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July 20, 2006

Overruling Democracy

George W. Bush claims he wants to bring democracy to the Middle East. But the evidence indicates that Bush only likes democracy when the elections go his way.

The Palestinians, subjected to a ruthless occupation by Israel for nearly four decades, held a democratic election in January. Much to Bush’s dismay, they elected Hamas to lead their parliament.

Likewise, voters in Lebanon democratically elected representatives of Hezbollah to parliament.

Yet Bush and his minions are doing everything they can to undo those election results.

After Hamas’s election, Israel and the United States spearheaded the imposition of severe economic sanctions against the Palestinians that have virtually crippled their infrastructure. Israel, which continues to control Gaza’s economy, withholds about $50 million of Palestinian monthly tax revenues.

When Palestinians in Gaza captured an Israeli soldier and members of Hezbollah in Lebanon captured two Israeli soldiers, Israel unleashed massive armed attacks against the people of Gaza and Lebanon.

Although justified as necessary to free the captured soldiers, Israel really hopes to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah in the process.

The Israel military demolished hospitals, airports, highways, power stations, fuel depots, and entire buildings with their inhabitants in Lebanon and Gaza. Hundreds of innocents have been killed and thousands injured. Israel kidnapped dozens of Hamas leaders.

Since Israel began its assaults in Gaza and Lebanon, Bush has cheered Israel on.

The United States supplies Israel with the sophisticated weapons it employs to slaughter Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, in violation of the US Arms Export Control Act. That law requires military items transferred to foreign governments by the US be used solely for internal security and legitimate self-defense.

“In my judgment, the best way to stop the violence is to understand why the violence occurred in the first place,” Bush sensibly observed. But then he continued, “And that’s because Hezbollah has been launching rocket attacks out of Lebanon into Israel, and because Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers. That’s why we have violence.”

Wrong.

“Israel’s actions in no way can be seen as a legitimate response to the small-scale attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah,” Robert Dreyfuss wrote Monday on TomPaine. “Instead, what Israel has done has used the pretext of those pin-prick attacks – a couple of border raids and a handful of errant rockets – to launch a strategic attack whose goals are to crush Hamas and the remaining institutions of Palestinian self-rule and decapitate and destroy Hezbollah politically and militarily in Lebanon.”

When Hamas and Hezbollah captured the Israeli soldiers, they intended to use them to negotiate the release of hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, who have languished in Israeli jails for years in barbaric conditions with no charges against them.

But Israel, with the blessing of the US government, reacted with overwhelming military force, killing hundreds of people and crippling the infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon.

This is not self-defense. It is a war of aggression that violates the United Nations Charter. Israel is engaging in collective punishment in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The United States was the only country to veto a Security Council resolution that would have accused Israel of a “disproportionate use of force” in Gaza. This sends a clear message that Israel can do whatever it wants and Washington will support it.

US Ambassador John Bolton echoed this sentiment when he said there was no “moral equivalence” between the civilian casualties from the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and those killed in Israel from “malicious terrorist attacks.” In other words, an Israeli life is worth more than a Lebanese life, in the eyes of our ambassador to the United Nations.

Both houses of the US Congress are poised to express their support for Israel and condemn Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Bush claims that Iran and Syria are pulling the strings in Gaza and Lebanon. Although some of the arms Hezbollah is using are made in Iran, many analysts doubt that Iran or Syria is calling the shots.

So where do Hamas and Hezbollah come from?

These two Islamic resistance movements were born in the 1980s in reaction to Israel’s invasion, occupation and oppression.

When the civil war in Lebanon ended, Hezbollah became a political party, winning seats in Parliament, and it continues to function in mainstream Lebanese society. Hezbollah was successful in 2000 in forcing Israel to withdraw from the southern strip of Lebanon which Israel had occupied since its 1982 invasion.

Before 1994, Hamas restricted its guerrilla actions to political and military targets in the occupied Palestinian territories. On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, shot and killed 29 Muslim worshippers in the Mosque of the Patriarch in Hebron. Hamas took revenge with a new weapon – the suicide bomber.

One of the deadliest attacks was a Tel Aviv bus bombing in October 1994 that killed 23 people. Posters at universities in the West Bank and Gaza read: “Israel has nuclear bombs, we have human bombs.” Indeed, Sheik Hassan Yousef of Hamas told the Journal of Middle East Affairs in 2002, “We do not have F-16s, but we do have one weapon that is more powerful than the F-16 or anything else. It is a weapon that is unconventional and at the same time mightier than any nuclear bomb. It is the martyrdom bomber.”

James O. Goldsborough, a former columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, correlated increases in the number of suicide bombers with Israel’s stepped up violence against the Palestinian people.

Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy widespread popular support because they stand up to Israeli aggression. Both combine political action and militant jihad with humanitarian, social and educational programs.

As Robin Wright wrote in Saturday’s Washington Post, Hezbollah “runs a major hospital as well as schools, discount pharmacies, groceries and an orphanage. It runs a garbage service and a reconstruction program for homes damaged during Israel’s invasion. It supports families of the young men sent off to their deaths. Altogether, it benefits an estimated 250,000 Lebanese and is the country’s second-largest employer.”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told Wright that he joined Hezbollah after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. “We used to discuss issues among ourselves,” he said. “If we are to expel the Israeli occupation from our country, how do we do this? We noticed what happened in Palestine, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the Golan, in Sinai. We reached a conclusion that we cannot rely on the Arab League states, nor on the United Nations,” he added. “The only way that we have is to take up arms and fight the occupation forces.”

There is tremendous support for Hezbollah among Arabs. Abdel-Menem Mustapha, Egypt bureau chief of the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, said, “The Arab street feels strong sympathy with Hezbollah and Nasrallah, because its pride has been battered, and it is weary of decades of concessions made to Israel by Arab governments.”

Journalist Dahr Jamail, reporting this week from the Lebanese/Syrian border, said tens of thousands of Arab protestors took to the streets, condemning Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Jamail also reported that thousands of angry Iraqis marched in Baghdad in solidarity with Nasrallah and denounced Israel and the United States for the attacks.

Bush is determined to control the entire Middle East – propelled by the neo-cons who seek economic and political hegemony over the region, and the Christian Zionists who await Christ’s second coming in Israel. William Kristol, editor of the neo-con Weekly Standard, said, “It’s our war.”

Bush has been itching for an excuse to expand his war on Iraq to Iran and Syria.

“The U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, has been drawing up plans, at the President’s direction, for a major bombing campaign in Iran,” Seymour Hersh wrote in last week’s New Yorker. Senior military commanders have warned the administration that “the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program” and “could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States,” including endangering our troops in Iraq, Hersh added.

On Saturday, the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat claimed that Israel, with backing from the United States, had given Syria 72 hours to pressure Hezbollah into releasing the two captured Israeli soldiers and stopping their cross-border attacks into northern Israel. Washington has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, says, “The escalation in Gaza reflects the failure of Israeli unilateralism, the failure of the Quartet-backed ‘Roadmap,’ the failure of the US-orchestrated exclusion of the UN, the failure of the international community to end the occupation, and the failure of the UN to intervene and provide international protection in the meantime.”

The real tragedy from Israel’s recent aggression in Gaza is that it threatens to dismantle negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. The Hamas-Fatah “prisoners’ statement” would confine armed resistance to the Israeli occupation to the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, not inside Israel.

The US corporate media is a mouthpiece for Israeli foreign policy. For example, Fox News Correspondent Bill Hemmer, stationed in Kiryat Shmona, Israel, near the Golan Heights the other day, might as well have been working for Israeli television. He reported, “We took more rockets here,” referring to the primitive Katyushas launched by Hezbollah.

George W. Bush, the champion of democracy, is playing with fire. If he continues his uncritical support for Israeli aggression, and follows his “Bring ’em on!” strategy in Iraq with Iran and Syria, he may just unleash the Armageddon he yearns for.

July 11, 2006

Israel Creates Humanitarian Crisis

The daily horrors emerging from Iraq have caused a majority of people in the United States to oppose Bush’s war there. Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis Israel has created in the occupied territories hovers below the radar for most Americans.

Israel has used the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third by Palestinians as an excuse to invade Gaza with overwhelming military force and demolish its infrastructure. What Israel and its benefactor–the United States–really want is to destroy the democratically-elected Hamas government.

During the preceding weeks, Israel instigated events that resulted in the capture of the Israeli soldier. The Israeli military had killed more than 30 civilians, including three children and a pregnant woman.

In the week since the Israeli soldier was captured, Israel’s US-supplied artillery has pounded the northern Gaza Strip. Its aircraft struck bridges on the main roads. And its helicopters knocked out Gaza’s main power plant, leaving half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people and its two main hospitals without electricity and running water. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have warned of a humanitarian crisis.

Israeli troops and tanks rolled into the southern Gaza Strip, in the biggest raid since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Israel has kidnapped 64 Palestinian governmental ministers and politicians. It bombed the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the astounding statement, “I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of [Jewish] Sderot is even more important to me.” The Associated Press quoted Olmert as saying, “I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza. I want them to know what it feels like.”

The crisis caused by the Israeli government has upset many Israeli citizens.

Hundreds of Israelis protested outside Olmert’s home, denouncing the government as war criminals and demanding an end to the Gaza invasion. “We call for our government to stop targeting Palestinian civilians–the targeting of civilians is a war crime–and start negotiating with the elected Palestinian leaders, not to arrest them,” said Yishai Menuhin, a spokesman for the peace group Yesh Gvul.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy also criticized the Israeli actions. He wrote, “A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization.”

Israel’s brutal retaliation against Palestinian civilians constitutes collective punishment. Attacks on a civilian population as a form of collective punishment violate article 50 of the Hague Regulations, which provides: “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.”

The Fourth Geneva Convention also prohibits collective punishment. Article 33 says: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.” The Convention requires all states party to it to search for and ensure the prosecution of perpetrators of the war crime of “causing extensive destruction … not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.” Amnesty International called the deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure war crimes.

Collective punishment is likewise forbidden by Article 75 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. As four US Supreme Court justices agreed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last week, Article 75 is “indisputably part of the customary international law.”

Before Israel’s invasion of Gaza last week, Hamas was beginning to retreat from its position that Israel has no right to exist. But Financial Times quoted Efraim Halevy, Israel’s most widely respected security expert, as saying, “Why should Israel care whether Hamas grants it the right to exist. Israel exists and Hamas’s recognition or non-recognition neither adds to nor detracts from that irrefutable fact.”

The state of Israel is in no danger of perishing. Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world. Its “enemy” the Palestinian people have no tanks, no airplanes, no heavy artillery.

The United States’ loyal and consistent support for Israel’s policies–to the tune of more than $3 billion in aid per year–has enabled the Israeli government to conduct a war of terror against the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat once told an American journalist, “I’ll tell you what this war taught us. It taught us that the real enemy is the United States. It is against you that we must fight. Not because your bombs killed our people but because you have closed your eyes to what is moral and just.”

If the US really wished to act on its human rights rhetoric, it should apply political and economic pressure that Israel could not resist. Under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, military hardware sold by the United States can only be used for defensive purposes or to maintain internal security. Israel has used F-16 fighter jets, Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, 15mm howitzers, M-16 automatic rifles, M50 machine guns and many other weapons and ammunition supplied by the United States. Retired US Army General James J. David, in a letter to Colin Powell in January, 2002, wrote: “If you’re going to deny the Palestinians weapons to defend themselves, then you must stop all military and economic aid to Israel.”

The Foreign Assistance Act prohibits the United States from rendering assistance to the government of any country ” which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

The United States should halt Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians by suspending all economic and military aid to Israel until Israel’s military forces have been withdrawn from the occupied Palestinian territories.

But Israel is the US client-state in the Middle East and Bush is just the latest US president to continue that symbiotic relationship.

Hamas has responded to the recent Israeli aggression with threats of retaliation. This probably means the resumption of the suicide bombings which Hamas halted more than a year ago. A statement signed by Hamas spokesman Abu Obeidi said, “We reiterate that the continued aggression and terrorist acts of the tyrannical occupation against the Palestinian people, amid the silence of the international community, will plunge the region in a sea of blood.”

A 2002 New York Times editorial said, “The growing harshness of Israeli military practices in the West Bank and Gaza is creating thousands of potential suicide bombers and Israel haters as well as coarsening a generation of young Israeli soldiers.”

United for Peace and Justice has called for an immediate end to the assault on Gaza by the Israeli military forces; the cutting off of US financial and military aid to Israel as well as US support for the Israel occupation of the Palestinian territories; and immediate shipments by the US government of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

It is time for the American people to demand that the US government stop its support for Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian people.

June 28, 2006

Cut and Run vs. Cut and Parade

In another Woody Allen moment reminiscent of George W. Bush pinning the Medal of Freedom on disgraced ex-CIA Director George Tenet, a third George – General Casey – has taken a page from the Democrats’ troop withdrawal playbook.

After being prepped with the Pentagon’s 74-page cheat sheet about “staying the course” rather than “cutting-and-running” from Iraq, the Republicans walked in lockstep for the past two weeks, shooting down the Democrats’ calls for bringing our soldiers home.

Late last week, Casey, the US commander in Iraq, condemned the concept of a withdrawal timetable. “I don’t like it,” he declared. “I feel it would limit my flexibility. I think it would give the enemy a fixed timetable, and I think it would send a terrible signal to a new government of national unity in Iraq that’s trying to stand up and get its legs underneath it.”

At the same time, speaking out of both sides of his medals, Casey was secretly recommending that Bush drastically reduce our troop commitment, coincidentally, just before the November elections. How bizarre.

Maybe it wasn’t Woody Allen who said, “When you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.” But that’s just what the un-indicted Karl Rove is best at.

Rove knows that the mess his boss created in Iraq will be on voters’ minds come November. By pulling the rug out from under the (semi-unified) Democrats’ strongest issue, he maximizes the chances of GOP retention of Congress.

Senator John Kerry, who finally admitted a couple of weeks ago he was wrong to vote for the war, said Casey’s plan “looks an awful lot like what the Republicans spent the last week attacking. Will the partisan attack dogs now turn their venom and disinformation campaign on General Casey?” Unlikely, given the GOP’s proclivity to goosestep to its commander in chief.

Keeping his options open, Bush conditions the pullback on the Iraqis’ ability to do the job. He can always send the troops back in after the election.

Things are not going swimmingly in Iraq right now. Twelve US troops died or were found dead this week. On Friday, a car bomb killed at least 5 people and wounded 18 in Basra. A bomb hit the Sunni mosque in Hibhib northeast of Baghdad where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed earlier this month; Friday’s bomb killed 10 worshippers and wounded 15. Also on Friday, the Iraqi government declared a state of emergency in Baghdad as US and Iraqi forces battled resistance fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles near the Green Zone.

On Monday, bombs at markets in two Iraqi cities killed at least 40 people and at least 22 others died throughout Iraq.

The same day, Zalmay Khalizad, US ambassador to Iraq, verified claims in a paper he signed documenting retaliation against Iraqis working with the US in the Green Zone. He touted the 8 hours of electricity per day that people in Baghdad now enjoy, up from 4 just a month ago.

Ultimately, the Bush administration plans to retain a small contingent of about 50,000 troops and the large “super” military bases it is building in Iraq, the raison d’etre for Operation “Iraqi Freedom.” Bush has no intention of ever leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented a 24-point national reconciliation plan on Sunday.

Maliki’s original plan called for the recognition of the legitimacy of the national resistance, differentiating it from the terrorists. It also advocated a timetable for withdrawal of coalition forces, and amnesty for Iraqis who had not killed civilians. Under intense pressure from the Bush administration and the Shia-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, these provisions were removed from the final document.

According to recent surveys, 87 percent of Iraqis favor a withdrawal timetable for US forces. On Monday, one Sunni leader in Iraq said the insurgency would persist until Washington sets such a timetable, but 7 Sunni groups offered the government a conditional truce.

The prime minister’s plan aims to offer amnesty to insurgents “not proved to be involved in crimes, terrorist activities and war crimes against humanity.” That would seem to exclude Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice.

Oddly, it was the Democrats who screamed the loudest about the amnesty plan. Senator Carl Levin called it “unconscionable,” exclaiming, “For heaven’s sake, we liberated that country.” Tell that to the Iraqi people.

June 23, 2006

‘Friendly Fire’ Cover-up

Sgt. Patrick R. McCaffrey Sr. and 1st Lt. Andre D. Tyson died on this day two years ago in Balad, Iraq. Back then, military officials reported that enemy insurgents ambushed them. The Army subsequently conducted an investigation and learned the men were targeted and killed by Iraqi troops they were training.

Although the Army completed its investigation on Sept. 30, 2005, it failed to clarify the initial notification to the families for nine months. It took a May 22 letter from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office to force the Army to finally come clean.

A month before he died, Patrick told his father that Iraqi forces they were training had attacked his unit. When he filed a complaint with his chain of command, Patrick “was told to keep his mouth shut,” his mother said.

After Patrick died, his parents conducted their own investigations. The Army denied requests to see autopsy reports. The McCaffreys persisted. They talked to soldiers in their son’s unit and managed to learn what really happened.

Bob McCaffrey was informed by members of his son’s company that insurgents were offering Iraqi soldiers about $100 for each American they could kill. “Iraqi troops are turning on their American counterparts,” Bob said. “That puts a knock in the spin that the White House is trying to put on this story — how the Iraqis are being well-trained and are getting ready to take over.”

Nadia McCaffrey learned that after her son was shot, a U.S. truck arrived. It picked up Lt. Tyson, who was dead, but did not take her son who was still alive. The truck returned later and took him to the base, where he bled to death.

Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Oscar Hilman and three other officers visited Patrick’s mother to deliver the official report. “It was overwhelming,” Nadia told me. “I had to live through the whole thing again.”

The officers “tried to patronize me as a good mom,” she added. “I said I won’t stand for that. I want the truth!”

When Nadia talked to Army officers yesterday she asked them, “How could you possibly let this happen”? They sat silent.

An Army official cited the “complexity” of the case as an excuse for the delay in telling the families how their sons really died, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“They never tell the family the truth,” said Ophelia Tyson, grandmother of Andre Tyson. “You know how politics is.”

“I really want this story to come out; I want people to know what happened to my son,” Nadia said. “There is no doubt to me that this is still happening to soldiers today, but our chain of command is awfully reckless; they don’t seem to give a damn about what’s happening to soldiers.”

The father of two children, Patrick joined the National Guard the day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. He was the first combat death in the 58-year history of California’s 579 Engineer Battalion, based in Petaluma, Calif. Patrick was listed as “Casualty No. 848.” That was 1,652 deaths ago.

“He was killed by the Iraqis that he was training,” Nadia said. “People in this country need to know that.”

“It’s god-awful,” said Bob, himself an Army veteran. “It underlies the lie of this whole situation in Iraq. It’s all to me a pack of lies.”

Boxer noted, “You have to ask yourself, ‘What are we doing there with a blank check and a blind eye, when our soldiers are risking their lives for the Iraqi people, and the Iraqis are turning around and killing our soldiers?’ We need an exit strategy.”

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June 20, 2006

One Nation Under Surveillance

We do not believe the Executive has, or should have, the inherent
constitutional authority to violate the law or infringe the legal rights
of Americans, whether it be a warrantless break-in into the home or
office of an American, warrantless electronic surveillance, or a
President’s authorization to the FBI to create a massive domestic
security program based upon secret oral directives.
-Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976

The revelation that President George W. Bush authorized the unlawful warrantless surveillance of Americans has resurrected the discussion of the proper balance to be struck between liberty and security.

This discourse is not new in the United States. Benjamin Franklin warned, “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” Franklin was prescient. Throughout our history, we have grappled with this apparent tension. Unfortunately, all too often, we have lost our liberties – without becoming more secure. It has been primarily the executive branch that has overreached across the lines that separate the three branches of our government. In this post-9/11 world, under the guise of his “Global War on Terror,” George W. Bush has arrogated to himself a level of presidential authority that rivals any such usurpation in the past.

Surveillance in this country has been aimed at slaves, immigrants, political radicals, suspected lawbreakers, the poor, workers, and anyone with a credit card or a computer. It has frequently been used by the government to suppress criticism of its policies.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party’s political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans. The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything “false, scandalous and malicious” with the intent to hold the government in “contempt or disrepute.” The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of repressive legislation passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).
During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in “red-baiting.”
COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) was designed to “disrupt, misdirect and otherwise neutralize” political and activist groups. In the 1960s, the FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a program called “Racial Matters.” King’s campaign to register African-American voters in the South raised the hackles of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who disingenuously claimed King’s organization was being infiltrated by communists. In fact, the FBI was really concerned that King’s civil rights and anti-Vietnam War campaigns “represented a clear threat to the established order of the U.S.” It went after King with a vengeance, wiretapping his telephones and securing personal information which it used to try to discredit him and drive him to divorce and suicide.

In response to the excesses of COINTELPRO, a congressional committee chaired by Senator Frank Church conducted an investigation of activities of the domestic intelligence agencies. The Church Committee concluded, “[I]ntelligence activities have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens and … they have done so primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.” The committee added, “In an era where the technological capability of Government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward ‘big brother government’ … Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law.” The committee stressed that the “advocacy of political ideas is not to be the basis for governmental surveillance.”

Congress established guidelines to regulate intelligence-gathering by the FBI. Reacting against President Richard Nixon’s assertion of unchecked presidential power, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, to regulate electronic surveillance while protecting national security.

FISA established a secret court to consider applications by the government for wiretap orders. It specifically created only one exception for the President to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant. For that exception to apply, the Attorney General must certify under oath that the communications to be monitored will be exclusively between foreign powers, and that there is no substantial likelihood that a United States person will be overheard.

In 2002, in direct violation of FISA, Bush signed an executive order that authorizes the National Security Agency to wiretap people within the United States with no judicial review. It is estimated that the NSA has eavesdropped on thousands of private conversations in the last four years. Additionally, the NSA has combed through large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States. It has collected vast personal information that has nothing to do with national security.

Electronic surveillance was first used during the Holocaust when IBM worked for the Nazi government organizing and analyzing its census data. Death camp barcodes – linked to computerized records – were tattooed onto prisoners’ forearms.

The advent of digital technology raised surveillance to a new level. Social Security numbers, credit cards, gym memberships, library cards, health insurance records, bar codes, GSM chips in cell phones, toll booths, hidden cameras, workplace identification badges, and the Internet all provide the government with effective tools to keep track of our finances, our politics, our personal habits, and our whereabouts through data mining. The Privacy Foundation determined in a 2001 survey that one-third of all American workers who use the Internet or email on the job are under “constant surveillance” by employers.

One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act lowered the standards for government surveillance of telephone and computer communications, and empowered the government to monitor books people read. It created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would “lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

That day came with the recent decision of a New York federal judge, dismissing a case that challenged the detention of hundreds of Arab and Muslim foreign nationals shortly after 9/11. None has been convicted of any crime involving terrorism. U.S. District Judge John Gleason ruled in Turkmen v. Ashcroft that the round-up and indefinite detention of foreign nationals on immigration charges based only on their race, religion or national origin does not violate equal protection or due process. This is not surprising in light of the anti-immigrant hysteria sweeping our country today.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans “they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

Milton Mayer described the escalation of surveillance that accompanied the rise of German fascism: “What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.” We should heed his words.

June 13, 2006

Spinning Suicide

They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.
Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of Guantánamo prison camp

Three men being held in the United States military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, killed themselves by hanging in their cells on Saturday. The Team Bush spin machine immediately swept into high gear.

Military officials characterized their deaths as a coordinated protest. The commander of the prison, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., called it “asymmetrical warfare.”

Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, said taking their lives “certainly is a good PR move.”

Meanwhile, George W. Bush expressed “serious concern” about the deaths. “He stressed the importance of treating the bodies in a humane and culturally sensitive manner,” said Christie Parell, a White House spokeswoman.

How nice that Bush wants their bodies treated humanely, after treating them like animals for four years while they were alive. Bush has defied the Geneva Conventions’ command that all prisoners be treated humanely. He decided that “unlawful combatants” are not entitled to humane treatment because they are not prisoners of war.

Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions requires that no prisoners, even “unlawful combatants,” may be subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. Incidentally, the Pentagon has decided to omit the mandates of Article 3 Common from its new detainee policies.

Bush resisted the McCain anti-torture amendment to a spending bill at the end of last year, sending Dick Cheney to prevail upon John McCain to exempt the CIA from its prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. When McCain refused to alter his amendment, Bush signed the bill, quietly adding one of his “signing statements,” saying that he feels free to ignore the prohibition if he wants to.

Bush & Co. are fighting in the Supreme Court to deny the Guantánamo prisoners access to US courts to challenge their confinement. The Court will announce its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld by the end of this month.

This hardly sounds like a man who believes in humane treatment for live human beings.

The three men who committed suicide, Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habradi,Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, were being held indefinitely at Guantánamo. None had been charged with any crime. All had participated in hunger strikes and been force-fed, a procedure the United Nations Human Rights Commission called
“torture.”

“A stench of despair hangs over Guantánamo. Everyone is shutting down and quitting,” said Mark Denbeaux, a lawyer for two of the prisoners there. His client, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, “is trying to kill himself” in a hunger strike. “He told us he would rather die than stay in Guantánamo,” Denbeaux added.

While the Bush administration is attempting to characterize the three suicides as political acts of martrydom, Shafiq Rasul, a former Guantánamo prisoner who himself participated in a hunger strike while there, disagrees. “Killing yourself is not something that is looked at lightly in Islam, but if you’re told day after day by the Americans that you’re never going to go home or you’re put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation and loss of hope,” he said. “This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else.”

“The total, intractable unwillingness of the Bush administration to provide any meaningful justice for these men is what is at the heart of these tragedies,” according to Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantánamo prisoners.

Last year, at least 131 Guantánamo inmates engaged in hunger strikes, and 89 have participated this year. US military guards, with assistance from physicians, are tying them into restraint chairs and forcing large plastic tubes down their noses and into their stomachs to keep them alive. Lawyers for the prisoners have reported the pain is excruciating.

The suicides came three weeks after two other prisoners tried to kill themselves by overdosing on antidepressant drugs.

Bush is well aware that more dead US prisoners would be embarrassing for his administration, especially in light of the documented torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the execution of civilians in Haditha.

More than a year ago, the National Lawyers Guild and the American Association of Jurists called for the US government to shut down its “concentration camp” at Guantánamo. The UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Committee against Torture, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the Council of Europe, have also advocated the closure of Guantánamo prison.

Bush says he would like to close the prison, but is awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision. At the same time, however, his administration is spending $30 million to construct permanent cells at Guantánamo.

June 6, 2006

Stop the Beast

To date, the Iraq War represents the fullest and most relentless application of the Bush Agenda. The ‘freer and safer world’ envisioned by Bush and his administration is ultimately one of an ever-expanding American empire driven forward by the growing powers of the nation’s largest multinational corporations and unrivaled military.
-Antonia Juhasz, The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

In an annual security conference on Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld assured the audience, “We don’t intend to occupy [Iraq] for any period of time. Our troops would like to go home and they will go home.”

Why, then, would the United States be building an enormous embassy in Baghdad and a base so large, it eclipses Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel which had been the largest foreign US military base built since Vietnam?
The new embassy, which occupies a space two-thirds the area of the national mall in Washington DC, comprises 21 buildings which will house over 8,000 government officials. It has a huge pool, gym, theater, beauty salon, school, and six apartment buildings.

The gargantuan military base, Camp Anaconda, occupies 15 square-miles of Iraqi soil near Balad. The base is home to 20,000 soldiers and thousands of “contractors,” or mercenaries. The aircraft runway at Anaconda is the second busiest in the world, behind only Chicago’s O’Hare airport. And, depending on which report you read, between six and fourteen more U.S. military bases are under construction in Iraq. It doesn’t appear we’ll be leaving any time soon — or any time, really.

Bush’s trumped-up war on Iraq has claimed nearly 2,500 US military lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Thousands of US soldiers suffer in military hospitals, most with head injuries, many missing limbs. Thousands more have PTSD. Our economy is in shambles from the war and Bush’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich. And America’s moral standing in the world continues to plummet.

So, with all the construction activity in Iraq, and with an overextended military and an under funded budget, how could the Bush Administration possibly consider expanding the fight and attacking Iran? Logic and reason say it couldn’t happen and shouldn’t happen. But this administration has rarely paid much heed to logic and reason.

The plan to attack Iran has long been in the works. Bush gave us a preview in January 2002 when he inaugurated it into his “axis of evil.” His 2006 National Military Strategy says, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.” On Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld called Iran the world’s leading terrorist nation. Does any of this have a familiar ring to it?

To understand why the US may attack Iran, one must consider the underlying motive of US militarism. The recent US strategy is calculated to maintain economic, political and military hegemony over oil-rich areas of the world. A 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post Cold War Strategy that was leaked to the New York Times said, “Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia to] preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”

Truthout writer Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who spent eight months in occupied Iraq, told a gathering at Thomas Jefferson School of Law on Friday that the US has been conducting ongoing special operations inside Iran. He cited unmanned surveillance drones flying over Iran. Jamail predicts Bush will invade Iran before the November election.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern agrees with Jamail’s prediction, but thinks it will happen in June or July. “There is already one carrier task force there in the Gulf, two are steaming toward it at the last report I have at least – they will be there in another week or so,” McGovern said on The Alex Jones Show.

Team Bush is following the same game plan used in the run-up to Iraq – hyping a threat that doesn’t exist and going through the motions of diplomacy.

Bush & Co. are not motivated by rationality. They act in the interests of the huge corporations, at the expense of humanity. During the Bush years, oil companies have earned record profits. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton has landed many of the juiciest contracts in Iraq. New Iraqi laws that US ambassador Paul Bremer put in place lock in significant advantages for US corporations in Iraq, including corporate control of Iraq’s oil.

Neoconservative Thomas Friedman, in a March 1999 New York Times article illustrated by an American flag on a fist, accurately summed up US foreign policy:

For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is … The hidden hand of the market will never work without
a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the
designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps.

As long as we allow our government to pursue this strategy, Abu Ghraibs and Hadithas will continue to emerge, our soldiers and thousands of people in other countries will continue to die, and our economy will continue toward bankruptcy. It is up to us to stop the beast – now!

May 30, 2006

The Haditha Massacre

They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.
– Observations of Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones after the Haditha Massacre

On November 19, 2005, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton allegedly killed 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in a three to five hour rampage. One victim was a 76-year-old amputee in a wheelchair holding a Koran. A mother and child bent over as if in prayer were also among the fallen. “I pretended that I was dead when my brother’s body fell on me, and he was bleeding like a faucet,” said Safa Younis Salim, a 13-year-old girl who survived by faking her death.

Other victims included girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3 and 1. The Washington Post reported, “Most of the shots … were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, doctors at Haditha’s hospital said.”

The executions of 24 unarmed civilians were conducted in apparent retaliation for the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas when a small Marine convoy hit a roadside bomb earlier that day.

A statement issued by a US Marine Corps spokesman the next day claimed: “A US Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.”

A subsequent Marine version of the events said the victims were killed inadvertently in a running gun battle with insurgents.

Both of these stories were false and the Marines knew it. They were blatant attempts to cover up the atrocity, disguised as “collateral damage.”

The Marine Corps paid $38,000 in compensation to relatives of the victims, according to a report in the Denver Post. These types of payments are made only to compensate for accidental deaths inflicted by US troops. This was a relatively large amount, indicating the Marines knew something was not right during that operation, according to Mike Coffman, the Colorado state treasurer who served in Iraq recently as a Marine reservist.

Congressman John Murtha, D-Pa., a former Marine, was briefed on the Haditha investigation by Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee. Murtha said Sunday, “The reports I have from the highest level: No firing at all. No interaction. No military action at all in this particular incident. It was an explosive device, which killed a Marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people.”

The Haditha massacre did not become public until Time Magazine ran a story about it in March of this year. Time had turned over the results of its investigation, including a videotape, to the US military in January. Only then did the military launch an investigation.

These Marines “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results,” a US official told the Los Angeles Times.

“Marines over-reacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” Murtha said.

Murtha’s statement both indicts and exonerates the Marines of the crime of murder.

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Premeditation and deliberation – cold-blooded planning – are required for first degree murder. Complete self-defense can be demonstrated by an honest and reasonable belief in the need to defend oneself against death or great bodily injury. The Marines might be able to show that, in the wake of the killing of their buddy Terrazas by an improvised explosive device, they acted in an honest belief that they might be killed in this hostile area. But the belief that unarmed civilians inside their homes posed a deadly threat to the Marines would be unreasonable. An honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend constitutes imperfect self-defense, which negates the malice required for murder, and reduces murder to manslaughter.

An honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend constitutes imperfect self-defense, which negates the malice required for murder, and reduces murder to manslaughter.

Many of our troops suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, a Marine in Kilo Company, did not participate in the Haditha massacre. TJ Terrazas was his best friend. Briones, who was 20 years old at the time, saw Terrazas after he was killed. “He had a giant hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back up in his skull,” Briones said of his buddy.

“A lot of people were mad,” Briones said. “Everyone had just a [terrible] feeling about what had happened to TJ.”

After the massacre, Briones was ordered to take photographs of the victims and help carry their bodies out of their homes. He is still haunted by what he had to do that day. Briones picked up a young girl who was shot in the head. “I held her out like this,” he said, extending his arms, “but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs.”

“I used to be one of those Marines who said that post-traumatic stress is a bunch of bull,” said Briones, who has gotten into serious trouble since he returned home. “But all this stuff that keeps going through my head is eating me up. I need immediate help.”

A key quote from a Marine officer could be used to show premeditation – and thus malice – in support of a possible murder charge against the shooters. An article in yesterday’s San Diego Union-Tribune which is reprinted from the New York Times News Service, cites a report by “one Marine officer” that “inspectors suspected at least part of the motive for the killings was to send a message to local residents that they would ‘pay a price’ for failing to warn the Marines about insurgent activity in the area.”

Curiously, that paragraph is missing from the same story in both the print and online editions of yesterday’s New York Times. For some reason, the Times had second thoughts about that paragraph, and removed it, after the copy had been sent to other papers over the wire.

Regardless of how those who may ultimately be charged with murder fare in court, a more significant question is whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will be charged with war crimes on a theory of command responsibility.

Willful killing is considered a war crime under the US War Crimes Act. People who commit war crimes can be punished by life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if he knew or should have known his inferiors were committing war crimes and he failed to stop or prevent it.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are knowingly prosecuting a war of aggression in Iraq. Under the United Nations Charter, a country cannot invade another country unless it is acting in self-defense or it has permission from the Security Council. Iraq had invaded no country for 11 years before “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the council never authorized the invasion.

A war that violates the UN Charter is a war of aggression.

Under the Nuremberg Tribunal, aggressive war is the supreme international crime.

Hagee flew from Washington to Iraq last week to brief US forces on the Geneva Conventions, the international laws of armed conflict and the US military’s own rules of engagement. He is reportedly telling the troops they should use deadly force “only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.” This creates a strong inference that our leaders had not adequately briefed our troops on how to behave in this war.

This, combined with the evidence that US forces are committing torture based on policies from the highest levels of government, as well as reports of war crimes committed in places such as Fallujah, served to put Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on notice that Marines would likely commit war crimes in places such as Haditha. Our highest leaders thus should have known this would happen, and they should be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act.

Murtha told ABC there was “no question” the US military tried to “cover up” the Haditha incident, which Murtha called “worse than Abu Ghraib.” Murtha’s high-level briefings indicated, “There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled,” he said.

“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” Murtha asked on “This Week” on ABC. “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”

Murtha said the decision to pay compensation to families of the victims is strong evidence that officers up the chain of command knew what had happened in Haditha. “That doesn’t happen at the lowest level. That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families.”

Haditha is likely the tip of the iceberg in Bush’s illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

“We have a Haditha every day,” declared Muhanned Jasim, an Iraqi merchant. “Were [those killed in Haditha] the first … Iraqis to be killed for no reason?” asked pharmacist Ghasan Jayih. “We’re used to being killed. It’s normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day.”

“We have a Fallujah and Karbala every day,” Jasim added, referring to the 2004 slaughter by US forces in Fallujah and bombings by resistance fighters in the Shiite city of Karbala.

In Fallujah, US soldiers opened fire on houses, and US helicopters fired on and killed women, old men and young children, according to Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein.

“What we’re seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government,” said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Senator John Warner, R-Va., head of the Armed Services Committee, pledged to hold hearings on the Haditha killings at the conclusion of the military investigation. “I’ll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib,” he told ABC News.

Warner’s pledge provides little solace to those who seek justice. Congress has yet to hold our leaders to account for the torture by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison. Only a few low-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted. The Bush administration has swept the scandal under the rug.

During the Vietnam War, the US military spoke of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. But in 1968, US soldiers massacred about 400 unarmed elderly men, women and children in the small village of My Lai. A cover-up ensued, and it wasn’t until Seymour Hersh broke the story that it became public.

“America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct,” said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. “US troops are very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn’t random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers.”

Graffiti on one of the Haditha victims’ houses reads, “Democracy assassinated the family that was here.”

So much for winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

We must pull our troops out of Iraq immediately, and insist that our leaders be held to account for the war crimes committed there.

May 22, 2006

The Hayden Charade

In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, General Michael Hayden promised to promote autonomy and objectivity in the CIA if confirmed as its new director. Hayden assured the senators he would provide “hard-edged assessments” and be tolerant of dissenting views on intelligence matters. “When it comes to speaking truth to power,” Hayden declared, “I will lead CIA analysts by example. I will … always give our nation’s leaders the best analytic judgment.”

The evidence, however, suggests precisely the opposite. As head of the National Security Agency, this 4-star general walked in lockstep with his commander in chief, George W. Bush. Hayden helped designed the illegal program of spying on our telephone calls and emails and then repeatedly defended it when interrogated by the senators at his hearing, citing “legal” opinions of Bush’s hired guns in the Justice Department.

Rather than providing the White House with a neutral assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, we can expect Hayden to give Bush the “intelligence” the president seeks to justify his war on Iran. Things did not run as smoothly as Bush would have wished under the last two CIA directors. He had to dispatch Dick Cheney to the CIA several times to furnish the “intelligence” he needed to rationalize his war on Iraq.

Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked Hayden if he was “comfortable” with under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s personal
intelligence-analysis cell, which hyped a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Hayden said he wasn’t comfortable with it and protested that he wasn’t aware of a lot of the activity going on leading up to the Iraq war.

But when questioned about Colin Powell’s use of false WMD information to support his infamous appearance before the United Nations in the run-up the war, Hayden made a telling admission.

In response to Levin’s question about the legal standard for declassifying information in the public interest, Hayden said, “We used that in Powell’s speech. George [Tenet] had to call me for three tapes.” Hayden was right in the middle of the preparation for Powell’s disingenuous presentation.

Hayden, who will be the third director of the CIA in two years, will salute and march to Bush’s agenda. The nation’s chief spook will shape the “intelligence” to fit Bush’s policy of regime change in Iran.

Hayden vowed to “reaffirm CIA’s proud culture of risk-taking and excellence.” Not one of the senators, from either party, interrogated Hayden about the CIA’s checkered past.

There was no mention of the CIA’s 1953 coup that ousted Iran’s democratically-elected president Mohammed Mosadeq and replaced him with the US-friendly tyrant, the Shah Reza Pahlavi. The 1979 Iranian revolution lead to the overthrow of the Shah’s regime and the rise of Islamic fascism under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, providing a model of theocracy for much of the Muslim world.

Absent was any reference in the hearing to the CIA’s support for Osama bin Laden in his fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The defeat of the USSR there, and the rise of the Mujahedin, enabled the Taliban to come to power. Then, Bin Laden used his CIA training to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

Today we are reaping what the CIA sowed in Iran and Afghanistan.

None of the senators asked Hayden about the CIA’s torture manuals, which have been utilized by myriad Latin American dictators to repress their people.

Much of the CIA’s risk-taking is nothing to be proud of. There is no indication that Hayden will bring new integrity to the CIA.

Hayden’s defense of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program was incredible. When questioned about the Fourth Amendment’s standard for searches and seizures, Hayden assured the senators that he had consulted with his relatives who are in law school for legal advice.

The Fourth Amendment says the people shall be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. For more than a century, the Supreme Court has held that in order to be reasonable, a search or seizure must be supported by a search warrant based on probable cause and issued by a judge. Only when certain narrowly-defined exceptions apply can the government dispense with a warrant.

Hayden and his law student relatives have reversed that presumption. He told the senators that only reasonableness, not a warrant, is necessary to intercept our private communications. Hayden said the NSA uses a probable cause standard. But the Supreme Court has consistently declared that a judge must determine whether probable cause exists.

When confronted with USA Today’s report that the NSA is collecting data on tens of millions of Americans, monitoring the calls we make and receive, Hayden refused to confirm or deny it.

Two of the long-distance companies named in that article, Verizon Communications and BellSouth, both facing lawsuits for invasion of privacy, have denied giving the government these records. AT&T has refused comment.

Interestingly, Bush issued an executive order on May 5 that allows Director of Intelligence John Negroponte – Michael Hayden’s boss – to authorize a company to conceal activities related to “national security.” Thus, we cannot trust the denials by Verizon and BellSouth.

Like Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on calls where one party is abroad, the NSA’s massive data collection is illegal.

Both of these programs violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which clearly requires a warrant issued by a FISA court judge.

It is illegal for the NSA to collect phone numbers from phone companies unless the FISA court authorizes it.

Telephone records that show what numbers have called a specific telephone are captured by a “trap and trace” device. A “pen register” shows what number a specific telephone has called.

The law on pen registers and trap and trace devices requires that a court order be obtained either under FISA or Title III, the criminal wiretap law.

In order to intercept communications, the NSA would have to demonstrate to the court that the person whose calls are being targeted is an agent of a foreign power or that the information is relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation.

The Patriot Act allows the FBI to use a national security letter – a kind of administrative subpoena – to obtain these records. But Congress specifically withheld this subpoena power from the NSA, which must convince the FISA court that the information is relevant.

There is no evidence that NSA has obtained court orders before obtaining the phone records of millions of Americans.

There is evidence, however, that the FBI is using national security letters to go after journalists critical of the administration. Brian Ross from ABC News told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that the government’s methods are changing the way he operates. It makes his work “very, very difficult,” he said. “And, you know, you sort of have to start thinking, I guess, like some sort of Mafia capo,” Ross noted. “You make your phone calls with bags of quarters at pay phones, if you can find them anymore. It’s chilling to say the least.” So much for a free press.

Last year, the FBI issued a total of 9,254 national security letters, targeting 3,500 citizens and legal residents.

In October 2002, while serving as NSA director, Hayden misled Congress about the extent of the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Hayden at the hearing, “I now have a difficult time with your credibility.”

Earlier this year, Hayden made more misleading statements in an appearance before the National Press Club. He said, “The intrusion into privacy is also limited: only international calls.” In fact, the NSA is collecting data on millions of purely domestic calls.

Hayden ducked several questions, deferring his answers to the closed session that followed the public hearing on Thursday. Senators who hear his secret testimony are forbidden to publicize it. Hayden refused to publicly answer seven questions posed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about whether the NSA has sought FISA warrants for pen register and trap and trace devices; whether terror suspects in secret CIA prisons are likely to remain incommunicado until the war on terror ends; whether there is periodic review of what useful intelligence can be gathered by interrogations of terrorists held for years with no contact with Al Qaeda; whether “water boarding,” recently classified as torture by the UN, is acceptable; whether the CIA will obey laws and treaties in light of the Detainee Treatment Act; whether Hayden agreed with the CIA inspector general’s conclusion that certain interrogation techniques constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment prohibited by the Convention Against Torture; whether Hayden agreed with estimates that Iran is some years away from nuclear weapons capability; and whether the CIA has received new guidance from the Justice Department about acceptable interrogation techniques since the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act.

Although Hayden pledged objectivity in his opening statement, he let slip his real intention under questioning by Levin. Hayden said the war on terror “is fundamentally a war of ideas. And we have to skew our intelligence to support the other elements of national power as well.” Hayden admitted he will skew the intelligence to fit Bush’s agenda.

During the hearing, Wyden nailed it. He asked Hayden, “Where is the independent check, General, the independent check that can be verified on these programs that the newspapers are reporting on?”

James Madison wrote in 1822: “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

General Michael Hayden as CIA director will see to it that we continue to be kept in the dark about how our liberties are swiftly vanishing. The future of our democracy is at stake.

May 21, 2006

UN to US: Close Guantánamo

For the second time this year, a United Nations body has chastised the United States for its torture of prisoners and told it to close its prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In February, the UN Human Rights Commission criticized the US government for force-feeding hunger strikers there – calling it torture – and urged the United States to “close the Guantánamo Bay detention facilities without further delay.”

Yesterday, the Committee Against Torture said that the United States “should cease to detain any person at Guantánamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible, ensuring that they are not returned to any State where they could face a real risk of being tortured.”

When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, it became part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. All parties to the Convention are required to file reports documenting their progress in implementing their obligations under the Convention.

The Committee Against Torture is charged with evaluating those compliance reports. In an 11-page document released yesterday, the committee evaluated the United States’ report, which was filed three and one-half years late.

In its evaluation, the committee stated it was “concerned by reliable reports of acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment committed by certain members of the [United States’] military or civilian personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq,” some of which resulted in death.

The committee called on the US to rescind any interrogation technique – including sexual humiliation, water boarding, short shackling and using dogs to induce fear – that constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Detaining persons indefinitely without charge, as the United States has done with most of the 500 or so prisoners at Guantánamo, constitutes a per se violation of the Convention, the committee noted.

The committee was particularly concerned that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which Congress passed last December, aims to strip US federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed by or on behalf of Guantánamo detainees. This issue is pending in the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which will be decided by the end of June.

Other concerns included forced disappearances, which are considered to be torture; the practice of rendition of prisoners to countries where they face a real risk of torture; and the establishment of secret detention facilities which are not accessible to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The United States “should promptly, thoroughly, and impartially investigate any responsibility of senior military and civilian officials authorizing, acquiescing or consenting, in any way, to acts of torture committed by their subordinates,” the committee declared.

It noted with disapproval that there have been no prosecutions initiated under the federal torture statute.

Last week, a district court judge in Virginia dismissed an “extraordinary rendition” lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a German citizen against former CIA director George Tenet and 10 other CIA employees. Khaled el-Masri alleged that he was beaten and injected with drugs after being seized near the Macedonian border with Albania, then taken to Afghanistan and held for five months.

In dismissing the suit, Judge T.S. Ellis said Mr. el-Masri’s “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets.”

On Thursday, three or four Guantánamo prisoners attempted suicide. Early reports indicated that when the guard force tried to intervene and save the life of one prisoner, other prisoners attempted to prevent them from rescuing the suicidal prisoner.

By the end of the day, the story provided by the US military had changed. In the later report, the military claimed that a group of prisoners had lured guards into the compound by staging a suicide attempt and then attacked the guards.