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Today's News and Views

ADMINISTRATION
Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, July 3, 2006

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush told prosecutors he directed Cheney to disclose classified information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so.

Libby has said that neither the president nor the vice president directed him or other administration officials to disclose Plame's CIA employment to the press. Cheney has also denied having any role in the disclosure.

On October 28, 2005, a federal grand jury indicted Libby on five felony counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, for allegedly concealing his own role, and perhaps that of others, in outing Plame as a covert CIA officer.

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Libby, in language strikingly similar to Bush's words, testified to the federal grand jury in the leak case that Cheney had told him to "get all the facts out" that would defend the administration and discredit Wilson. Portions of Libby's grand jury testimony were an exhibit in a recent court filing by Fitzgerald.

Dana Perino, a spokesperson for the White House, declined to comment. James E. Sharpe, an attorney for President Bush, did not return a phone message left at his home on Saturday. The special prosecutor's office also declined to comment.

The disclosure of classified information as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, and the unmasking of Plame as a CIA "operative" by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, occurred after Wilson began asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq.

Wilson had led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger in March 2002 to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were almost certainly not true. Still, President Bush cited the Niger allegations during his 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Saddam had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Wilson has said he sought out White House officials, believing they did not know all the facts, and was rebuffed, he began speaking to reporters about his Niger mission, although he initially asked journalists not to reveal his identity.

On June 12, 2003, the same day that news accounts appeared citing Wilson's allegations against the administration-albeit without him being named-Libby first learned from Cheney that Plame worked at the CIA and might have played a role in sending her husband to Niger. Libby's indictment stated: "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President learned this information from the CIA."

On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public in an op-ed piece in The New York Times and on NBC's "Meet the Press" with his claims that the Bush administration had misrepresented the Niger information to make the case for war.

Among those who took notice was Cheney.

Cheney cut Wilson's op-ed out of the newspaper and wrote in the margins: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question. Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

In grand jury testimony, Libby testified that Cheney would "often... cut out from a newspaper an article using a little penknife he had" and "look at, think about it." Whether Libby saw Cheney's annotation of Wilson's column is not clear. Libby testified: "It's possible if it was sitting on his desk that, you know, my eye went across it."

That aside, court papers filed by Fitzgerald's office have asserted: "At some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

Two days after Wilson's column appeared, on July 8, 2003, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby questioned Wilson's mission to Niger by telling Miller that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, according to Miller's federal grand jury testimony, and the indictment of Libby. Libby has claimed that he and Miller never discussed Plame that day -- a claim that prosecutors assert is a lie.

Four days later, on July 12, 2003, Libby told Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame worked for the CIA and that she might have had a role in her husband's selection for the Niger mission. Libby also spoke to Miller again that day and discussed Plame's work at the CIA, according to Miller's grand jury testimony and the Libby indictment.

Central to the criminal charges against Libby is Libby's grand jury testimony and his statements to the FBI that when he talked to Cooper and Miller about Plame, he was only repeating rumors that he had heard from other journalists. Libby has testified that one or two days before talking to Miller and Cooper about Plame, NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert told Libby that Plame worked for the CIA, and that other reporters had heard the same information.

According to Libby's indictment, Libby told the FBI that after Russert told him about Plame, Libby responded "that he did not know that, and Russert replied that all the reporters knew it. Libby was surprised by this statement because, while speaking with Russert, Libby did not recall that he previously had learned about Wilson's wife's employment from the Vice President."

Contradicting Libby, Russert testified to the grand jury that he never spoke about Plame to Libby. Prosecutors alleged that Libby lied about Russert, and the Libby indictment states that he learned about Plame from Cheney and also from State Department and CIA officials with either direct or indirect access to classified information.

A central focus of Fitzgerald's investigation has been why Libby would devise a cover story on how he learned of Plame's CIA work when prosecutors had obtained Libby's own notes showing that Libby had first gotten the information from Cheney. Libby told the FBI and testified to the grand jury that he had forgotten what Cheney had told him by the time that he made the Plame disclosure to reporters.

"I no longer remembered it," Libby testified to the grand jury regarding his June 12 conversation with Cheney. It was only after speaking to Russert, Libby testified, that he "learned" the information about Plame's CIA employment "anew."

Federal investigators have concluded that Libby's account is implausible. They have also questioned Libby's testimony that he does not believe he discussed the matter again with Cheney until at least July 14, 2003, the date of Novak's column that called Plame an "agency operative."

Federal investigators have a substantial amount of evidence that Cheney and Libby spoke about the matter in detail shortly after Wilson's column appeared on July 6. Cheney's handwritten notes in the margin of the Wilson column are one reason that prosecutors have believed that the two men spoke earlier than Libby has said they did.

Why -- if the criminal charges against Libby are correct -- would Libby lie to the FBI and the grand jury that he was only circulating rumors he had heard from reporters?

One obvious reason, prosecutors have believed, is that Libby did not want to admit that he was disseminating material gleaned from classified information. Even if Libby believed that he was unlikely to be charged with disclosing classified information, the investigators think that Libby could have feared the loss of his security clearance or his job. Or, perhaps most important of all, he worried about embarrassing Cheney and Bush.

Sources say investigators believe it is possible that Libby was trying to obscure Cheney's role in the Plame leak -- either by the vice president directing Libby to leak her CIA status, or through a general instruction from Cheney encouraging Libby to get the word out about Plame's role in sending Wilson to Niger. They say it is also possible that Libby lied to conceal the fact that he leaked Plame's identity to the press without Cheney's approval.

Another important reason that Cheney and Libby may have spoken about Plame shortly after July 6, rather than July 12, is that Libby testified that he and Cheney talked on a regular basis after July 6 about how to counteract Wilson's allegations. During grand jury testimony, a prosecutor asked Libby whether this was "a topic that was discussed on a daily basis?" Libby replied: "Yes, sir." When the prosecutor followed up by saying, "And it was discussed on multiple occasions each day, in fact?" Libby again responded: "Yes, sir."

Asked why the matter was so important to Cheney, Libby replied: "He wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn't done-what the facts were or were not. He was very keen on that and said it repeatedly: Let's get everything out."

Libby further testified that Cheney was not referring to going public with information about Plame, but rather making available other classified information that both men believed would rebut Wilson's charges and discredit him.

Cheney encouraged Libby to disclose portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, according to court records filed by Fitzgerald. One section of the report mentioned the Niger allegations as credible, and Cheney, Libby, and other senior administration officials wanted to demonstrate that the CIA's incorrect assessments were a reason why the administration was making its own claims about the Niger matter.

As National Journal first reported in April, Cheney directed Libby to leak portions of a highly classified March 2002 intelligence report on the CIA's Directorate of Operations debriefing of Wilson after he returned from Niger. Although the debriefing did not mention Plame, Cheney and Libby believed that portions of it would contradict Wilson's accounts.

During the same time that Cheney and Libby's effort to leak classified information to discredit Wilson was under way, other White House officials were working through a formal interagency declassification process to make public portions of one or both of the same documents. It is unclear why Cheney and Libby were apparently acting without the knowledge of other senior government officials who were working with Cheney and Libby to formally declassify much of the very same information.

Leading the effort to formally declassify some of the same information, according to legal and government sources, were presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and then-CIA Director George Tenet.

A senior government official who has spoken to the president about the matter said that although Bush encouraged Cheney to get information out to rebut Wilson's charges, Bush was unaware that Cheney had directed Libby to leak classified information. The White House has pointed out that the president and vice president have broad executive powers to declassify whatever information they believe to be in the public interest. Meanwhile, court papers filed by Fitzgerald in April suggest that Libby was reluctant to leak any classified information to the press, and only did so after being assured that his actions were approved by both the president and vice president.

Regarding a meeting with Judith Miller that was scheduled for July 8, 2003, in which Cheney wanted Libby to leak her portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald asserted in the court papers that Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose... [portions] of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion."

"[Libby] further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE. [Libby] testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE."

And Libby "testified that he spoke to David Addington, then Counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that presidential Authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of a document."

A senior government official familiar with the matter said that in directing Libby to leak the classified information to Miller and other reporters, Cheney said words to the effect of, "The president wants this out," or "The president wants this done."

-- Previous coverage of pre-war intelligence and the CIA leak investigation from Murray Waas.

Posted on Thu, Jun. 29, 2006
An innocent is executed

On Monday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia issued a scathing opinion insisting there has never been a single proven case in which an innocent person was executed in the past three decades. The opinion’s timing has an irony overshadowed only by its tragedy: Just the day before, the Chicago Tribune published a detailed account of what was mostly likely just such an execution.

There is no stronger argument against the death penalty than the fact that in an imperfect justice system, there is too much of a chance of the ultimate mistake being made, that someone could wrongly be executed.

Lacking incontrovertible DNA or other physical evidence, it cannot be proved beyond a scintilla of doubt that the state of Texas wrongfully put Carlos De Luna to death in 1989. But all evidence indicates another man, Carlos Hernandez, killed a convenience store clerk, Wanda Lopez, six years earlier. De Luna had always said he was the victim of mistaken identity and had even named Hernandez as the killer.

“Ending years of silence,” the Tribune reported Sunday, “Hernandez’s relatives and friends recounted how the violent felon repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to death row for a murder Hernandez committed.

“The newspaper investigation, involving interviews with dozens of people and a review of thousands of pages of court records, shows the case was compromised by shaky eyewitness identification, sloppy police work and a failure to thoroughly pursue Hernandez as a possible suspect.”

In a case involving Kansas’ death penalty, Supreme Court Justice David Souter laid out the argument that too many people have been wrongfully sentenced to death. The court upheld Kansas’ law in a 5-4 ruling, despite its unacceptable provision that if aggravating and mitigating circumstances are equal, they cancel each other out, and the defendant is sentenced to death. “A law that requires execution when the case for aggravation has failed to convince the sentencing jury is morally absurd, and the Court’s holding that the Constitution tolerates this moral irrationality defies decades of precedent aimed at eliminating freakish capital sentencing in the United States,” Souter wrote.

Souter’s opinion so incensed Scalia that the conservative justice wasn’t satisfied with Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion and felt compelled to write his own, specifically to rebut Souter. After complaining that Souter’s opinion was inappropriate for its denunciation of the death penalty as it is now carried out, Scalia launched into a passionate defense of the state-sanctioned killing, a practice most other nations have rejected as barbaric.

“There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America’s death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society. (I say sanctimonious, because most of the countries to which these finger-waggers belong had the death penalty themselves until recently – and indeed, many of them would still have it if the democratic will prevailed),” Scalia wrote. “It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”

Justice Scalia and other enthusiastic death penalty proponents should listen: That is the name of Carlos De Luna being shouted, and it isn’t just coming from lobbyists, it is coming from the voices of simple Americans who object to their government killing people in their name.

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

by Angry Girl
Nightweed.com

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm

12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml

13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html

16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here: http://www.bbvdocs.org/videos/baxterVPR.mov)

http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190

17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml

18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.

http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
http://uscountvotes.org/

VIDEO: "The Chimp Video' - Chimpanzee hacks Diebold audit log

FreeVideoCoding.com

What Really Happened

GRAND THEFT MEXICO

Published by Greg Palast July 3rd, 2006 in Articles

Greg Palast in London
Matt Pascarella in Mexico City

Monday, 3 July The Guardian
Dispatch from Mexico City

The election race south of the US border is officially too close to call. Now, where have we heard that before?

As in Florida in 2000, and as in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls show the voters voted for the progressive candidate. The race is “officially” too close to call. But they will call it - after they steal it.

Reuters reports that, as of 8pm eastern time, as voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls showed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the “leftwing” party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderon of the ruling conservative National Action party (PAN).

We’ve said again and again: exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can’t tell pollsters whether their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science - and Calderon’s ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.

Calderon’s election is openly supported by the Bush administration.

On the ground in Mexico city, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation’s electoral commission. We are not surprised.

This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico’s voter files under a secret “counter-terrorism” contract with the database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia (See BUSH TEAM HELPS RULING PARTY “FLORIDIZE” MEXICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.)The FBI’s contractor states that following the arrest of ChoicePoint agents by the Mexican government, the company returned or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known that collecting this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful in challenging a voter’s right to cast a ballot or in preventing that vote from counting.

It is, of course, impossible to know whether the FBI destroyed its own copy of the files of Mexico’s voter rolls obtained by ChoicePoint or whether these were then used to illegally assist the Calderon candidacy. But we can see the results: as in the US, first in Florida, then in Ohio, the exit polls are at odds with “official” polls.

In November 2004, the US Republican Senator Richard Lugar, in Kiev, cited the divergence of exit polls and official polls as solid evidence of “blatant fraud” in the vote count in Ukraine. As a result, the Bush administration refused to recognise the Ukraine government’s official vote tally - proving once again that republicans are incapable of irony.

The foreign mainstream press has already announced, despite the polling discrepancies, that Mexico’s elections were fair and clean, which would be a first for that country where Lopez Obrador’s party has seen its candidates defeated by “blatant fraud” before. The change this time is that the fraud is simply less blatant.

****************

Watch for our video reports from Mexico City at www.GregPalast.com to be carried on Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman, this Wednesday, July 5. Rick Rowley, in Mexico City, contributed to this report.

Matt Pascarella is North American producer for GregPalast.com. Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.”

For interview requests contact: Fiona McMorrough at FionaM ( at) fmcm.co.uk or interviews (at) gregpalast.com

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Progressive Daily Beacon Opinion Piece

All Hail King George's Non-Birthday...And If You Have Time, Some 'Props' for the Nation Too

A. Alexander, July 4th, 2006

It isn't bad enough George W. Bush has decided to hijack the United States Constitution and is currently trying to figure out how best to undermine the Supreme Court's Guantanamo ruling, now he's decided to claim Independence Day as his own.

It requires a certain amount of arrogance -- Texas-sized arrogance actually -- for a president to "manipulate intelligence" such that he can lead a nation to war under false pretenses.

It is no small amount of hubris that allows Bush to unilaterally ignore more than 750 laws passed by the peoples' representatives.

It is difficult to imagine the ego that drives Bush to single-handedly erase the Bill of Rights and spy on some 200 million Americans. And, no, USA Today did not retract the veracity of that claim, only that they have not been able to confirm BellSouth and Verizon had also signed contracts, as AT&T had, with NSA.

It shouldn't come as any surprise then that a president of such unbounded conceit and who displays an eager willingness to undermine nearly every principle upon which the United States has been built, would also assume ownership of the Nation's day of Independence. And that is exactly what George W. Bush has decided to do in 2006.

Though born on July 6, Bush will celebrate his birth on the Nation's birthday. The symbolism and message couldn't be clearer - Dear Leader's day of birth is as important, in his mind anyway, as the day America declared itself a new nation.

It seems the president's ego and sense of self-importance knows no bounds. On this July Fourth, all Hail King George! And if you have the time, pay some 'props' to the day America declared its independence.

July 04, 2006

How do they get away with it? That is a recurring question in the long nightmare that has overtaken us and allowed the most corrupt, power-mad, fanatical, incompetent, oil-guzzling, hypocritical, self-aggrandizing, war-mongering, runners of failed businesses to commandeer the country and endanger our democracy with policies that fail even a minimalist’s measure of good governance.
From the start claims that an MBA president would conduct the affairs of state in a manner that would stand in high relief to the previous administration’s inefficiencies were superficial and overblown. The photo-op cabinet gatherings that always started on time with attendees dressed in proper leadership garb were cozy enclaves that hid the subterranean nature of what these folks were really up to.
Those secret meetings in Vice President Cheney’s office with energy moguls, the longing for an excuse to invade Iraq, the murmurings that presaged attempts to gut government programs and privatize Social Security - - those were the big ideas at work as the pin-stripe brigade began a rampage that had its roots in the administration’s ideological game plan long before September 11th provided the means to implement its wishful thinking. And for the evangelicals who had helped elect this president a few bones - - creationism, gay marriage, roadblocks to embryonic stem-cell research, holds on family planning information or sex education that went beyond abstinence, to name just a few of the ‘initiatives’ introduced at the behest of right-wing religious leaders.
And underpinning the whole process were tax cuts that so lop-sidedly accrued to wealthy political benefactors. Most remarkable in that particular instance is the notion among so many that lowering taxes has something to do with them. In fact nothing could be further from the truth just as nothing could be less the case than that our invasion of Iraq has made the country safer. These twin deceptions have been embraced by large numbers of a gullible and poorly informed electorate that is deliberately misled by a propaganda machine emanating directly from The White House and filtered through Congressional leaders and media hacks.
What in fact has become of the meager tax cuts most ordinary Americans enjoyed? With stagnant wages and rising fuel costs those benefits have likely been devoured and re-distributed to corporate magnates and corrupt government officials - - people who seem to have no problem profiting from the largesse of middle-income wage earners even as they legislate according to the dictates of lobbyists and line up lucrative post-government jobs in the lobbying industry for themselves. If this hasn’t become obvious to Mr. and Mrs. Average American by now, it should be the business of those outside the charmed circle to make it clear before the next election.
As the president has said ‘you have to keep repeating things over and over to get the truth out’ except, of course, what he and his people were ‘getting out’ wasn’t the truth; that was carefully concealed under layers of confusing rhetoric. What people in the administration seem to forget, though, is that tapes and videos are easily retrieved highlighting discrepancies and downright lies about things which have been disproven and for which no adequate explanation or disclaimer can be made. Such inconsistencies should be re-visited “over and over” until the truth sinks in.
But beyond the administration’s free ride in the wake of 9/11, it is curious that an incompetent bunch of losers could ascend to positions of such influence and power. Neither Bush nor Cheney were especially gifted in business. The president was buttressed by family friends in various unsuccessful ventures and allowed to parlay some dubious dollars into a windfall when he sold the Texas Rangers. Cheney, on the other hand, made millions as an ineffectual, and possibly suspect, CEO of Halliburton and walked off leaving the company in dire straits due in part to decisions he made, among them acquiring the Dresser Corporation that saddled Halliburton with a huge asbestos liability. Perhaps he assumed he could influence legislation to set limits on asbestos claims, an effort he made once he became vice president. And of course, Halliburton has had a felicitous reprieve as a result of its no-bid wartime contracts.
Adding to the problem of being in way over their heads was the installation of equally unqualified cronies and ideologues in positions that required expertise, not just political credentials. The party faithful found a place at the table, but proved to be incapable of formulating effective policies either because they were too long in the tooth to fathom the complexities of the 21st century or were tied too slavishly to their Commander in Chief’s limited and limiting vision.
It may not be enough to say simply “had enough?” Still - - no harm in reminding voters how this White House and Republican Congress have failed to provide adequate “homeland security”, a fair-and-balanced economic agenda or sound foreign policy and how they exemplify the corruption that secrecy and cronyism engender.

Posted by Ann at 10:56 AM on Jul 04, 2006

Jun 30, 2006
Secret terrorist probe not so secret – or useful, insiders say

By Rachael Lee Coleman
rcoleman@moneylaundering.com

News of the Bush administration’s clandestine bank surveillance program stunned many Americans, but Washington insiders say it didn’t surprise them or the terrorists the program tails.

President Bush described last week’s media reports exposing the U.S. Treasury Department’s terrorist finance tracking program – covert scrutiny of international financial transactions through a Belgium-based cooperative known by its acronym SWIFT – as “disgraceful” and Republican Senator Jim Bunning accused the reporters who wrote the stories of “treason.”

“The rhetoric on this is way out of proportion on both sides,” said Victor Comras, a former State Department official and U.S. diplomat appointed by the United Nations Security Council to assess global anti-terrorist financing efforts. “The people who finance terrorism and launder money recognized long ago that these transactions can be traced.”

Since the New York Times and other media didn’t tell the public anything the terrorists didn’t already know and since banks already monitor suspicious transactions for the U.S. government, many question the probe’s usefulness. “It’s not a cost-effective way to deal with terrorism issues,” Comras said.

Known program

The Bush administration has repeatedly bragged about its efforts and self-proclaimed success tracking terrorist financing since the September 11 attacks. The government described its quest to catch financiers in numerous public documents, reports and Capitol Hill testimonies. Even as far back as 1990, the Council on Europe called for greater cooperation between Interpol and agencies like SWIFT – a global banking hub that monitors millions of transfers worth trillions of dollars.

Comras co-authored a 2002 report for the UN Security Council describing how “critical” data-rich international clearinghouses, like SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) or CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System) and the Federal Reserve Wire Transfer System, could be monitored for terror-related transactions – a tactic adopted by Canada’s financial intelligence agency FinTRAC, which requires banks there to provide it with SWIFT data.

“The U.S. was touting quite loudly its tracking of terrorist financing,” said Comras, an attorney and consultant on terrorism financing. “If they’re doing that, it’s only logical that they’re following the funds through the clearinghouses. How else would they do it? For us, it was an obvious no-brainer.”

With that much information circulating in the public domain, specialists believe terrorists certainly knew of the controversial Central Intelligence Agency-run program, just as they discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation acquired records from Western Union, the world’s largest money transmitter. According to Ron Suskind’s recently-published book The One-Percent Doctrine, the FBI used subpoenas to obtain credit card transaction records from Western Union’s parent company, First Data Corp., to track potential terrorist activity.

“The 9/11 terrorists educated themselves about the American financial system,” said Andy Cochran, a terrorism and homeland security consultant and founder of the Counterterrorism Blog. “You would think, by now, they would have found out what was happening, the same as they found out about Western Union. They’re doing the acting. We’re doing the reacting.”

Jim Shedd, an international consultant and former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, said it was only a matter of time before the press unearthed the story.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that the government is doing everything it can to protect the country,” Shedd said. “Once it’s out of the bag, it’s out of the bag.”

Just one tool

Government officials claim the secret program helped them capture al Qaeda operative Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, whom they believe masterminded the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort. They also say it helped them track down Uzair Paracha, a Brooklyn man convicted last year for laundering $200,000 for an al Qaeda operative in Pakistan.

Some acknowledge that the covert program may have been useful immediately after September 11, but Shedd and others agree it isn’t – and shouldn’t be – the government’s only anti-terrorism tool, particularly when terrorists and other criminals move money through alternative channels.

“The M.O. has changed,” Cochran said. “The question is whether we have changed with it, and I don’t think we have.”

As transaction monitoring becomes more sophisticated, financiers send smaller amounts of money in a greater number of transactions. Terrorists and other criminal networks often co-mingle dirty funds with legitimate charitable contributions, or use cash couriers and underground systems like the black market peso exchange and Hawala, an ancient trust-based remittance system used in Asia and the Middle East that involves no actual movement of cash.

“They use a number of different methods,” Comras said. “They still use the banking system, but in ways we aren’t able to decipher. They’re very effective in masking transactions, most of which come in under the wire very safely. We’re lost in mass amounts of information.”

That leads to questions about SWIFT’s usefulness in these kinds of endeavors. Treasury assured SWIFT – a consortium of 2,200 institutions – that it only sought data for specific individuals when the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, served it with broad administrative subpoenas. SWIFT officials said they were forced to balance the “confidentiality of our users’ data” with the request and that they “negotiated with the Treasury over the scope and oversight” of the program.

Still, investigators and specialists agree that mining millions of records is a tough way to find potential terrorists because most use aliases and combine wire transfers with a multitude of other transfer mechanisms.

“If you have a specific lead and you get lucky, it can be a useful tool,” Comras said. “If you’re using it for data mining purposes, it’s not effective because you’re sifting through millions of transactions everyday trying to figure out which ones are questionable.”

SARs just as effective

The SWIFT data, investigators agree, is no more useful than the information already provided to the U.S. government by the banks handling the transactions. The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has been overwhelmed with suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and other documents that the Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to file. According to FinCEN, those businesses filed 230,000 SARs in 2005 and more than 3 million since 1996.

The USA Patriot Act amended the BSA in 2001 to grant law enforcement agencies equal access to that and other BSA data. Two years later, the U.S. Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security designated the FBI to lead terrorist financing investigations and operations.

Yet, turf wars and a lack of communication between agencies like the CIA and the FBI have caused investigators to duplicate probes and prevented them from gleaning the wealth of information at their fingertips.

Treasury officials kept mum about how, or even if, analysts use SAR and SWIFT data together. However, OFAC spokeswoman Molly Millerwise noted that SWIFT data is “used only for terrorism investigations” and is “distinct from SARs and other reports” banks must file under the BSA.

“My greatest criticism is that we don’t know yet what to do with the terrorists once we’ve spotted them,” Comras said. “We put them on a list, but nobody cares what that list means. We haven’t really put terrorist financiers out.”

How to Beat 'Cut and Run'

If Rove can successfully con Democrats into ignoring Iraq and reciting their laundry list of other priorities, Republicans win.

By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek

July 3-10, 2006 issue - For more than a quarter century, Karl Rove has employed a simple, brilliant, counterintuitive campaign tactic: instead of attacking his opponents at their weakest point, the conventional approach, he attacks their strength. He neutralizes that strength to the point that it begins to look like weakness. When John McCain was winning in 2000 because of his character, Rove attacked his character. When John Kerry was nominated in 2004 because of his Vietnam combat experience, the Republicans Swift-Boated him. This year's midterm elections will turn on whether Rove can somehow transform the Democrats' greatest political asset—the Iraq fiasco—into a liability.

After escaping indictment, Rove is focused again on what he does best: ginning up the slime machine. Anyone who dares criticize President Bush's Iraq policy is a "cut-and-run" Democrat. The White House's object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it's time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.

These are the stakes: if Rove can successfully con Democrats into ignoring Iraq and reciting their laundry list of other priorities, Republicans win. It's shameful that the minimum wage hasn't been raised in nine years and that thousands of ailing Americans will ultimately die because of Bush's position on stem-cell research. But those issues won't get the Congress back for Democrats. Iraq can.

You would think it would be the GOP running away from the war. Instead, in gamblers' parlance, Republicans "doubled down" on Iraq. After the good news about Zarqawi's death, they bet that by uniting behind Bush, they would shift the blame to the squabbling Democrats, even though the Democrats have no power at all to change—or even affect—policy on the ground. Rove's notion is that strong and wrong beats meek and weak.

It almost worked. It looked recently as if Democrats were so fearful of being cast as war weenies that they would change the subject. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. held a press conference on the Democratic issues for the fall that barely mentioned Iraq. Hillary Clinton tried to focus on a lengthy list of worthy issues that, except for the mistreatment of veterans, had little to do with the war.

Why are Democrats having so much difficulty holding Bush accountable for his myriad failures? I think it's because they've lost touch with the basic merits of accountability, particularly on education, where they let interest-group politics trump tough judgments on performance.

But then, some Senate Democrats got smart for a change. They recognized that the party out of the White House doesn't need a detailed strategy for ending a war, just a general sense of direction. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, his plan wasn't any more specific than "I will go to Korea." When Richard Nixon was asked how he would end the Vietnam War in 1968, he said he had a "secret plan"—and got away with it. So now 80 percent of Senate Democrats are united behind something called the "Levin-Reed Amendment." The details of it (begin withdrawal without a firm timetable for getting out completely; diplomacy with the Sunnis; purging the Iraqi military and police of bad guys) are less important than that they finally came up with something.

Of course parrying "cut and run" with "Levin-Reed" won't suffice. But Sen. Joe Biden's riposte to the GOP's symbolic roll-call votes—"The Republicans are now totally united in a failed policy"—is a start. This isn't rocket science. Unless things improve dramatically on the ground in Iraq, Democrats have a powerful argument: If you believe the Iraq war is a success, vote Republican. If you believe it is a failure, vote Democratic.

Isn't that irresponsible? Not in the slightest. It's only under Bush that criticizing the conduct of a war has been depicted as somehow unpatriotic. Lincoln was lambasted by opponents during the Civil War as was FDR during World War II. To take a lesser example, some of the same Sean Hannitys of the world who slam antiwar critics were blasting Bill Clinton's Bosnia policy in 1999 when U.S. planes were in the air over Belgrade.

We'll see this summer if Democrats begin to get up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, "This isn't about us. It's about them." We'll see if, when Karl Rove wants to talk about Iraq, the Democrats respond with three familiar words: "Bring it on."

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