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Private security contractors lack accountability

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

A recent shootout in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar that left 10 people dead is helping to focus attention on the issue of private security companies, and the existing lack of accountability concerning their activities.

The June 29 incident in Kandahar involved security contractors employed by coalition military forces. A group of the contractors attacked a local police station apparently in an attempt to free a colleague who had been taken into custody for supposedly forging documents. In addition to two senior police officers, eight civilians died in the armed confrontation. Hours after the shootout, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement asking the US-led coalition forces to hand over the private security contractors suspected of involvement in the killings. Later, 41 Afghan security contractors were placed under arrest.

Representatives of coalition forces emphasized that no foreign troops and no “foreign nationals” were involved in the incident. A coalition spokesman went on to characterize the attack as “Afghan on Afghan.”

Nevertheless, the attack is prompting heightened scrutiny of the coalition practice of employing de-mobilized local militiamen to provide security. Up to 3,000 former Afghan militia fighters are directly employed by the US military in Operation Enduring Freedom, according to an estimate prepared by Swisspeace, a research outfit focusing on conflict resolution.

In the absence of adequate troop levels and well-trained Afghan forces, international militaries and civilian agencies have used private security firms to protect their personnel and assets since 2001. Given the growing international presence and spiraling insecurity in recent years, the security sector has proven to be highly lucrative. Accordingly, the number of private security companies mushroomed.

Early this year, 39 companies — 21 of them foreign-based — were licensed under regulations issued in 2008. However, loopholes in criminal jurisdiction and accountability allow many security firms to operate in a gray area, seemingly beyond the reach of the Afghan justice system. Some companies, which did not, or could not obtain licenses, reportedly continue to operate with impunity. In some instances, private security contractors employed by foreign militaries or diplomatic missions enjoy immunity.

There are several instances in which security contractors have avoided facing Afghan justice in connection with deadly incidents. For example, on May 5, a shooting in Kabul left one civilian dead and injured two others. The four American Xe (formerly Blackwater) contractors involved left the country after an initial “detention” period, during which the US military carried out its own investigation. The findings of that investigation have not been made public.

Earlier, during an early April visit to Afghanistan to gauge the impact of the private security companies on the Afghan population, a United Nations working group suggested that subcontracting constituted a problem. There are “23,000 people . . . in those [39] companies which are already registered and most of them are not foreigners, most of them are Afghan nationals and they are subject to this problem of improper relations with those who hire them,” the working group’s leader, Alexander Nikitin, said during an April 9 news conference.

Anger among Afghans against private security firms has steadily escalated over the past few years, due to what is seen as unwarranted aggression and thuggish behavior. While incidents involving the use of lethal force usually manage to make their way into the public discourse, the routine harassment and bullying behavior of security contractors, involving contact with Afghan civilians, usually goes undocumented and unreported. For example, private security firms are widely loathed among Afghans for indiscriminately closing roads, setting up private checkpoints, commanding civilian vehicles off the road and frequently using the barrel of a gun to keep Afghans at bay.

While no representative of a private security company would publicly comment, some said privately that they would welcome tighter regulations. Several representatives complained that in the absence of such regulations, their firms end up being tarred with the same brush as the more brutish firms.

The absence of a comprehensive legislative framework is widely seen as one impediment to reform. A bill containing a new set of regulations for private contractors is currently stuck in parliament.

Incidents involving private contractors are expected to increase as more foreign troops arrive in Afghanistan, senior military and UN officials tell EurasiaNet. In his quarterly Afghanistan report issued on June 23, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predicted an upsurge of violence. “The significant increase in Afghan and international troops fighting the insurgents could also result in an increase in security incidents,” the secretary-general said.

With the increase in violence and the winding down of operations in Iraq, Afghans fear a surge of foreign security contractors will arrive in Afghanistan looking for work. That would be an unwelcome development to Interior Minister Muhammad Hanif Atmar. Following a visit to Kandahar after the June 29 incident, the minister declared that illegal militias were “intolerable” and should be disarmed immediately. This, however, seems easier said than done.

EurasiaNet

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Protest in London over ‘rigged’ Iranian election

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Green flags and banners fly as a crowd of 2,000 or so demonstrators chant anti-Iranian regime slogans. Many pump their fists into the air, screaming in Persian: “Guns and tanks are of no use to you any more because the people have now spoken.” It’s a chant followed by: “Ahmadinejad, you’re a murderer.”

From the rooftop of the Iranian Embassy in London an unmanned video camera records the faces of the angry crowd gathered in Knightsbridge, emboldened by their fury over what they believe was a rigged election.

A Metropolitan police officer who has been patrolling the demonstrations since they began three days after the close of polls in mid June, told The Times: “They’re filming quite a lot. Any intelligent person would assume they’re sending the footage back to Iran.” The tactic seems all the more disturbing as Nazenin Ansari, the diplomatic editor of Kayhan, a Persian weekly newspaper in London, says she has been investigating claims that a number of British Iranians have “disappeared” since the election.

“I have heard of some cases of people travelling from London into Tehran who have simply disappeared from the airport,” she said. “And I know of many cases of people who were planning to go and have decided not to any more. Because they have been in the demonstrations, there’s a real fear of photos being taken and being used against them.”

The swelling opposition towards the Ahmadinejad administration has politicised a once predominantly apolitical British Iranian community that feared expressing its dissent publicly.

Many activists accuse the regime of spying by gathering footage to punish and intimidate people should they choose to visit their homeland. Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian activist and blogger, said that he was bouyed by the rapidly growing involvement of the Iranian population in Britain, which stands between 53,000 and 73,000, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.

“One of the tangible things from all these demos is people have gotten to know each other and gotten closer to each other,” he said. “We’re united by a common goal, a common dream to change the misperception the world has of Iranians, because not all Iranians want to be represented by Ahmadinejad and his regime.”

Vahid Sadeghi Shirazi, a former political prisoner in Iran and one of the main demonstration organisers in London, said: “We are the voice of the Iranian people who are not allowed to speak up at the moment.” But a fear of the Iranian regime remains, as evidenced at Thursday’s rally — which marked the tenth anniversary of the student uprising against the Islamic revolution — in which many demonstrators disguised their faces with sunglasses, hats, wigs and paint.

Local activists are developing fresh ways of dodging the regime’s dissent radar by developing secret communication methods with their counterparts back home. Their greatest weapon has been cyberspace, despite the Iranian Government’s attempt to monitor websites and personal e-mails.

The movement was brought to life by the backing given to Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s main rival in the June 12 election. A movement that has met with violence, which, the regime’s opposition claims, has left more than 250 people dead. The regime is accused of playing down this figure by saying that only 20 deaths have been recorded.

The movement has also left hundreds of activists and bystanders who found themselves in wrong place at the wrong time behind bars.

Marayam, 32, a student from East London, spent four days in a police cell in Tehran during a holiday to visit her family. Her whereabouts became unknown the moment she was taken into custody. “They [police] told my parents they had never heard my name and categorically denied that I was in their custody,” Maryam, who was released without charge, said. The maths student returned to London recently.

From The Times

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G8 leaders fail to reach agreement on global crisis

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

China, France, Russia challenge supremacy of US dollar

The leaders of the G8 group of major industrialized countries lined up for their photo call at the conclusion of this year’s summit and sought to put their deliberations in the Italian town of L’Aquila in the best possible light.

US President Barack Obama spoke of a historic consensus on environmental policy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that “considerable progress” had been made at the summit. In fact, most of the decisions announced over the past three days were vague and non-committal. In general, they marked a retreat from positions agreed (and not carried out) at preceding G8 summits.

Climate change

Attempts at the summit to reach a binding decision on the limitation of greenhouse gases were blocked by developing economies such as India, China and Brazil, which argued that climate targets were being used by developed industrial countries—in particular, the US—to hamper their own economic growth. Representatives from all three countries had been invited to attend the second day of G8 talks in L’Aquila.

An initial proposal put forward at the summit for an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 was buried within hours of being announced. Canada said the goal was “aspirational” and Russia said it could not possibly meet the target.

In the event, the summit agreed to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but its final resolution was notable for its lack of detail. It remained unclear which reference year would apply for the reduction. If the starting point is later than 1990—the baseline normally used—then the target entails more modest cuts, as most countries saw emissions rise after that date.

The latest agreement also falls well short of the target set by the European Union in March 2007, which called for a 20 percent reduction of CO2 emissions by 2020, in comparison with 1990 levels. Germany had even declared it wanted cuts of as much as 40 percent by 2020.

The G8 leaders also left open the question of how their climate targets were to be financed, with any decision on this issue left until the G20 summit planned for the end of September in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Commenting on the G8 resolution on climate change, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon complained that the G8 had missed a “unique opportunity” for progress.

Farm aid

Much of the talk of success at the end of the summit centred on the decision by G8 leaders to establish a $20 billion fund spread over three years for farm aid to less developed nations. Initial summit communiqués mentioned a sum of $15 billion, and summit participants presented the final sum agreed, involving an additional $5 billion, as a considerable advance aimed at assisting poor nations and continents, in particular, Africa.

The sum of $20 billion is completely inadequate to alleviate poverty in undeveloped nations. In a report issued a week before the summit, the British charity ActionAid noted that one billion people were going hungry in the world, and declared that decisions at the G8 gathering could “literally make the difference between life and death for millions in the developing world.”

The token amount announced in Italy condemns these hundreds of millions of people to worsening hunger and poverty, as the global economic crisis takes a particularly cruel toll on the weakest and most vulnerable economies. Most of Africa and Asia are being starved of capital, which is being monopolized by imperialist powers seeking to bail out their banking systems, even as the export markets of so-called Third World countries shrink.

Moreover, the communiqué on farm aid fails to make clear whether the $20 billion (of which the US has pledged a paltry $3.5 billion) represents new money, or is merely to be redistributed from funds long since promised. At its summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in 2005, G8 leaders pledged no less than $50 billion in aid for underdeveloped countries by the year 2010. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only one third of this target had been met.

Financial and economic policy

G8 leaders were also unable to come to any firm agreement on how to combat the financial crisis. Acknowledging the dangers posed by the crisis, the summit issued a statement on Wednesday that declared, “The situation remains uncertain and significant risks remain to economic and financial stability.”

However, the G8 is deeply divided on how to respond to the crisis. The US and Britain advocate additional large-scale injections of capital to the banks and big business, while a number of European countries, led by Germany, oppose further stimulus measures, warning of the danger of ballooning government budget deficits and the threat of inflation. Germany, whose economy is geared to industrial exports, is particularly concerned over the prospect that soaring US deficits will further depress the value of the US dollar in relation to the euro, pricing German exports out of the US and other major markets.

The G8 leaders were unable to arrive at a coordinated policy in response to the crisis. They could do little more than urge individual governments to collaborate with one another as they pursue their own national solutions. The joint declaration acknowledged the lack of consensus, stating that “exit strategies will vary depending on economic conditions and public finances.”

Pro forma, the G8 summit participants unanimously denounced trade protectionism and warned of the dangers of increasing national isolation. In a joint declaration released Thursday, the G8 members and the G5 group of emerging economies—Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa—declared they were “committed” to completing by the end of 2010 the World Trade Organization Doha round of talks aimed at reducing trade barriers and liberalizing economies.

None of these proclamations can be taken seriously. Rather than bringing down trade barriers and other forms of economic protectionism, the universal response by individual nations to the financial crisis has to been to step up retaliatory trade, currency and capital measures against other countries.

The US government adopted a “buy American” clause as part of its stimulus program, requiring that only steel and other goods made by domestic producers be used in planned infrastructure projects. The multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout enacted by the Obama administration and resulting record budget deficit have, moreover, resulted in the bulk of available private capital on world financial markets flowing into the US.

The Chinese authorities responded with their own stimulus package, which also contains a “buy national” clause. Other leading nations are taking similar measures.

According to Holger Görg from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, “If German Chancellor Angela Merkel rescues Opel in the wake of the crisis because it is a German company, that is also protectionism.”

Differences on trade policy broke to the surface at the summit over the issue of energy markets. Alarmed by the recent increase in oil prices, which raises the danger of a prolonged world recession, France and Britain proposed measures to regulate energy markets and reduce the volatility of oil prices. Their proposal was promptly rebuffed by oil exporters Russia and Canada, both of which said it would be impossible to administer markets in such a way.

Iran

In its joint declaration and under massive pressure from the US delegation, the G8 expressed its “serious concern” over “post-election violence in Iran,” but put off endorsing new sanctions against the country. In his visit to Moscow earlier in the week, President Obama brought considerable pressure to bear on the Russian leadership to take a harder stance against the Iranian government. In L’Aquila, however, the Russian delegation declared that the measures taken against the opposition in Iran were an internal matter.

Challenges to the US dollar

As is often the case at such summits, the most significant and contentious issues were not part of the official agenda. While the G8 leaders were unable to arrive at viable agreements on economic policy, climate change or world poverty, there was growing evidence of the emergence of a block of countries intent on challenging the leading role of the US in economic policy and world affairs.

On Thursday, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo openly criticized the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. According to the Chinese foreign ministry, Dai told summit leaders: “We should have a better system for reserve currency issuance and regulation, so that we can maintain relative stability of major reserve currency exchange rates and promote a diversified and rational international reserve currency system.”

Dai did not mention the dollar, but the target of his remarks was clear. China’s has a total investment in US Treasuries of more than $1 trillion.

Dai’s comments repeat criticisms of the role of the dollar first made by official Chinese sources in March, but his remarks at a high-level meeting of world leaders represents a new stage in the escalation of economic tensions between the US and China.

When asked about Dai’s comments, G8 leaders sought to play down their significance. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown initially said he could not remember Dai making such remarks at a session of the summit he attended along with the US president. When his memory was jogged, Brown said, “We don’t want to give the impression that big change is around the corner and the present arrangements will be destabilized.”

In fact, Dai’s comments had been preceded earlier in the week by a statement from the Kremlin’s top economic adviser, Arkady Dvorkovich, who told the Wall Street Journal that the issue of an alternative global reserve currency should be part of the agenda of the G8 meeting.

“We will, alongside China, stress the need to gradually develop a global financial system which will be based on several new strong regional currencies,” Dvorkovich told reporters. “With time,” he added, “those new currencies will then take on a more global character.”

In a significant development, the same theme was also taken up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who told a press conference on Thursday that the current system, based since the end of World War II on the supremacy of the US dollar, was outdated and should be replaced.

“Frankly, 60 years later one must ask oneself the question: Shouldn’t a world that is multi-polar… be mirrored by a multi-polar economic system?” Sarkozy said, adding, “Even if it’s a difficult subject, we’ll discuss this in the coming months.”

Stefan Steinberg

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MoD ‘misled courts over Iraqi deaths investigation’

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

A panel of three judges criticised “disturbing failures” in how the MoD handled applications to withhold evidence, saying that all future requests should treated by the courts “with very considerable caution”.

The Government earlier this week ordered a new inquiry into the deaths of 20 Iraqis following a gun battle near the town of Majar-al-Kabir in 2004. Relatives of the victims claim they were murdered and mutilated at Camp Abu Naji, a British base.

Yesterday Lord Justice Scott Baker and two other judges condemned “truly alarming” errors made by the MoD in its efforts to prevent documents becoming public during an earlier investigation.

A public interest immunity (PII) certificate presented to the courts – in which the MoD claimed that permissible interrogation limits issued to soldiers should be kept secret to protect national security – was factually incorrect because the information was already in the public domain, the judges said.

The MoD compounded its error by failing to inform the courts when the inaccuracy was realised, they added.

“The court was misled into making a number of rulings on a false basis, all of which were wrong and should never have been made,” Lord Justice Scott Baker said.

“The steps that are currently being taken by the MoD, including the prospective detailed review of its PII process in this case, must ensure that false assertions are never again made in a ministerial certificate and schedule.”

An MoD spokesman said the errors were a matter of “deep regret”. He said: “There was absolutely no intention of misleading the Court. There will be a thorough review of what went wrong and measures will be introduced urgently to ensure that this cannot happen again.”

The MoD emphatically denies the original allegations and says that the 20 people who died were killed “on the battlefield”.

Announcing the new inquiry on Monday, Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, said that there was no evidence of torture or mutilation.

“However, these are serious allegations and we regret that we have failed to provide the court with timely and sufficient disclosure of information to enable them to determine the facts,” he said.

“Given these failings of disclosure, we have suggested to the court that a fresh investigation be undertaken into allegations of the murder of Iraqi detainees.”

Matthew Moore

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Bush admin discouraged probe into afghan killing

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Bush administration officials discouraged an investigation into a mass killing in Afghanistan, government officials and human rights workers say. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war were killed by forces under Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord who was backed by the United States during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, The New York Times reported Saturday.

An investigation into the killings was requested by the FBI, the State Department, the Red Cross and by human rights groups. They told the Times the Bush administration would not investigate because Dostum was on the CIA payroll. The general also served in the government of President Hamid Karzai, who was supported by the United States.

The Obama administration has not addressed the issue yet, but State Department officials are working to keep Dostum from staying on as military chief of staff to the Afghan president, senior officials told the Times. Dostum was reappointed to the post after a suspension for allegedly threatening a political rival.

He is considered an important ally of Karzai, the Times said. The new US administration has maintained frostier relations with Karzai, whose government is seen as corrupt and unpopular, although Obama has dispatched 21,000 fresh troops to fight a mounting Taliban-led insurgency ahead of August elections, the report said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have told Karzai they objected to the recent reinstatement of Dostam as military chief of staff, the Times said, citing a senior State Department official.

“We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated,” the official added, hinting the Obama administration is open to an inquiry. Dostam, whose alleged killings may have amounted to the biggest war crime in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, was reinstated to his post last month after being suspended last year for allegedly threatening a political opponent at gunpoint.

But he remains in exile in Turkey. The killings took place in late November 2001, shortly after the invasion that ousted Kabul’s Taliban government.Taliban prisoners captured by Dostam’s forces after a major battle in northeastern Kunduz province were allegedly packed into shipping containers and left to suffocate, or were shot through the container walls, before being buried in mass graves.

Estimates on the number of people killed have ranged from several hundred to several thousand. Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison.

Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan. A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died.

Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed. The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter.

In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defence Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite.

“We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.” Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an ‘informal inquiry,’ asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.

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Officials Claim Wiretaps Were of Limited Value

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear.

The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information.

Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

While the program obtained information that “had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.’s overall counterterrorism efforts,” the report concluded. The Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence branches also viewed the program, which allowed eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of Americans, as a useful tool but could not link it directly to counterterrorism successes, presumably arrests or thwarted plots.

The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality. The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States.

These threat assessments, which provided the justification for President George W. Bush’s reauthorization of the wiretapping program every 45 days, became known among intelligence officials as the “scary memos,” the report said. Intelligence analysts involved in the process eventually realized that “if a threat assessment identified a threat against the United States,” the wiretapping and related surveillance programs were “likely to be renewed,” the report added.

The report found that the secrecy surrounding the program may have limited its effectiveness. At the C.I.A., it said, so few working-level officers were allowed to know about the program that the agency often did not make full use of the leads the wiretapping generated, and intelligence leads that came from the wiretapping operation were often “vague or without context,” the report said.

The findings raise questions about assertions from Mr. Bush and his most senior advisers that the warrantless wiretapping program was essential in stopping terrorist attacks. In January 2006, for example, Mr. Bush said the surveillance program “helped prevent attacks and save American lives.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney has made the same point, most recently in his public defense of the administration’s campaign against terrorism.

The report provided previously undisclosed details about the legal and operational schisms that dogged the program in its five years of existence. The 38-page document released Friday was an unclassified version. The bulk of the findings remain classified in separate reports from each of the five inspectors general, who represent the Justice Department, the N.S.A, the C.I.A., the Defense Department and the Office of National Intelligence.

The inquiry included interviews with about 200 government and private-sector personnel, but a number of key players — including David Addington, a top aide to Mr. Cheney; George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; John Ashcroft, the former attorney general; and John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer who endorsed the wiretapping program — declined to be interviewed.

Congressional Democrats who had been critics of the program said they found the report’s conclusions disturbing.

“While former Bush administration officials continue to argue that their policies made the country safer,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, “I believe this report shows that their obsession with secrecy and their refusal to accept oversight was actually harmful to U.S. national security, not to mention the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans.”

A statement from Dennis Blair, the current director of national intelligence, said he was committed to “seeing that all surveillance activities protect U.S. national security and comply with the laws of the United States.”

Among other findings, the report concluded that Alberto R. Gonzales, as attorney general, provided “confusing, inaccurate” statements about N.S.A. surveillance activities to lawmakers in 2007, but did not “intend to mislead Congress.” Mr. Gonzales had said that a dispute between the White House and Justice Department lawyers in 2004 did not relate to the wiretapping program but rather to “other” intelligence activities.

The report states that at the same time Mr. Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping operation, he also signed off on other surveillance programs that the government has never publicly acknowledged. While the report does not identify them, current and former officials say that those programs included data mining of e-mail messages of Americans. That was apparently what Mr. Gonzales was referring to in his Congressional testimony.

The investigation stopped short of assessing whether the wiretapping program violated the law requiring court-ordered warrants before wiretapping Americans’ communications. But the report faulted the administration for what it called a failure to conduct adequate legal review of the program at its inception.

The report said that Mr. Yoo, of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, gave the White House his first legal opinion endorsing the wiretapping in November 2001, weeks after it had begun, and that his boss, Jay Bybee, was not even aware of the program’s existence.

Moreover, Mr. Ashcroft gave his legal authorization to the program for the first two and a half years based on a “misimpression” of what activities the N.S.A. was actually conducting. In March 2004, a showdown occurred in Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room when top Justice Department officials refused to sign off on the legality of the program and threatened to resign. The report said that the White House had the program continue by having Mr. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, sign the authorization.

What the report described as flawed legal opinions by Mr. Yoo and efforts to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that approves intelligence wiretaps, “jeopardized” the Justice Department’s relations with the court, the report said. The panel also recommended that the Justice Department examine criminal cases that grew out of the program to determine if prosecutors had complied with federal judicial requirements to disclose information to defendants.

In 2008, Congress restructured the federal surveillance law, the broadest such overhaul in three decades. The inspector generals’ report said the new law “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than did the original program. That same measure also gave legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

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