But What about Congressional Oversight?

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In addition to showing how the Iran hawks have evaded oversight over their Special Forces war plan against Iran, Sy Hersh seems intent on generating pressure on Democrats to withhold funding now being used to start a covert war with Iran.

Hersh notes that the Gang of Eight has been briefed on the CIA–but not the Special Forces, assassination of high value targets–part of the plan.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

I love how Hersh feels the need to remind Democrats they are in the majority.

Then, after recalling all the opposition to Administration plans from within the military, Hersh returns to Democrats’ failure to prevent policies they oppose.

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

Now, the problems with oversight seem to focus on two things. First, the Democrats once again got punked by Administration lies when, three years ago, David Obey backed off an attempt to withhold funding for such operations.

On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. Read more →

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The Barnacle Branch Still Evading Oversight

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I’ll have several things to say about Sy Hersh’s latest. For the moment, though, I just wanted to lay out his central argument: that Dick Cheney is abusing the structure of command and Congressional oversight to launch a covert campaign against Iran.

Hersh reports that President Bush signed a Finding authorizing broad actions against Iran. Here’s how Andrew Cockburn described the finding, in a piece cited by Hersh:

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, "unprecedented in its scope."

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border — whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

The fans of regime change have managed to implement such a plan while evading oversight in a couple of ways. First, the hawks pushed out Admiral William Fallon on March 11 rather than reading him in on some of the stuff they were doing with Specials Ops forces in the Middle East.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility.

[snip]

“He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” [Marine General Jack] Sheehan said. Read more →

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The Ghorbanifar Timeline, Two

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I will have more to say on specific details revealed in my Ghorbanifar Timeline in the coming days. But for now, I wanted to make my main point more strongly by focusing on particular dates in the timeline.

The timeline strongly suggests that the hawks within the White House sustained the contacts with Ghorbanifar as part of a (mostly successful) campaign to prevent the Administration from building a closer relationship with Iran.

Before I get into actual dates, recall Flynt Leverett’s argument (which was so dangerous the Administration censored it heavily). Leverett argues that the only workable solution to our relations with Iran is to forge a "grand bargain," trading security for more constructive Iranian engagement throughout the Middle East.

In the current regional context, issue-specific engagement with Iran is bound to fail. The only diplomatic approach that might succeed is a comprehensive one aimed at a “grand bargain” between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

[snip]

Iran will only cooperate with the United States, whether in Iraq or on the nuclear issue, as part of a broader rapprochement addressing its core security concerns. This requires extension of a United States security guarantee — effectively, an American commitment not to use force to change the borders or form of government of the Islamic Republic — bolstered by the prospect of lifting United States unilateral sanctions and normalizing bilateral relations.

The parts of Leverett’s op-ed that got censored reveal that, in fact, Iran has attempted to foster such a grand bargain several times during the Bush Administration. Colin Powell and Richard Armitage cautiously supported those attempts. But each time those efforts started developing, the Administration scuttled the efforts–usually based on inflammatory claims.

And at least some of those claims may have come from Manucher Ghorbanifar.

In other words, top Administration officials kept letting Ghorbanifar’s fraudulent "intelligence" get inserted into the government because it provided critical–albeit fraudulent–support for a policy of regime change in Iran.

Now look at the known dates:

December to February 2001

Michael Ledeen says he first started putting this meeting together "soon after September 11, 2001, probably in the October 2001 timeframe." The first documented discussions about the meeting occurred on November 7, and the meeting occurred from December 10 through 13.

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The Ghorbanifar Meetings Timeline

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The SSCI report on the Rome meeting has a really funny footnote.

Mr. Franklin is currently awaiting direction from the Department of Justice to report to prison on matters unrelated to those discussed in this report. He was indicted in August 2005 along with two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for conspiring with each other to unlawfully disclose classified national defense information. Mr. Franklin subsequently pled guilty, and was sentenced in January 2006 on three felony counts: conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it; conspiracy to communicate classified information to an agent of a foreign government; and the unlawful retention of national defense information.

The footnote is funny (in addition to the fact that it misstates when Franklin was first indicted) because Franklin pled guilty to dealing information about Iran to AIPAC. The reason Franklin did so was not because of money or blackmail, but because he disagreed with US policy on Iran, and was happy to work with AIPAC to pressure the government into a more hawkish policy on Iran. Which is pretty much what was happening with the Ghorbanifar information. As DOD’s own Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) report suggested,

Ghorbanifar or his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. Government.

Along with a lot of other crappy "intelligence," Ghorbanifar was floating plans to overthrow the regime in Iran, so the end goal of both the AIPAC effort and Ledeen and Ghorbanifar’s efforts was regime change in Iran.

The suggestion that Franklin’s indictment is unrelated to the Ghorbanifar meetings is also funny because, while Franklin claimed he did not know Ledeen in 2001 when Ledeen selected him to attend the Rome meeting, by fall 2004, Ledeen was intervening to get Plato Cacheris to represent Franklin in the AIPAC scandal. Thus, while there’s no reason to believe the Israelis were involved in the Rome meeting, the same group of Neocons were involved in parallel efforts to undercut US efforts to establish closer relations with Iran.

Now, as Laura Rozen revealed, it appears that this thing is not over–she reports that Harold Rhode has lawyered up. Rhode refused to cooperate with the SSCI’s most recent efforts to investigate this meeting last fall, which suggests he has gotten much more reluctant to talk about what happened (and DOD says he has forgotten what he said in 2004, displaying the forgetfulness all Bush Administration criminals seem to share). But if you think about it, there are only two logical explanations for why–two and a half years after Larry Franklin pled guilty to sharing defense information–he is still "awaiting direction from DOJ to report to prison." Either someone high up in the Administration intervened to keep Franklin out of the pokey (OVP is named in the SSCI report, and we know Dick Cheney has prevented allies from going to prison before), or Franklin has been cooperating with investigators for two and a half years. (His docket just shows a "delayed reporting date."

With all that said, I decided to look more closely at the timeline involved. What follows combines several timelines: the timeline of both the meetings and the investigations into those meetings from the SSCI report, key details from Franklin’s indictment, and details of attempts to foster closer relations with Iran detailed in this Flynt Leverett op-ed. I’ll say more about what this timeline shows in follow-up posts.

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The FISA Shaft Is Underway

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As you know, the FISA Amendments Act has been being negotiated behind closed doors by Steny Hoyer, Kit Bond and friends for some time now. See here and here. Well, the action is coming a little faster than we all anticipated.

It now appears quite clear that either the House will vote on the War Funding Supplemental and then go to the FISA Amendments ACT or, and it is not clear at this time what the odds on this are, link the two bills and vote on both at the same time. Here is what we do know. House has finalized their war supplemental bill, and it appears to be a go for a vote tomorrow (Thursday). So, the best evidence is that the vote on FISA will be on Friday June 20, and may be as early as Thursday night. There is precious little time left to make our voices heard.

Here is what Liz Rose from the ACLU gave me for publication:

One thing bugging me is that we do not have the Hoyer draft and neither do reporters; and yet some reporters are believing every single word Hoyer says. Feingold, Leahy, Conyers do not have the draft; the only people who do have it are Rockefeller, Bond, and Hoyer. People who are for the proposal. And yet I have not yet heard anyone question why that is. No sunshine and no one demanding to see the details.

Plus, even if leadership will vote with us, and act like they are on our side, the truth is they control the calendar. Nothing happens unless they want it to. It is so cynical and calculating. And it seems that the unwritten story is that this whole FISA cave in is really all about the DCCC and their worries about freshmen dems getting re-elected. They are not afraid of terrorists — they are afraid of ads about terrorists. If they were really afraid of terrorists they would just extend the orders. But all they really want is to reward the big telco contributors and get more checks for their campaign coffers. It is all political.

But I think they are wrong. Fear mongering did not help Guiliani win. And remember how good the House Dems were when they stood up on FISA and said no to the senate bill?. I will keep you up Read more →

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The FISA Fix and Obama’s Profile In Courage Leadership Moment

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Whether by design or random chance, there is so much information, on so many and diverse subjects, flooding the politically astute citizen currently that it is hard to keep track. It seems like we are drawn from one crisis and seminal issue to another with the passing of not every day, but with the passing of every hour. And yes, they are all pretty much that important; but there are some that portend not just how we do in our lives, but who we are and what we stand for in the first place. Chief among those is the question of whether we are a nation of men freelancing in the public trough of goodwill, or a nation of laws in which men operate within the rule of law and under the edicts and guidance of our founding fathers and the Constitution they bequeathed us.

One of these issues has been at the forefront of out conscience for nearly a year now; the issue of how to improve the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) for the future we face and how to address the criminal violations of FISA we have suffered in the past. How we resolve FISA will go a long way indeed in indicating whether we are a nation of admirable laws or, alternatively, of mere opportunistic men.

The three critical parts of FISA that are the subject of the heated and protracted fight over reform are exclusivity, minimization and retroactive immunity. Simply put, exclusivity refers to the relative degree in which the resulting FISA law will control this area of the law. The original FISA statute was designed to be the

…exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.

As Marcy Wheeler has pointed out however, the Bush Administration performed a terminally disingenuous end run around the exclusivity mandate of FISA via one of John Yoo’s made to order faux legal opinions. The exclusivity provisions must be made impervious to such sophistry and with sufficient teeth to insure future compliance by the executive branch.

Minimization is the word for the procedures the government uses to

remove and (eventually) delete any data from US persons collected incidentally in the course of surveilling someone overseas. If we could be guaranteed that minimization procedures are sound, then the whole debate over Read more →

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Whitehouse: Bush’s Lies “Rot the Very Fiber of Democracy”

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Updated with YouTube from Selise. 

If you’re reading the SSCI Phase II reports, go to this thread to discuss what you’re finding.

But if you want to know what Senator Whitehouse thinks about it, you can see his speech here.

Or you can read it below:

Mr. President, five years ago, President Bush and this administration misled this country into a war that should never have been waged, a war that has cost our nation the lives of more than four thousand courageous men and women, squandered many hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and diminished the world’s faith in our country.

This morning, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by our distinguished chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, released a report confirming what many have long feared: that the Bush Administration ignored or swept aside substantial, reliable intelligence that portrayed something other than what the President and his political allies wanted America to see.

Mr. President, the decision to take a nation to war, as Chairman Rockefeller indicated, is among the gravest and most momentous that a leader can make. In our democracy, we expect and deserve to be sure that when our troops are sent in harm’s way, when their families are made to watch and wait through sleepless nights, when our security and national welfare is put on the line, that that decision has been taken for the right reasons. This is a sacred compact, an article of faith, between our people and their government.

This Administration broke that compact, betrayed that faith.

For years, the evidence has mounted that this Administration’s reasons for war were a sham. And just this week, the President’s own former spokesman indicated that the White House ran a "political propaganda campaign" building the case for war.

This morning’s report is a chilling reminder of the Bush Administration’s willingness to overlook or set aside intelligence that did not conform to its pre-ordained view of the world. Over and over again, the Committee documented instances in which public statements by the President, the Vice President, and members of the Administration’s national security team were at odds with available intelligence information.

By leading the American people to believe that the situation in Iraq was significantly more drastic than it actually was, the Bush Administration took this country into an unnecessary war – a war it still refuses to end.

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Phase II Report Working Thread

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The SSCI has released (finally) the remaining reports on Iraq intelligence. I’m printing them out and beginning to read. If you want to read, too, use this thread to talk about what you’ve found.

(Update: Go here for text files–thanks tw3k). For a background, here’s McClatchy.

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The Chinese Turned Out My Lights (Maybe)

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Remember that terrible blackout in 2003, that took power out from MI to NY and in between?

It was great fun here in Ann Arbor, for a little while. You could walk down the streets of the city and sushi merchants would come out and pretty much give their sushi away. We had an "apocalypse" barbecue that night, where everyone brought all the meat from their freezer or fridge and any alcohol that was cold, and consumed it in one big gluttonous barbecue. I had a non-electric land-line at the time and a gas stove and it was summer time, so I was pretty comfortable for the whole two-day affair. But it quickly turned our freeways heading west (where there was still power) into parking lots and those with electrical phones lost their communication and aside from the gluttony it was a big expensive mess.

Apparently, the Chinese did it.

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.

One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.

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“The Waterboard”

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The ACLU has a bunch of new documents on water-boarding posted–including a very heavily redacted draft of the 2004 CIA OIG report on the CIA’s interrogation methods. The report is interesting for three reasons:

  • The way they refer to water-boarding
  • The timing
  • The rationale

The Waterboard

One of the very few things they’ve left unredacted (in all these heavily redacted documents) are the references to water-boarding. But they don’t use it as a verb, "to water-board." Rather, they almost always refer to it as "the waterboard."

The water board technique

interrogators administered [redacted] the waterboard to Al-Nashiri

interrogators used the waterboard on Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

Cables indicate that interrogators [redacted] applied the waterboard technique to Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

waterboard session of Abu Zubaydah

waterboard on Abu Zubaydah

The waterboard has been used on three detainees: Aby Zubaydah, Al-Nashiri, and Khalid Sheykh Mohammad

I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it does. It really emphasizes the clinical and bureaucratic nature of this practices, and pretends that human beings are not the ones inflicting it.

The Timing

The ACLU refers to this as a "draft document," though there is nothing on what is visible on the cover page to suggest this wasn’t a final draft–so we can’t be sure whether the date on the report is the date when it was finally released.

Still, I find the date worthy of note: May 7, 2004. Read more →

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