Surprise Surprise: “Laptop of Death” a Possible Forgery

Almost four years ago today, Colin Powell presented some dodgy intelligence suggesting Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. Powell’s announcement had all the trappings of Bush propaganda: sketchy exiles, the pre-emption of IAEA counter-evidence, technical specs that make a known civilian application look like a nuclear weapon, and, of course, Powell himself.

Does it surprise you to learn, via Juan Cole, that that intelligence may well have been forged?

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.

The documents in question were acquired by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from a still unknown source — most of them in the form of electronic files allegedly stolen from a laptop computer belonging to an Iranian researcher. The US has based much of its push for sanctions against Iran on these documents.

Nope, it doesn’t surprise me either.

Still, even though none of us are surprised, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to figure out who forged all the evidence tailored to get the US involved in wars in the Middle East? Before Dick Cheney absconds with the evidence?

CIA & Foggo: It’s Hard On Spy Pimps Out There

It’s getting hard out there on the pimps and cons in the CIA, first Director Goss goes down the tubes, and now his right hand man Foggo is headed to the slammer.

As reported Monday, Dusty Foggo has copped an incredibly lenient plea to one count of simple wire fraud. Foggo, formerly Number Three man in the Bush CIA, under Director Porter Goss who also resigned in disgrace, had been charged with 28 counts of sordid and sundry fraud, conflict of interest, bribery aiding and abetting, and false statements, all primarily related to the Duke Cunningham and Brent Wilkes criminal convictions.

Just how did Foggo get such a sweetheart deal?

It must have been the evidence that Foggo created a new deputy director of administration position and hired his mistress to fill it, the weekly poker games at Washington hotels with Congressmen such "Duke" Cunningham, lobbyists, House intelligence committee staff members and prostitutes. Or maybe Foggo’s assistance to childhood friend, Brent Wilkes, one of two defense contractors bribing House intelligence committee member Cunningham with tens of thousands of dollars in antiques, travel, fancy meals, house payments, and hookers in exchange for earmarks steering more than $100 million worth of government contracts to Wilkes’ San Diego-based firm, right?

As the always excellent Laura Rozen details in an article just out in Mother Jones:

No, what truly worried Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3. They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes, estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source familiar with Read more

We Have Met The WMD Terrorists, And They Are US

Well, here comes a new entry in the Captain Renault "I am shocked, shocked to hear of this" file. It turns out that Jose Rodriquez and the CIA are not the only ones that Cheney and Bush have ordered to destroy critical material evidence the subject of investigations into international terror cases. Nope; of course not. They have put their grubby little thumbs to the screws on the Swiss as well. From the startling new reporting in today’s New York Times:

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having deep associations with Dr. Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Yet even as American officials describe the relationship as a major intelligence coup, compromises were made. Officials say the C.I.A. feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners’ relationship with the United States — and perhaps raise questions about American dealings with atomic smugglers — but would also imperil efforts to recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran’s nuclear program.

So the prosecution and trial of the Tinner group, and related avenues into the depths of the spiderweb of influence and dealings of AQ Khan is lost. Good thing that our good allies against terror, the Pakistanis, have their thumbs on AQ Khan and are getting to the bottom of how Khan’s "rogue" network was able to operate. Eh, not so much. Now, we know that in the Bush Administration, all policy and interaction with Pakistan begins and ends with Dick Cheney. Kind of Read more

The Strange Case of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul (Part 2)

In part 1, I laid out the facts surrounding the detention and illegal transfer of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul. In this post, I want to demonstrate why this case matters. There is a pattern to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal usurpation of executive power. Because the pattern broke down in this case, the strategy behind that power grab is laid bare. The struggle within the administration over the disposition of Rashul and the way it was resolved helps to illuminate the true nature of the current regime. Perhaps this case creates an opening to unravel the authoritarian infrastructure that has been built within our country in the last eight years.

Part 2: Why it matters

In the grand scheme of things, focusing on this case might seem a little like busting Al Capone for tax evasion. The Bush/Cheney Administration has institutionalized the most egregious extralegal executive abuses in our nation’s history. As matters of policy, they’ve launched a war of aggression under false pretenses, violated the most basic human right treaties, trashed the Fourth Amendment, denied the right of habeas corpus to citizens and non-citizens alike, set up secret prisons, disappeared their presumed opponents around the world, tortured the innocent and presumed guilty alike, conducted sham military tribunals against the underage and the mentally ill, and, worst of all, claimed the power to indefinitely detain anyone in the world, including U.S. citizens, without any external check whatsoever. And that’s just the stuff they have admitted to.

If we want to undo all this, and I very much do, we’ll have understand how they were able to accomplish it. I’m not going to rehash the sociopolitical environmental conditions that the administration took advantage of. Folks here understand that the generalized fear and anger after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the fecklessness of the Democratic party, the docile and compliant traditional media, the tight discipline within the Republican party, and the latent authoritarian impulses of a sizeable minority of the country created the necessary conditions for what happened. I want to focus on how the administration manipulated secrecy, its own people’s psychology, and the instinct for institutional self-preservation to manage a shifting set of narratives that allowed them to follow a deliberate strategy of expanding executive power and upsetting the constitutional balance of government while evading responsibility and steam-rolling all opposition. Then, I hope to show how this case exposes some chinks in the rather substantial armor of these malefactors. Read more

FISA Redux Again: The Slippery Slope Leads Down A Rabbit Hole

Five days ago, in the post "FISA Redux: The Slippery Slope Becomes A Mine Shaft", we discussed the new set of domestic spying protocols that the Bush Administration is determined to entrench into law and practice before leaving office. The measures would:

…make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years. … would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies.

Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.

…also would allow criminal intelligence assessments to be shared outside designated channels … It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government.

As if that wasn’t enough fun for one post, we also learned that Attorney General Mukasey

…would release new guidelines within weeks to streamline and unify FBI investigations of criminal law enforcement matters and national security threats.

Well, that didn’t take long. Guess what; they’re here. It is amazing how when it comes to protecting the rights and privacy of American citizens, the health and stability of the environment, the education of our children, and the care and compassion to military veterans, the Bush Administration produces nothing but bad faith delay, obstruction and, often, outright refusal to act. They are imminently capable, however, of moving with breathtaking alacrity when they sense the opportunity to seize unheard of domestic police state powers that undercut the Constitution, solely by Administrative fiat, and that fundamentally alter the way the American public exists in relation to it’s government in terms of their privacy and, in an existential sense, if not physical, their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Here, courtesy of the New York Times, is the new joy the Attorney General is announcing to "protect yer freedums":

A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American Read more

The Strange Case of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul (Part 1)

[Today Emptywheel has a special treat in the form of a guest post from one of our very longtime commenters, William Ockham. Marcy alluded to this right before she left. WO really drilled deep into this story and has produced a great article. As the title suggests, there will also be a Part II that will delve into the implications. Give WO some love and participation in comments, and in light of the special nature of this post, please stay on topic for this one; if there are other issues, please feel free to use the previous post on the Bates Contempt Decision for those. Thank you. – bmaz]

In June 2004, Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul had his 15 minutes of fame when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered questions at a press conference about the detainee known to American soldiers only as Triple X, the first ghost detainee transferred from CIA custody to the U.S. military. Rashul was suspected of being a member of Ansar al-Islam, a violent Kurdish Sunni Islamist movement opposed to the dominant Kurdish groups of northeastern Iraq. The real story of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul wasn’t his terrorist past or his time as a ghost detainee of the DOD, but his treatment by the CIA in between.

Part 1: Did the DOJ cover up what its own OLC ruled was a war crime committed by the CIA?

The Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice has had a notoriously broad view of the Executive Branch’s ability to define our obligations under the Geneva Conventions. But if the OLC under Goldsmith and Bradbury decided that the CIA had engaged in a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions (and even John Yoo agreed), and the CIA OIG had made a criminal referral to the DOJ, wouldn’t you expect a prosecution? Recently released CIA documents suggest that such a referral was made, but no prosecution occurred. Perhaps the very public complicity of Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and George Tenet played a role in the decision not to prosecute. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I want to make it clear that I’m using the term ‘war crime’ in the very narrow sense of a violation of U.S.C. § 2441.

The Crime

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yester-year, that is, the summer of 2003. Dana Priest (in a story from October 2004) and Jane Mayer (The Dark Side) are our narrators. Mayer’s account (in bold) appears to derive directly from Jack Goldsmith:

Read more

FISA Redux: The Slippery Slope Becomes A Mine Shaft

(photo h/t Pointed Words)

Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

With the utterance of those words and placement of quill to paper, by Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, so began the half life decay of his wisdom. The surveillance state we occupy today is the festering, mature result of the acts of cloying politicians and barons of power to serve their own political and financial goals by declaring themselves the protectors of law and order. The daddy state. They spread fear of isolated, and ultimately inconsequential, yet publically hyped acts of crime and terror in order to supplicate the nation at large.

It has been a singularly effective scheme.

So it began with characterization of hideous and substantive Fourth Amendment violations of fundamental search and seizure law as "mere technicalities". Soon judges and prosecutors, being elected or politically appointed officials themselves, started shading their duties, principles and morals under the law to find creative ways around Constitutional protections in order to avoid results that would be unpopular. Then the officials ran again for reelection proudly proclaiming how they protected the "law and order for the citizens" by "clamping down on criminals" and "elimianting the criminal’s use of technicalities". The more they talked the talk, the more they walked the walk. Down the slippery slope.

And that is where we find ourselves today. From Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson in today’s Washington Post:

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders. (Emphasis added)

This is sick. Quite frankly, the contours of this have been quite obvious, and even partially stated, as being on the way for a while now if you were paying attention. This is why I was foaming at the mouth when the Protect America Act (PAA) was passed a year ago, and especially when Congress voted "just to extend (renew) it for a period". Read more

Habbush’s Freedom Fries Forgeries

In his description of how Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti negotiated protection from the United States, Ron Suskind writes,

Bush, Cheney, and top aides to the vice president wanted Habbush, in essence, to earn his passage. The United States was working furiously on "the case." It needed damning disclosures, not the Iraqi intelligence chief–who was given the code name "George"–saying there were no WMD.

Suskind doesn’t describe how, in spite of the fact that he insisted Iraq didn’t have WMD, Habbush still managed to convince the US to take him to Jordan and install him with $5 million in hush money. Suskind notes–but does not explain–that Habbush got out of Iraq early, close to the start of the war.

Habbush was ready. He slipped out of Baghdad with the help of U.S. intelligence and into Amman, Jordan, where he’d had his meetings with Shipster.

It is instructive, then, to look at the two other Habbush letters sent during the early war period. First, there’s the April 24, 2003 letter designed to frame British (then) Labour MP George Galloway as having been bought off with money from Saddam’s oil sales (h/t for all of these articles to a friend).

Saddam Hussein’s former head of protocol said yesterday that the document found by The Daily Telegraph saying that George Galloway received substantial payments from the Iraqi regime was "100 per cent genuine".

Haitham Rashid Wihaib, who fled to Britain with his family eight years ago after death threats, said he had no doubt that the handwritten confidential memorandum addressed to the dictator’s office apparently detailing how the Labour MP benefited from Iraq’s oil sales was authentic.

Sitting in a cafe in central London, a world away from Saddam’s palace where he spent 13 years arranging the dictator’s daily schedule, he carefully studied the letter discovered in the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad.

As Mr Galloway continued to denounce the letter as a forgery, Mr Wihaib said he recognised the "clear and distinctive" handwriting as that of Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti, head of the Iraqi intelligence service, who is number 14 – the jack of diamonds – on America’s "most wanted" list.

The letter would have been intended to smear Galloway for his efforts to forestall the war–and his campaign to show how unfairly Iraq was treated under sanctions.

Read more

Not a Question of If, But Who, Forged the Letter

As a number of you pointed out last night, Philip Giraldi says Suskind got the forged uranium document close, but no cigar.

An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.

[snip]

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.

Now, I’m not at all surprised that Giraldi says Suskind got details wrong. The story always had a fundamental logical flaw (which Giraldi points out), which is that Cheney and CIA hate each other–and particularly hated each other in this period, when OVP believed Tenet had forced DOJ to open the Plame investigation. Note, there is significant reason to believe that Tenet knew Cheney declassified CIA properties over his objections, so things were probably quite tense between CIA and OVP, just as OVP was handing over documents showing that Cheney was the one pushing to leak Plame’s identity.

Also, as I pointed out here, Bob Woodward (well, consider the source) has said that Suskind’s CIA sources have led him astray in the past. And, as I pointed out here, there is something surprisingly credible about Tenet’s insistence that he always–up to and including late 2003–refused to endorse the Iraq-Al Qaeda claims. So there is reason to take Giraldi’s post seriously.

But something still doesn’t sit right with Giraldi’s story, either. As Sara points out, Iyad Allawi was a CIA guy, not–at first–an OVP guy. (OVP’s guy, Ahmad Chalabi, himself a fan of forgeries, discredited this one right away.) Read more

The Anthrax Prosecutor: The Daughter of the Defense Attorney for BushCo’s “Germ Boy”

Guess who they’ve got prosecuting the anthrax case? Amy Jeffress, daughter of Bill Jeffress, the guy who was last seen trying to keep Scooter Libby, known within the Administration as "Mr. Germ," out of the pokey. Yeah. That gives me confidence in the investigation.

First, from an account of today’s meeting with Judge Lamberth (h/t JimWhite and bmaz):

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the release of hundreds of pages of documents, including more than a dozen search warrants issued as the government closed in on Ivins in an investigation into events that killed five, sickened dozens and rattled the nation a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The long-sealed material was expected to be available to the public within hours.

Lamberth ordered the release after consultation with Amy Jeffress, a national security prosecutor at the Department of Justice. [my emphasis]

Next, the wedding announcement showing who Amy Jeffress’ daddy is:

The bride, 34, is known as Amy and is keeping her surname. She is an assistant United States attorney in Washington. She graduated magna cum laude from Williams College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received a master’s degree in political science from the Free University in Berlin and a law degree from Yale University.

The bride is the daughter of Judith and William Jeffress Jr. of Arlington, Va. Her mother is a social worker at the Adoption Service Information Agency in Washington. Her father is a partner in Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin, a Washington law firm where the bridegroom is an associate. [my emphasis]

And finally, here’s Jeremy Scahill on Libby’s role as "Germ Boy" within the administration.

In mid-2002, as they struggled desperately to sell the war, these key players in "Plamegate" were engaged in full-out offensive aimed at convincing Americans that the country faced an imminent threat of a smallpox attack. To underscore this "threat," Libby began fanatically pressing to have the entire US population preemptively vaccinated against smallpox (which was declared eradicated in 1980).

[snip]

What Hauer and his colleagues at HHS may not have known is that smallpox was a career-long obsession of Libby’s–so much so that his nickname in the administration was "Germ Boy."

[snip]

More than a decade later, Libby was facing renewed frustration with another group of experts challenging his obsession. Read more

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