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How to Find out the Hidden Secrets of the Bush Administration

Monday, December 1st, 2008

In March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming — one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades’ worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover’s loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents’ papers — everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers — be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were due to be turned over to Carlin at the beginning of Bush’s term.

Gonzales wanted Carlin to delay the release until June. His letter didn’t say why, but Carlin agreed. Then in June, Carlin got another memo from Gonzales — Bush’s attorney now wanted until the end of August. Carlin agreed again. The extensions continued until November, when Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush’s rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone.

Bush’s executive order had little to do with any concerns of Reagan himself, whose estate has since shared his papers enthusiastically. Some administration critics theorized at the time that Bush was trying to shield from scrutiny his father’s vice presidential records, which were among the Reagan White House documents — but ultimately it wasn’t really about George H. W. Bush, either. It was about the new president and vice president, and the kind of government they intended to run. Bill Clinton’s White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents — down to the White House Christmas card list — when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. “I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much,” Carlin says. “It was a different philosophy.”

Gonzales’s March 2001 memo was the opening salvo in a war over information, one that began in the earliest days of the Bush administration and will continue beyond its end. The stakes, which no one could have predicted when the letter crossed Carlin’s desk, are now self-evidently enormous: when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. We still do not know how intelligence operatives, acting in the name of the United States, have interrogated suspected terrorists, and how they are interrogating them now.

We do not know how many Americans’ phone calls and e-mails were scanned by the National Security Agency. We do not know — although we can guess — who ordered the firings of the U.S. attorneys who didn’t comply with the Bush administration’s political agenda, and we do not know who may have been wrongly prosecuted by those who did. There are large gaps in our understanding of the backstories to everything from pre-war intelligence in Iraq to the censoring of scientific opinion at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And those are the things we know we don’t know — there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns.

The thought of revisiting this history after living through it for eight years is exhausting, and both President Barack Obama and Congress will have every political reason to just move on. But we can’t — it’s too important. Fortunately, an accounting of the Bush years is a less daunting prospect than it seems from the outset. If the new president and leaders on Capitol Hill act shrewdly, they can pull it off while successfully navigating the political realities and expectations they now face. A few key actions will take us much of the distance between what we know and what we need to know.

Three months after Bush issued his presidential records order, a Justice Department attorney named Anne Weismann stood in front of Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington’s district court. Weismann was defending Dick Cheney’s refusal to hand over the records from the energy task force meetings he had convened the previous year, which had prompted a lawsuit by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club. Sullivan was irate. “I get the feeling the government’s underestimating the seriousness of this case,” he told Weismann.

Weismann had been a Justice lawyer for twenty years, and had appeared often in Sullivan’s court. But this case was different. “I’ve never seen him that angry — he wouldn’t even let me talk,” she recalled recently. The encounter made her rethink what she was doing. Weismann still believes that there were limited legal arguments to make in defense of keeping the energy task force records secret. But what drove Cheney was something bigger. The case would ultimately wind its way to the Supreme Court, after Cheney’s legal team claimed to Sullivan that executive privilege meant the White House didn’t have to hand over anything to the courts if he didn’t feel like it. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled in Cheney’s favor, Weismann was no longer representing the vice president. The day Sullivan read her the riot act in district court, she says, “was the point at which I said, ‘I have to stop doing this.’ ”

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Fisk: Afghanistan in Crisis

Monday, December 1st, 2008

By Robert Fisk | The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands—all but a square mile at the centre of the city—and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad’s “Green Zone”; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai’s government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape—one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted—and more than 100 others are now on Kabul’s death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, “gender-sensitive” Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban’s ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

“Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power,” a Kabul business executive says—anonymity is now as much demanded as it was before 2001—“but people hate the government and the parliament which doesn’t care about their security. The government is useless. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there’s mass unemployment—but of course, there are no statistics.

“The ‘open market’ led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now you’ve got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own profits—then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and there’s only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans themselves.”

Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul—again, anonymity was requested—says both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. “A Taliban group will arrive at a village headman’s door at night—maybe 15 or 16 of them—and say they need food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then there’s the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans.”

In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the Americans are talking about forming “tribal militias” to combat the Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars of the [1980s] were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was first tried out two years ago—it was called the Auxiliary Police Force—it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.

“Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge it all up again,” another NGO official says in near despair. “ ’Oh,’ they proclaim, ‘let’s have local militias—what a bright idea.’ But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done four or five years ago.”

What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have “democracy”? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai’s own government? And—most important of all—is development really about “securing the country”? The tired old American adage that “where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins” is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the “key”—of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same “key” which the Russians tried—and it did not fit the lock.

“We” are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar—one of America’s principal targets in this wretched war—you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn’t want to talk to Mr Karzai.

Partition is the one option that no one will discuss—giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest—but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as “Pashtunistan”; and that would have to include much of Pakistan’s own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the “Great Game” and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which—history shows— has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.

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Kristol Calls On Bush To Pardon Torturers And Wiretappers, Reward Them With Medal Of Freedom

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Think Progress |

In his new Weekly Standard column, right-wing pundit Bill Kristol lays out a to-do list for President Bush before he leaves office. He urges Bush to deliver speeches “reminding Americans of our successes fighting the war on terror.” Kristol dreams, “Over time, Bush might even get deserved credit for effective conduct of the war on terror.”

After urging Bush to fight the incoming administration’s desire to close Guantanamo, Kristol concludes with this:

One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

In the Bush era, the Medal of Freedom has come to absurdly represent a reward for those who carried out policy failures at the urging of the Bush administration. By this standard, the implementers of torture and warrantless wiretapping certainly qualify for such a medal.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the White House “isn’t inclined to grant sweeping pardons for former administration officials involved in harsh interrogations and detentions of terror suspects.” President-elect Barack Obama is reportedly unlikely to pursue criminal cases against such officials, but is said to be considering a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible.”

Bush’s “record of stonewalling inquiries into his administration’s legally questionable behavior — the torture policy that led to the Abu Ghraib nightmare; illegal wiretapping; the politically motivated firing of federal attorneys — justify concern that he may be considering pardoning officials involved in those misdeeds,” the New York Times warns in an editorial this morning. “If he wants to try to reclaim his reputation, he can start by not abusing the pardon power on his way out the door,” the Times writes.

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Former interrogator slams torture: Torture has cost nearly as many lives as 9/11

Monday, December 1st, 2008

By Ali Frick | In a Washington Post op-ed today, a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006 sharply criticizes American torture techniques as ineffective and dangerous. “Torture and abuse cost American lives,” he writes:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. … It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

The writer, who used a pseudonym for the article, adds that when he switched his team’s techniques to a rapport-building method, they found enormous success. One detainee told the author, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

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George W. Bush Belongs in Prison

Monday, December 1st, 2008

By Joel S. Hirschhorn |

Electing Barack Obama president was the first step in redeeming American democracy. The second step must be indicting ex-president George W. Bush, giving him a fair trial, finding him guilty of many criminal acts and putting him in prison. Forget revenge. Think rule of law and justice.

I want President Obama soon after taking office to go on television and announce the formation of a special group of outstanding jurists and attorneys to make a recommendation whether or not the US Justice Department should bring criminal charges against George W. Bush. Based on earlier analyses, including work by the American Bar Association, I have no doubt they will recommend indictment.

If moral honesty and courage have any meaning, then the nation must take seriously the concept that no president can ever be allowed to be above the law. How can President Obama not strongly support this? Surely no president must be allowed to disrespect and dishonor the US Constitution. George W. Bush broke his oath of office. His behavior was treasonous. Instead of defending the Constitution he disgraced it. Instead of protecting constitutional rights, including privacy, he sullied them. He asserted his right to ignore or not enforce laws so he could break them. Respect for the office of the presidency must never be allowed to trump truth and justice.

Millions and millions of Americans and people worldwide know that George W. Bush made 9/11 the trigger for initiating an illegal war in Iraq that has killed and maimed so many thousands of people. What Vincent Bugliosi, author of “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” called “the most serious crime ever committed in American history.” I say convict Bush of myriad counts of criminally negligent homicide related to both Iraq and the Katrina disaster and put him in prison. A former president in prison would not disgrace the presidency. It would restore honor to the office and the Constitution.

Surely millions more people now understand that George W. Bush bears responsibility for creating the conditions that encouraged greed-driven capitalism to rape and murder the middle class and push us into the current global economic meltdown. By removing government oversight and regulation he committed the greatest acts of fraud in the history of mankind. After he made American democracy delusional he made prosperity delusional.

We the people are paying the price for George W. Bush’s criminal acts and so must he. When George W. Bush is sent to prison everyone will see that American democracy has earned the respect of the world. Everyone will better understand that evil comes in many forms and that even an elected president of the United States of America can and must be recognized as a perpetrator of horrendous criminal acts.

Please President-elect Obama, make it so. Be the principled person we want you to be. Make the USA the nation it is supposed to be. Have the courage to do what Congress refused to do when it did not impeach George W. Bush. Change history by showing the world that American justice applies as equally to the president as it does to anyone else. Do not let George W. Bush escape the justice and prison sentence he deserves. Do not let respect for the presidency trump respect for justice. If we do not bring George W. Bush to justice that probably only you can make happen, then surely we do not restore respect for the office that you worked so hard to achieve.

To ensure that no future president behaves like George W. Bush we must punish him. Not merely through the words of historians, but through the physical punishment that he has inflicted on so many millions of people. In previous eras citizens would have demanded “off with his head.” Now we must demand “lock him up.” How poetic for a pro-torture ex-president. As summed up at www.imprisonbush.com : “Bush must be made accountable to the law, to serve as a lesson to all those who would attempt to destroy the American system of laws and liberty for the sake of their own power.” This is a test for both President Obama and American democracy.

If there is any kind of God in the universe, then George W. Bush must go to prison. When he does, then and only then should God bless America.

Formerly a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, Joel S. Hirschhorn is the author of nonfiction books, including Prosperity Without Pollution, Sprawl Kills and Delusional Democracy.

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Police in CCTV ‘beating’ of war hero to be probed

Monday, December 1st, 2008

The officers, called to deal with a man who was creating a nuisance, are said to have mistaken Mark Aspinall, 24, for the culprit.

CCTV footage of the incident appears to show PC Peter Lightfoot and a colleague chasing Mark and throwing him to the floor. They then seemingly bang his head on the ground and punch him eight times while holding him down.

Lance Corporal Mark, 24, who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq and was described as a model soldier by his commanding officer, was later charged with assaulting police and a public order offence.

Magistrates found him guilty and ordered him to pay the officers £250 in compensation. But the charges were quashed on appeal by judge John Phipps who said: “I am shocked and appalled at the level of police violence shown here.”

Now the Independent Police Complaints Commission has launched an inquiry in the wake of the publication of the shocking CCTV images by our sister paper the Sunday Mirror.

The Greater Manchester Police’s professional standards branch is also holding an internal inquiry.

Mark, who admits being drunk, suffered 14 head injuries during the incident in Wigan.

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Open government means access to e-mails

Monday, December 1st, 2008

 

Business and budgeting as usual have gone by the boards for most cities and towns. The revenue picture is grim, and communities are hurting. With but one major revenue source, a property tax paid by people who are also facing hard times, tough decisions must be made. Cut services, including some long considered essential, and reduce the help given residents who need it? Or make life that much harder for taxpayers, who are themselves struggling?

When cuts must be made, passions and suspicions run high. Are those who squawk the loudest, no matter what the merit of their case, winning out at the expense of those with greater needs? Are the well-connected the last to lose their jobs? It’s natural to harbor such suspicions and ask such questions in good times, let alone during the kind of economic angst communities are suffering now.

On Wednesday the Monitor’s Amy Augustine reported on a challenge to a Hopkinton selectman’s decision to discuss potential ways to cut that town’s budget via e-mail messages with the board’s other members. The issue came to light when a resident requested copies of official e-mails and received one marked “Eyes Only.”

Whoops and double whoops. Nonpublic business messages between a quorum of town officials on a matter not exempt under the state’s right-to-know law are a no-no. And sending proof of a potential violation to a member of the public guarantees trouble.

The e-mail, from board Chairman Scott Flood to his colleagues, was an assessment of town needs and wants, with suggestions for which budget items should be considered for cuts and which public properties should be sold.

Those are controversial subjects guaranteed to spur lobbying attempts and protests, but they are under discussion in every town and city hall.

Hopkinton’s practices are better than many: An e-mail message between a quorum of members is, if the sender believes it falls under the right-to-know law, forwarded to the town administrator, who will make it available to the public upon request. There are potential flaws with that system - all town officials may not understand or interpret the law correctly or the same way, for example - but it shows a good-faith effort to conduct open government. Another potential problem exists with such systems because citizens can’t easily ask for something they don’t know exists.

The new system Hopkinton will put in place as a result of resident Janet Krzyzaniak’s request for information is a vast improvement and could become a model for other towns. Hopkinton officials will now e-mail each other using town accounts rather than private accounts, and all messages will go into a folder available to the public at the town hall.

Like Hopkinton’s board members, most local office holders work a full-time job. Town business has become far more complicated and demanding. The ability of officials to communicate by e-mail is a blessing, one that, properly used, greatly benefits citizens who depend on the willingness of volunteers who sacrifice a huge chunk of their time for the good of the community.

In keeping with the times and technology, it would also be helpful, since the messages were created in electronic form, for towns to keep them in a digital folder that’s available to the public on the town’s website. Now that would truly be government at its most open and accessible.

Concord Monitor and New Hampshire Patriot

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First ID cards not being scanned

Monday, December 1st, 2008

The first batch of biometric identity cards issued in Britain last week to foreigners are not being read because the government failed to issue a single scanner in time.

Machines that scan fingerprints and facial details were meant to be in the hands of employers, recruiters and emergency services for the rollout of the cards on Tuesday.

But The Observer reported that the Home Office had still not issued the biometric readers by last week, and was unable to say when deployment would begin.

As a result, the cards can only be used as a visual identifier, like a valid passport or visa, making their current use akin to a ‘flash and go’ corporate identity card scheme.

Ministers have hailed the capture of facial image and fingerprints of card-holders as a way to “lock” foreign nationals to one identity and help stamp out illegal working.

Welcoming the issuing of the cards to foreign staff, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation said the move would enhance “safe and ethical recruitment” in the UK.

It called its members, including IT recruiters, to ensure that they
familiarise themselves with the appearance of the cards to ensure foreign candidates they engage are eligible.

However, documents from the Home Office state that the cards’ biometric details will only be cross-checked with the National Identity Register in a minority of cases.

Employers who suspect the cards are not genuine must report to the UK Borders Agency, as must colleges in the UK with similar doubts about foreign students they enlist.

Public and private sector bodies need to change how they vet workers’ rights to be in the UK, ensuring their contact details and a copy of their identity card are stored.

 © Contractor UK

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