2008 August 05

guardian.co.uk | Climate change protesters today accused police of conducting a smear campaign after officers said they had recovered knives and makeshift weapons during searches of the protest camp at Kingsnorth power station in Kent.

Police said the confiscated items “strongly indicated” that a hardcore group of protesters intended to break the law. Gary Beautridge, the assistant chief constable of Kent police, said that while most of the people at the camp were peaceful, it was “clear” a minority intended to use the equipment for “criminal purposes”.

The weapons, which officers said included an adapted knife, a knife block containing knives and a large chain with a padlock, had been found in woods near the camp. “There is no justification whatsoever for having these weapons,” Beautridge said in a statement.

“I would suggest that a minority of people had hidden them with the intention of causing harm to police officers, and possibly to the horses or dogs we are using on patrol.”

Camp organisers reacted angrily to the claims, condemning the statement as “an irresponsible stunt” intended to deter people from attending the camp.

“To link a stash of knives allegedly found somewhere in the Hoo peninsula [in Kent] to the Camp for Climate Action is nothing but a smear campaign against us,” said Ester Davies, one of the camp organisers.

“To suggest that the campers - environmentalists living at a camp serving only vegan food - would even consider hurting a police horse shows the police’s press release to be nothing but political policing.”

Other equipment seized since the camp began on Thursday included bolt croppers, climbing ropes and padded suits, which police said suggested that protesters were intending to break into the power station.

Isabelle Michel, another camper, said demonstrators had not made any secret of the fact that they intended to take direct action at the power plant. “This in no way justifies the way the police are treating the camp,” she said. “It is disgraceful to suggest that the campers have criminal intent.

“This is obviously an attempt by the police to distract us from raising issues about climate change.”

Organisers have urged MPs Bob Marshall-Andrews and Colin Challen and MEPs Caroline Lucas and Chris Davies, who have already written to Beautridge to complain about his policing of the event, to investigate the latest claims.

Demonstrators and police have been involved in repeated standoffs since the camp opened. Protesters have accused police of being heavy-handed, while officers said they were forced to use riot shields in clashes yesterday.

Beautridge defended the police’s actions in entering the camp to remove obstacles to two access points, saying officers “will not compromise on safety”.

Campaigners are protesting against proposals by the plant’s owners, Eon, for a coal-fired facility - the first such plant to be built in Britain for over 30 years. More than 1,000 protesters are expected to try to shut down the power station in a planned day of mass action on Saturday.

Twelve people were arrested yesterday. Seven have been charged with offences including possessing a blade, driving without insurance and obstructing and resisting a police officer.

S. Koreans fire water cannons at Bush protesters

SEOUL, South Korea - Police fired water cannons at thousands of protesters Tuesday as President Bush got a volatile reception in South Korea at the start of his three-nation Asian trip.

Dueling demonstrations reflected mixed sentiments in this U.S. ally, where public opinion surveys remain generally positive about America, though many people decry Washington for a variety of issues. Bush will meet Wednesday with President Lee Myung-bak for the third time since the conservative, pro-American leader took office in February.

Some 18,300 police were on high alert with riot gear and bomb-sniffing dogs to maintain order during Bush’s brief visit, the National Police Agency said.

About 30,000 people gathered in front of Seoul City Hall for an afternoon Christian prayer service supporting Bush’s trip. Large South Korean and U.S. flags were held aloft by balloons overhead along with a banner reading, “Welcome President Bush.”

“The United States made sacrifices for South Korea during the Korean War and helped us live well,” said Kim Jung-kwang, a 67-year-old retired air force colonel who wore his military uniform to the rally. “The United States is not our enemy. Without the U.S., we will die.”

As evening approached, an estimated 20,000 anti-Bush protesters gathered nearby. Police turned water cannons on them as they tried to move onto the main central downtown boulevard, telling the crowd that the liquid contained markers to tag them so they could be identified later.

“I don’t have anti-U.S. sentiment. I’m just anti-Bush and anti-Lee Myung-bak,” said Uhm Ki-woong, 36, a businessman who was wearing a mask and hat like other demonstrators in an apparent attempt to conceal his identity.

The anti-Bush crowd dwindled later in the evening to several thousand people, with the hard-core remnants turning aggressive. Protesters shattered the windows of a police bus and authorities responded by again firing water cannons.

About 70 demonstrators were arrested, police said, in addition to another 12 near the military airport where Bush landed.

Bush held off on visiting Seoul earlier this year when protesters staged nightly candlelight vigils and repeatedly clashed with riot police over imports of American beef, saying Lee ignored public health concerns over the possibility of mad cow disease and failed to consult with citizens. Lee has promised to patch up relations with Washington that became strained under Seoul’s previous decade of liberal governments.

Bush calls Lee a friend, which is good considering the raft of sensitive topics they will tackle before the American president heads to Thailand, then to the Beijing Olympics.

At the top of the list is getting North Korea to live up to its commitment to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Sunday is the earliest that Washington could move to strike North Korea from a list of state-sponsors of terrorism, a long-held demand from Pyongyang. But first, Washington wants the North to agree to procedures for verifying a declaration of its nuclear programs that Pyongyang submitted to the international arms talks — six months late and with fewer details than the U.S. originally demanded.

Washington has called for North Korea to allow thorough inspections and interviews with nuclear scientists, but Pyongyang has so far not accepted the proposal.

“We’re at a very critical moment now for the North Korean government to make a decision as to whether or not they’re going to verify what they said they would do,” Bush said in an interview with China’s state-run CCTV last week. “It’s one thing to say it, but I think it’s going to be very important for them to understand that we expect them to show us.”

Grateful for South Korea’s troop contribution in Iraq, Bush also will try to persuade Lee to make a bigger contribution in Afghanistan to help deal with the Taliban’s resurgence.

“Obviously we’d like to see a greater role for South Koreans in Afghanistan, if the South Korean people are willing to move in that direction,” Dennis Wilder, the National Security Council’s senior director for Asian affairs, told reporters on Air Force One.

Also on the agenda will be efforts by both presidents to have their legislatures approve a free trade agreement, with estimates it could increase bilateral trade by 25 percent. But with free trade deals with Colombia and Panama stalled in Congress, the prospects for ratification by the end of the year are unlikely.

Bush will meet with U.S. troops based in South Korea, as he did during a stopover in Alaska, where he expressed gratitude for their role in fighting terrorism.

“About a year ago, people thought Iraq was lost and hopeless,” Bush said at Eielson Air Force Base, where he posed for photos with airmen and soldiers and worked the crowd, at one point lifting a baby in the air. “People were saying, ‘Let’s get out of there, it doesn’t matter to our national security.’

“Iraq has changed — a lot — thanks to the bravery of people in this hangar and the bravery of troops all across our country. The terrorists (are) on the run. The terrorists will be denied a safe haven, and freedom is on the march. And as a result, our children are more likely to grow up in a peaceful world.”

Bush’s Asia trip also includes stops in Thailand and China. In an interview aboard Air Force One with The Washington Post, Bush said it was “really hard to tell” whether human rights in China had improved over the past eight years.

Bush said he speaks candidly with Chinese President Hu Jintao about human rights, but he skirted a question about a pre-Olympics security drive by Chinese authorities.

“They’re hypersensitive to a potential terrorist attack,” Bush said in the article for Tuesday’s editions of the paper. “And my hope is, of course, that as they have their security in place, that they’re mindful of the spirit of the Games, and that if there is a provocation, they handle it in a responsible way without violence.”

MP accuses Government of building DNA database by stealth

By Shahid Naqvi | A Tory MP whose Black Country uncle was murdered more than a year ago has accused the Government of creating a “DNA database by stealth” after police failed to return his genetic details taken during the investigation.

Greg Hands, MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, allowed detectives with West Midlands Police to take his fingerprints and swabs after widower Les Ince was found stabbed to death with a barbecue meat skewer in February 2007.

The father-of-two claims he is one of a million innocent people whose DNA is being held by the state without permission and despite no law being passed by Parliament to allow such information to be held.

West Midlands Police has promised to return his details but Mr Hands accused the force of dragging its heels due to a reluctance to let go of the information.

“I am not attacking West Midlands Police in anyway,” said the MP. “What I am saying is the Government needs to establish a set of proper procedures for keeping people’s DNA. Parliament has never approved there being a national database. We have a situation where a million people’s DNA has been taken and put on this database even if they have no connection with crime.

“I think the Government are building a national database by stealth. They are finding whatever means they can to get your DNA sample. I think that is wrong without it being properly debated in Parliament and without proper safeguards.”

Mr Hands said recent history had demonstrated Government offices could not be trusted to hold on to data in the wake of a series of high-profile security lapses with data.

Though accepting there may be good arguments for creating a national DNA database, he insisted the authorities had no powers to hold genetic information against people’s will.

“I am not necessarily against it. I would listen very carefully to the arguments. I would look at what safeguards are in place and who can access the information. But until we have a debate in Parliament it remains a grey area.

“My case has had a certain amount of publicity. But there are one million people like me who have never been charged with any crime whose DNA is being held.”

Pensioner Mr Ince, aged 80, was brutally attacked at his home in Walsall on February 21, 2007. He was found injured in an under-stairs cupboard and later died in hospital. An X-ray showed the skewer had penetrated his body.

Despite a £5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his attackers, police have so far made no arrests in connection with the crime.

Mr Hands said: “It is one of those murders that I think will be quite hard to solve because there is no apparent motive. My uncle as far as we are aware had no enemies in life. He was an 80-year-old man living on his own and wasn’t well off. My best guess is it was a burglary gone wrong.”

Mr Hands said “ironically” DNA samples taken at the scene of the crime could end up holding the key to solving the crime.

West Midlands Police said Mr Hands was sent a letter in June confirming his DNA samples will be removed from the national DNA database and his fingerprints returned.

“He has received correspondence saying this request will be honoured,” said a spokeswoman for the force.

DNA database least of our concerns

By Ian Williams | Privacy concerns over the details of innocents being held in the UK’s National DNA Database are not nearly as worrying as other planned government files.

This is the revelation from Mike Barwise, a security expert from Infosecurity Adviser, the online forum run by the Infosecurity Europe team.

“The media seems preoccupied at the moment about people’s DNA being stored centrally, but the reality is that the database is really a one-dimensional invasion of citizens’ privacy,” said Barwise.

“Two-dimensional databases, such as the planned telecommunications database of the numbers people call from their landlines and mobile phones, are much more worrying.”

According to Barwise, when you factor in the time element to the planned government telecommunications database and add in location-based data from the cellular carriers, you create a three-dimensional view of the person concerned.

“Not only do you have the numbers called and the locations called from, but you have a time-based diary from which you can extrapolate their movements,” he explained.

Because we do increasingly more on our mobiles, Irwin highlights that the proposed telecommunications database would reveal a vast amount about a person’s circle of business and social contacts, as well as web browsing habits and other very personal information.

“This has been a highly charged subject for years, not least due to the progressive extension of the scope of the database, culminating in recent proposals to include young children who might offend in the future – or indeed everyone in the country,” he said, adding that the issue arouses strong emotions.

Fortunately for those equally concerned by the proposal, the creation of the database has been called into question by Information Commissioner Richard Thomas who described it as “a step too far for the British way of life”.

Diego Garcia: the UK’s shame

By Andy Worthington | The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” These words are particularly apt in relation to the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States in 1971, where the truth – that a secret “War on Terror” prison existed from 2002 until as recently as 2006 – has been persistently denied by both the British and American governments.

Yesterday, Time magazine reported that a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, stated that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island” in 2002, and possibly 2003. This is the highest-level admission to date that a secret prison existed on Diego Garcia, but it is by no means the first time that the prison’s existence has been revealed.

In 2003, Time reported that Hambali, an Indonesian “high-value detainee”, who was transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was being held on Diego Garcia, and in May this year, El Pais [in Spanish] reported that Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a joint Syrian-Spanish national who was seized in Pakistan in October 2005, was held on the island in the months after his capture. Unlike Hambali, Nasar’s current whereabouts are completely unknown; he is, in effect, one of “America’s disappeared.”

The reality of Diego Garcia’s secret prison has also been confirmed by retired US general Barry McCaffrey in 2004 and 2006, in a report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe and in a statement made to the Observer in March this year by Manfred Novak, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture. In contrast, the position taken by both the British and American governments occupies a parallel universe, in which the timeless resonance of Aeschylus’ words is confirmed.

For five years, since questions were first asked about the secret prison by Lord Wallace of Saltaire in January 2003, the British government refused to acknowledge its existence, and its first denial was indicative of what was to come. “The United States Government,” Baroness Amos explained, “would need to ask for our permission to bring any suspects to Diego Garcia. They have not done so and no suspected terrorists are being held on Diego Garcia.”

The blanket denials finally came to an end this February, when David Miliband announced that his US counterparts had checked their records and had discovered that two rendition flights, each carrying one prisoner, had passed through Diego Garcia in 2002. He maintained, however, that he had been assured that the planes had only landed for refuelling, and that no prisoner had ever set foot on the island. Mr. Miliband repeated these claims just four weeks ago, after apparently receiving further confirmation from his US counterparts that no other rendition flights had passed through British territory.

The latest revelations about Diego Garcia make it abundantly clear that the British government can no longer accept any kind of “assurances” from its US counterparts regarding the use of the island. Ignoring Aeschylus’ sage advice, Ministers have, to put it bluntly, fooled themselves into thinking that ignorance is a substitute for accountability. The truth, of course, is that they are both morally and legally responsible for what takes place on Diego Garcia, and have a duty to address crimes committed on British territory.

As these crimes include kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and illegal imprisonment, which are prohibited under domestic UK and international law, and quite possibly torture, which is prohibited under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, the British government must immediately initiate a full and open public inquiry into Diego Garcia’s true role in the “War on Terror”.

Pressure Grows for F.B.I.’s Anthrax Evidence

WASHINGTON — After four years of painstaking scientific research, the F.B.I. by 2005 had traced the anthrax in the poisoned letters of 2001 to a single flask of the bacteria at the Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., according to government scientists and bureau officials.

But at least 10 scientists had regular access to the laboratory and its anthrax stock — and possibly quite a few more, counting visitors from other institutions, and workers at laboratories in Ohio and New Mexico that had received anthrax samples from the flask at the Army laboratory.

To get that far, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had helped invent what was virtually a new science, microbial forensics, the use of biochemical clues to track a germ weapon to its source.

The bureau sponsored research at a score of government and university laboratories intended to estimate the age of the anthrax, tracing the water used to grow it, assessing how it was made into an inhalable powder and, perhaps most important, taking its genetic fingerprint.

But at that point, the science had largely reached its limits. To figure out who in the narrowed pool of scientist-suspects was the perpetrator, the F.B.I. would have to rely on traditional gumshoe investigative methods: interviewing colleagues and family members, searching houses and cars, doing surveillance, and assessing personalities.

About 18 months ago, investigators appeared to sharpen their focus on Bruce E. Ivins, a veteran anthrax researcher, whom they placed under intensive surveillance as they examined every aspect of his life and work.

Since Dr. Ivins’s suicide last week, F.B.I. officials have said prosecutors were preparing to indict him for sending the anthrax letters, which killed five people, although charges appear to have been a few weeks away.

Dr. Ivins had been a respected microbiologist for three decades at the United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. He was a popular neighbor in Frederick, Md., a Red Cross volunteer and an amateur juggler who played keyboards at his church.

But the investigators found some personal quirks, according to law enforcement officials and people who knew the scientist well. They found that Dr. Ivins, who had a history of alcohol abuse, had for years maintained a post office box under an assumed name that he used to receive pornographic pictures of blindfolded women.

Years ago, he had visited Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, an obsession growing out of a romance with a sorority sister in his own college days at the University of Cincinnati — although someone who knew him well said the last such visit was in 1981.

What is more relevant, agents focused new attention on a 2002 Army investigation of a spill of anthrax the same year outside the secure laboratory that Dr. Ivins worked in, and his puzzling behavior in trying to clean the area with bleach while failing to report the contamination. They studied his anthrax vaccine patents and considered whether the promise of royalties after a bioterrorism scare might have been a motive. They noted that he had a lyophilizer, which could be used to dry wet anthrax into powder, a form not ordinarily used at Fort Detrick.

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

Another former co-worker, Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, who collaborated on anthrax research with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s, had a similar theory.

“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure,” Dr. Hedlund said. “It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don’t believe he would have done what they say he did.”

With such views voiced by Dr. Ivins’s acquaintances — and vocal skepticism from key members of Congress — the pressure is growing on the F.B.I. to unveil its evidence.

On Monday, officials began to contact survivors of the anthrax attacks and family members of the five who died to say they would get a briefing, in person or by telephone, before the case against Dr. Ivins was made public.

Shirley Davis, the primary caretaker for Ottilie W. Lundgren of Oxford, Conn., a 94-year-old woman who was killed in the anthrax letter attack, said that she received a call on Monday.

“They asked if we could put together a list of questions we would like to have answered, just to get an idea of just exactly what happened,” Ms. Davis, 78, said. She said she had not yet been given a day or time for the briefing.

“It is a relief to know that they have found something,” Ms. Davis said. “It has been seven years now. But it may end up still that they don’t really know why this happened or what happened.”

F.B.I. officials say they do know a great deal about what happened and will make it public, possibly as early as Wednesday. They say the core of their case will be the science, which produced the giant step from a globe of possible suspects to a single lab and a single flask.

Faced with the scientific mystery of the powder, government and outside scientists first looked at chemical isotopes in the attack strain for clues as to when and where the bacteria had been grown. Analyzing traces of the beef broth used to grow the anthrax, scientists measured carbon-14 left from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, whose quantity diminishes every year.

By calculating the ratio of carbon-14 to the normal kind in residue of plants eaten by the cow from which the broth was made, investigators learned by June 2002 that the anthrax had been grown within the last two years.

A second clue was developed from the new ability to sequence, or decode, the chemical letters of DNA. Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research, a pioneer in genome sequencing, sequenced the full genome of the anthrax recovered from the blood of Robert Stevens, the first victim of the attacks.

The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million chemical letters of their DNA. But researchers found enough differences in the attack strain to provide a reasonable chance of identifying its source.

The chief difference was that a stretch of DNA was flipped head to tail in some bacteria in the attack strain, but not in any other samples.

Further, the attack strain contained bacteria with both the flipped and the unflipped DNA, showing that it was a mixture of two strains, which analysts later found reflected a mix of origins — 85 percent from the Dugway Proving Ground of the Army in Utah and 15 percent added at Fort Detrick, according to one person close to the investigation.

To make sure the case for the distinctive features of the attack anthrax could hold up in court, agents collected thousands of samples of Ames strain anthrax from labs around the world, said scientists familiar with the F.B.I.’s thinking. “This is the step that took so long,” one scientist said.

Decoding the genome of a bacterium like anthrax may have cost around $500,000 in 2002, and even the F.B.I.’s budget would have been strained to decode thousands of genomes. A new generation of sequencing machines can now sequence bacterial genomes for around $500. But those machines did not become available until about 2005, which may have been another reason for the delay.

Despite speculation that the anthrax had a special coating to make it more deadly, an F.B.I. scientist, Douglas Beecher, published an article in 2006 saying no such sophisticated additives had been found. That finding broadened the number of scientists and technicians who could have made the anthrax, another obstacle to a quick resolution.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University biochemist and an opponent of the rapid expansion of biodefense research since 2001, said the F.B.I. should long ago have released some of its scientific conclusions.

“The finding that the attack material could be traced definitively to a U.S. bioweapons research lab could, and should, have been released as soon is it was obtained,” Dr. Ebright said, noting that the finding could raise questions about the wisdom of proliferating stocks of anthrax and other pathogens.

“This is not just a finding with Agatha Christie-Perry Mason implications,” he said.

U.S. May Have Taped Visits to Detainees

The Bush administration informed all foreign intelligence and law enforcement teams visiting their citizens held at Guantanamo Bay that video and sound from their interrogation sessions would be recorded, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The policy suggests that the United States could possess hundreds or thousands of hours of secret taped conversations between detainees and representatives from nearly three dozen countries.

Numerous State Department cables to foreign government delegations in 2002 and 2003 show that each country was subject to rules and regulations “to protect the interests and ensure the safety of all concerned.” Condition No. 1 stated that U.S. authorities would closely monitor the interrogations, a practice that the Defense Department confirmed last week was also carried out to gather intelligence.

“The United States will video tape and sound record the interviews between representatives of your government and the detainee(s) named above,” read several of the nearly identical cables, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Should such videotapes exist, they would reveal how representatives from countries such as China, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia treated detainees in small interrogation booths at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — sessions that some detainees have said were abusive and at times contained threats of torture or even death. Though attorneys for the detainees have long sought to obtain such evidence, the administration has thus far denied the requests and has not indicated that such tapes exist.

The Defense Department has long maintained that it did not regularly videotape interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, and only last month acknowledged recording at least seven hours of Canadian officials interrogating terrorism suspect Omar Khadr after the Canadian Supreme Court ordered Canadian officials to release those tapes. The Khadr tapes show that U.S. officials had the capability and infrastructure to record the conversations from several angles.

In the Khadr tapes, the young Canadian is shown having polite but tense conversations with Canadian intelligence officers in a small booth with a table, chairs and a wall-mounted air conditioner. At times, Khadr appears frustrated and distraught, complaining about his treatment during captivity. The videos captured images from multiple vantage points, including from behind the slats of a vent, and also captured audio from the sessions.

Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the videotaping of visits by foreign delegations was not “standard operating procedure” but that such monitoring was done to protect the detainees, the foreign officials and the United States. He also said it was conducted for “intelligence-collection purposes.”

“If videotapes were made, they were likely used for translators to transcribe and/or for intelligence officers to clarify their notes after the fact,” Gordon said. Defense officials declined to list the countries that had sent intelligence agents because the roster is classified, but they put the number at more than 30. They declined to say how many tapes were made.

The documents show that the State Department was working with several governments in early 2002, allowing them to bring three-person teams to Guantanamo Bay for week-long visits. Early delegations were from such countries as Bahrain, Belgium, France and Russia, according to e-mails provided to The Post, just as the facility’s detainee population was dramatically increasing.

Officials from governments that visited detainees at Guantanamo Bay said they understood that the sessions would be taped and expected that it would happen, both for security and intelligence purposes.

“We knew for a while that all the interrogations and questioning was being recorded, and that that was the routine,” said one Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to discuss the visits. “We sent a total of three teams, and it was common knowledge that all the interviews with the detainees were videotaped and recorded.”

Current and former U.S. government officials said the foreign delegation visits in 2002 — shortly after the facility was opened — were key to intelligence gathering because foreign agents could speak a detainee’s language and could put the conversations in a context that eluded U.S. interrogators.

U.S. officials required the foreign delegations to share their final reports from such visits, as well as any recordings the foreign agents made themselves. A U.S. official also witnessed the conversations, often from within the same room.

“The value we saw was that these guys would know their nationals and could get information better than we could,” said a U.S. official familiar with the visits. “We were pretty green in this area at that time. We also wanted to know what was going on in the room, because we were on the hook for the well-being of everyone that came in there.”

Every country that has received a detainee transfer from Guantanamo Bay at one point visited the facility to identify its nationals and to question them from an intelligence and law enforcement perspective, two U.S. officials said.

Some countries visited numerous times, including Bahrain, which sent a delegation in April 2002 and then about once a year after that, according to Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer who represented six Bahraini nationals and described the meetings as tense.

“There was nothing comforting about the visits,” he said. “I don’t remember anyone talking about knowing they were being videotaped in those meetings, but if you have the Khadr videotape and this statement, that seems pretty clear. The question is: Did the U.S. destroy everything?”

In 2005, lawyers representing the detainees obtained an order from a judge in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia forcing the government to preserve all evidence of possible coercion, including videotapes. After the CIA acknowledged last year that it destroyed tapes of detainee interrogations, Pentagon officials said they were continuing to preserve evidence in the case of Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, a Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo Bay, but have never specified what evidence they have.

Detainees have for years reported being threatened by their home governments in interrogations at the facility, some to the point of trying to commit suicide after the meetings for fear of having to return home to face possible torture or death. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, has criticized the U.S. government, saying that it ushers “interrogators from recognized human rights abusing regimes onto the U.S. military base” and that it allows threats and abuse “with the active involvement of U.S. forces.”

The lawyers have vowed to push for evidence of such abuse at the Supreme Court-mandated habeas corpus hearings that are scheduled to begin soon.

George Brent Mickum IV, a Washington lawyer who represents Guantanamo Bay detainees, said he has learned from a former interrogator at the facility that U.S. officials kept an index listing all the videotapes of the foreign delegations. He also said that one of his clients — Bisher al-Rawi, who was returned to England from Guantanamo Bay — was interviewed by Britain’s MI-5 intelligence service at least five times at the facility, conversations Mickum says would show that Rawi should not have been imprisoned.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that these tapes did in fact exist and that, contrary to what the military says, it was absolutely SOP,” Mickum said. “I would be shocked if they had not been destroyed.”

Zachary Katznelson, legal director of Reprieve, which represents 32 Guantanamo Bay detainees, said that foreign governments have threatened some of his clients and that he would be interested in seeing the interrogation tapes as potential evidence that the United States has been complicit in sending detainees to countries that are known to torture.

“I think there’s no question, if you invite someone in, and they threaten them, the person who invited them in should be held accountable,” Katznelson said. “We will request any and all videotapes by U.S. and foreign intelligence services to find out what was being done to them and what threats were made against them.”

One of Reprieve’s clients, Hisham Sliti, a Tunisian who remains detained, told the organization that the Tunisian government sent three people to interrogate him and that they threatened him with “water torture in the barrel” upon his return.

Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra

By Deborah Haynes in Baquba and Michael Evans | A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt.

Four thousand British troops – including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade – watched from the sidelines for six days because of an “accommodation” with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault.

US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts.

Hundreds of militiamen were killed or arrested in the fighting. About 60 Iraqis were killed or injured. One US Marine died and sevenwere wounded.

US advisers who accompanied the Iraqi forces into the fight were shocked to learn of the accommodation made last summer by British Intelligence and elements of al-Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia Muslim cleric.

The deal, which aimed to encourage the Shia movement back into the political process and marginalise extremist factions, has dealt a huge blow to Britain’s reputation in Iraq.

Under its terms, no British soldier could enter Basra without the permission of Des Browne, the Defence Secretary. By the time he gave his approval, most of the fighting was over and the damage to Britain’s reputation had already been done.

Senior British defence sources told The Times that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who ordered the assault, and high-ranking US military officers had become disillusioned with the British as a result of their failure to act. Another confirmed that the deal, negotiated by British Intelligence, had been a costly mistake.

The Ministry of Defence has never confirmed that there was a deal with al-Mahdi Army, but one official denied that the delay in sending in troops was because of the arrangement agreed with the Shia militia.

A spokesman for the MoD said that the reason why troops were not sent immediately into Basra was because there was “no structure in place” in the city for units to go back in to start mentoring the Iraqi troops.

Colonel Imad, who heads the 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade, 1st Iraqi Army Division, the most experienced division, commanded one of the quick-reaction battalions summoned to assist British-trained local forces, who faltered from the outset because of inexperience and lack of support.

He said: “Without the support of the Americans we would not have accomplished the mission because the British Forces had done nothing there.

“I do not trust the British Forces. They did not want to lose any soldiers for the mission.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Western, a senior US Marine advising the Iraqi Army, told The Times: “I was not happy. Everybody just assumed that because this deal was cut nobody was going in. Cutting a deal with the bad guys is generally not a good idea.”

He emphasised, however, that he was not being critical of the British military, which he described as first-rate.

Captain Eric Whyne, another US Marine officer who took part in the battle, said that he was astounded that “a coalition force would make a pact with essentially their enemy and promise not to go into their area so as not to get attacked”. He alleged that “some horrific atrocities” were committed by the militia in Basra during the British watch.

A senior British defence source agreed that the battle for Basra had been damaging to Britain’s reputation in Iraq. “Maliki, and the Americans, felt the British were morally impugned by the deal they had reached with the militia. The British were accused of trying to find the line of least resistance in dealing with the Shia militia,” said the source.

“You can accuse the Americans of many things, such as hamfistedness, but you can’t accuse them of not addressing a situation when it arises. While we had a strategy of evasion, the Americans just went in and addressed the problem.”

Another British official said that the deal was intended as an IRA-style reconciliation. “That is what we were trying to do but it did not work.” The official added that “accommodation” had become a dirty word.

US officials knew of the discussions, which continued until March this year. They facilitated the peaceful exit of British troops from a palace compound in Basra last September in return for the release of a number of prisoners. The arrangement fell apart on March 25 when Mr al-Maliki ordered his surprise assault on Basra, catching both the Americans and British off-guard.

The Americans responded by flying in reinforcements, providing air cover and offering the logistical and other support needed for the Iraqis to win.

The British were partly handicapped because their commander, Major-General Barney White-Spunner, was away on a skiing holiday when the attack began. When Brigadier Julian Free, his deputy, arrived to discuss the situation with Mr al-Maliki at the presidential palace in Basra, he was made to wait outside.

The MoD spokesman said that the operation was launched at such short notice that the only support that could be given in the first few days was air power – in the form of Tornado ground attack aircraft – and logistics.

He said that after British troops were withdrawn from Basra last year it was realised that the Iraqi forces still needed help, which was why the current British force contained more instructors and trainers.

Marines ordered to stay longer in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has ordered roughly 1,250 Marines serving as trainers for the Afghan security forces to stay on the warfront about a month longer to continue a mission that military leaders say is a top priority, according to a senior military official.

In addition, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has authorized the deployment of up to 200 other troops to Afghanistan to support the Marines. That includes eight helicopter crews that could be shifted from Iraq if commanders decide.

The senior military official spoke to The Associated Press on Monday on condition of anonymity because the formal announcement has not yet been made.

The decision to extend the tour of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment in Afghanistan comes just a month after defense officials told the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit that it would stay an extra month in Afghanistan.

According to the official, the decision to hold the battalion there longer is part of an effort to capitalize on the gains the Marines have made in the training mission. The extension means that the battalion would return home in late November.

Gates’ decision to send the other support forces comes after weeks of discussions by top military leaders who scrambled to find needed troops. He authorized Army Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who is temporarily in charge of U.S. Central Command, to shift up to eight helicopter units from Iraq to Afghanistan — four Cobra attack aircraft and four MH-53 heavy lift helicopters.

The remainder of the support forces being deployed are smaller units, including engineers, route clearance troops and explosive ordnance disposal teams. It was not clear Monday whether those support forces also would return home in late November, or if they would stay longer in Afghanistan.

Late last week Gates hinted at the moves, saying the Pentagon was “looking at” sending a couple hundred troops at the most to Afghanistan soon.

The Pentagon announced in January that the Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., was being ordered to Afghanistan, largely because efforts to press other NATO nations to increase their troop levels at the time had failed. The MEU has been fighting Taliban militants in the volatile south.

At the same time, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, which is based at Twentynine Palms, Calif., was ordered to deploy also.

Gates has said he would not replace the Marines with other U.S. troops when they left later this year. But commanders have said they need three more combat brigades — or as many as 10,000 troops — to bolster the fight in Afghanistan. And U.S. officials have indicated they would like to send extra brigades there next year.

Military leaders, however, have made it clear they need to free units from Iraq deployments in order to send more troops to Afghanistan. As security in Iraq continues to improve, officials have suggested that units initially headed for Iraq late this year or early next year could be sent to Afghanistan instead.

Union slams EPA chief for ignoring staff on global warming

WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen Johnson stunned his staff last month when he publicly opposed their proposals for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, four union officials representing EPA staff working on global warming policies said in a letter provided to McClatchy Monday.

The letter alleges that Johnson subverted the work of EPA staff and damaged the agency’s reputation for “sound science and policy.” The EPA needs public respect and support in order to implement the nation’s environmental laws, it said.

Several Democratic senators recently have called for Johnson to resign, charging that he disregarded science and the law and may have misled them when he testified on Capitol Hill. Congressional committees are investigating whether the EPA’s decisions have been made in accord with the conclusions of its staff and whether the White House interfered with some of the agency’s work.

“I’m sensing there’s built-up frustration among EPA employees,” said one of the authors of the letter, Mark Coryell, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3907, which represents staff members at the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory.

“Their best efforts to do right by the law and sound science have been subverted by actions taken by or not taken by Johnson, our administrator,” Coryell said. “A lot of them are certainly hurt by the impact on their professional reputations.”

The environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility gave a copy of the letter by Coryell and the others to McClatchy.

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said Monday that the science of the document released last month “speaks for itself and the administrator is proud of the work the staff completed at his direction.”

The Supreme Court in 2007 found that the EPA has the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. The court said that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA should determine whether the emissions endanger the public and, if so, regulate them.

Johnson hasn’t issued an endangerment finding. Last month, in response to the high court’s ruling, he released a wide range of proposals by his staff for controlling greenhouse gas emissions and called for comment through Nov. 28.

But Johnson also argued that the federal Clean Air Act was “ill-suited” for regulating greenhouse gases, that the regulations would be “very complicated, time-consuming and, likely, convoluted,” and that they’d be “relatively ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas concentrations given the potentially damaging effect on jobs and the U.S. economy.”

In addition, Johnson attached letters from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and department secretaries in the Bush cabinet who disagreed with the EPA staff’s proposals on legal, economic and scientific grounds.

The letter from Coryell and the other union officials said that EPA staff members who worked on the proposed regulations weren’t given a chance to read the critiques or respond to them before the document was made public.

The letter said Johnson’s actions were “troubling and, quite frankly, unprofessional,” adding: “We believe EPA’s hardworking, dedicated staff has earned more respect than you are giving.”

The letter was dated July 30 and signed by Coryell and Silvia Saracco, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3347 at EPA’s Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, and William Evans and J. William Hirzy, president and vice president, respectively, of National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 280 at EPA headquarters.

The union leaders also wrote that Johnson should release documents and testify as requested by Congress.

George Tenet And White House Admit Iraq Intelligence Chief Told Them Iraq Had No WMD

Ron Suskind was on NPR this morning to discuss his new book The Way of the World, which alleges Iraq’s intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush told the US before the war that Iraq had no WMD.

NPR asked George Tenet and the White House for comment, and, remarkably enough, they both essentially admitted this was true.

Further corroboration appears in a November, 2003 New York Times story by James Risen. Risen’s article is about last-minute attempts by Iraq to avert war, using a Lebanese-American intermediary named Imad Hage who knew Richard Perle:

• The CIA sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq to ask them what WMD Iraq had, and they uniformly reported it had nothing.
• Iraq’s foreign minister Nouri Sabri secretly told the US in 2002 that Iraq had no active WMD programs.
• Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, told an acquaintance just before the war that he expected we would find “Not much, if anything.”

Study: 1 in 4 soldiers at war have hearing loss

By Gregg Zoroya | The bombs along the Baghdad road exploded one after the other, leaving one soldier unconscious and another screaming from his wounds. Staff Sgt. Kevin Dunne’s squad was under attack. Rifle and machine gun fire pinned them down. Then, shots from a sniper.

Dunne said he couldn’t hear well enough to tell where the sniper fire was coming from.

In the four months before the April 7 attack, the chief physician at Fort Hood, Texas, had warned that Dunne’s hearing was so bad that he should be removed from combat duties. Others in the Army overruled him and sent Dunne back to Iraq for his third combat tour.

Now, a member of Dunne’s squad — Sgt. Richard Vaughn, 22, of San Diego — lay dead from a sniper’s bullet.

“He was lying in the middle of the street motionless,” Dunne wrote. “I blame myself a lot for not being able to identify the threat simply because of the way I heard the shots.”

Hearing loss is one of the most common ailments that affects troops sent back to combat, according to the Pentagon and government researchers. One in four soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have damaged hearing, the Army said. In addition, a recent study from the Rand Corp. reported one in five combat veterans suffer post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. Back pain, leg injuries and other musculoskeletal problems are the top ailments of troops in the war zone, said Ellen Embrey, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for force health protection and readiness.

Dunne, who in Iraq was part of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, is now back home. Besides his hearing problems, he shows signs of PTSD and has severe back problems.

After more than five years of war marked by multiple deployments, many combat veterans are developing long-term health problems, raising the risk that ailing troops are being sent back into combat.

Since 2003, 43,000 troops who were classified as medically unfit in the weeks prior to deployment were still sent to war, Pentagon statistics show. That number began to drop after 2003, but the trend has reversed in the last two years. Central Command, which oversees troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, is drafting rules that could make it more difficult to send unfit troops to war.

“As much as I wanted to get out there …, I’m seriously physically challenged by not being able to hear,” Dunne wrote. “The guys to my left and right don’t deserve anything to happen to them because of my personal pride.”

He has fought off and on in Iraq since 2003, when his unit was profiled by USA Today. Dunne has been in occasional contact with the newspaper since then.

Meanwhile, Dunne began a series of routine medical exams and screenings to understand the war’s toll on him. Doctors found:

• Hearing loss. His hearing declined dramatically during Dunne’s first tour. Army audiological records show loss in various frequencies, particularly in his left ear, said Anthony Cacace, an audiologist and professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Cacace reviewed Dunne’s medical test records provided by USA Today.

The weakness leaves him struggling to hear consonant sounds, especially if there is background noise.

“He’s going to have one hell of a time understanding what people say if he can’t get visual cues,” Cacace said, adding Dunne has the hearing of a 70-year-old in his right ear and worse than that in his left.

• Severe lower back pain dating to his first Iraq tour from April 2003 to April 2004. By his third tour, Dunne required regular painkiller injections.

• PTSD symptoms after his second tour, when Dunne was near a suicide bomb explosion.

• Tinnitus, or ringing in the ears that never stops. To sleep, he listens to rock music on his iPod, a common means of coping for troops with tinnitus, said Army Maj. Dan Ohama, an audiologist working in Baghdad.

Service-connected back and neck injuries have left nearly 50,000 Iraq- and Afghanistan-era veterans permanently disabled, Department of Veterans Affairs records show. VA has treated 75,000 such veterans for PTSD and placed nearly 35,000 on permanent disability. And almost 70,000 suffer from tinnitus, VA records show.

In December, weeks before Dunne went to Iraq for his third tour, his company commander spelled out the staff sergeant’s chief physical problems. The soldier’s battle-damaged hearing, Capt. Alex Garn wrote, “limits his ability to identify enemy locations by sound, hear commands from his team leaders, hear radio traffic over a squad radio, or speak with local nationals in combat, which could have negative ramifications to the mission.”

On Dec. 19, the chief physician and medical commander at Fort Hood, Texas, where Dunne is based, urged that he be taken out of infantry. “At risk of continued hearing loss,” Col. Jeffrey Clark wrote.

Clark was the only doctor on a five-member panel reviewing Dunne’s fitness for combat on Dec. 19. He was overruled by the other four panelists. Dunne’s brigade commander and three senior sergeants agreed that Dunne should stay in infantry and go to Iraq.

“Hearing loss is present in all forms … in the Army,” wrote one panelist, Master Sgt. Ulysses Martin. “It’s impossible to validate whether he will lose his hearing more or less in the future. I feel that infantry is his best place.”

One factor in their decision was Dunne’s desire to return despite his hearing loss. He said he felt a responsibility to be with his platoon. His unit’s young soldiers, he wrote from Iraq, “needed as much help as they can get.”

“That’s pride,” said Geni Gillaspie, Dunne’s girlfriend and the mother of his two children. “That’s Kevin … wanting to lead his men and do the right thing.”

“Very dedicated soldier,” Martin wrote during the review. “Wants to stay infantry. This is his life. I vote he stays infantry.”

Despite his desire to deploy, Dunne thought his commanders would limit his combat exposure because of his hearing loss. Garn had recommended in his memorandum that Dunne be given a hearing aid to wear into combat.

Neither happened. During that April firefight, Dunne realized he was truly handicapped.

“I came to terms with myself and realized that I was not as confident in my ability to continue my job,” he wrote in an e-mail May 6. “It was better for me to realize this than to ignore it.”

“I don’t know how to approach [commanders] and tell them of what my feelings are,” he wrote in an e-mail April 26, “because I’ve been around long enough to know that I’ll be looked at as a quitter.”

Army regulations allow troops with health problems to go to war if their job comports with their physical limitations and if there are resources in the combat zone — such as psychological counseling — to treat them.

But a Government Accountability Office report released June 10 found the rules are not always followed. It said that after doctors identified significant health issues among dozens of soldiers from three installations — Fort Drum in New York and Forts Stewart and Benning in Georgia — infantry commanders failed to limit their duties or schedule review boards to determine whether they should be moved to different jobs or out of the Army.

Troops with hearing unfit for combat are showing up in the war zone, Ohama said.

“We see cases of soldiers deploying when they did not meet the hearing standards,” he said.

As troops prepare for war, medical officers need to be forceful, said S. Ward Casscells, the Pentagon’s chief of military medicine.

“The commander has to make the call based on the mission, but the doctors should make the case very clearly that deploying Cpl. X against his or her medical judgment is a decision that could be held against the commander,” Casscells wrote in his Internet blog.

The risks of a mistake are too high, said James Martin, a retired colonel and expert on military culture at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

“This is a disability you don’t want to get worse,” he said. “You don’t want this person to be put in a position where he might hurt himself or others.”

At the time of the April attack, the forward operating base in Baghdad where Dunne was deployed was under constant mortar and rocket fire. He sought counseling with one of the Army’s combat stress teams.

“They say my symptoms are mimicking signs of depression. Who the hell knows what that means?” he wrote on May 6. “They gave me three sheets of paper with breathing techniques, another describing how to imagine being in a happy place … and to remind myself to relax when I started getting anxious.”

With the installation under daily rocket or mortar fire, Dunne said, the recommendations were impractical.

“For them to tell me to think happy [thoughts] is what will resolve my issues immediately — I have no faith in their judgment,” he wrote May 22.

Dunne finally was moved from the front lines only after he complained by e-mail to Gillaspie; his mother, Diann Dunne; and after USA Today inquired about Dunne’s combat fitness. He was given another hearing exam by Ohama in Baghdad. The results confirmed the earlier findings.

His current brigade commander, Col. Mark Dewhurst, cites the review board’s decision in December as the reason Dunne was in combat.

“Staff Sgt. Dunne attested that he could fulfill his duties,” Dewhurst said.

“Dunne relayed that he did not want to let down his soldiers, so he did not report his condition,” he said.

Martin said it is a mistake to rely too heavily on the service member suffering the disability when it comes to the question of fitness.

“You can’t ask the person to make the determination because emotionally, they’re too connected to wanting to overcome their disability.”

In a telephone interview from Texas, Dunne said he is uncertain about his long-term future.

Another fitness hearing is scheduled and he has been assigned to a rear-detachment unit. Dunne said he once dreamed of law enforcement, but his hearing loss has put that out of reach.

So shortly before coming home, Dunne accepted an offer to re-enlist for three years with an $11,000 bonus. He hoped the Army would find a place for him away from combat.

Last week, he said he received some good news on that front — a new assignment as a casualty liaison officer for 4th Infantry Division wounded who arrive at the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. All casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan pass through that facility.

“I get back to helping out and doing things for these guys,” he said. “I’m really excited.”

Would Obama prosecute the Bush administration for torture?

By Mark Benjamin | On the campaign trail in April, Barack Obama was asked whether, if elected, he would prosecute Bush administration officials for establishing torture as American policy. The candidate demurred. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” he said. But he quickly added, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems to solve.”

People who have given advice to the Obama campaign say they see little political advantage in the candidate discussing during a general election campaign how his administration might investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials for torture. Other than the response above, prompted by a question from Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, he has said little about his plans. But behind the scenes, a slate of foreign policy and human rights experts with various degrees of connections to the Obama campaign, some of them likely to occupy positions of authority in an Obama administration, have begun to discuss that very issue, and in great detail. What they’re likely to recommend to Obama, should he become president, won’t fulfill the dreams of those who’ve hoped for immediate criminal accountability for Bush administration officials.

Members and advisors of the administration-in-waiting have formed largely informal working groups to take up a whole host of issues related to the Bush administration’s legacy, like what to do about the Guantánamo detainees. While they have not been asked to develop a formal recommendation for Obama on the question of criminal accountability for torture, those who are weighing the issue, a group that includes some of the 300 people the New York Times recently described as Obama’s “mini State Department,” are moving toward consensus on some key points. Specifically, don’t hold your breath waiting for Dick Cheney to be frog-marched into federal court. Prosecution of any officials, if it were to occur, would probably not occur during Obama’s first term. Instead, we may well see a congressionally empowered commission that would seek testimony from witnesses in search of the truth about what occurred. Though some witnesses might be offered immunity in exchange for testimony, the question of whether anybody would be prosecuted would be deferred to a later date — meaning Obama’s second term, if such is forthcoming.

While there are certainly participants in these discussions who believe that top-level administration officials deserve to be hauled before a judge, even the harshest critics of the current administration’s torture policies don’t think there will be an immediate effort by the next president to prosecute anyone from the Bush administration. “I don’t sense the political appetite for it,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, who is involved in the informal discussions about what Obama could do about investigating torture. “I don’t think the next president will do that no matter who he is.”

Attorneys say successful prosecutions would be tough anyway. The Justice Department approved the abuse and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006 to make prosecutions more difficult. There is also speculation that any end-of-term presidential pardons by Bush might include some of the likely torture defendants.

But the avenues of investigation being discussed don’t necessarily rule out at least an attempt at prosecuting Bush officials at some later date. The nonpartisan presidential commission that Malinowski and other people involved in the discussions are advocating would have considerable power, granted by Congress, to force cooperation. The commission would ultimately deliver recommendations to the president that would include, among other things, whether or not Cheney deserves that walk up the courthouse steps.

The first order of business, however, would be learning the truth. “I think a lot of us feel that the American people are entitled to the whole truth,” said another person who knows about the discussions. “The American people are entitled to [an investigation] from an official body that has access to the classified documents that makes as much public as it can,” that person added.

The commission would focus strictly on detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, or the practice of spiriting detainees to a third country for abusive interrogations. The panel would focus strictly on these abuses, leaving out any other allegedly illegal activities during the Bush administration, such as domestic spying.

It would also try to confirm or debunk, once and for all, the claims of high-level Bush administration officials that the use of abusive interrogations worked and resulted in significant intelligence gains.

This might include claims made by the president. In a Sept. 6, 2006, White House address, Bush admitted to a network of secret CIA prisons and the use of “tough” interrogation techniques by the agency. He then ticked off a treasure trove of intelligence he said the CIA pried out of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaida operative captured on March 28, 2002, by intelligence agents from the United States and Pakistan.

But FBI agents initially interrogated Zubaydah using tried and true, noncoercive techniques, reportedly with success. The CIA later took over and used coercive methods that included waterboarding. Controversy lingers over claims about the effectiveness of the CIA’s methods, particularly in comparison to the FBI’s approach.

Like the 9-11 Commission, Congress could grant this panel the authority to issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to cooperate and leverage the production of documents. The panel might also have the power to grant witnesses immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

Immunity, in fact, remains one of the thorniest issues in the ongoing discussions about how to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation program. A recent Newsweek piece by Stuart Taylor Jr. suggested that Bush “pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution” for torture during the Bush years. Taylor argued that this would encourage those individuals to testify freely in front of some sort of truth commission.

That indemnity arrangement is more reminiscent of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the 1990s-era investigation aimed at unearthing the sins of apartheid. But blanket indemnity would not be part of the commission under discussion. “A lot of people think that that is not something that goes over well with the American people,” said the person familiar with the discussions. “What we have much more of a tradition of is presidential fact-finding commissions.”

Instead of offering a blanket amnesty, the fact-finding commission would delay any decisions on whether or not to attempt to prosecute any Bush administration officials for their transgressions. Given the time it would take for a commission to do its work, any such decision would probably not take place till Obama’s second term. That would be in accord with what Obama said in April, in what seems to be his lone statement on the issue of accountability, about not wanting his first term to be taken up by what critics would try to characterize as political retribution.

“Something like this would be unprecedented in the American experience and I think it would be absolutely necessary,” Kenneth Kitts, author of “Presidential Commissions and National Security: The Politics of Damage Control,” said when informed of the rough plans for the commission. “We’ve had panels that have looked at scandals. We’ve had panels that have looked at intractable political problems,” said Kitts, a political science professor at South Carolina’s Francis Marion University. “But nothing in terms of looking at an issue that has this array of legal, moral and even spiritual questions attached to it.”

Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign, did not respond to Salon’s request for comment by press time.

Suskind: Bush ordered fake letter linking Iraq to 9/11

By David Edwards and Nick Juliano | A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq’s intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

The faked letter was first reported as genuine by the conservative London Sunday Telegraph in December 2003. Right-wing commentators and Bush defenders harped on that disclosure as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. According to Suskind’s book, the CIA had been protecting Habbush in the early months of the invasion; the agency persuaded the Iraqi intelligence chief to write the letter in his own handwriting and paid him $5 million.

CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante reported Tuesday that Suskind’s sources had seen a draft of the letter written on White House stationary.

The Way of the World is Suskind’s third book on the inner workings of the Bush administration, joining The One Percent Doctrine, which outlined the often extreme anti-terror policies advanced by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, and The Price of Loyalty, which painted a picture of the early day’s of Bush’s presidency with the help of ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Predictably, the White House is unhappy with Suskind’s latest offering and the Bush administration is relying on its trademark push-back of insulting the messenger. White House spokesman Tony Fratto insulted Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Wall Street Journal, as a practitioner of “gutter journalism,” and called the allegations “absurd.”

Suskind appeared Tuesday on NBC’s Today Show for interviews about the latest book.

New Book Claims Bush White House Used Forged Documents In Case For Iraq War

Haaretz | The Bush administration used forged documents that it presented as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the September 11 terrorist attacks, and which were later used as a pretext to launch the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to a newly released book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind.

In “The Way of the World,” Suskind writes that documents cited by the administration allege that Hussein’s regime permitted Al-Qaida operatives who carried out the 9/11 attacks to train on Iraqi soil, and that Saddam was seeking to obtain uranium in order to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

According to the book, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations was responsible for fabricating the documents. The book goes on to say that the British intelligence agency MI6 recruited Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief, Tahir Abd al-Jalil al-Tikriti, and questioned him in Amman two months before the war, and then handed him over to the CIA.

Al-Tikriti continued to function as an agent for the Americans until after the invasion, when he was taken into custody by the U.S. military. His activities on behalf of the Americans remained a well-guarded secret, as his name continued to appear on a list of wanted members of Saddam’s regime. The Americans distributed decks of cards containing the names and pictures of wanted Iraqi officials, among them al-Tikriti.

Months after the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime, al-Tikriti’s CIA handlers requested that he handwrite a letter on official Iraqi government letterhead stating that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, underwent training in Iraq prior to carrying out the attacks, according to Suskind. In addition, al-Tikriti wrote in the letter that Al-Qaida aided the Iraqi government in obtaining uranium in Niger. It is worth noting that evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Niger was discredited after the source of the information, an Italian informant, was discovered to have falsified his claims.

The CIA was quick to disseminate the letter to journalists in Iraq, Britain, and the United States while creating the impression that it was discovered in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry archives by U.S. forces, Suskind writes. A short time later, the British Daily Telegraph was one of the first newspapers to publish the contents of the letter, which was touted as proof that there indeed was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, and that the Iraqi leader was intent on developing weapons of mass destruction. Other newspapers though were more skeptical of the document’s authenticity.