President Barack Obama quietly issued another signing statement on Friday, stating that he has the authority under the Constitution to disregard certain sections of the $106 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghainstan passed by Congress last week.

The provisions at issue in the bill sets policies and directs administration officials to promote them when negotiating with international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It would also require the White House to apply pressure to the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and calls on the Treasury Department to file reports with Congress on activities conducted by the World Bank and the IMF.

But Obama, who sharply criticized George W. Bush for issuing an unprecedented number of signing statements and ignoring the will of Congress, wrote that the provisions in the appropriations bill dealing with international financial institutions limited his “ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations” and therefore could ignore it.

“[P]rovisions of this bill within sections 1110 to 1112 of title XI, and sections 1403 and 1404 of title XIV, would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the congress prior to such negotiations or discussions,” Obama’s signing statement said.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised, if elected, to limit his use of signing statements. He has issued five other signing statements since taking office.

“What George Bush has been trying to do as part of his effort to accumulate more power in the presidency is he’s been saying ‘well I can basically change what Congress passed by attaching a letter saying I don’t agree with this part or I don’t agree with that part,” Obama said last year during a campaign stop. “I’m gonna’ choose to interpret it this way or that way.’ That’s not part of his power. But this is part of the whole theory of George Bush that he can make laws as he’s going along. I disagree with that. I taught the constitution for 10 years. I believe in the constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States.

“We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.”

In December 2007, the Boston Globe quoted Obama as saying it’s a “clear abuse of power to use such [Presidential signing] statements as a license to evade laws that the president does not like or as an end-run around provisions designed to foster accountability.”

“I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law.”

But that’s exactly what Obama did Friday. And since he was sworn in he has used it frequently and has used reasoning cited by the Bush administration to explain why he would ignore Congress.

After he was sworn in in January, Obama called on all executive branch agencies to ignore Bush’s signing statements.

By Jason Leopold, NEWS JUNKIE POST

A special prosecutor appointed to investigate the firings of nine federal prosecutors in 2006 has built a strong case against Alberto Gonzales that may result in obstruction of justice charges against the former Attorney General related to the role he played in the U.S. Attorney firings, according to attorneys directly involved in the probe whose clients have met with the special counsel.

According to legal sources, over the past several weeks Gonzales’s former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has provided damaging information to Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy, an Assistant U.S. Attorney from Connecticut, about Gonzales. Sampson is said to have told the special prosecutor that Gonzales was far more engaged in the attorney firings than he had previously disclosed to Dannehy, in Congressional testimony and in interviews with Justice Department watchdogs.

Sampson, these sources said, is also facing obstruction of justice charges and the sources familiar with his interviews with Dannehy said he had provided detailed information about Gonzales’s role in the firings in hopes of staving off the possibility of criminal charges he may face for his role in the dismissals. The legal standard for an obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and perjury charges is specific intent.

With that in mind, the legal sources added that although Dannehy has collected voluminous evidence over the past four months that would appear to suggest Gonzales and other Bush administration officials may have committed crimes related to the attorney firings–including perjury and conspiracy–it’s also possible that criminal charges won’t be filed if she believes she cannot prove intent.

However, Sampson is said to have provided Dannehy with an important piece of evidence that bolstered her case against Gonzales: the former Attorney General was aware of and helped create a list of federal prosecutors to fire.

In testimony before Congress in April 2007, Gonzales said he played no role in creating such a list and was unaware that anyone in his office had put such a list together.

“I have searched my memory,” Gonzales said, in response to a question by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) about one meeting Gonzales attended in November 2006 when he discussed the firings. “I have no recollection of the meeting…. I don’t remember the contents of this meeting.”

But Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.

Several legal sources said Sampson described Gonzales as “very hands on” with regard to the U.S. Attorney firings. However, one snag that Dannehy has apparently hit is proving that any of the prosecutor firings were specifically intended to thwart public corruption cases, according to legal sources familiar with her probe. Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California was in the midst of a corruption investigation involving associates of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Republican congressman from San Diego, when she was fired.

Gonzales’s attorney, George Terwilliger, did not return calls for comment Wednesday afternoon. Neither Sampson nor his attorney returned numerous calls for comment over the past week. Gonzales resigned as Attorney General in the summer of 2007.

Additionally, Dannehy is said to have closed in on former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and apparently has information that shows he allegedly perjured himself during testimony before Congress. McNulty testified before Congress in February 2007 that the prosecutor firings were “performance related,” an allegation he knew to be untrue. Documents released by the Justice Department showed that Gonzales and McNulty participated in an hour-long meeting with Sampson and three other officials on Nov. 27, 2006 – about two weeks before the U.S. Attorneys were fired – to review the plan to fire them.

However, legal sources knowledgeable about Dannehy’s probe said McNulty is unlikely to face any criminal charges about his role in the U.S. attorney firings.

Gonzales, meanwhile, has continued to downplay the seriousness of the prosecutor firings.

In an interview in February with CNN, Gonzales characterized the scandal and the public’s focus on it as “little negatives” and claimed, falsely, that a Justice Department watchdog report concluded that a majority of the dismissals were for “performance related reasons.”

Gonzales told CNN that the report prepared by Inspector General Glenn Fine and H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, “clearly found that there were performance related reasons for the removal of most of these U.S. attorneys and with respect to the remainder, they didn’t have enough information to draw definite conclusions.”

In a reent interview, David Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico whose firing was deemed by the inspector general to be the most partisan of the nine, said, Gonzales “needs to shoot straight with the American people.”

“Alberto Gonzales is showing the same remarkable disengagement he was criticized for by the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report,” Iglesias told me. “This time, he is disengaged from the official findings of fact. Far from being “little negatives”, despite the good work that was done by the Justice Department, the Inspector General’s Report officially found illegal political hirings of attorneys and immigration judges, an out of control Civil Rights section, and improper firings of U.S. Attorneys, myself included.

“The report, conducted by non-partisan, career investigators established our firings were “fundamentally flawed” and rejected “performance-related” reasons for seven out of nine U.S. Attorneys. In my case, the report examined and rejected every reason give for my firing as “disingenuous after the fact rationalizations.” The Justice Department was a train wreck under the failed leadership of Gonzales.”

Fine and Jarrett’s joint report concluded that Iglesias’s firing was the most “controversial” of the nine and that his dismissal was “engineered” by former New Mexico GOP lawmakers Sen. Pete Domenici, Rep. Heather Wilson and former White House political adviser Karl Rove over complaints about Iglesias’s refusal to secure indictments in voter fraud cases and in a public corruption case.

The watchdogs’ report said Bush and Rove “spoke with Attorney General Gonzales in October 2006 about their concerns over voter fraud in three cities, one of which was Albuquerque, New Mexico,” and concerns Domenici had about Iglesias’s job performance.

“There is conflicting evidence about exactly what was communicated to Gonzales, and what the Department’s response was to these concerns,” according to the report. “Gonzales testified that he recalled mentioning his conversation with Rove to [his former Chief of Staff Kyle] Sampson and asking him to look into the matter. Sampson told congressional investigators that he recalled that after the removals became public, Gonzales told him that he recalled the President telling him in October [2006] that Domenici had concerns about Iglesias.”

People who used to work with Iglesias n the U.S. Attorneys office in New Mexico have met with Dannehy, according to people knowledgeable about the probe. But, “out of deference to the on-going probe,” Iglesias declined to say whether he has met with Dannehy.

Fine and Jarrett did not have subpoena power and were unable to interview Bush administration officials in order to determine whether crimes were committed. Dannehy, however, has meticulously pieced together the rest of the narrative since former Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed her special prosecutor last October.

Dannehy has briefed Attorney General Eric Holder about the status of her investigation, according to Justice Department sources, but it’s still unclear when she expects to complete her probe.





Alberto Gonzales’ resignation speech from 9/17/07

By Jason Leopold, NEWS JUNKIE POST

Former detainees have alleged they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, according to a new BBC report based on interviews with more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram between 2002 and 2006.

Hundreds of detainees are still being held in U.S. custody at the Bagram prison without charge or trial.

“When prisoners are in American custody and under American control, no matter the location, our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake,” said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project. “Torture and abuse at Bagram is further evidence that prisoner abuse in U.S. custody was systemic, not aberrational, and originated at the highest levels of government. We must learn the truth about what went wrong, hold the proper people accountable and make sure these failed policies are not continued or repeated.”

In April, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at Bagram, including the number of people currently detained, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as “enemy combatants.”

“The U.S. government’s detention of hundreds of prisoners at Bagram has been shrouded in complete secrecy,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The American people have a right to know what’s happening at Bagram and whether prisoners have been tortured there.”

In a related case, the ACLU is representing former Bagram prisoner Mohammed Jawad in a habeas corpus challenge to his indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. The Afghan government recently sent a letter to the U.S. government suggesting Jawad was as young as 12 when he was captured in Afghanistan and taken to Bagram, where he was tortured.

Despite the fact that the primary evidence against Jawad was thrown out in his military commission case at Guantánamo because it was derived through torture, the U.S. government continues to rely on such evidence – including evidence obtained during interrogations at Bagram – in Jawad’s current habeas case to justify holding him indefinitely.

The BBC report comes several months after the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a bipartisan report on the treatment of prisoners at prison facilities Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate report concluded that a combination of various torture techniques approved by high-level Bush administration officials coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators were directly responsible for the December 2002 deaths of two detainees at Bagram.

The report classified their deaths as homicides. In other words, the two prisoners were tortured to death.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibulllah was killed two days after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

The details of their murders at the hands of military interrogators have been previously reported. But the Senate report includes new information about the behind-the-scenes meetings that took place between high-level Pentagon officials in the months before their deaths where “enhanced interrogation” policies implemented at Bagram were discussed.

Previous reports, including one from the Army’s criminal investigative unit, have pinned Dilawar and Habibullah’s deaths on rogue soldiers and on-the-ground military officials but have never linked the murders directly to the interrogation policies enacted by the Bush administration.

Indeed, a report into detainee abuse completed in 2004 by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the former Naval inspector general, who conducted an investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan at the request of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, specifically cleared Pentagon officials stating they “did not promulgate interrogation policies . . . that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees.”

A declassified version of the 360-page Church report, delivered to Congress in March 2004, said there was “no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture,” which critics of the Bush administration believed was a cover-up.

But the Armed Services Committee report undercuts those specific conclusions contained in the Church report and flatly states that policy directives authorized by Rumsfeld were a contributing factor to the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah.

The Armed Services Committee report says, “the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands of Bagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides.”

in February, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit two-pages from the Church report that had been classified. Those documents included details of two detainee deaths at Bagram in December 2002 believed to be Dilawar and Habibullah, but those pages did not identify the detainees who were killed by name.

Some of the former detainees interviewed by the BBC were held at Bagram during that time frame on suspicion of being involved with the Taliban government or al-Qaeda around the time the Habibulah and Dilawar were murdered.

The Armed Services Committee traced the murder of Dilawar and Habibullah’s to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the U.S. launched an attack against the Taliban government.

At that time, a Special Mission Unit Task Force (SMU TF) was charged with interrogating prisoners believed to have been linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Armed Services Committee report says in October 2001 the SMU TF was sent to Afghanistan “with a mission” and the rest of the description contained in the report from that point was redacted.

“While SMU TF operators conducted a limited amount of direct questioning, or, ’screening’ of detainees while on the battlefield, it appears that they did not conduct interrogations until at least October 2002,” the report says. “Prior to that point, SMU personnel had observed interrogations conducted by Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF-180), which had assumed control of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan at the end of May 2002.”

A footnote contained in the Armed Services Committee report notes that Vice Admiral Church “examined interrogation techniques used by SMU in the USCENTCOM area of responsibility.”

But Church’s report “did not discuss the SMUs” work interrogating prisoners.

The Armed Services Committee report goes on to say that interrogation techniques for Bagram were gleaned from Guantanamo during a two-day visit there in October 2002 by SMU TF members. The visit took place “just as the [Joint Task Force-170 stationed at Guantanamo] were finalizing a request submitted to SOUTHCOM…to use interrogation techniques including stress positions, removal of clothing, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, hooding, use of detainee phobias such as dogs, exposure to cold weather or water, and non-injurious contact such as grabbing, poking and pushing.”

Daliwar and Habibullah were subjected to a combination of those techniques, such as stress positions and hooding, and that played a major role in their deaths, the Armed Services Committee report concluded.

In late October, the SMU TF returned to Afghanistan and a proposal was made to the SMU Commander there. SMU TF “outlined a rationale” for conducting its own interrogations at Bagram.

They recommended the “imaginative but legal use of non-lethal psychological techniques (i.e., battlefield noises/chaos, barking dogs, etc.)” as well as stress techniques such as “sensory deprivation (hoods, silence, flex cuffs), sensory overload (shouting, gun shots, white noise, machinery noise) and manipulation of the environment (hot, cold, wet. windy, hard surfaces).”

SMU TF also proposed to Lt. General Dan McNeil, the commander of the Joint Task Force-180, building an interrogation facility for “high-value” detainees co-located at the Bagram Collection Point, where Daliwar and Habibullah were held and interrogated.

When the New York Times revealed in 2005 that Dilawar and Habibullah’s were tortured to death, McNeil was quote denying reports that the detainees were chained by their wrists to the ceilings in their prison cells.

“The briefing stated that CJTF-180 was focused on the detention mission rather than the interrogation mission, that ‘no advanced interrogation techniques’ including ’sensory deprivation/overload, sleep deprivation, psychological manipulation’ were employed by CJTF-180, and that current procedures were having only ‘limited success[es],” the report says.

“While the SMU briefing noted that ‘advanced interrogation techniques’” were not in use at Bagram prior to November 2002, Army investigations into the deaths of two detainees at Bagram in early December revealed that, by early December 2002, at least one of the techniques, sleep deprivation, was apparently in wide use there.”

The report noted that on Nov. 1, 2002, “a month before the two detainee deaths at Bagram, the [Special Forces Task Force] Staff Judge Advocate (SJA) analyzed legal authorities and constraints relevant to [Special Mission Unit Task Force] personnel’s participation in interrogations.”

The staff judge advocate’s analysis “is reflected in a memo which was provided to the Committee in redacted form,” the report says. “Although the particular interrogation techniques in use [at Bagram] were redacted from the version of the memo shared with the Committee, unredacted portions of that memo discuss the [Special Mission Unit Task Force] concerns about those techniques.

“Although the memo stated that while, in the author’s opinion, “none of the interrogation techniques used or observed by [redacted] personnel constitutes ‘torture,’” it also stated that “another observer might disagree.’”

In addition, the memo stated that one of the [redacted] techniques “could rise to the level of torture if applied in such a way and for such a period of time that it rises to the level of severe physical pain or suffering.. It also said, “Although the interrogation techniques may not constitute ‘torture’ they may rise to the level of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment proscribed by international law.”

On Nov. 28, 2002 Habibullah, an Islamic Mullah, was taken to Bagram by CIA operatives. “

“The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical,” according to the 2005 New York Times report.

A  day before Habibullah was taken to Bagram, Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes sent Rumsfeld an action memo advising the Defense Secretary to approve a list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including standing for up to four hours and the use of military dogs, to use against prisoners at Guantanamo. But as the Armed Services Committee report state, the interrogation policy “became known to interrogators in Afghanistan.

The Armed Services Committee report does not describe the brutal beatings he endured for the six days he was interrogated and detained at the prison facility.

But an autopsy attributed his death on Dec. 4, 2002 to a pulmonary embolism, “a blood clot dislodged by the beatings he’d received,” McClatchy Newspapers reported last year.

The New York Times added: “Habibullah’s autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the sole of a boot.”

Two days before he was killed, Rumsfeld signed the action memo presented to him by Haynes.

The Armed Services Committee report said those “aggressive interrogation techniques.. conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

“Shortly after Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of his General Counsel’s [William Haynes] recommendation to authorize aggressive interrogation techniques, the techniques­-and the fact the Secretary had authorized them–became known to interrogators in Afghanistan. A copy of the Secretary’s memo was sent from GTMO to Afghanistan.”

The Armed Services Committee report further added, “Captain Carolyn Wood, the Officer in Charge of the Intelligence Section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, said that in January 2003 she saw a power point presentation listing the aggressive techniques that had been authorized by the Secretary” a month earlier.

Wood was singled out in an Army criminal investigative report as having lied to investigators by saying that the shackling of prisoners in prolonged standing positions was done to protect interrogators from being harmed. The Army’s internal report said the technique-authorized by Rumsfeld-was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation.

Wood went on to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Defense Department reports into the abuse at the prison said she was responsible for interrogation procedures there that went above and beyond those approved by Army commanders.

However, as the Armed Services Committee report makes clear it was Rumsfeld’s interrogation directives and a Feb. 7, 2002 action memorandum signed by Bush suspending the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners that “opened the door” to the systematic abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to a detailed account in 2005 in the New York Times, Dilawar, a taxi-driver, was apprehended Dec. 5 by U.S. Forces and taken to Bagram and interrogated about a rocket attack on American base.

Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on Dec. 10, 2002.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar’s leg was pummeled so badly that the” tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified.”

“Had Dilawar lived,” Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”

According to the secret pages of the Church report released in February, “interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of “compliance blows” which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths.

The Church report claimed that “none of these techniques have ever been approved in Afghanistan.”

“Of these, three (marked with X) are alleged to have been employed during interrogations. These techniques-sleep deprivation, the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family, and beating are alleged to have been used in the incidents leading to the two deaths at Bagram in December 2002, which are described at greater length later in this report.”

However, the Church report, which said Dilawar and Habibullah’s deaths were isolated incidents at the hands of a few rogue soldiers, failed to take into account Rumsfeld’s directive to military officials at Bagram to get tougher with detainees and obtain “actionable intelligence” through “detainee exploitation” which, according to the Armed Services report, resulted in widespread abuse at Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The Church report goes on to say that a criminal investigation concluded in October 2004 with the recommendation that criminal charges be filed “against 28 soldiers in connection with the deaths.”

But the Bush administration officials who authorized and implemented the policies were not held accountable. Indeed, Vice Admiral Church, who conducted the investigation, never bothered to interview Rumsfeld because he did not believe it to be necessary.

“In the wake of the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, [Combined Joint Task Force-180] and the [Special Forces Task Force] began developing written standard operating procedures (SOPs) for interrogations,” the Armed Services Committee report says.

According to the Church report, following an investigation one day after Dilawar was killed, an Army lieutenant “prohibited several interrogation techniques implicated in the detainees’ deaths.”

Specifically, he prohibited the practice of handcuffing as a means of enforcing sleep deprivation, hooding a detainee during questioning, and any form of physical contact used for the purpose of interrogation.

“It should be noted that handcuffing as a means of enforcing sleep deprivation was never approved in any interrogation policy; and in any event…..constituted the only interrogation guidance in Afghanistan at the time,” according to the two-pages from the Church report. “Although some of the measures were later reversed in the March 2004 interrogation guidance, as described previously, they do not indicate initial action was taken.”

The U.S. Military never produced any evidence to prove that either Habibullah or Dilawar had connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

In fact, as the New York Times reported, when Dilawar had died, “most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

An award-winning journalist whose recent book sharply criticized U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and other officials as being negligent for failing to stop a key al-Qaeda figure during their tenure directing the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad filed a complaint with the Justice Department’s ethics watchdog requesting an investigation into Fitzgerald for allegedly using government resources to try and kill the publication of the book.

Peter Lance, a former investigative correspondent for ABC News, sent a letter last week to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) calling for a wide-ranging probe of Fitzgerald as a result of his “20 month campaign…to kill the hardcover and paperback editions of my Harper Collins investigative book Triple Cross.” [Full disclosure: I provided Lance with a quote endorsing his book that appears on the cover of Triple Cross].

Lance’s book was published in hardcover in September 2006. Months later, Fitzgerald, who rebuffed Lance’s repeated requests for an interview prior to the publication of Triple Cross, sent a letter to Harper Collins alleging the book defamed and libeled him (and others) and demanded the publisher stop distribution of Triple Cross and cancel any future printings and issue a public statement refuting the allegations made in the book about Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald also demanded “copies of all manuscript drafts and any correspondence between author and publisher regarding the fact-checking process for the book.”

Harper and Lance spent nearly a year and tens of thousands of dollars vetting the book internally and through an outside attorney. Other than some minor sentence structure changes the paperback version of Triple Cross—released last week—does not read differently than the hardcover version in its criticism of Fitzgerald.

Lance’s request for an ethics investigation into Fitzgerald cents on the fact that the federal prosecutor, who said he was acting as a private citizen in demanding the book be pulled from shelves, sent a 16-page letter dated Nov. 16, 2007 was sent from the office of the “U.S. Attorney Chicago” at 6:02 PM Central Time.

It’s unknown whether Fitzgerald, who rose to national prominence during his stint as special counsel investigating the role Bush administration officials played in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and his dogged pursuit of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and publishing magnate Conrad Black, used his staff to conduct research and draft the lengthy letters he sent to Harper Collins.

But that’s what Lance wants the DOJ’s ethics watchdog to find out.

Lance believes the letter Fitzgerald sent from the office of the U.S. Attorney of the Northern District of Illinois was “a clear attempt to intimidate me and chill my publisher.”

Lance has asked OPR to find out whether Fitzgerald, “apart from his use of the [fax machine from his U.S. Attorneys office]…devote any other Department of Justice Resources in furtherance of his campaign to kill the book.

Additionally, Lance said OPR should determine how much time Fitzgerald spent on “attempting to chill me and my publisher” and whether it had any impact on “his duty to protect the citizens of the Northern District of Illinois.”

“Perhaps most important,” Lance’s June 13 letter to Mary Patrice Brown, Acting Counsel of OPR, “did Mr. Fitzgerald use the privileges and powers of his office to intimidate a publishing company and a reporter who were acting in the best traditions of investigative journalism?”

“In effect, did he abuse his authority by bringing the weight of his reputation as a ‘relentless’ prosecutor to bear in attempting to crush a book he found critical” of his work as a federal prosecutor in New York.

“I ask that [OPR] to determine whether…Fitzgerald crossed the line from public official charged with protecting the Constitution to thin-skinned prosecutor who used the authority of his office to undermine it,” Lance’s complaint says.

A Justice Department spokesman said the agency was unfamiliar with Lance’s letter and declined to comment. Fitzgerald did respond to several requests for comment.

But a week before the paperback edition of Triple Cross was due to be released, Fitzgerald told the Associated Press that the book “lied about the facts and alleged that I deliberately misled the courts and the public in ways that in part caused the deaths in the 1998 [U.S. Embassy in Kenya] bombing attacks and in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

“It is outrageous to falsely accuse me of causing those deaths corruptly.”

But Lance’s book makes no such direct claims.

“Patrick Fitzgerald accuses me of making charges in the book that I never made,” Lance said in an interview. “At the same time, he continually fails to respond to the substantive allegations documented in 604 pages, 1,425 end notes and 32 pages of documentary appendices.”

Costly Blunders

What Lance does reveal, however, is that Fitzgerald, who in the 1990s was the Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York directing the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad, and other intelligence and Justice Department officials made some costly blunders that arguably led to the 9/11 attacks.

For example, in 1991, the FBI discovered that a mailbox store in New Jersey had direct ties to al-Qaeda but failed to monitor the location.

Four years later, Fitzgerald named the owner of the store as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror case he was prosecuting.

However, since Fitzgerald did not file any formal charges against the owner, the store continued to stay in business and once again fell beneath the Justice Department’s radar. Six years later, two of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their phony identification cards from that very store.

Lance’s account, which he spent seven years researching, relies heavily on internal government and court documents and trial transcripts, some of which he successfully had unsealed, to tell the story of former Egyptian army major and al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed, who hoodwinked government prosecutors like Fitzgerald and successfully penetrated the CIA’s Europe division and the FBI in California, all while Mohamed was secretly helping bin Laden orchestrate the African Embassy bombings.

Details of Mohammed’s deception kicks off the first chapter of Triple Cross:

“On October 20, 2000, after tricking the U.S. intelligence establishment for years, Ali Mohamed stood in handcuffs, leg irons, and a blue prison jumpsuit before Judge Leonard B. Sand in a Federal District Courtroom in Lower Manhattan.

“Over the next thirty minutes he pleaded guilty five times, admitting to his involvement in plots to kill U.S. soldiers in Somalia, and Saudi Arabia, U.S. ambassadors in Africa, and American civilians anywhere in the world … In short but deliberate sentences, Mohamed peeled back the top layer of the secret life he’d led since 1981…”

During that plea session, Lance writes, Mohamed kept quiet about “his most stunning achievements,” including how he avoided being caught in a State Department Watch List, enlisted in the US Army and was stationed at the same base where the Green Berets and Delta Force undergo training, and wooed a Silicon Valley medical technician, whom he married.

In the courtroom, Mohamed, fluent in four languages, “didn’t say a word about how he’d moved in and out of contract spy work for the CIA and fooled FBI agents for six years as he smuggled terrorists across US borders, and guarded the tall Saudi billionaire who had personally declared war on Americans: Osama bin Laden,” Lance writes.

Yet in the years prior to his dramatic courtroom appearance, Mohamed, Lance revealed, continually outflanked Fitzgerald.

After a face-to-face meeting with the al Qaeda spy in the fall of 1997, Fitzgerald tried, unsuccessfully to turn him and when Ali, spurned him and left, Fitzgerald, as Lance reports, turned to FBI agents and called Ali, “the most dangerous man I have ever met.

He vowed not to “let this man on the street” and yet that’s what he did for another 10 months as Mohamed perfected the East African Embassy bombing plot that Mohamed had set in motion in 1993. Fitzgerald waited until one month after the bombings that killed 220 and injured thousands before he finally arrested Mohamed.

According to the book’s press release, in 1996, Fitzgerald and other Justice Department and intelligence officials “discredited a treasure trove of al Qaeda-related evidence, including evidence of an active al Qaeda cell operating in NYC five years before 9/11 and of a Bin Laden plot to hijack a plane to free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—intelligence considered so important that it was later cited in the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing given to George W. Bush just weeks before 9/11.”

Additionally, in 1999, Lance alleges that Fitzgerald signed a false affidavit published for the first time in Triple Cross “swearing that the al Qaeda intelligence collected by an FBI informant was a fabrication, a “hoax” and “scam” perpetrated by [one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing Ramsey] Yousef and a Mafia figure the FBI had used to “sting” Yousef for eleven months from 1996-97.”

Lance’s theory is that Fitzgerald knowingly filed the false affidavit to possibly cover up ties between the FBI agent and a major mafia figure, who was the jailhouse informant’s father.

A careful analysis of the book’s footnotes and appendices clearly shows that all of the charges Lance leveled against Fitzgerald can be backed up by documentary evidence.

‘A Deliberate Lie’

Still, in one of his most recent letters to Harper Collins and despite the publication of supporting documents and footnotes that would appear to back up the allegations made against him, Fitzgerald characterized Triple Cross as “a deliberate lie masquerading as truth.”

Lance said that statement, as well as Fitzgerald’s comments to the Associated Press, is defamatory and libelous and uttered with “actual malice” and reckless disregard for the truth, which is what Fitzgerald had accused Lance of in writing Triple Cross.

“Even though I believe that Fitzgerald libeled me both in his ‘deliberate lie masquerading as the truth’ line in his fourth letter to [Harper Collins] and in his false statement to the AP, I would never sue Fitzgerald for libel or try and use the civil defamation laws to suppress criticism or limit public debate on an issue as he attempted to do in his 32 pages of threat letters sent to me and my publisher in what amounted to a 20 month personal vendetta,” Lance said.

“I believe in the free marketplace of ideas, and even if defamed by a powerful official like Fitzgerald, I would not use the civil tort of defamation to try and prevent him from expressing himself.”

Several weeks ago, Fitzgerald told the publisher if Triple Cross was published as planned and “it defames me or casts me in a false light, Harper Collins will be sued.”

Thus far, Fitzgerald has not made good on his threat.

jason@newsjunkiepost.com

By Jason Leopold, NEWS JUNKIE POST

Five people pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Detroit for their roles in a wide-ranging international stock fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mails, or “spamming.”

Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines while Bradley acknowledges that he is facing up to 78 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

The CAN-SPAM Act was passed by Congress in 2003 to address spam e-mails.  The criminal provisions of the Act prohibit falsification of certain information used in the transmission of e-mail.

John S. Bown, 45, of Fresno, Calif., pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. He also pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit computer fraud by creating a botnet and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. A botnet is a network of computers that have been infected by malicious software. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Bown acknowledges he is facing up to 63 months in prison and a $75,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

William C. Neil, 46, of Fresno, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the CAN-SPAM Act and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Neil acknowledges he is facing up to 37 months in prison and a $30,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

James E. Fite, 36, of Culver City, Calif., pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud, and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. He also pleaded guilty to violating the CAN-SPAM Act and making false statements to FBI agents. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Fite acknowledges he is facing up to two years in prison and a $30,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines. All five defendants are scheduled to be sentenced on Oct 29, 2009.

“We will not allow criminals to use e-mail as a conduit for fraud.  This prosecution, the Department’s largest to date under the CAN-SPAM Act, underscores our strong and steadfast commitment to ridding our financial markets and cyberspace of e-fraudsters looking to prey on innocent victims,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer.

“Alan Ralsky was at one time the world’s most notorious illegal spammer,” said U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg.  “Today Ralsky, his son-in-law Scott Bradley, and three of their co-conspirators stand convicted for their roles in running an international spamming operation that sent billions of illegal e-mail advertisements to pump up Chinese ‘penny’ stocks and then reap profits by causing trades in these same stocks while others bought at the inflated prices.  Using the Internet to manipulate the stock market through spam e-mail campaigns is a serious crime, and this case serves notice that federal law enforcement has the both the capability and the will to successfully investigate, prosecute and punish such cybercrimes.”

“Cyber crime investigations are a top priority of the FBI and we will continue to aggressively investigate those individuals who use and hide behind computers to commit various crimes,” said Andrew G. Arena, Special Agent in Charge, FBI.

“In today’s competitive international business world, there will always be a select few who illegally manipulate the system for their own profit,” said Maurice M. Aouate, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). “IRS CI will continue to diligently follow the money and assist in the seizure and forfeiture of any ill-gotten gains from their illegal business practices.”

“Today marks a victory for all those who entrust their money to others within the U.S. economy.  Postal Inspectors have protected Americans from those that have used the U.S. Mail for fraudulent purposes since the passage of the Mail Fraud Statute in 1872,” said Joseph A. Pirone, U.S. Postal Inspector in Charge.  “Ralsky’s and Bradley’s pleas demonstrate the Postal Inspection Service’s continuing commitment to protect the public.”

According to court records, from January 2004 through September 2005, Ralsky, Bradley, Judy Devenow, Bown, William Neil, Anki Neil, James Bragg, Fite, Peter Severa, How Wai John Hui, Francis Tribble, and others engaged in a related set of conspiracies designed to use spam e-mails to manipulate thinly traded stocks and profit by trading in those stocks once their share prices increased after recipients of the spam e-mails traded in the stocks being promoted. The defendants were indicted in the Eastern District of Michigan in December 2007.

Ralsky served as the chief executive officer and primary deal maker for the spam e-mail operation. Bradley, Ralsky’s son-in-law, served as the chief financial officer and director of operations for the spam e-mail operation. Bown, who was chief executive officer of an Internet services company, GDC Layer One, served as the chief technology officer for the spam e-mail operation. William Neil, who was an employee of GDC Layer One, built and maintained a computer network used to transmit spam e-mails as part of the conspiracy. Fite was a contract spammer who hired others to send spam e-mails as part of the conspiracy.

Devenow, Hui and Tribble previously pleaded guilty for their roles in the conspiracy. Devenow served as a manager for the spam e-mail operation and also sent spam e-mails. Tribble planned and directed the stock trading carried out in furtherance of the conspiracy. Hui, who was the CEO of China World Trade, served as the lead dealmaker representing the companies whose stocks were being promoted via spam e-mail.

The cases against Anki Neil, Bragg and Severa are still pending.

The charges arose after a three-year investigation, led by the FBI with assistance from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and IRS-CI revealed a sophisticated and extensive spamming operation. The case is being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg and Trial Attorneys Thomas Dukes and Mona Sedky Spivack of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

According to court documents, many of the spam e-mails promoted thinly traded “pink sheet” stocks for U.S. companies owned and controlled by individuals in Hong Kong and China. The spam e-mails contained materially false and misleading information or omissions and were created and sent using software programs that made it difficult to trace them back to the conspirators. According to the indictment, the conspirators used wire communications, the U.S. mail and common carriers to further their frauds. The conspirators also engaged in money laundering involving millions of dollars generated by their manipulative stock trading.

According to the indictment, the defendants used various illegal methods in order to maximize the amount of spam that evaded spam-blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening, and acting on, the advertisements in the spam. These included using falsified “headers” in the e-mail messages, using proxy computers to relay the spam, using falsely registered domain names to send the spam, and also making misrepresentations in the advertising content of some of the underlying e-mail messages.

jason@newsjunkiepost.com

The complaint, filed by the Justice Department on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation-Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), seeks maximum penalties from BP alleging the company violated federal clean air and water laws and failed to implement spill prevention technology.

The state of Alaska also sued BP for violating environmental laws. The state claims it lost as much as $1 billion in revenue claiming due to the oil spills, which resulted in 35 million barrels of oil that BP was unable to produce. The complaint says the spills along with BP’s work to repair a severely corroded pipeline “significantly reduced oil production for more than two years.”

BP officials would not comment on the lawsuits.

The Justice Department’s civil lawsuit further alleges that BP Exploration Alaska further violated the Clean Air Act by improperly removing asbestos-containing materials from its pipelines and failed to comply in a timely manner with a corrective order PHMSA issued to BP.  PHMSA’s order required BP Alaska to conduct certain testing, inspection, maintenance and repair activities.

But according to a November 2008 report in the Wall Street Journal, Scott West, who formerly headed the EPA’s criminal investigation into the spills, said the Justice Department, under George W. Bush, “hastened to shut down the investigation, settling for lower penalties than it could have obtained.” In early 2007, the EPA considered seeking penalties of up to $672 million and possible felony charges against BP, according to the Journal report.

“Nelson Cohen, the U.S. attorney for Alaska, said that opting for the $20 million fine was ‘a judgment call’ his office made,” the Journal reported. “It’s not my job to take every nickel from a defendant when they have done something wrong. Our job is to come up with what we feel is fair and just.”

West said the criminal investigation was halted after Ronald Tenpas, a career prosecutor for the Justice Department, was appointed assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources in May 2007, according to the Journal.

In November 2007, BP plead guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a $20 million fine for violating the Clean Water Act related to the March 2006 oil spill at the company’s operations in Alaska’s North Slope. The other spill for which the Justice Department sued BP occurred in August 2006. On Oct. 15, 2007, a few weeks before the company plead guilty to the charges, BP reported yet another spill to officials at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

The federal judge who placed BP on probation for three years said the 201,000 gallon oil spill that occurred in March 2006 was a “serious crime” that could have been prevented if BP had spent more time and funds investing in pipeline upgrades and a “little less emphasis on profit.”

The March 2006 oil spill-the worst in the history of oil development in Alaska’s North Slope- resulted from a severely corroded transit pipeline. Alaskan state officials said that as much as 260,000 gallons of crude oil leaked out of a pipeline in an oil field operated by BP and jointly owned by Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips and blanketed two acres of frozen tundra near Prudhoe Bay – just 60 miles from the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a region that proponents of drilling was to open up to exploration.

The spill went undetected for about five days before a BP oilfield worker detected the scent of hydrocarbons during a drive through the area that led him to believe there was a spill from one of the companies’ facilities.

Profits from drilling in Alaska’s North Slope have declined between 1999 and 2007. The volume of oil extracted from the North Slope fell from 800,000 barrels in 1980 to half that amount several years ago, which is part of the reason the Bush administration, BP and other companies had been so eager to drill in ANWR. Oil production in the region is now roughly 750,000 barrels per day and often fluctuates.

The Prudhoe Bay oil field–the largest in North America–accounts for 8 percent of the country’s domestic crude supply. Production at Prudhoe Bay began in 1977, and during its peak in the 1980s the field produced more than 1 million barrels of oil per day. BP operates Prudhoe Bay and shares the costs with owners Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil and Chevron. BP’s decades long presence in the North Slope would put the company in the lead position to drill in ANWR if the refuge were opened to exploration, Alaskan lawmakers have said.

As the volume of oil in Prudhoe Bay decreased, BP began to institute cost-cutting measures, laying off hundreds of employees and cutting back on safety and maintenance of pipelines and other infrastructure at Prudhoe Bay.

In a March 16, 2006 interview with the New York Times, longtime BP employee Marc Kovac said he and his co-workers warned the company numerous times that cost-cutting measures affecting routine maintenance and inspection would increase the likelihood of accidents, pipeline ruptures and spills.

“For years we’ve been warning the company about cutting back on maintenance,” Kovac told the New York Times. “We know that this could have been prevented.”

In federal court last November, Cohen, the federal prosecutor in Alaska, agreed that BP’s Alaska operations were shoddily run, stating that for more than eight years BP failed to run a cleaning device through its pipelines and allowed corrosion to build up.

The shortfall boosted world oil prices to what seemed like a bargain at the time: $60.81 at the close of business on October 26, 2007. The company also pleaded guilty that month to a felony and paid $50 million in fines related to an explosion at a Texas refinery that killed 15 employees and injured nearly 200 people. Furthermore, BP paid a $303 million fine to settle charges that the company manipulated prices in the propane market. On top of that, BP has a prior felony conviction for improperly disposing of hazardous waste.

Hundreds of pages of documents detailing BP’s decade-long neglect of its Prudhoe Bay pipelines, its internal safety regulations, and the company’s alleged cover-up of past oil spills that resulted from severely corroded pipelines support those assertions.

The BP documents, which include emails, photographs, videos, and letters sent to BP executives and Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and even President Bush, as well as internal reports, all of which were early warnings about problems plaguing BP’s Prudhoe Bay operations, were written by more than 100 company whistleblowers and date back as far as 1999.

The documents provide a detailed picture of how BP seemingly ignored dozens of early warnings from employees that its drilling operations on Alaska’s North Slope would be doomed if the company did not take immediate steps to upgrade its pipelines and other infrastructure.

Moreover, these records show how that over the course of five years federal and state lawmakers and other officials routinely failed to follow up on the warnings and take direct action to ensure that BP did not jeopardize a critical part of the country’s oil production and that it maintained the safety of its workforce.

Chuck Hamel, an activist and former oil broker based in Alexandria, Virginia, launched the now defunct web site that housed the documents ANWRnews.com. Hamel was contacted seven years ago by a group of BP employees who were concerned that the company’s cost-cutting measures at its Prudhoe Bay operations would have an adverse impact on safety and operations.

“We were concerned about BP’s cost cutting-efforts undermining our ability to respond to emergencies, and reducing the reliability of critical safety systems,” states a letter sent to Hamel signed by dozens of BP’s Prudhoe Bay employees on April 13, 2001. “We were concerned about the lack of preventative maintenance on our equipment. We had suffered a major fire, which burned a well pad module to the ground, and nearly cost one of our operators his life.”

Hamel is credited with exposing weak pollution laws at the Valdez tanker port in the 1980s and electrical and maintenance problems with the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, immediately took up the BP whistleblowers’ cause and in mid-2001 wrote a letter to BP President Lord John Browne raising the issue of safety and maintenance problems at the Prudhoe Bay facilities.

“Courageous ‘Concerned Individuals’ contacted me for assistance in reaching you,” Hamel’s April 11, 2001, letter to Browne said. “They have not succeeded in being heard in the past two years in London, Juneau or Washington. I am again a reluctant conduit. They hope that you will take whatever action appropriate to effect corrective action which would protect the environment, the facilities, and their safety.”

Hamel sent a copy of the letter to President Bush. While Browne promised to look into the issues plaguing Prudhoe Bay, the situation there worsened as oil spills became routine, and pipelines continued to rupture.

Additional whistleblowers came forward to expose the flaws at BP’s North Slope operations, in some cases warning company executives and lawmakers that an Exxon Valdez-type disaster was bound to happen if BP did not invest additional funds in upgrading its corroded pipelines and non-operational safety valves.

“The situation will continue to deteriorate for the workers’ safety and the environment until one of two things happen: Either there will be a major environmental catastrophe at Prudhoe Bay, similar to the Exxon Valdez, or there will be a change in environmental and employee safety oversight in Alaska before that disaster occurs,” according to a March 4, 2002, copy of BP employee William Burkett’s testimony before a Senate Committee chaired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. and Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla.

BP refused to budge, and on several occasions, Hamel alleged, company executives lied to Congress and Alaska state regulators about the condition of its Prudhoe Bay facilities and the amount of money the company was spending on maintenance and pipeline upgrades.

Glen Plumlee, a senior financial analyst with Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., operator of the trans-Alaska pipeline system of which BP is a majority owner, filed a complaint with federal labor officials in 2006 alleging that company executives retaliated against him because he cooperated with the Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal investigation into the company.

Plumlee, 51, of Anchorage, told federal investigators he was pressured to boost estimates of how much Alyeska was spending to fight corrosion on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Severe corrosion in one of BP’s transit pipelines at Prudhoe Bay, which connects directly to the trans-Alaska pipeline, is the reason the company shut down its North Slope operations this week.

Plumlee claimed that company executives pressured him in December 2005 to alter the amount of money BP-controlled Alyeska spent on pipeline corrosion – from $28 million to $46 million – for the previous year, which he refused to do.

Plumlee added that it wasn’t the first time he had been asked to cook the books. “On September 19, 2005, an Alyeska executive asked him to pull together the numbers on corrosion spending for Steve Marshall, BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.’s president,” according to an April 5, 2008 report in the Fairbanks News-Miner.

Another high-level executive of BP-controlled Alyeska also tried to warn company executives about numerous safety and maintenance problems associated with the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline system that, if unanswered, would have had a direct impact on BP’s Prudhoe Bay operations.

In August 2005, Dan Hisey, the former chief operating officer of Alyeska, created a comprehensive list for Alyeska’s top executives of the 101 current and potential problems plaguing the pipeline system, one of which was severe corrosion. A week after the list was circulated Hisey’s position was abolished.

The CIA destroyed videotapes that showed its agents subjecting high-level al-Qaeda detainees to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods after the agency’s inspector general issued a classified report in the spring of 2004 that concluded the techniques used on the prisoners “appeared to constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, as defined by the International Convention Against Torture.”

In a little known Jan. 10, 2008 declaration in response to a motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to hold the CIA in contempt for destroying the videotapes, the CIA provided insight into CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s report and revealed that he viewed the torture tapes.

“In January 2003, [Office of Inspector General] OIG initiated a special review of the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program. This review was intended to evaluate CIA detention and interrogation activities, and was not initiated in response to an allegation of wrongdoing,” the declaration says. “During the course of the special review, OIG was notified of the existence of videotapes of the interrogations of detainees. OIG arranged with the NCS to review the videotapes at the overseas location where they were stored.

“OIG reviewed the videotapes at an overseas covert NCS facility in May 2003. After reviewing the videotapes, OIG did not take custody of the videotapes and they remained in the custody of NCS. Nor did OIG make or retain a copy of the videotapes for its files. At the conclusion of the special review in May 2004, OIG notified DOJ and other relevant oversight authorities of the review’s findings.”

According to a Nov. 9, 2005, story in The New York Times published the same month the tapes were destroyed, “Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability.”

“They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States,” the New York Times reported.

“The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world,”the New York Times reported.” They said it referred in particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret location by the CIA since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe he is drowning.

The destruction of the videotaped interrogations, which were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, were destroyed in November 2005, after The Washington Post published a story that first exposed the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects, using techniques that were not legal on US soil. The Post’s story discussed the harsh methods the CIA used when questioning detainees. However, it’s unknown whether the Post’s story directly led to the destruction of the videotapes.

It is widely believed that the videotapes were destroyed to cover-up illegal acts. It is also believed that the tapes were destroyed because Democratic members of Congress who were briefed about the tapes began asking questions about whether the interrogations were illegal, according to Jane Mayer, author of the book The Dark Side and a reporter for The New Yorker magazine.

“Further rattling the CIA was a request in May 2005 from Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to see over a hundred documents referred to in the earlier Inspector General’s report on detention inside the black prison sites,” Mayer wrote in her book. “Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA’s interrogation videotapes.

“Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency’s top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubayda and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller. But the Democratic senator’s mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request the made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005.”

The videotapes were destroyed in November 2005, the same month that the Washington Post published a front-page story about CIA black prison sites where the interrogations took place and were filmed. Also in November 2005, the New York Times published a story about Helgerson’s classified report into the agency’s interrogation methods.

One person who assisted CIA Inspector General John Helgerson with his probe was Mary O. McCarthy, who alleged CIA officials lied to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

“A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that ‘CIA people had lied’ in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading,” The Washington Post reported.

McCarthy “worried that neither Helgerson nor the agency’s Congressional overseers would fully examine what happened or why.” Another friend said, “She had the impression that this stuff has been pretty well buried.” The Post story reported, “In McCarthy’s view and that of many colleagues, friends say, torture was not only wrong but also misguided, because it rarely produced useful results.”

In April 2006, ten days before she was due to retire, McCarthy was fired from the CIA for allegedly leaking classified information to the media, a CIA spokeswoman told reporters at the time.

In her book, Mayer wrote that the “2004 Inspector General’s report, known as a “special review,” was tens of thousands of pages long and as thick as two Manhattan phone books. It contained information, according to one source, that was simply “sickening.” The behavior it described, another knowledgeable source said, raised concerns not just about the detainees but also about the Americans who had inflicted the abuse, one of whom seemed to have become frighteningly dehumanized. The source said, “You couldn’t read the documents without wondering, “Why didn’t someone say, ‘Stop!’”

According to Mayer, Vice President Dick Cheney stopped Helgerson from fully completing his investigation. That proves, Mayer contends, that as early as 2004 “the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The [interrogation] Program.”

“Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney” before his investigation was “stopped in its tracks.” Mayer said that Cheney’s interaction with Helgerson was “highly unusual.”

Cheney has admitted in several interviews over the past month that he personally “signed off” on waterboarding three terrorist detainees.

In October 2007, former CIA Director Michael Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on “a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

jason@mynewsjunkie.com

In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, former Halliburton unit KBR complained that it will be at a “competitive disadvantage” to win “large-scale” international contracts because it is being forced to comply with U.S. laws.

In February, KBR pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and admitted that it paid $180 million in “consulting fees” to two agents for use in bribing Nigerian government officials to win a lucrative construction contract for the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant while former Vice President Dick Cheney headed the corporation. KBR paid a $402 million fine as part of its plea deal.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, KBR agreed to retain an independent compliance monitor for three years to ensure it is abiding by U.S. laws, limit its use of foreign agents, and promised to file regular reports on the compliance program with the Department of Justice.

KBR, which was spun off from Halliburton into a separate company in 2007, said in a 10-K filing with the SEC, however, that “limitations on our use of agents as part of our efforts to comply with applicable laws, including the FCPA, could put us at a competitive disadvantage in pursuing large-scale international projects.”

“Most of our large-scale international projects are pursued and executed using one or more agents to assist in understanding customer needs, local content requirements, and vendor selection criteria and processes and in communicating information from us regarding our services and pricing,” the company said in its quarterly filing, which was first reported by Footnoted.org, an investigative business news website whose reporters dig through SEC filings and pull out important nuggets of information.

“As a result of our settlement of the FCPA matters…a monitor will be appointed to review future practices for compliance with the FCPA, including with respect to the retention of agents. Our compliance procedures and our requirement to have a monitor may result in a more limited use of agents on large-scale international projects than in the past. Accordingly, we could be at a competitive disadvantage in successfully being awarded such future projects, which could have a material adverse effect on our ability to win contracts and our future revenue and business prospects.”

Additionally, KBR revealed in the same SEC filing that the company recently uncovered “information” that shows former executives may have been involved in a bidding scheme with its competitors but that the Department of Justice agreed not to pursue the matter in exchange for KBR’s guilty plea.

“In connection with the investigation into payments relating to the Bonny Island project in Nigeria, information has been uncovered suggesting that [former KBR Chief Executive Albert "Jack"] Stanley and other former employees may have engaged in coordinated bidding with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction projects, and that such coordination possibly began as early as the mid-1980s,” KBR said in its SEC filing. ” In connection with KBR LLC’s agreeing to enter into the plea agreement described above, the DOJ has agreed not to pursue any further investigation or penalties relating to the coordinated bidding allegations.”

According to the DOJ, at critical junctures before the EPC contracts were awarded, Stanley and others allegedly met with three successive former holders of a top-level office in the executive branch of the Nigerian government to ask the office holder to designate a representative with whom the joint venture should negotiate the bribes.

Last September, Stanley pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and conspiring to violate FCPA. The DOJ said Stanley paid more than $180 million in bribes to Nigerian government officials so KBR could win the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas plant contract.

Stanley is a close associate of Cheney who was promoted by the former vice president in 1998 to head Kellogg, Brown & Root, Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary. Stanley faces seven years in prison and nearly $11 million in restitution payments. His sentencing is scheduled for August.

According to last year’s plea deal, Stanley started paying bribes began in 1995, the year Cheney was named chief executive of the corporation, and ended when Stanley was fired in 2004.

Stanley and others allegedly negotiated bribe amounts with the office holders’ representatives and agreed to hire UK attorney Jeffrey Tesler and the other agent to pay the bribes. Tesler was hired as a consultant to KBR after it was formed in a 1998 merger that Cheney engineered between Halliburton and Dresser Industries.

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department indicted Tesler and Wojciech Chodan, 71, of Maidenhead, England, with one count of conspiracy to violate FCPA and 10 counts of violating the FCPA.

According to the indictment, Tesler was hired in 1995 as an agent of a four-company joint venture that was awarded four engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts by Nigeria LNG Ltd., (NLNG) between 1995 and 2004 to build liquid natural gas facilities on Bonny Island.

The scandal and plea deal, however, has not affected KBR’s ability to secure lucrative government contracts.

KBR was awarded a new $35 million defense contract last month to build a power plant and electrical distribution center in Iraq even though the company is under criminal investigation over the electrocution of two U.S. Soldiers who allegedly were killed as a result of KBR’s shoddy electrical work.

In fact, in its SEC filing KBR said it received written notification from the U.S. Department of the Army “stating that it does not intend to suspend or debar KBR from [Department of Defense] contracting as a result of the guilty plea by KBR LLC.”

KBR reported that government contracts the company received accounted for $11.6 billion in revenue in 2007 and 2008.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday Israel would back a peace agreement with Palestine but only if Palestinians agree that they have no control over their airspace, would give up the right to have an army, and would agree to a prohibition to bring in arms.

“In my vision of peace, two people live in good neighbourly relations, each with their own flag … Neither threaten the other’s security,” Netanyahu said in a speech at Bar-Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv, Al Jazeera reported. ”In any peace agreement, the territory under Palestinian control must be disarmed, with solid security guarantees for Israel.”

Nabil Abu Rudeina, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, immediately rejected the offer and blasted Netanyahu’s demands. He said the speech was a “deadly blow” to the peace process.

Rudeina also told Agence France-Presse:

“[Netanyahu] spoke of a Palestinian state while emptying it of any substance by excluding a stop to settlements.”

“By demanding the recognition of Israel’s Jewish character, he wants the Palestinians to become part of the global Zionist movement.”

“He wants to impose a solution without taking into account the rights of the refugees and by speaking in terms under which Jerusalem will not be the capital of the future Palestinian state, which will not have any sovereignty.”

However, Netanyahu did not rule out a complete halt to settlements, which the Obama administration was harshly critical of last week as thwarting efforts for peace.

We’re still waiting on reaction from the Obama administration to Netanyahu’s speech. We will keep you updated as this story continues to unfold.

jason@newsjunkiepost.com

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Last month, the CIA told a federal court judge it could not abide by a court order and turn over detailed documents about the destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes because it would compromise the integrity of a special prosecutor’s criminal investigation into the matter.

U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein responded by demanding a sworn declaration from special counsel John Durham confirming that to be the case. 

In a subsequent court filing, Lev Dassin, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, backtracked and said the government would no longer rely on that argument. Dassin said a “senior government official” would soon submit a declaration explaining why the detailed documents about related to the videotaped interrogations should not be turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Late Monday, the identity of the “senior government official” was revealed. It was CIA Director Leon Panetta, who said in a 24-page sworn declaration that the documents must be withheld in the interests of national security. 

Panetta argued that the documents should not be disclosed because they contain top-secret information about the use of specific interrogation techniques, as opposed to abstract information about the legal justification to use those methods that were included in four Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos — from 2002 and 2005 — that President Barack Obama ordered to be released in April.

Additionally, Panetta said a detailed description of the cables “contains information relating to intelligence sources and intelligence methods that is specifically exempted from disclosure” under the National Security Act.

Plus, “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations where [enhanced interrogation techniques] were applied would provide al-Qa’ida with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” Panetta said.

“Al Qa’ida has a very effective propaganda operation. When the abuse of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison was disclosed, al-Qa’ida made very effective use of that information in extremist websites that recruit jihadists and solicit financial support.

“Information concerning the details of the [enhanced interrogation techniques] being applied would provide ready-made ammunition for al-Qa’ida propaganda. The resultant damage to national security would likely be exceptionally grave, and the withholding of this information is therefore proper under” certain FOIA exemptions.

Arguments Challenged

However, Panetta’s arguments were disputed by ACLU officials.

“The public has a right to know not only which interrogation methods were authorized but how those unlawful methods were actually applied,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project. “This information is particularly important because documents that are already public suggest that interrogators disregarded even the minimal limits that the memos set out.”

Other civil liberties advocates noted that the Obama administration’s argument that disclosures of national security crimes could endanger national security could be a blanket excuse to conceal wide swaths of government wrongdoing.

“The CIA’s withholding of documents because they might be used as propaganda would justify the greatest governmental suppression of the worst governmental misconduct,” said Alex Abdo, a fellow with the ACLU National Security Project.

“If we accept the CIA’s rationale, the government could, for example, suppress any document discussing torture, Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay.”

The documents at issue, according to a description of the materials that accompanied Panetta’s declaration, included a photograph of the first “high-value” detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times during the month of August 2002 at a secret CIA “black site” prison.

Other documents were notes drafted after the videotaped interrogations were viewed; e-mails that raise questions about how the destruction of the tapes should be explained publicly; and other internal communications about the policies and legal guidance related to the videotaped interrogations and their destruction.

In previous court filings, the CIA disclosed that 12 of the 92 videotaped interrogations depict CIA interrogators subjecting Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged mastermind of the USS Cole attack in 2000, to brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding. The 80 other videotapes purportedly show Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in their prison cells.

Back-and-Forth

Last month, the CIA released indexes to the ACLU that showed how CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley, Virginia, with daily “torture” updates of Zubaydah during the month of August 2002.

The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

Some of those cables are included in the 580 documents the CIA has identified as relating specifically to the case, and Panetta is asking Judge Hellerstein to let the agency keep the materials under wraps for national security reasons.

The Obama administration has used similar arguments about a threat to national security in explaining why it won’t turn over to the ACLU 44 photographs that depict U.S. soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that a detailed description of the photographs at issue have been publicly available for some time. 

In that case, the Obama administration is now going above and beyond what the Bush administration had done in attempting to block the materials. 

While the Obama administration is appealing to the disclosure case to the Supreme Court, two pro-Iraq War senators, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, are pushing for legislation to block release of photographs showing U.S. soldiers mistreating detainees.

Sens. Lieberman and Graham threatened to shut down Congress if legislation they sponsored blocking the release of all such photographs is stripped from the Iraq/Afghanistan war supplemental funding bill. 

Both situations – the photos and the documents regarding the videotapes – mark an about-face on the open-government policies that President Obama proclaimed during his first days in office.

On Jan. 21, he signed an executive order instructing all federal agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests and promised to make the federal government more transparent.

Backlash on Openness

However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that after he ordered the disclosure of the “torture memos” in April, the President was stung by a backlash against his decision and now is aiming to avoid further criticism from the Right. 

According to former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, Panetta has become entrenched in the CIA bureaucracy. “It is obvious Panetta wants to make no waves at the CIA,” Goodman said.

“It is extremely difficult for any outsider to make his mark within a bureaucracy as parochial and insular as the one at CIA,” said Goodman, who spent more than two decades at the agency.

“Panetta, unfortunately, has tried to ingratiate himself with the negative elements. Panetta’s first mistake was to keep in place all of the holdovers from the era of George Tenet and Porter Goss, who were responsible for the culture of cover-up created at the CIA.

“In keeping Steven Kappes as the deputy director, Panetta signaled that there would be no change at the Agency and no punishment for corruption. Kappes, after all, was the ideological driver for those policies that Obama and Panetta criticized before Panetta’s confirmation.

“Instead of reaching out to contrarians or dissidents from the intelligence community, Panetta has relied solely on the leadership he inherited, the very people who have a vested interest in making sure that nothing changes.”