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Habbush’s Freedom Fries Forgeries

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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.

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Cheney and Your 3 Ounce Shampoo Bottles

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Remember Rashid Rauf? Because of him (and Dick Cheney, as I explain below), you’ve got to either try to squeeze your Tom’s of Maine down into 3 ounce tubes or use crappy sugar-sweet toothpaste when you travel.

Rauf is the Pakistani who was kibbitzing a bunch of British wannabe terrorists without passports, teaching them how to make bombs out of liquids in airplane bathrooms.

The story around Rauf’s arrest (and the subsequent fear-mongering about the purported plot) was always sketchy. As I wrote in 2006, news reports basically said he got arrested, without explaining how or by whom.

Here’s me reading the MSNBC scoop about the US launching the arrests before the Brits were ready:

Americans pushed the Brits to do two things they didn’t want to do. First, they pushed the Brits to arrest Rashid Rauf before they wanted to.

The British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the U.S. would "render" him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.

British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody "in circumstances where there was due process," according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British.

This passage is actually quite interesting. The US wanted Rauf arrested. The Brits wanted to wait–they wanted to wait until they could arrest Rauf in such a way that he could be tried in the UK. The US threatened to render him. The Brits tried to hold out, so they could prosecute him legally. And then … that’s where the article is less clear. Was Rauf arrested using due process? Will Rauf be a defendant and witness in the UK? Or did the US snatch him, making him useless for a legal prosecution and possibly endangering the larger case in the UK?

So to put Murray and MSNBC together, the US wanted Rauf arrested right away. The Brits wanted to wait so they could use due process. The US threatened to "render" Rauf. The Brits complained.

And then he got arrested.

But by whom, and in what way? As I suggested before, the MSNBC article just drops the whole question, making it clear that the US won that battle, somehow. But it doesn’t explain–was he rendered? Did the US force Pakistan to arrest him? Where is he now? Who has custody?

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

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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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Once Again, Forgeries?

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Everyone’s buzzing about the revelation from Ron Suskind that a letter revealed in December 2003, alleging that Mohammed Atta trained in Iraq, was a CIA-created forgery.

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

[snip]

Suskind writes in his new book that the order to create the letter was written on “creamy White House stationery.” The book suggests that the letter was subsequently created by the CIA and delivered to Iraq, but does not say how.

Here’s Con Coughlin, the reporter who first reported the letter, on MTP in 2003.

Coughlin: Well, this is an intriguing story, Tom. I mean, basically, when I was in Baghdad, I picked up a document that was given to me by a senior member of the Iraqi interim government. It’s an intelligence document written by the then-head of Iraqi intelligence, Habush to Saddam. It’s dated the 1st of July, 2001, and it’s basically a memo saying that Mohamed Atta has successfully completed a training course at the house of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, who, of course, was killed by Saddam a couple of months later. Now, this is the first really concrete proof that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam. I saw your interview with James Woolsey earlier and he was talking about the article in The Weekly Standard. And there is a lot of detail there. But this is a document, and I’ve had it authenticated. This is the handwriting of the head of Iraqi intelligence, Habush, is one of the few people still at large who is in the pack of cards. And it basically says that Atta was in Baghdad being trained under Saddam’s guidance prior to the 9/11 attack. It’s a very explosive development, Tom. [my emphasis]

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Michael Isikoff’s Chat with Cheney’s Lawyer

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One of the details that most surprised me in Scott McClellan’s account of the CIA Leak investigation and aftermath was his description of the White House response to the confirmation–on April 5, 2006–that Libby had testified he had leaked the NIE with the authorization of the President.

Now the fact that he himself had authorized the selective leaking of national security information to reporters made him look hypocritical.

[snip]

In time, we would learn that the president’s penchant for compartmentalization had played an important role in the declassification story. The only person the president had shared the declassification with personally was Vice President Cheney. Two days after the Fitzgerald disclosure, Cheney’s lawyer told reporters that the president had "declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out" but "didn’t get into how it would be done." Then the vice president had directed his top aide, Scooter Libby, to supply the information anonymously to reporters. [my emphasis]

Granted, I was on a business trip in India when this all went down. But this was a detail I missed. "Cheney’s lawyer told reporters"? I was used to Libby’s lawyer prior to the indictment, Joseph Tate, telling reporters all manner of things under the cover of anonymity. Robert Luskin’s anonymous, wild spinning of reporters? Kind of goes without saying. But Cheney’s lawyer, Terry O’Donnell?

But it all made sense when someone pointed me to the one piece of journalism he could find repeating that citation–would you believe it, a Michael Isikoff piece?

A lawyer familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, told NEWSWEEK that the "president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out." But Bush "didn’t get into how it would be done. He was not involved in selecting Scooter Libby or Judy Miller." Bush made the decision to put out the NIE material in late June, when the press was beginning to raise questions about the WMD but before Wilson published his op-ed piece. [my emphasis]

I double checked with McClellen to make sure that’s the public statement he meant, and he said,

Dan Bartlett volunteered to me that the vice president’s lawyer was telling at least some reporters anonymously what I reference on page 295, which is specifically referring to the Newsweek article …

In other words, yes, Cheney’s lawyer was the one spreading that story to–of all people–Michael Isikoff. Now everything began to make sense.

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Jane Mayer, the CIA Inspector General’s Report, and the Torture Tapes

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Though Mayer doesn’t connect the eventual destruction of the torture tapes in November 2005 with the Doug Jehl story published on November 9, 2005, revealing the conclusion of the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture, she reinforces a point I’ve made in the past–the decision to destroy the torture tapes was closely tied to the release of the IG report and the analysis made in the report.

The book is even more detailed than published excerpts have been about starkly the IG report changed the views on torture among some Administration officials, particularly Jack Goldsmith.

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

Goldsmith was required to review the report in order to settle a sharp dispute that its findings had provoked between the Inspector General, Helgerson, who was not a lawyer, and the CIA’s General Counsel, Scott Muller, who was. After spending months investigating the Agency’s interrogation practices, the special review had concluded that the CIA’s techniques constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, in violation of the international Convention Against Torture. But Muller insisted that every single action taken by the CIA toward its detainees had been declared legal by John Yoo. With Yoo gone, it fell to Goldsmith to figure out exactly what the OLC had given the CIA a green light to do and what, in fact, the CIA had done.

As Goldsmith absorbed the details, the report transformed the antiseptic list of authorized interrogation techniques, which he had previously seen, into a Technicolor horror show. Goldsmith decline to be interviewed about the classified report for legal reasons, but according to those who dealt with him, the report caused him to question the whole program. The CIA interrogations seemed very different when described by participants than they had when approved on a simple menu of options. Goldsmith had been comfortable with the military’s approach, but he wasn’t at all sure whether the CIA’s tactics were legal. Read more →

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Scott McClellan Dismantles Cheney’s Plame Firewall

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When evidence from the Scooter Libby trial showed that Dick Cheney had probably ordered Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame’s identity, Cheney built a firewall that legally excused the leak–but still insulated George Bush from involvement in knowingly outing a CIA spy. Cheney claimed, on at least two occasions, that he himself had the authority to declassify classified information, presumably up to and including Valerie Plame’s identity. Yet new information from Scott McClellan dismantles Cheney’s firewall; McClellan reveals that in the same period when Cheney was claiming he had the authority to declassify such information, the White House Counsel’s Office under Harriet Miers disagreed that the Vice President had such declassification authorities.

The Evidence Cheney Ordered Libby to Leak Plame’s Identity

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In spring of 2006, evidence was accumulating that Dick Cheney had ordered Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame’s identity to Judy Miller. We learned (and then, during the trial, we saw) that on July 7 0r 8, Cheney had ordered Libby to leak something to Judy Miller. We learned from Miller’s newspaper account (and then, during the trial, from her testimony) that after receiving that order, Libby proceeded to leak Plame’s identity to Miller.

And, as we got more information, we learned that Scooter Libby’s cover story for that order and that leak–that Cheney had only ordered him to leak the National Intelligence Estimate–could not be true. That’s because (among other reasons), Libby claimed he did not leak the classified information Cheney ordered him to leak until he got reassurances from David Addington that the President could insta-declassify classified information, thereby making such a leak legal.

I had previously spoken to our General Counsel, David Addington, and our General — and ask our General Counsel, does the President have the ability if he wants to take any document and say it’s declassified, go talk about it?

And Libby further explained that, at the same conversation where he got those reassurances from David Addington, he asked about Wilson’s probable contract with the CIA.

Q. And can you recall what — in your conversation with Mr. Addington about declassification, do you recall if you discussed any other topics with Mr. Addington at the time?

A. Yes. I also discussed in that conversation or close to that conversation, the question of whether there was a contractual obligation for Mr. Wilson.

Given these details, Libby’s notes, and Addington’s testimony (Addington said the conversation took place after Joe Wilson’s op-ed appeared), we can date this conversation to July 7 or 8. (Indeed, Libby even says the conversation declassifying the information itself may have happened on July 7 or "some time at the end of the previous" week.) Read more →

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Caretaker for the Regime

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Carrie Johnson’s got an interestingly-timed profile of Michael Mukasey today. She accurately describes Mukasey as trying to, above all, just get to the end of the term with no big new scandals erupting.

From a book-lined den on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, the attorney general is watching the clock.

Tenure, after all, is short for Michael B. Mukasey, a retired federal judge who has just six more months to restore confidence in a department battered by allegations of improper political meddling before time runs out on the Bush administration.

Mukasey is one of several elder statesman who accepted the president’s request to rejoin government late in the second term, only to confront increasingly intense political battles and the detritus left by their predecessors. Yet, unlike Michael Hayden at the CIA and Robert M. Gates at the Defense Department, Mukasey has complicated his task with his steadfast refusal to reopen old wounds and purge the ranks of his roiled department.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) recently appraised Mukasey as "content to serve as a caretaker for the regime of excessive executive power established by the Bush administration."

As Democratic lawmakers and White House officials tangle over how actively investigators should explore the past, the attorney general generally has sided with the administration and declined to open criminal probes on matters that predate him.

In the past month, Mukasey has rejected requests to name a special prosecutor to examine whether Cabinet officials committed war crimes when they approved harsh interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects. He refused to take a second look at a public corruption case that 52 bipartisan state attorneys general say smacks of selective prosecution. He refrained from characterizing the department he joined last November as torn apart by partisan discord even though more than a dozen officials, including his forerunner, Alberto R. Gonzales, departed amid a politically charged firing scandal.

I say this is interestingly-timed because most of the stonewalling she lists are the same things Democratic Senate Judiciary Members listed a few weeks back when Mukasey testified before the Committee: torture, Siegelman, the politicization of DOJ (she missed John Yoo’s OLC opinions). But that was then, this is now, and in the interim two weeks, two conflicts have arisen, which both threaten to make Mukasey the point of controversy, rather than the guy trying to tamp it down.

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Waxman’s Investigation

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Unlike HJC, Oversight does not publicly release subpoenas when they serve them. So Mukasey’s cowardly letter begging Bush to invoke executive privilege so he doesn’t have to go to jail for shielding Dick Cheney’s role in outing Valerie Plame is one of the first hints of the scope of what Waxman was after. Here are some details I find particularly interesting.

The subpoenaed documents concern the Department’s investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. The documents include Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") reports of the Special Counsel’s interviews with the Vice President and senior White House staff, as well as handwritten notes taken by FBI agents during some of these interviews. The subpoena also seeks notes taken by the Deputy National Security Advisor during conversations with the Vice President and senior White House officials and other documents provided by the White House to the Special Counsel during the count of the investigation. Many of the subpoenaed materials reflect frank and candid deliberations among senior presidential advisers, including the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, and the White House Press Secretary. The deliberations concern a number of sensitive issues, including the preparation of your January 2003 State of the Union Address, possible responses to public assertions challenging the accuracy of a statement in the address, and the decision to send Ms. Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in 2002 to investigate Iraqi efforts to acquire yellowcake uranium. Some of the subpoenaed documents also contain information about communications between you and senior White House officials.

[snip]

Much of the content of the subpoenaed documents falls squarely within the presidential communications and deliberative process components of executive privilege. Several of the subpoenaed interview reports summarize conversations between you and your advisors, which are direct presidential communications. Other portions of the documents fall within the scope of the presidential communications component of the privilege because they summarize
deliberations among your most senior advisers in the course of preparing information or advice for presentation to you, including information related to the preparation of your 2003 State of the Union Address and possible responses to public assertions that the address contained an inaccurate statement. Read more →

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Wilson Statement on Bush’s Invocation of Executive Privilege to Protect Cheney

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Joe Wilson sent the following response to Bush’s invocation of executive privilege to hide Dick Cheney’s involvement in ordering the Plame leak:

Today the president took the unprecedented step of asserting executive privilege to thwart congressional efforts to review Vice President Cheney’s interview with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald concerning the betrayal of Valerie Wilson’s covert CIA identity. We agree with Congressman Waxman that the position taken by the president is ludicrous.

The American people have a right to know what role the vice president played in the leak of Ms. Wilson’s covert identity for political purposes. The fact that the Attorney General is recommending the assertion of executive privilege reveals that this Department of Justice is as beholden to the White House as that run by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Given the White House’s continued efforts to cover up the truth and subvert legitimate congressional inquiries, our civil suit may be the only way the American people will learn the truth. We seek to hold those public officials responsible for this serious breach of national security accountable for their actions, and to ensure that future generations of public servants are not tempted to engage in similarly despicable behavior.

Here’s an update on the status of their case with a link to support the suit.

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