble-makers they were facing who’d come for a fight with the police. They were young, peaceful, allbeit frustrated and angry anti-war protesters. You will know that there has never been any trouble on the score of Stop the War marches that London has scene hitherto. One particular officer, I will not give his number at this stage as I intend to make a formal complaint about his conduct and I am releasing this letter to the press, was quite simply out of control. He assaulted a young woman; he deployed his metal baton in a frenzied way; he ripped placards from the hands of several demonstrators when I can assure you the demonstrators in question were not using these cardboard placards in any improper way. He was standing next to a sergeant, whose number I also have, who if he tesitfies truthfully will bear out what I am saying.

A senior officer - I could see no identifying number, but I know he was senior because he was giving out orders - was actually taunting the demonstrators, including me in a display of political partiality such as I have never witnessed.

But the most serious mistake is one I believe you have a duty toinvestigate, and that was the tactical decision to deploy the black-boiler-suited riot squad - when there was clearly no riot. This decision, however, was one which appeared designed to start one. Given the small number of demonstrators involved - far less than the number of revellers on an ordinary Friday night in Romford - it was an unnecessary and provocative overreaction and served as nothing other than a provocation compounding the protesters’ feelings about the denial of what they and I regard as their rights as citizens in a free country.

This squad behaved intolerably. It was as if they were facing a dangerous crowd of molotov cocktail throwing, pike wielding insurrectionists. It was a scene redolent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and cannot possibly be justified by the scale of this incident. This squad proceeded to deal out a shocking level of violence against unarmed civilan protesters, overwhelmingly young and many of them female. I have no doubt the large number of press photographers present and taking pictures of the scenes will bear this out.

This was not the Metropolitan Police’s finest hour, Commissioner. It was a sledgehammer to crack a nut and did harm to the reputation of your officers and their commanders, and I believe you have a duty to investigate it.

I look forward to a swift reply,

Yours sincerely,

George Galloway MP

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Republicans’ Offshore Drilling Plan Would Expand Dysfunctional System

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

By Phil Mattera | The response to the politically opportunistic call by the Bush Administration and John McCain to expand offshore oil drilling is being framed primarily in environmental terms. The drilling, which would do nothing in the short term to address soaring gasoline prices, would indeed create serious risks for the coastlines of Florida and California and would worsen global warming.Yet there is another compelling reason to oppose the plan: the federal system of offshore leasing has been characterized by gross mismanagement that has allowed big oil companies to avoid paying billions of dollars in royalties. There is no reason to doubt that an expansion of drilling leases would bring more of the same.

For those who missed this particular scandal, here is some background. Commercial offshore oil drilling was pioneered in the late 1940s by Kerr-McGee Corp. While little thought was given to environmental issues at the time, there were disputes between the federal government and coastal states over which should control the leasing process. The 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gave the states control over the first three miles (more for Texas and the Gulf Coast of Florida), and the feds took over after that up to the 200-mile territorial limit.

There wasn’t much controversy over offshore drilling until 1969, when an undersea well off the coast of Santa Barbara, California suffered a blowout and leaked 200,000 gallons of oil that contaminated 35 miles of coastline. This led to state and federal restrictions on offshore drilling in new areas. Periodically over the past 30 years, the oil & gas industry and its allies in Congress have tried to ease the limits but were shot down.

Defeated in its effort to get access to more offshore areas, the industry sought to make its existing drilling more profitable by pressing for reductions in the royalties it had to pay the federal government through the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS). In the mid-1990s, when energy prices were relatively low (oil was at about $16 a gallon), Congress gave in to industry pressure and passed legislation in 1995 providing “royalty relief.”

The law contained safeguards to prevent a windfall for drilling companies by terminating the relief when oil prices rose above a certain level, but Clinton Administration officials failed to include those provisions in some 1,000 deepwater leases it signed in 1998 and 1999.

That oversight would come to haunt the federal government. As oil prices rose in 2004 to the point at which royalty relief should have ended on those leases, the cost to the Treasury in lost revenue rose to billions of dollars. Once the situation became publicly known, thanks to reporting by Edmund Andrews of the New York Times, some oil companies agreed to renegotiate the leases, while others such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron refused.

Complicating the situation, Kerr-McGee (now part of Anadarko Petroleum) later brought a legal challenge against the safeguards, making the dubious argument that Congress never intended to give MMS the authority to impose them. Last year the drillers received a favorable ruling in the case, prompting the Government Accountability Office to estimate recently that, if the decision is upheld, the loss of revenue from leases signed from 1996 through 2000 could be as high as $53 billion.

The federal government is also likely being cheated on leases signed after 2000. In 2006, several MMS auditors publicly charged that they had been pressured by their superiors to terminate investigations of underreporting of royalties related to leases not subject to royalty relief.

This is the dysfunctional system that the Republicans want to expand. One is tempted to ask: Is this really about increasing oil supplies—or creating another giveaway for Big Oil?

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CIA Played Larger Role In Advising Pentagon

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

By Joby Warrick | A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

Torture “is basically subject to perception,” CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known. By the time of the meeting, the CIA already had used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on at least one terrorism suspect and was holding high-level al-Qaeda detainees in secret prisons overseas — actions that Bush administration lawyers had approved.

The new evidence, along with hours of questioning of former Pentagon officials at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, shed light on efforts by top aides to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to research and reverse-engineer techniques used by military survival schools to prepare U.S. service members for possible capture by hostile forces. The techniques — sensory deprivation, forced nudity, stress positions and exploitation of phobias, such as fear of dogs — would eventually be approved for use at Guantanamo Bay and would spread to U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison. Nearly all were later rescinded.

The newly released documents show that in the summer of 2002, Pentagon officials compiled lists of aggressive techniques, soliciting opinions from the CIA and others, and ultimately implementing the practices over opposition from military lawyers who argued that the proposed tactics were probably illegal and could harm U.S. troops.

The memos and other evidence evoked intense bipartisan condemnation from members of the Armed Services Committee who spent nearly eight hours grilling some of the former and current officials involved with the decisions.

“The guidance that was provided during this period of time, I think, will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military and intelligence communities,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: “How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?”

One of the most explosive memos was the account of the October 2002 Guantanamo Bay meeting in which the CIA’s Fredman joined 10 Defense Department officials and lawyers to discuss how to extract better intelligence from detainees there. Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding.

“If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique, it can feel like you’re drowning,” he said, according to the meeting’s minutes, which do not provide a verbatim transcript.

Fredman said medical experts should monitor detainees. “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of the cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental,” he was quoted as saying.

CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the remarks attributed to Fredman. “The far more important point is the fact that CIA’s terrorist interrogation program has operated on the basis of measured, detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice,” he said. “The agency program, which has been carefully reviewed within our government, has disrupted terrorist plots and saved innocent lives.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the administration’s consistent policy has been to treat detainees humanely and within the law. “Abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government,” he said at a news briefing yesterday.

But some of Fredman’s advice was apparently persuasive for top Pentagon officials, who in the following weeks approved the first formal program for harsh interrogations at the facility in Cuba. While the outlines of the Guantanamo Bay program are widely known, the new documents suggest a common interest by the CIA and Pentagon in the use of tactics from a program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. In testimony, officials involved in SERE training acknowledged being asked to write memos for senior Pentagon officials about which techniques had the greatest psychological effect.

Among those questioned yesterday about decisions was William J. “Jim” Haynes II, a former Defense Department general counsel who acknowledged pressing for more aggressive techniques but said the decisions were driven by the administration’s fear of more terrorist strikes.

“What I remember about the summer of 2002 was a government-wide concern about the possibility of another terrorist attack as the anniversary of September 11″ approached, Haynes said. He also cited “widespread frustration” among Pentagon officials that summer about the slow progress on obtaining information from Guantanamo Bay detainees.

But Haynes and other Pentagon officials acknowledged that the proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law. Among them was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force. He warned in an October 2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would “shock the conscience of any legal body” that might review how the interrogations were conducted.

“This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,” Fallon wrote. He added: “Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

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General Accuses White House of War Crimes

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

By Dan Froomkin | The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, “tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

“The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted –both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Pamela Hess of the Associated Press has more on the report, which resulted from “the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far” and “found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders.”

The War Council

So if war crimes were committed, who’s responsible?

In today’s installment of a major McClatchy Newspapers series on the U.S. detention system, Tom Lasseter writes: “The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn’t the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

“It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

“The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.

“The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the ‘War Council,’ drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. . . .

“The international conventions that the United States helped draft, and to which it’s a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another’s offices. No one in the War Council has publicly described the group’s activities in any detail, and only some of their opinions and memorandums have been made public. . . .

“Only one of the five War Council lawyers remains in office: David Addington, the brilliant but abrasive longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney. His primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn’t check.”

The other members were Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales.

For more on Addington’s central role, see my Sept. 5, 2007 column; for more on the relationship between the administration’s legal memos and torture, see my April 2 column.

The Senate Investigation

The Senate Armed Services Committee made news with a hearing yesterday — part of its continuing investigation into the administration’s interrogation policies. (Here’s the C-SPAN video.)

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: “A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

“Torture ‘is basically subject to perception,’ CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. ‘If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.’ . . .

“Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding.” . . .

“Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: ‘How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?’.”

Levin also introduced evidence that proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law. Warrick writes: “Among them was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force. He warned in an October 2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would ’shock the conscience of any legal body’ that might review how the interrogations were conducted.

“‘This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,’ Fallon wrote. He added: ‘Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.’”

The star witness yesterday was Haynes — the former Pentagon general counsel, “War Council” member and Addington protege.

Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times that Haynes “sparred at length with senators seeking to pin on him some responsibility for the harsh tactics and the worldwide outrage they provoked.

“Documents released Tuesday show that some of Mr. Haynes’s aides in July 2002 sought out information about aggressive interrogations.

“Mr. Haynes fended off attacks by Democrats and some Republicans, noting that the Defense Department has 10,000 lawyers and saying he had no time to conduct legal research himself on which methods were permitted.

“Moreover, Mr. Haynes said, ‘as the lawyer, I was not the decision maker. I was the adviser.’

“Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he thought Mr. Haynes’s advice had led American soldiers drastically astray. ‘You degraded the integrity of the United States military,’ Mr. Reed said.”

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: “If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday’s Senate appearance by the Pentagon’s former top lawyer.

“William ‘Jim’ Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee. . .

“It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility.

“A committee investigation found that, contrary to his earlier testimony, Haynes had showed strong interest in potentially abusive questioning methods as early as July 2002. Later, ignoring the strong objections of the uniformed military, Haynes sent a memo to Donald Rumsfeld recommending the approval of stress positions, nudity, dogs and light deprivation. . . .

“Haynes mixed his forgetfulness with a dash of insolence. He suggested to [Claire] McCaskill [(D-Mo.)] that ‘it’s important that you understand how the Defense Department works.’ He cut off [Jack] Reed [(D-R.I.)] with a ‘Let me finish, Senator!’ and disclosed that he had been too busy to give more attention to the Geneva Conventions: ‘I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions made every day. This was one.’”

Mark Benjamin of Salon offers up a timeline based on the Senate investigation. He writes that “as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture.

Phil Carter analyzes the new evidence on washingtonpost.com

Adam Zagorin writes for Time: “Despite years of investigation into alleged abuse and death of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9/11, the only Americans held accountable have been the low-ranking ‘bad apples’ convicted for the worst atrocities at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. No official blame has been assigned to higher-ups for abuses at Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, much less for crimes allegedly committed by U.S. personnel in various secret CIA prisons around the world.”

Tim Rutten writes in his Los Angeles Times opinion column: “Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States.”

Rutten writes that, along with earlier revelations, “the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration — mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of ‘the unitary executive,’ which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials.”

Rutten, however, has nothing but scorn for the “handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics” who are calling for criminal indictments or war-crime trials.

The White House Line

White House spokesman Tony Fratto repeated the official administration position yesterday: “I’m telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government. The policy of this government has been to take these detainees and to interrogate them and get the information that we can get to help protect this country, which we have been very successful at doing, and we’ve been very successful at getting the information that has saved lives and prevented attacks on this country and on our allies. . . .

“[W]e do not abuse and we treat detainees humanely and comporting with the law.”

Iraq Watch

Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: “U.S. and Iraqi officials negotiating long-term security agreements have reworded a proposed White House commitment to defend Iraq against foreign aggression in an effort to avoid submitting the deal for congressional approval, Iraq’s foreign minister said yesterday.

“The alternative under discussion will pledge U.S. forces to ‘help Iraqi security forces to defend themselves,’ rather than a U.S. promise to defend Iraq, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said. Although ‘it’s the other way around,’ he said, ‘the meaning is the same, almost.’

“Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), one of the most outspoken critics of the proposed agreement, called the change ‘a distinction without a difference.’ Senior Democratic and Republican lawmakers have questioned whether the accord will constitute a defense treaty requiring congressional ratification and have accused the Bush administration of withholding information on the talks. . . .

“In a document he signed last fall with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Bush pledged ’security assurances and commitments . . . to deter foreign aggression against Iraq that violates its sovereignty and integrity of its territories, waters, or airspace.’

“Under sharp questioning from U.S. lawmakers, the administration has insisted that the agreement will be ‘nonbinding’ and can be legally signed by Bush without congressional approval.”

About Those Bases

Kyle Crichton blogs for the New York Times: “In the debate over the future American military role in Iraq, the Bush administration has held firm on one point in particular: there will be no permanent American bases in Iraq. Just last week, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker denied a report in The Independent of London to the effect that the United States was building 50 ‘permanent’ bases.

“But what constitutes a permanent base? Almost anything, it turns out. . . .

“[E]ven though we may never have permanent bases in Iraq, we could very well have some venerable temporary facilities there before we finally depart. . . .

“[A] handful of big bases . . . are already there and looking quite permanent, from the KFC and Burger King outlets, to the car dealerships, to the 6,000- person mess halls.”

Curveball Redux

John Goetz and Bob Drogin write in the Los Angeles Times about catching up with Rafid Ahmed Alwan, the Iraqi informant code-named Curveball.

“[I]n his first public comments, the 41-year-old engineer from Baghdad complains that the CIA and other spy agencies are blaming him for their mistakes. . . .

“It was intelligence attributed to Alwan — as Curveball — that the White House used in making its case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He described what turned out to be fictional mobile germ factories. The CIA belatedly branded him a liar. . . .

“‘I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life,’ he said. ‘I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.’”

FISA Watch

Manu Raju writes in The Hill: “Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they would not stand in the way of a compromise overhaul of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), despite their concerns with the impacts of the sprawling measure.

“Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, said some Democrats are ‘not happy with that, but there may be enough to get a majority vote.’ . . .

“Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) predicted Tuesday that there is enough support within the Democratic Conference to approve [the] contentious overhaul. . . .

“The latest development comes after Rockefeller, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and the Bush administration reached an accord late last week to break a weeks-long stalemate over balancing electronic surveillance with the right to privacy for American citizens, according to several people familiar with the talks.”

The New York Times editorial board writes: “In the waning months of his tenure, President Bush and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president’s powers to spy on Americans without a court order.

“This week, the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill hope to announce a ‘compromise’ on a domestic spying bill. If they do, it will be presented as an indispensable tool for protecting the nation’s security that still safeguards our civil liberties. The White House will paint opponents as weak-kneed liberals who do not understand and cannot stand up to the threat of terrorism.

“The bill is not a compromise. The final details are being worked out, but all indications are that many of its provisions are both unnecessary and a threat to the Bill of Rights. The White House and the Congressional Republicans who support the bill have two real aims. They want to undermine the power of the courts to review the legality of domestic spying programs. And they want to give a legal shield to the telecommunications companies that broke the law by helping Mr. Bush carry out his warrantless wiretapping operation.”

Glenn Greenwald of Salon yesterday started raising money for broadcast ads targeting Hoyer and “other Congressional enablers” for their support of the ostensible compromise. Greenwald announced this morning that in the first 16 hours of the campaign, more than $70,000 came in.

Bush on Gas Prices

H. Josef Hebert writes for the Associated Press: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production. Democrats quickly rejected the idea. . . .

“With the presidential election just months away, Bush made a pointed attack on Democrats, accusing them of obstructing his energy proposals and blaming them for high gasoline costs. His proposal echoed a call by Republican presidential candidate John McCain to open the Continental Shelf for exploration. . . .

“Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, rejected lifting the drilling moratorium that has been supported by a succession of presidents for nearly two decades.

“‘This is not something that’s going to give consumers short-term relief and it is not a long-term solution to our problems with fossil fuels generally and oil in particular,’ said Obama. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, lumping Bush with McCain, accused them of staging a ‘cynical campaign ploy’ that won’t help lower energy prices.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: “Mr. Bush has long advocated opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to drilling, and in 2006 signed into law a bill that expanded exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. But the topic of coastal drilling has been an extremely sensitive one in the Bush family; Mr. Bush’s father, the first President Bush, signed an executive order in 1990 banning coastal oil exploration, and Mr. Bush’s brother Jeb was an outspoken opponent of offshore drilling when he was governor of Florida.

“Now, though, President Bush is considering repealing his father’s order… [T]wo people outside the White House said such a move was under serious consideration, and a senior White House official did not dispute their account.”

Writes Stolberg: “With oil selling for more than $130 a barrel and no end in sight to high gasoline prices, Mr. Bush, a former oilman from Texas who came into office vowing to address an impending energy shortage, does not want to end his presidency in the midst of an energy crisis.”

Flood Watch

Tom Raum writes for the Associated Press: “President Bush pledged housing help and other federal aid to victims of Midwest storms and said he would inspect flood damage in a trip to Iowa on Thursday.

“Briefed on Tuesday by officials involved in the relief effort, Bush also said he would work with Congress on emergency legislation to help replenish a federal emergency disaster fund.”

Safavian Watch

James V. Grimaldi and Del Quentin Wilber write in The Washington Post: “A federal appeals court yesterday ordered a new trial for a former White House aide convicted of obstructing justice and lying, a setback for prosecutors in their four-year-old investigation into the activities of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.”

Karl Rove Watch

Dan Friedman writes for CongressDaily: “House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday renewed their demand that former White House political adviser Karl Rove testify publicly on the politicization of the Justice Department but suggested they may accept a compromise in which Rove would be interviewed in private without taking an oath to tell the truth.

“The committee on May 22 subpoenaed Rove to testify at a July 10 hearing on the White House’s role in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and his alleged involvement in the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama.

“Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said the White House has ordered Rove not to testify.

“But in a letter sent Monday to Luskin, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Judiciary Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., said Luskin recently suggested to the committee staff that Rove appear ‘without a transcript or oath,’ but without any limit on the committee’s right to seek sworn testimony later.

“Luskin’s proposal diverges from a White House offer to allow former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to appear for a similar interview on the condition the committee not seek future testimony from her, the letter said.

“‘This is an important step forward,’ Conyers and Sanchez said of Luskin’s proposal. ‘We are encouraged by this suggestion,’ they added. . . .

“Nonetheless, the letter by Conyers and Sanchez also called a request by Luskin that the interview covers only the Siegelman matter and not the U.S. attorney firings ‘unacceptable.’”

Peter Stone writes in National Journal: “To judge from his public persona, former White House senior adviser Karl Rove is devoting the lion’s share of his time to analyzing the presidential campaign as an on-air commentator for Fox News and in columns for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets; restarting his political consulting firm; writing a book; and giving speeches nationwide.

“Rove has strongly suggested he has largely eschewed dispensing advice to the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain or to outside political groups seeking to influence the November elections.

“But away from the spotlight, Rove has been busy pitching in by giving informal advice to McCain’s team and spending a considerable amount of time as an outside adviser to Freedom’s Watch, the conservative political group that is expected to spend tens of millions of dollars to help elect House GOP candidates. . . .

“One prominent GOP strategist says that Rove’s various behind-the-scenes efforts for McCain and Freedom’s Watch are aimed at bolstering the Bush administration’s sagging fortunes, helping Republicans in a tough election year, and protecting his own place in history. Rove, who was a key architect of George W. Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and 2004, is ‘trying to vindicate the Bush administration by electing a Republican president,’ the GOP source said. ‘This is very personal for Karl.’”

Poll Watch

Harris Interactive reports: “The latest Harris Poll finds the nation in a foul political mood. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all register their worst ratings ever. More people than ever also think the country is on the wrong track. . . .

“President Bush’s latest ratings are 24 percent positive and fully 75 percent negative. Previously, his worst numbers were 26 percent positive and 72 percent negative in April of this year. His ratings are substantially worse than those of any president, except for Jimmy Carter (22%-77% in July 1980), since Harris first started measuring them in 1963.

“Vice President Cheney’s ratings are even worse, 18 percent positive and 74 percent negative, compared to his previous low of 21 percent positive, 74 percent negative last July.”

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Sweden passes ‘Big Brother bill’

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Press TV | Swedish lawmakers vote in favor of a controversial bill allowing all emails and phone calls to be monitored over ’security issues’. Lawmakers voted late on Wednesday on one of the most divisive subjects in Sweden in recent years.

The bill was narrowly passed after a few revisions were made with 143 votes in favor, 138 opposed and one parliamentarian abstaining.

Critics of the bill have slammed the proposal as an attack on civil liberties that would create a “Big brother” state, while supporters say it is necessary to protect the country from foreign threats.

Meanwhile, the new law is due to take effect on January 1, 2009 and will allow the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) - a civilian agency despite its name - to tap all cross-border Internet and telephone communication, AFP reported.

However, even though the government has said that only cross-border communications would be monitored, all communications risk getting caught in the net since some internet servers are located abroad and FRA would need to check all emails to establish whether they have crossed the border.

At the moment, FRA is only allowed to check military radio communications but with the new law, they will be able to listen in to all cross-border telephone calls, as well as reading people’s emails and text messages.

The Defense Ministry has meanwhile defended the new law by insisting that the new legislation is necessary in today’s changed world, where communications are increasingly transmitted through fiber-optic cables.

Critics of the new law, including human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and even the former head of the Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, had prior to Wednesday’s revision argued that it didn’t go far enough in protecting individual rights.

However the government for its part insists that it has addressed all concerns by its last minute amendments of the law that adds more independent and parliamentary controls to FRA’s work.

SM/RE

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