Another 16 Words: Boumediene Bites Bush Again

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images3.thumbnail.jpegLaura Rozen rocks, and today she rolls up more jaw dropping malevolence and fraud on the part of the Bush/Cheney Administration.

A potentially explosive new court filing by the lawyers for Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Guantanamo detainees suggests that the Bush administration ordered the Bosnian government to arrest and hold the men after an exhaustive Bosnian investigation had found them innocent of any terrorism related activity and had ordered their release, in order to use them as props in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union speech.

The filing–"Lakhdar Boumediene, et al., Petitioners, v. George W. Bush, President of the United States, et al., Respondents, Petitioners’ Public Traverse to the Government’s Return to the Petition for Habeas Corpus"–lays out the case that the Bush administration threatened at the highest levels to withdraw diplomatic and military aid to the Balkan nation if Bosnia released the men, which its own three-month investigation had found innocent of any terrorism charges in the days leading up to Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union.

Faced with the threats of the withdrawal of aid and that if it released the men, the White House would order NATO troops to detain them, Bosnia transferred the men under duress to the custody of the US government in January 2002. Ten days later, Bush used sixteen words to warn Americans that, in "cooperation" with the Bosnian government, it had captured terrorists who had planned to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo: "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush told the nation.

But, six years later, the detainees’ petition says, after the US Supreme Court has sided with the detainees and ordered the US to give the detainees habeas corpus rights, the Bush administration has failed to repeat the embassy plot charges that Bush used in his State of the Union address, or to produce credible evidence of why the men should be held as enemy combatants.

It is hard to be shocked by these kind of revelations anymore, there has been so much criminal depravity on the part of the Bush/Cheney crew in relation to their torture and sadistic gulag detention programs that it just dulls the senses after a while. And it is not like we didn’t know that the case against Lakhdar Boumediene was bogus; that was evident from the prior litigation that led to the original Supreme Court Boumediene decision. The pleading containing the new allegations is here (pdf). For those of you perplexed by the title of the pleading, a "traverse" pleading is nothing more than a somewhat archaic term for a reply pleading.

The revelation that Boumediene has been, from the outset, about yet another 16 word intentional lie to the American public, and indeed the world, in the hallowed State of the Union Speech, in order to fraudulently gin up the basis for an illegal and immoral war of aggression, is heart stopping and hard to stomach. Read more →

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Meet the Bloggers: Pitchforks and Congressional Hearings

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Watch Meet the Bloggers

I just finished taping tomorrow’s edition of Meet the Bloggers, which shows at 1PM ET. John Cusack was on to talk about the DVD release of his movie, War Inc. We talked some about Congressional hearings–both regarding war profiteering and regarding finance companies who use their bailout money to send executives on a boondoggle.

Which got me thinking … There’s been some righteous anger directed at all the fat-cats on Wall Street since the bailout, though less so directed at the folks getting rich off our war of choice in Iraq. 

How do we capitalize and focus that righteous anger?

Now that people are so fed up, how do we channel it into a positive application of pitchforks and prevent it from becoming really ugly?

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The Devil Went Down To Georgia

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Well, okay, it was Dick Cheney. Close enough. From The Los Angeles Times:

Appearing alongside beleaguered Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday criticized Russia’s conduct in its short war with Georgia and pledged to continue American support for reconstruction and humanitarian aid.
…
Cheney’s remarks probably will further inflame Moscow, where officials have railed against the United States’ alliances with the former Soviet states. This week, President Dmitry Medvedev said bluntly that Moscow expected to maintain a "privileged" sphere of influence in the region of the former Soviet Union.

However, U.S. officials Thursday brushed off criticism that the White House is deliberately approaching the brink of confrontation with Russia.

"The United States is not trying to paint Russia as an enemy," said Robert A. Wood, a State Department spokesman. "We’re very concerned about its behavior and what that means for the future of the U.S.-Russia relationship. We’re looking at all aspects of our relationship with Russia, in terms of how we go forward."

Russian officials also have been dismayed by the apparent staying power of Saakashvili, often referred to in Moscow as a "war criminal" for launching the military operation in early August in the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Russia responded by sending in troops to defend the pro-Russian enclave, which broke with Georgia’s government more than a decade ago. The fighting ended with Russia continuing to occupy parts of Georgia proper to enforce the separation from South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that the world should impose an arms embargo on Georgia until Saakashvili is out of power.

Georgian officials have said the United States will help rebuild the country’s crushed military. But that was not directly affirmed during Cheney’s visit, which came a day after President Bush said the U.S. would provide up to $1 billion in nonmilitary assistance.

The whole Georgia/Russia war in, and over, the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions in the Caucasus seems somewhat surreal. In spite of the critical nature of what happened, and continues to happen there, there has been a paucity of credible reporting in the United States. What are still the two nuclear superpowers in the world, and a clear step toward cold war renewal, were all involved as were, of course, the people who actually live in those areas. Some of them are no longer living; and, yet, we still don’t know who the true aggressor was. And, strangely, the American educated, Cheney confidante, Georgian President Saakashvili was literally plastered on American television during the entire conflict in an unprecedented manner for a foreign leader. While there may be slight confusion over who started the Georgia-Russian war; we do know who ended it, the Russians handed the Georgians their own rear ends.

Juan Cole relates:

All sides have committed massacres and behaved abominably. There are no clean hands involved, notwithstanding the strong support for Georgia visible in the press of most NATO member countries. (Georgia has been jockeying to join NATO, something Moscow stridently opposes.) Still, not everyone in NATO agrees that Saakashvili is a hero. While traveling with the negotiating team of President Nicolas Sarkozy, one French official observed that "Saakashvili was crazy enough to go in the middle of the night and bomb a city" in South Ossetia. The consequence of Russia’s riposte, he said, is "a Georgia attacked, pulverized, through its own fault."

Far as I can determine, that is about right. Tiny Georgia made a gutsy, and monumentally ill advised, move on South Ossetia, an area that wanted independence and that was under the protective eye of Russia. Despite initial heavy losses, Georgia did not back off, and Russia rolled over them until there was basically no way for Georgia to continue fighting.

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Bush Re-Ups War, Obstructs Accountability As Nation Twitters Over Palin

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The country and the progressive blogosphere have long been suckers for Cheney/Rovian shiny object distractions. I am afraid that is happening as we speak. First off (and i will come back to this later in a separate post) all of the heat, passion an unity that was generated and consolidated by Los Dos Clintonos, Al Gore and then, mightily and masterfully, Barack Obama, is being dissipated by the wind of fixation on Sarah Palin.

But more importantly, critical and substantive things are going on that we need to be paying attention to. Eric Lichtblau in the NYT reminds us of a huge one this morning:

Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.
…
The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.
…
The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics. (Emphasis added)

In all the flurry and bustle of the conventions and Palin, not to mention back to school and Labor Day weekend for the nation, this could be lost in the flow. It must not be. This provision has all the potential implications, problems, Read more →

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

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[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 →

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No One Could Have Predicted, Republic of Georgia, the Follow-Up

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Yesterday, I said,

Since Condi’s gone somewhere (probably buying shoes in NYC), let me anticipate what she’ll say when she ever gets back to work: "No one could have predicted that the Georgians would incite the Russians to pursue regime change in Georgia."

Today, the NYT’s diplomatic correspondant writes,

One month ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia, for a high-profile visit that was planned to accomplish two very different goals.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. “I’m going to visit a friend and I don’t expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend,” she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.

[snip]

Ms. Rice went to Tbilisi just as tensions between Russia and Georgia were escalating. Standing next to Mr. Saakashvili during a press conference, she said that Russia “needs to be a part of resolving the problem and solving the problems and not contributing to it.” Mr. Saakashvili, for his part, was clearly thrilled to host Ms. Rice.

[snip]

Ms. Rice did not get on the phone with her Georgian counterpart on Thursday, but left it to Mr. Fried to deliver the “don’t go in” message, a senior administration official said. “I don’t think it would have made any difference if she had,” the official said. “They knew the message was coming from the top.”

A few hours later, in the early morning hours of Friday, Aug. 8, Georgia launched its offensive in South Ossetia, and Russia responded with a tenfold show of force. Ms. Rice, the administration official said, “called Saakashvili on Friday morning, after their folks were in.”

Now, I’m not even remotely surprised that State is now claiming they had nothing to do with this, Condi’s visit and on-the-record confrontation of Russian not-withstanding.

I am wondering, though. At what point do people start calling Condi on her refrain, "No one could have predicted"?

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“No One Could Have Predicted,” Republic of Georgia Edition

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Since Condi’s gone somewhere (probably buying shoes in NYC), let me anticipate what she’ll say when she ever gets back to work: "No one could have predicted that the Georgians would incite the Russians to pursue regime change in Georgia."

At least that’s the story the Administration has been feeding Jonathan Landay.

Bush administration officials, worried by what they saw as a series of provocative Russian actions, repeatedly warned Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to intervene in his country militarily, U.S. officials said Monday.

But in the end, the warnings failed to stop the Georgian president — a Bush favorite — from launching an attack last week that on Monday seemed likely to end not only in his country’s military humiliation but complete occupation by Russian forces.

[snip]

Pentagon officials said that despite having 130 trainers assigned to Georgia, they had no advance notice of Georgia’s sudden move last Thursday to send thousands of Georgian troops into South Ossetia to capture that province’s capital, Tskhinvali.

Me, I agree with Jeff Stein, this is spin, presumably designed to excuse American impotence in the face of Russia’s aggression.

A "surprise." My, oh, my.Except I don’t believe it. As easy as it is to believe that the CIA, etc., blew another huge event, I find it impossible to accept that not one of the 127 Pentagon advisors in Georgia, including Special Forces and intelligence contractors, were clueless about Tblisi’s intent — and preparations — to move into South Ossetia.That just doesn’t pass the laugh test.On July 15, for starters, amid rising tension between Moscow and Tblisi over South Ossetia, some 1,200 U.S. troops launched a three-week long joint military exercise with Georgian troops. Three weeks later, on the night of Aug. 7, "coinciding with the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Georgian President Saakashvili ordered an all-out military attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia."It is simply inconceivable that the Pentagon wasn’t wired to the helmets of Georgian troops, despite the denials of U.S. military officials.

See also this quote one of those military trainers gave Danger Room:

One of the U.S. military trainers put it to me a bit more bluntly. “We’re giving them the knife,” he said. “Will they use it?”

As I said, I think the presumed spin is designed to excuse US inaction in the face of an utter lack of means to respond to Russia. Read more →

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Your Expensive Commute Has Gone To Line Maliki’s Pocket

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iraqi-oil.jpg

I see that Henry Waxman’s just as focused on oil as those Republicans trying to stink up the House–only in Waxman’s case, he’s demonstrating that the Iraqi budget surplus is almost the same amount as the money Americans have spent on Iraqi oil.

On Tuesday, the Govemment Accountability Office reported that by the end of this year Iraq may amass a budget surplus of between $67 billion and $79 billion as a result of windfall oil sale revenues.

This is roughly the same amount U.S. consumers have paid to purchase Iraqi oil since the war began. According to data provided by the Energy Information Administration, the United States is the single largest purchaser of Iraqi oil, and U.S. consumers will have spent between $70 billion and S74 billion to purchase Iraqi oil by the end of this year.

This means U.S. consumers have been paying record gas prices at the pump to build up Iraq’s massive budget surplus. At the same time, U.S. taxpayers have paid $48 billion to fund Iraq’s reconstruction. I am writing to ask what steps the Bush Administration is taking to ensure that Iraq contributes its fair share to finance the reconstruction.

I’m sure the international oil market doesn’t work on a one-to-one correlation like this. But the American consumers paying $4 a gallon to fund their 30 mile commutes don’t know that–nor do they care, I suspect. Waxman writes:

Based on this information, it appears that U.S. taxpayers are paying twice – once through their taxes to pay for lraq’s reconstruction and a second time at the pump to help build Iraq’s massive surplus.

Shorter Waxman: Why have American taxpayers been asked to forgo necessities to line Nuri al-Maliki’s pockets?

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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]

Read more →

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Why Is the State Department “Hunting” for Deals for Bush’s Oil Buddy?

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Man, Condi Rice has got to be tired of getting damning letters from Henry Waxman.

This one shows that, despite very specific denials from the Bush Administration that they knew anything about Bush buddy and uber-donor Ray Hunt scoring one of the first oil deals with Kurdish Iraq, the State Department was in fact very well informed about the deal.

Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed.

The documents show:

  • On June 12 and 15,2007, Hunt Oil officials met with officials from the U.S. Regional Reconstruction Team (RRT) for the Kurdistan region, located in Erbil, "to investigate investment prospects" in the Kurdish region.6 During the June 15 meeting, the Hunt Oil officials "specifically asked if the [U.S.] had a policy toward companies entering contracts with the KRG.7 According to notes taken by Hunt Oil officials, they were told the "U.S. has no policy, for nor against."8 Synopses of these meetings were sent to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as part of weekly situation reports on June 14 and 21,2007.9
  • On July 12,2007, Ray Hunt, president and CEO of Hunt Oil, sent a letter to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of which he was a member, making clear his intentions to pursue oil exploration in Kurdistan. Mr. Hunt disclosed that Hunt Oil was "approached a month or so ago by representatives of a private group in Kurdistan as to the possibility of our becoming interested in that region."10 He went on to describe the visit of an oil survey team and stated that "we were encouraged by what we saw. We have a larger team going back to Kurdistan this week."11
  • In August 2007, Hunt Oil representatives exchanged e-mails with State Department personnel discussing their return to Kurdistan in late August to "assess business opportunities in Kurdistan. 12
  • On August 30, 2007, Ray Hunt sent a second letter to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board informing the board that he would be traveling to Kurdistan during the week of September 3,2007, to meet with members of the Kurdistan Regional Government, including the President, Prime Minister, and Oil Minister. 13 Read more →
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