History > 2006 > USA > CIA / NI / NSA / NGA (IV-VI)

Cheney Will Testify in C.I.A. Leak Case

December 20, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 — Vice President Dick Cheney will be summoned as a defense witness in the trial of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, a defense lawyer said Tuesday in federal court. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney signaled that he would not resist the request for his testimony.

The decision to call Mr. Cheney was announced by Theodore V. Wells, a lawyer for Mr. Libby, whose trial is scheduled to begin next month.

“We’re calling the vice president,” Mr. Wells said at a hearing before Judge Reggie B. Walton in Federal District Court.

Mr. Cheney has been a looming presence in the C.I.A. leak case from the start, and his appearance as a defense witness would keep the vice president and the White House in the foreground of Mr. Libby’s trial. Mr. Libby is the only person charged with a crime as a result of an investigation into whether anyone in the Bush administration intentionally leaked the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency officer.

After the announcement at Tuesday’s hearing, Lea Anne McBride, Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, said: “We’ve cooperated fully in this matter and will continue to do so in fairness to the parties involved. And as we’ve stated previously, we’re not going to comment further on the legal proceedings.”

The prospect of Mr. Cheney’s testimony suggested that Mr. Libby’s trial could be transformed from a narrowly gauged perjury case into a riveting courtroom drama with the taciturn vice president as the star witness. He would testify under oath and be exposed to cross-examination by prosecutors.

Mr. Cheney would be the first sitting vice president, at least in modern times, to appear as a witness in a criminal trial, said Prof. Joel Goldstein of the St. Louis University Law School, an authority on the vice presidency.

Although Mr. Cheney has been a vigorous proponent of sweeping executive authority, which includes the notion that the president and perhaps other high officials could resist calls to testify in criminal trials involving their official conduct, his appearance may not set precedents, legal experts said. That is mostly because the Libby case presents a different situation from one in which such officials are subpoenaed to testify, they said.

Mr. Cheney appears to have voluntarily agreed to testify on behalf of Mr. Libby, whom he has steadfastly supported. It is unclear whether Mr. Cheney would appear personally in the courtroom or seek to testify in a less exposed manner like having his testimony taken at the White House and introduced into the trial by videotape.

The trial stems from the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. officer in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak. The fallout from that disclosure led to an investigation by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a special prosecutor, into whether the leak violated any laws and whether Ms. Wilson’s name was disclosed as part of a campaign to punish her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, for his criticism of the White House.

Mr. Wilson wrote an opinion article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003 — shortly before the Novak column — in which he claimed that the White House had twisted intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. He wrote that he had personally investigated whether Iraq bought uranium in Africa and had not found any basis for that belief.

Mr. Fitzgerald did not bring any charges in connection with laws that prohibit the willful disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity as a covert operative. But he did indict Mr. Libby, also known as Scooter, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, saying he had untruthfully testified to a grand jury and federal agents when he said he had learned about Ms. Wilson’s role at the C.I.A. from reporters rather than from several officials, including Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers have said, in court papers, that they will seek to demonstrate that he had no motive to lie and that if he made any inaccurate statements about his conversations with reporters, they were a result of his being distracted by far more important issues of national security.

In his testimony, Mr. Cheney will probably be asked to affirm Mr. Libby’s statements that he was occupied with many important issues and that there was no deliberate White House plan to disclose Ms. Wilson’s identity.

Prosecutors have said in legal filings that Mr. Cheney played a central role in the White House reaction to Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article. Mr. Fitzgerald has hinted in filings that Mr. Cheney may be a prosecution witness, although he said at the hearing that the government had no plans to call the vice president.

According to Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony, cited in prosecution legal papers, Mr. Cheney believed that the article falsely attacked his credibility because it asserted that the vice president’s office instigated Mr. Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger.

Prosecutors have already disclosed a copy of the article on which Mr. Cheney made handwritten notations asking whether it was Mr. Wilson’s wife who sent him on the trip.

In previous legal briefs, prosecutors have said they want to use Mr. Cheney’s notes as evidence, saying they show the agitated environment in Mr. Cheney’s office and the importance that Mr. Libby attached to the effort to rebut the article.

After Mr. Cheney expressed concern, Mr. Libby told several reporters that Mr. Cheney’s office had not sent Mr. Wilson on the trip and that he might have traveled on what was little more than a junket arranged by Ms. Wilson.

With the trial scheduled to start on Jan. 16, Mr. Libby’s lawyers and federal prosecutors skirmished throughout the hearing over several likely issues about Mr. Libby’s motives and state of mind.

William H. Jeffress Jr., one of the defense lawyers, said he planned to call Mr. Libby as a witness, along with several reporters who interviewed him in mid-2003, to show that Mr. Libby had encouraged the reporters to testify or give depositions in the case.

    Cheney Will Testify in C.I.A. Leak Case, NYT, 20.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/washington/20leak.html

Man Mistakenly Abducted by C.I.A. Seeks Redress

November 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

RICHMOND, Va., Nov. 28 — A lawyer for a German man who was abducted while on vacation in Macedonia and said he was tortured while in C.I.A. custody in Afghanistan urged a federal appeals court on Tuesday to reinstate his lawsuit against the agency, which had been dismissed for national security reasons.

In May, a federal trial judge threw out the suit brought by Khaled el-Masri, who said he was an innocent victim of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program of transferring terrorism suspects secretly to other countries for detention and interrogation. Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court in Alexandria said that although it appeared a great injustice might have been done to Mr. Masri, he was persuaded by the government that there was no way to even begin a trial without impermissibly disclosing state secrets.

Benjamin Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, told a three-judge appeals panel on Tuesday that the government’s position was absurd because what happened to Mr. Masri had hardly remained secret. He noted that the German government was openly investigating whether its officials had played a role in Mr. Masri’s ordeal, and numerous news accounts have quoted unidentified American officials as confirming what happened.

Mr. Wizner said the government had not plausibly explained how national security interests might be harmed by a trial. He said President Bush acknowledged the C.I.A.’s program, known as extraordinary rendition, this summer, and it is widely known that other governments have been involved. A trial would not disclose state secrets but would merely involve “confirmation of a fact the entire world already knows,” he said.

Gregory G. Katsas, a senior Justice Department lawyer, told the judges that courts must defer to the executive branch when it invokes the state secrets doctrine, which was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1953.

Mr. Katsas said Porter J. Goss, who was the C.I.A. director when the suit was brought, filed a secret statement with the court outlining the agency’s case against a trial. Mr. Katsas said the statement provided a detailed account of how seemingly innocuous disclosures “will have a cascading effect that will have devastating consequences” for national security.

Mr. Masri sat stolidly in the first row of the courtroom during the 50-minute argument. A large man with graying hair cinched in a ponytail, he said in an interview later that he was infuriated with Judge Ellis’s view that there might be no remedy for the injustice apparently done to him.

Mr. Masri, who was born in Kuwait, was arrested in Macedonia on Dec. 31, 2003, and flown to a prison in Afghanistan, where he was held for five months. During his incarceration, he has said, he was shackled, beaten and injected with drugs.

On Tuesday, he said through an interpreter that he was kept in deplorable conditions “not fit for a human being at all.” Upon arrival in Afghanistan, he said, he was told that he was in a place where he had no right to recourse for what happened to him.

“I would like an explanation for what happened,” he told reporters. “I would like an apology.”

Mr. Wizner, his lawyer, said that although he believed Mr. Masri was entitled to financial compensation, he was not necessarily seeking anything beyond some official expression of remorse.

United States officials have been quoted anonymously in news reports as saying that Mr. Masri’s case was one of mistaken identity; intelligence authorities may have confused him with an operative for Al Qaeda with a similar name.

The officials said Mr. Masri was released in May 2004 on the orders of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, after she learned he had been mistakenly identified as a terrorism suspect. He was freed in Albania, where he was left to make his way home to Germany, which he likened to being treated “like a piece of luggage.”

Mr. Masri, who had earlier been denied permission to come to the United States to attend the hearing, said he has not been able to find a job since his return to Germany. “Both my Arab and German friends keep their distance,” he said.

On Wednesday, he is scheduled to meet with some Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are exploring the rendition program and the Bush administration’s increasingly frequent invocation of the state secrets doctrine to block lawsuits.

    Man Mistakenly Abducted by C.I.A. Seeks Redress, NYT, 29.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/washington/29rendition.html?hp&ex=1164862800&en=1675f6bbece3eb05&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Despite a Year of Ire and Angst, Little Has Changed on Wiretaps

November 25, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 — When President Bush went on national television one Saturday morning last December to acknowledge the existence of a secret wiretapping program outside the courts, the fallout was fierce and immediate.

Mr. Bush’s opponents accused him of breaking the law, with a few even calling for his impeachment. His backers demanded that he be given express legal authority to do what he had done. Law professors talked, civil rights groups sued and a federal judge in Detroit declared the wiretapping program unconstitutional.

But as Democrats prepare to take over on Capitol Hill, not much has really changed. For all the sound and fury in the last year, the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program continues uninterrupted, with no definitive action by either Congress or the courts on what, if anything, to do about it, and little chance of a breakthrough in the lame-duck Congress.

While the Democrats have vowed to press for more facts about the operation, they are of mixed minds about additional steps.

Some favor an aggressive strategy that would brand the program illegal and move to ban it even as the courts consider its legality. Others are more cautious, emphasizing the rule of law but not giving Republicans the chance to accuse them of depriving the government of important anti-terrorism tools.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who will take over as House speaker in January, favors an investigation to determine how the security agency’s program actually operated and what its legal framework is under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a senior aide to Ms. Pelosi said. Administration officials said they were concerned they could have to shut down a program they deemed vital to national security.

The 1978 law requires counterterrorism officials to obtain court orders to eavesdrop on people inside the United States. But the security agency’s program involved eavesdropping without warrants on the international telephone and e-mail communications of Americans and others in this country suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Congressional Republicans, for their part, see a missed opportunity to resolve the many questions hovering over the operation during a year in which they still commanded majorities in the House and Senate.

“We could’ve fixed this early on,” said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a believer that the surveillance program violates the 1978 law.

“For every day that passes,” Mr. Specter said in an interview, “there’s an invasion of privacy that could be cured.”

To understand the helter-skelter nature of the debate over the wiretapping program, one need look no further than Mr. Specter.

After the program was publicly disclosed last Dec. 15, the senator called it an “inappropriate” usurpation of presidential authority that “can’t be condoned.” He signed onto a bill last summer written by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that would effectively ban the program as it is now operated and require a court order for all wiretapping of Americans.

Then, after a series of confidential meetings with the White House, Mr. Specter worked out a compromise to bring the program before a secret intelligence court to test its constitutionality. He was promptly pummeled by Democrats and editorial writers for giving away too much to the White House.

Mr. Specter changed course again last week and submitted yet another proposal that would require warrants for eavesdropping on communications coming out of, but not into, the United States, and would put the whole issue on a fast track to the Supreme Court. Its fate, like its predecessors’, is unclear.

Along the way, Mr. Specter has clashed with politicians on the left and the right. He got into a public spat with Vice President Dick Cheney when the latter succeeded in keeping Mr. Specter from subpoenaing telecommunications executives to testify about cooperation with the security agency, and he traded terse words with Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, over Mr. Feingold’s efforts to have the Senate vote to censure the president over the wiretapping.

“It’s always difficult,” Mr. Specter said, “to get legislation on a controversial issue that has such political overtones.”

The lack of a resolution has left many shaking their heads. Some officials said the unanswered questions had cast doubt on the public credibility of broader intelligence operations and created occasional confusion among intelligence agents over what was and was not allowed in tracking terrorism suspects.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty over this program,” said a former senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the wiretapping program is classified.

“We’ve had a wasted year at this point,” the former official said, “and nothing has been done to try to really figure out how or whether we should amend the process.”

The program was secretly approved by Mr. Bush weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then, the security agency, which has historically been restricted from spying within the United States, has monitored thousands of international telephone calls and e-mail messages to and from people in this country, people with knowledge of the operation say. Senior administration officials say it has been critical in helping to identify previously unknown plots, but other government officials involved in the operation have said that it has often led to dead ends and to people with no clear links to terrorism.

The administration has steadfastly defended the program and has warned of a serious threat to national security were it stopped.

In a speech last week, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales labeled as “myth” the idea that the program “is an invasion of privacy and an unlawful eavesdropping tool.” The program, he said, “does not invade anyone’s privacy, unless you are talking to the enemy in this time of war.”

The legal authority, the administration argues, rests on both the president’s inherent constitutional authorities as commander in chief as well as a Congressional resolution passed days after Sept. 11 that authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda.

The only judge to rule directly on the question, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Federal District Court in Detroit, rejected the administration’s claims to broad executive authority, ruling the program illegal in August and ordering it shut down.

“There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” the judge wrote.

The Justice Department is appealing that decision, as well as a separate ruling in San Francisco allowing lawsuits against telecommunication companies to proceed. In that case, Judge Vaughn Walker of Federal District Court rejected the government’s assertion that the lawsuits should be quashed because they touched on “state secrets” and risked harming national security.

Justice Department officials said they were hopeful they would succeed in overturning the Detroit ruling, but they acknowledged they were concerned over where the courts would ultimately come down.

“It would certainly be good to have clarity on this,” said a senior Justice Department official, who was given anonymity to discuss the department’s internal thinking. “Do people want resolution on a program this important? Sure.”

Even after the Democrats won control of Congress this month, Mr. Bush pushed the passage of wiretapping legislation as a priority for the lame-duck session that concludes next month. During that brief window before Democrats take power, administration officials also hope to push through related measures that would effectively insulate telecommunications and government officials from legal liability growing out of the wiretapping.

But Republicans and Democrats alike give the White House virtually no chance of moving substantive wiretapping legislation before January.

An aide to Ms. Pelosi noted that the White House has until now agreed only to limited briefings on the program.

“There is bipartisan interest in seeing whether the administration’s claims that the program can’t comply with F.I.S.A. are indeed so,” the aide said. “We were legislating on an issue where the full parameters were not known or well understood.”

    Despite a Year of Ire and Angst, Little Has Changed on Wiretaps, NYT, 25.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/washington/25nsa.html?hp&ex=1164517200&en=8d802ec0f55cdf6a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

'They treat a whistle-blower like a virus'

Updated 11/24/2006 12:18 AM ET
USA Today

Most people first heard about Russell Tice last December when the former National Security Agency intelligence analyst asked to testify before Congress about NSA programs he claims are illegal.

But his confrontation with his employer began much earlier. In 2001, Tice reported suspicions that an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which oversees the NSA and other intelligence-gathering agencies, was spying for China.

When he followed up on the allegations several years later, Tice was ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation. Although he had passed his regular exam nine months earlier, the in-house psychologist conducting the latest evaluation decided Tice had psychotic paranoia.

After almost 20 years in intelligence, Tice's security clearance was revoked. He was transferred to a maintenance position at the NSA vehicle pool, and then to a government furniture warehouse.

Just days after publicly urging Congress to pass stronger protections for federal intelligence agency whistle-blowers facing retaliation, he was fired in May 2005.

"They treat a whistle-blower like a virus which they basically surround with buffers in an attempt to marginalize, isolate and prevent from having an impact on an organization," says Tice's lawyer, Joshua Dratel. Tice, through his lawyer, declined a request for an interview.

On July 25, Tice received a subpoena to "testify and answer questions concerning possible violations of federal criminal law" before a federal grand jury. The subpoena did not indicate whether he was the target of the investigation or whether it involved disclosures he made for a New York Times story on a NSA wiretapping program. Tice has acknowledged that he was the source for the Times piece in a January interview with ABC News and in press releases issued by the National Security whistle-blowers Coalition.

NSA spokesperson Don Weber declined to comment on Tice's allegations. "The National Security Agency upholds the highest standards of integrity in its handling of allegations of unlawful or inappropriate practices, and respects fully the requirements of the formal process by which such allegations are investigated," Weber wrote in an e-mail.

By Catherine Rampell with wire reports

    'They treat a whistle-blower like a virus', UT, 24.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistle-blower-nsa_x.htm

Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House.
Then, on June 6, he was assassinated - apparently by a lone gunman.
But Shane O'Sullivan says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder

Monday November 20, 2006
Guardian

At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver.

As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy's plans to sell bombers to Israel) and notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Witnesses place Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy, but the fatal bullet is fired from one inch behind. And more bullet-holes are found in the pantry than Sirhan's gun can hold, suggesting a second gunman is involved. Sirhan's notebooks show a bizarre series of "automatic writing" - "RFK must die RFK must be killed - Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68" - and even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember shooting Kennedy. He recalls "being led into a dark place by a girl who wanted coffee", then being choked by an angry mob. Defence psychiatrists conclude he was in a trance at the time of the shooting and leading psychiatrists suggest he may have be a hypnotically programmed assassin.

Three years ago, I started writing a screenplay about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, caught up in a strange tale of second guns and "Manchurian candidates" (as the movie termed brainwashed assassins). As I researched the case, I uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing. I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and started dipping into the nether-world of "assassination research", crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales, a fearsome Yaqui Indian.

Morales was a legendary figure in CIA covert operations. According to close associate Tom Clines, if you saw Morales walking down the street in a Latin American capital, you knew a coup was about to happen. When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that finished: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." From this line grew my odyssey into the spook world of the 60s and the secrets behind the death of Bobby Kennedy.

Working from a Cuban photograph of Morales from 1959, I viewed news coverage of the assassination to see if I could spot the man the Cubans called El Gordo - The Fat One. Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy's speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil moustache took notes.

The source of early research on Morales was Bradley Ayers, a retired US army captain who had been seconded to JM-Wave, the CIA's Miami base in 1963, to work closely with chief of operations Morales on training Cuban exiles to run sabotage raids on Castro. I tracked Ayers down to a small town in Wisconsin and emailed him stills of Morales and another guy I found suspicious - a man who is pictured entering the ballroom from the direction of the pantry moments after the shooting, clutching a small container to his body, and being waved towards an exit by a Latin associate.

Ayers' response was instant. He was 95% sure that the first figure was Morales and equally sure that the other man was Gordon Campbell, who worked alongside Morales at JM-Wave in 1963 and was Ayers' case officer shortly before the JFK assassination.

I put my script aside and flew to the US to interview key witnesses for a documentary on the unfolding story. In person, Ayers positively identified Morales and Campbell and introduced me to David Rabern, a freelance operative who was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961 and was at the Ambassador hotel that night. He did not know Morales and Campbell by name but saw them talking to each other out in the lobby before the shooting and assumed they were Kennedy's security people. He also saw Campbell around police stations three or four times in the year before Robert Kennedy was shot.

This was odd. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and Morales was stationed in Laos in 1968. With no secret service protection for presidential candidates in those days, Kennedy was guarded by unarmed Olympic decathlete champion Rafer Johnson and football tackler Rosey Grier - no match for an expert assassination team.

Trawling through microfilm of the police investigation, I found further photographs of Campbell with a third figure, standing centre-stage in the Ambassador hotel hours before the shooting. He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F Kennedy.

Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joann-des when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99% sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: "If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.

We move to Washington to meet Wayne Smith, a state department official for 25 years who knew Morales well at the US embassy in Havana in 1959-60. When we show him the video in the ballroom, his response is instant: "That's him, that's Morales." He remembers Morales at a cocktail party in Buenos Aires in 1975, saying Kennedy got what was coming to him. Is there a benign explanation for his presence? For Kennedy's security, maybe? Smith laughs. Morales is the last person you would want to protect Bobby Kennedy, he says. He hated the Kennedys, blaming their lack of air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

We meet Clines in a hotel room near CIA headquarters. He does not want to go on camera and brings a friend, which is a little unnerving. Clines remembers "Dave" fondly. The guy in the video looks like Morales but it is not him, he says: "This guy is fatter and Morales walked with more of a slouch and his tie down." To me, the guy in the video does walk with a slouch and his tie is down.

Clines says he knew Joannides and Campbell and it is not them either, but he fondly remembers Ayers bringing snakes into JM-Wave to scare the secretaries and seems disturbed at Smith's identification of Morales. He does not discourage our investigation and suggests others who might be able to help. A seasoned journalist cautions that he would expect Clines "to blow smoke", and yet it seems his honest opinion.

As we leave Los Angeles, I tell the immigration officer that I am doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. She has seen the advertisements for the new Emilio Estevez movie about the assassination, Bobby. "Who do you think did it? I think it was the Mob," she says before I can answer.

"I definitely think it was more than one man," I say, discreetly.

Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, weeks before he was to be called before the HSCA. Joannides died in 1990. Campbell may still be out there somewhere, in his early 80s. Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there. Lopez believes the CIA should call in and interview everybody who knew them, disclose whether they were on a CIA operation and, if not, why they were there that night.

Today would have been Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated

· Shane O'Sullivan's investigation will be shown tonight on Newsnight, BBC2, 10.30pm.

    Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?, G, 20.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1952393,00.html

Democrats demand CIA detainee documents

Posted 11/17/2006 8:28 PM ET
By Laurie Kellman, Associated Press
USA Today

WASHINGTON — A Senate Democrat who will chair its Judiciary Committee next year asked the Justice Department to release newly acknowledged documents setting U.S. policy on how suspects in the war on terrorism are detained and interrogated.

"The American people deserve to have detailed and accurate information about the role of the Bush administration in developing the interrogation policies and practices that have engendered such deep criticism and concern at home and around the world," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Leahy demanded two documents whose existence the CIA recently acknowledged in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"If President Bush and the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture its prisoners, the public has a right to know," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney involved in the case.

The first document is a directive Bush signed giving the CIA authority to set up detention facilities outside the U.S. and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.

The second is a 2002 memo from the Justice Department's office of Legal Counsel to the CIA General Counsel regarding interrogation methods that the spy agency may use against top al-Qaeda members.

Leahy asked Gonzales to produce any revisions and analyses of those and other memos. He also requested agency documents that interpret the scope of interrogation practices permitted and prohibited by the detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act.

The Justice Department will respond appropriately, spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Friday. But he added that "it is vital to protect national security secrets," particularly in sensitive programs overseen by that intelligence committees. Roehrkasse also said the department will weigh whether the documents being sought fall under the category of confidential deliberations, including legal advice.

    Democrats demand CIA detainee documents, UT, 17.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-17-dem-documents_x.htm

Egyptian Says He Was Tortured After Being Kidnapped in Milan

November 11, 2006
The New York Times
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME, Nov. 10 — A militant Egyptian cleric who prosecutors say was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency said in a newly published account that he was tortured with electric shocks while he lay on a wet mattress in a Cairo prison and was repeatedly beaten and forced to eat rotten bread in a pitch-black cell, while rats and cockroaches ran over his body.

The cleric’s recounting was contained in an affidavit given to Italian prosecutors investigating his alleged abduction. Excerpts were published in a Milan daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on Thursday.

“I am writing my testimony from this, my tomb,” writes Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, at the start of an 11-page letter that was excerpted Thursday by the newspaper. His face has been transformed, he claims, “as a result of the torture.”

Milanese prosecutors have appended the account to the case they are building against 39 people, including 25 C.I.A. operatives. Prosecutors accuse them of abducting Mr. Nasr and sending him to Egypt for questioning, in the American practice of rendition. Members of the Italian secret services, including Nicolo Pollari, the country’s top spy, are also under investigation in the kidnapping, which took place in Milan in February 2003.

Earlier this year, an Italian military police officer confessed to having participated in the kidnapping, which he believed was jointly organized by the American and Italian intelligence services.

In the letter, Mr. Nasr says he was stopped by an American, asked for his documents and then forced into a white van where he was “beaten on my stomach and my entire body” before being bound and gagged and taken to Cairo by plane.

In the Cairo prison, he says, he was subjected to weeks of torture while he was being interrogated. “It lasted seven months,” he wrote, but “it felt like seven years.” His wife, Nabila, told Milanese prosecutors that Egyptian officials had tried to bribe her husband so he would deny that he had been kidnapped.

Writing from Egypt, she said that her husband had been offered $2 million “to say that he had not been kidnapped and to say that he had come of his own free will” to Egypt, the Milan newspaper reported Friday.

Milanese prosecutors have asked that the United States extradite the 25 operatives they believe organized and executed the kidnapping.

    Egyptian Says He Was Tortured After Being Kidnapped in Milan, NYT, 11.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/world/europe/11italy.html

U.S. fights detainee access to attorney

Updated 11/4/2006 4:49 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency's closely guarded interrogation techniques.

Human rights groups have questioned the CIA's methods for questioning suspects, especially following the passage of a bill last month that authorized the use of harsh — but undefined — interrogation tactics.

In recently filed court documents, the Justice Department said those methods, along with the locations of the CIA's network of prisons, are among the nation's most sensitive secrets. Prisoners who spent time in those prisons should not be allowed to disclose that information, even to a lawyer, the government said.

"Improper disclosure of other operational details, such as interrogation methods, could also enable terrorist organizations and operatives to adapt their training to counter such methods, thereby obstructing the CIA's ability to obtain vital intelligence that could disrupt future planned terrorist attacks," the Justice Department wrote.

The documents, which were first reported by The Washington Post, were filed in opposition to a request that terror suspect Majid Khan should be given access to an attorney. Khan, 26, immigrated from Pakistan and graduated high school in Maryland.

According to documents filed on his behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Khan was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. During more than three years in CIA custody, Khan was subjected to interrogation techniques that defense attorneys suggest amounted to torture.

President Bush acknowledged the existence of the CIA system in September and transferred Khan and 13 other prisoners designated as "terrorist leaders" to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Under a law passed last month, they are to be tried before special military commissions and may not have access to civilian courts.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is among several advocacy groups challenging that law. They say the Constitution guarantees prisoners a right to challenge their detention.

The Justice Department argues that civilian courts no longer have jurisdiction to intervene in the case. They say keeping details about the CIA program secret is essential because national security is at stake.

"Information obtained through the program has provided the United States with one of the most useful tools in combating terrorist threats to the national security," the government argued in court documents.

"It has shed light on probable targets and likely methods for attacks on the United States, has led to the disruption of terrorist plots against the United States and its allies, and has gathered information that has played a role in the capture and questioning of senior al-Qaeda operatives," it said.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, responded in court documents Friday that there is no evidence Khan has classified information. Gutierrez accused the administration of using national secrecy concerns to "conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has not indicated when he will rule.

    U.S. fights detainee access to attorney, UT, 4.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-04-terrorism-detainees_x.htm

CIA tried to silence EU on torture flights

Germany offered access to prisoner in Morocco if it quelled opposition

Thursday October 26, 2006
Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor

The CIA tried to persuade Germany to silence EU protests about the human rights record of one of America's key allies in its clandestine torture flights programme, the Guardian can reveal.

According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaida suspect being held in a Moroccan cell. But the US secret agents demanded that in return, Berlin should cooperate and "avert pressure from EU" over human rights abuses in the north African country. The report describes Morocco as a "valuable partner in the fight against terrorism".

The classified documents prepared for the German parliament last February make clear that Berlin did eventually get to see the detained suspect, who was arrested in Morocco in 2002 as an alleged organiser of the September 11 strikes.

He was flown from Morocco to Syria on another rendition flight. Syria offered access to the prisoner on the condition that charges were dropped against Syrian intelligence agents in Germany accused of threatening Syrian dissidents. Germany dropped the charges, but denied any link.

After the CIA offered a deal to Germany, EU countries adopted an almost universal policy of downplaying criticism of human rights records in countries where terrorist suspects have been held. They have also sidestepped questions about secret CIA flights partly because of growing evidence of their complicity.

The disclosure is among fresh revelations about how the CIA flew terrorist suspects to locations where they were tortured, and Britain's knowledge of the practice known as "secret rendition". They are contained in Ghost Plane, by Stephen Grey, the journalist who first revealed details of secret CIA flights in the Guardian a year ago. More than 200 CIA flights have passed through Britain, records show.

He describes how one CIA pilot told him that Prestwick airport, near Glasgow, was a popular destination for refuelling stops and layovers. "It's an 'ask-no-questions' type of place and you don't need to give them any advance warning you're coming," the pilot said.

The CIA used planes of Air America, a group of private companies it secretly owned, and a second company, Aero Contractors. A CIA Gulfstream V jet, frequently used for the secret rendition of prisoners, flew to Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory where the US has a large base, the book says. Grey plans to publish more than 3,000 logs of the CIA flights on the internet this week.

CIA pilots, sometimes using false identities and whose planes regularly passed through Britain, ran up huge bills in luxury hotels after flying terrorist suspects to secret locations where they were tortured. But they revealed their whereabouts and identities by indiscreet use of mobile phones and allowed outsiders to track their aircraft's flights.

On one occasion, CIA pilots and crew lived it up in Majorca after rendering Benyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian brought up in Notting Hill, west London, to Afghanistan where he was tortured. Benyam was detained in Pakistan early in 2002, and then flown to Morocco, where he says he suffered appalling torture. He is being held at Guantánamo Bay.

Benyam has said in a statement to his lawyer that he was tortured for more than two years after being questioned by US and British officials. He says that while in Morocco he was shown photos of people he knew from a west London mosque, and was asked about information he was told was supplied by MI5.

The government has consistently denied it has ever actively cooperated in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme". The Foreign Office said yesterday that the government had "not approved and will not approve a policy of facilitating transfer of individuals through the UK to places where there are substantial grounds to believe they face a real risk of torture".

    CIA tried to silence EU on torture flights, G, 26.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1931693,00.html

Castro Foe With C.I.A. Ties Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot

October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

EL PASO, Oct. 6 — Thirty years ago, long before liquids and gels were restricted on airliners, a tube of Colgate toothpaste may have brought a plane down from the sky.

Cubana Airlines Flight 455 crashed off the coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Plastic explosives stuffed into a toothpaste tube ignited the plane, according to recently declassified police records.

Implicated in the attack, but never convicted, was Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who has long sought to topple the government of Fidel Castro.

Today, Mr. Posada, 78, is in a detention center in El Paso, held on an immigration violation while the government tries to figure out what to do with him. His case presents a quandary for the Bush administration, at least in part because Mr. Posada is a former C.I.A. operative and United States Army officer who directed his wrath at a government that Washington has long opposed.

Despite insistent calls from Cuba and Venezuela for his extradition, the administration has refused to send him to either country for trial.

Intensifying the problem is that Mr. Posada, who was arrested last year in Miami after sneaking into the country, may soon go free because the United States has been reluctant to press the terrorism charges that could keep him in jail.

That prospect has brought a hail of criticism of the Bush administration for holding a double standard when it comes to those who commit terrorist acts.

“The fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte,” said José Pertierra, a Washington lawyer who is representing the government of Venezuela in its effort to extradite Mr. Posada. “A terrorist is a terrorist.”

The Bush administration has stopped short of prosecuting him as a terrorist, however, even though the Justice Department called him as much this week. In papers filed in federal court in El Paso on Thursday, it described him as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites.”

Instead, Mr. Posada faces immigration charges, as the Bush administration tries its best to deport him somewhere else, where he would walk free.

Few countries seem willing to take him. So far, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama have all turned down American requests to take Mr. Posada, who denies that he bombed the plane but who is linked to the case in declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. files.

“Who would want him?” asked one lawyer close to the case, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because of the delicacy of the litigation. “Wherever he goes there will be intelligence agents from a variety of nations following him, not to mention hit squads.”

Two countries do want Mr. Posada: Venezuela, where he is wanted for blowing up the plane, and Cuba, where he is viewed as an enemy of the state who has repeatedly tried to assassinate Mr. Castro.

An immigration judge has ruled that Mr. Posada may be subject to torture in those two countries. But because no other country has stepped forward, and because he has not been officially deemed a terrorist by the American government, a federal judge recommended last month — coincidentally on Sept. 11 — that Mr. Posada be released.

The Bush administration is now invoking a law that bars the release of an illegal immigrant who poses adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. That tack has placed it in the awkward position of, in effect, having to call Mr. Posada a terrorist even as it refuses to charge him as one.

Mr. Posada has longstanding links to American intelligence agencies, and his colorful past helps to explain why this is not a garden variety terrorism case. One immigration judge involved in the proceedings described them as being “not unlike one of Robert Ludlum’s espionage thrillers.”

A former sugar chemist and exterminator in Cuba, Mr. Posada has been working in the shadows to carry out a policy not unlike the one Washington has advocated over the decades — the removal of Mr. Castro.

“How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?” asked Felipe D. J. Millan, Mr. Posada’s El Paso-based lawyer. “This would be the equivalent of calling Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or Benjamin Franklin a terrorist.”

Mr. Posada received military training in the United States and worked for the C.I.A. as far back as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He played a role in supplying the contras in Nicaragua. He has admitted, but subsequently denied, involvement in a string of bombings of Cuban tourist facilities.

By the time the Cubana Airlines plane exploded, Mr. Posada was no longer in the employ of the C.I.A. But records show that he may have notified his former bosses that a bomb was going to be set off on a plane shortly before it happened.

Venezuela and Cuba staged events on Friday, the 30th anniversary of the airplane bombing, where Mr. Bush was condemned for his government’s failure to turn over Mr. Posada. A billboard posted outside the United States Interest Section in Havana features the image of Mr. Bush, Mr. Posada and Hitler.

Some of the anger directed at the Bush administration’s handling of the case originates closer to home. Roseanne Nenninger Persaud, whose 19-year-old brother, Raymond, was one of the passengers who perished, recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urging him to brand Mr. Posada a terrorist.

“It feels like a double standard,” Ms. Nenninger, who was born in Guyana but has since become an American citizen, said in a telephone interview from New York. “He should be treated like bin Laden. If this were a plane full of Americans, it would have been a different story.”

A majority of the victims were Cubans, including the entire Olympic fencing team, which was returning from a competition in Venezuela. Guyanese and North Koreans made up most of the other passengers.

“Luis Posada Carriles is a terrorist, but he’s our terrorist,” said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has been unearthing documents on Mr. Posada’s case. “The historical baggage that he brought with him when he sneaked into the U.S. has created this dilemma for the Bush administration.”

Getting out of jail has not been a problem for Mr. Posada in the past. In Venezuela, where he was held in the prison bombing, he had associates bribe a guard and he walked out dressed as a priest in 1985. In Panama, where he was implicated in a plot to kill Mr. Castro during a visit there, the departing president pardoned him in 2004.

He appears headed for release again, this time from a nondescript holding center ringed by barbed wire near El Paso’s airport.

Mr. Posada’s cloak-and-dagger past — his aliases, his fake passports, his life on the run through Latin America — is over, insists his Miami-based lawyer, Eduardo R. Soto.

In fact, even before Mr. Castro fell ill and ceded power to his brother, Mr. Posada declared his campaign to topple the Cuban leader by force to be over.

“The Cuban government is in a very deteriorated condition, inexorably reaching its end, and I sincerely believe that nothing would help to go back to the past with sabotage campaigns,” Mr. Posada said.

Mr. Posada’s case has eerie parallels with the case of Orlando Bosch, an associate who has also been accused of playing a role in the bombing. The administration of Mr. Bush’s father released Mr. Bosch from prison in 1990, a step praised by many in Florida’s Cuban community. Now 80, he lives outside Miami.

Mr. Posada is two years younger and in failing health, partly the result of a 1990 assassination attempt against him. His application to become a United States citizen has been rejected by the government, but Mr. Posada, who is a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, is pursuing the matter on appeal.

Mr. Soto says Mr. Posada wants to devote whatever time he has left in life to members of his family who live in South Florida, and to a hobby he picked up years ago in prison — painting.

“Mostly nature scenes,” Mr. Soto said. “He’s seen a lot of those.”

    Castro Foe With C.I.A. Ties Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/world/americas/08posada.html

C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda

October 3, 2006
By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the C.I.A. had collected suggesting an attack was in the works. But both current and former officials, including allies of Mr. Tenet, took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that he and his aides had left the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had ignored them.

Earlier this week, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said they could not recall being told about a meeting like the one described by Mr. Woodward.

On Monday, officials said Mr. Tenet had told members of the commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.

“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”

Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.

But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.

“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”

Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The dispute that has played out in recent days gives further evidence of an escalating battle between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who should take the blame for the failure to stop the Sept. 11 attacks and assertions by Bush administration officials that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and cultivating ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Tenet resigned as director of central intelligence in the summer of 2004 and was honored that December with a Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony. Since leaving the C.I.A., Mr. Tenet has stayed out of the public eye, largely declining to defend his record even after several government investigations assailed the faulty intelligence that helped build the case for the Iraq war.

Mr. Tenet is now completing work on a memoir that is scheduled to be published early next year. It is unclear how much he will use the book to settle old scores, although recent books have portrayed him both as dubious about the need to invade Iraq and angry that the White House has made the C.I.A. the primary scapegoat for the war.

In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” the journalist and author Ron Suskind quotes Mr. Tenet’s former deputy at the C.I.A., John McLaughlin, as saying Mr. Tenet “wishes he could give that damn medal back.”

In his own book, Mr. Woodward wrote that over time Mr. Tenet developed a particular dislike for Ms. Rice, and that the former C.I.A. director was furious when she publicly blamed the agency for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Mr. Hussein was pursuing nuclear materials in Niger.

“If the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone, without question,” Ms. Rice told reporters in July 2003.

In fact, the C.I.A. had told the White House months before that the intelligence about Niger was dubious, and had managed to keep the claim out of an October 2002 speech that Mr. Bush gave in Cincinnati.

More recently, Mr. Tenet has told friends he was particularly angry when, appearing recently on Sunday talk shows, both Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney cited Mr. Tenet as the reason that Bush administration officials asserted that Mr. Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney recalled in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk,’ ”

Philip Shenon reported from Jidda, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

    C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda, NYT, 3.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/washington/03rivals.html?hp&ex=1159934400&en=a8d116e7a90c4c5f&ei=5094&partner=homepage