MISCELLANEOUS NEWS REPORTS * 2004.09.01 to date misc_digest_2004_9.txt Aljazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage Associated Press (AP): http://www.ap.org/ Inter Press Service (IPS): http://ipsnews.net/ Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/ ABC News (Aus): http://www.abc.net.au/news/ BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/ CNN: http://www.cnn.com/ Baltimore Sun: http://www.sunspot.net/ Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Dawn (Islamabad): http://www.dawn.com/ Hartford Courant: http://www.ctnow.com/news/ Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/ Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.com/news/NW-front_Front.asp San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/news/ Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/ The Age (Melbourne): http://www.theage.com.au/ The Guardian (UK): http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ The Independent (UK): http://www.independent.co.uk/ The Mirror (UK): http://www.mirror.co.uk/ The Observer (UK): http://www.observer.co.uk/ The Scotsman (Edinburgh): http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/ The Telegraph (UK): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Toronto Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ ================================================================================ Contra Costa Times: September 21, 2004 TALK OF INTERFERENCE, CLOSED TESTIMONY SHAKE AL HALABI SPY TRIAL By Scott Marshall http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9722345.htm TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE - The court martial of an airman accused of attempted espionage was delayed today by what defense attorneys said was interference from the Justice Department, including the possibility that at least a portion of the trial might be closed to the public. The Air Force contended this morning the delay was caused by efforts to coordinate between agencies in what has been a complicated case. "There's been no improper manipulation," and the Air Force still has final authority in deciding charges, Kellogg said. The delay comes a day after a scheduled meeting with a top Air Force commander who was to consider whether some of the charges might be dropped against Senior Airman Ahmad I. Al Halabi, a linguist who translated for suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "I'll go on record in saying the Justice Department is interfering in this case," said Donald Rehkopf Jr., a civilian attorney for Al Halabi, whose court martial resumed this week. Rehkopf said prosecutors gave him a document seven minutes before the proceedings were scheduled to resume at 8:30 a.m. today. The document indicated the government might try to close at least a portion of the trial because it would involve classified information. Rehkopf would not disclose the contents of the document, which he said came from the Defense Secretary's office. The document deals with classified information and is designated "for government use only." The document might or might not become evidence in the court martial, Rehkopf said. The defense has sought various government documents throughout the case. Some two dozen pretrial motions are pending in the case, including a request that the entire case be dismissed. The military judge presiding in the case, Air Force Col. Barbara Brand, denied a dismissal request Monday, based on what defense attorneys claimed was denial of Al Halabi's right to a speedy trial. The surprise notice of a possible courtroom closure broke a previous deadline set by Brand, in which she ordered both sides to give adequate notice of any attempt to close the proceedings. Charity Kenyon, an attorney for the Sacramento Bee, after consulting with Times editors, notified the Air Force that media organizations would object to a courtroom closure, contending journalists have a right to reasonable notice to object. "I think the public needs to scrutinize this case, just like the public needed to scrutinize the Chaplain Yee case," he said, referring to Army Capt. James Yee, who was arrested and accused of espionage at Guantanamo. The case fell apart, and Yee resigned from the Army in January. Defense attorneys and prosecutors were prepared to proceed with the trial last week, but the case was delayed because of Justice Department involvement, which has occurred frequently during the past three months, Rehkopf charged. "Various Air Force officers who have had roles in this case have been hindered in what they acknowledge needs to be done, because of Justice Department inaction or, their quote, 'reviewing it.' "It's totally atypical." Asked why the Justice Department was involved in a military trial, he responded, "That was my question. "I have a sense that the leadership of the Justice Department is scrambling, because they don't have any idea about military justice," Rehkopf said. "It is the political season, and there is no legal basis." "We have an issue that is beyond our control," said the lead prosecutor, Lt. Col. Bryan Wheeler said today. "Their inaction and belated action is delaying anything we can do in the courtroom," Added Rehkopf, "There's been no delay between the defense and prosecutors for the last week." Air Force Col. John Kellogg, deputy staff judge advocate for the Headquarters Air Mobility Command, which has jurisdiction over Travis Air Force Base, said allegations of top officers hindering progress in this case paints too dark a picture. "That's all this is, coordination," Kellogg said today. "Again, this has been a complicated case" with several agencies within the Defense Department and also the FBI, which is under the Justice Department. Al Halabi, 26, is a supply clerk, naturalized Syrian-American and Arabic speaker who translated documents and conversation for Guantanamo detainees. The Air Force began investigating him in November 2002. Once jury selection begins, Al Halabi is expected to plead not guilty to any remaining charges. Through pretrial maneuvering, Al Halabi's attorneys have helped trim from 30 to 16 the number of charges filed against him after his July 23, 2003, arrest. He was arrested as he returned to the United States from Cuba, en route to San Francisco and ultimately Syria, where he was to be married. The most serious remaining charge against him is attempted espionage, for which he could be sentenced to life without parole. [ Reach Scott Marshall at 925-743-2216 or smarshall2@cctimes.com ] * * * USA Today: Septemebr 20, 2004 TRANSLATOR'S SPY TRIAL SUSPENDED By Laura Parker, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-09-20-spy-trial_x.htm TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- The court-martial of an Air Force translator who is accused of taking part in a spy ring at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday when the judge told prosecutors to find out whether their superiors plan to drop any of the charges. The instruction from Col. Barbara Brand came just after the start of the court- martial of Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, and as a behind-the-scenes skirmish continued over the status of a classified document that is key to the case. Al Halabi, a Syrian national and naturalized U.S. citizen, is accused of trying to pass about 200 classified documents to unknown enemies of the USA while working at Guantanamo, where nearly 600 suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives are held. But two weeks ago, the military acknowledged that only one of the documents is secret. An Air Force spokesman said then that the change in the documents' status could affect some of the 16 counts against Al Halabi. But none of the charges involving the now-unclassified documents has been dropped or amended. The prosecutors now will confer with the legal counsel to Lt. Gen. William Welser III, commander of the 18th Air Force, who ultimately is responsible for the case. The charges against Al Halabi include attempted espionage, lying to investigators and disobeying orders. If convicted, he could face life in prison. He initially was charged with 30 counts, including aiding the enemy, which carried the death penalty. But after his arrest last year, 14 counts were dropped as errors by military investigators came to light -- errors that raised questions about whether there ever was a spy ring at Guantanamo. Al Halabi spent 10 months in jail and has been confined to the base since his release in May. Don Rehkopf, Al Halabi's civilian defense lawyer, said he wasn't sure what to expect from Welser. "I don't know what the hell is going on in the Pentagon and I'm not sure anyone there does either," Rehkopf said after court. The court-martial began as Al Halabi's lawyers asked that the case be dismissed. They said government delays in reviewing the status of documents had violated Al Halabi's right to a speedy trial. Brand denied the request. Maj. Kim London, one of Al Halabi's two military lawyers, said authorities delayed the case to seek more evidence. But "they'll never be in a better position ... because the evidence to support their charges doesn't exist." Capt. Roger Bowers, an Air Force prosecutor, said the delays were as much the fault of the defense as the prosecution. Al Halabi was arrested in July 2003, when he was on leave from Guantanamo and en route to Syria. In his laptop, agents found translations of 186 letters to and from Guantanamo detainees. Agents later intercepted a box Al Halabi had shipped to his California address that contained other documents. The government initially said all the documents were secret. Now, only one is classified: an order regarding the transfer of detainees who were being released. Prosecutors have not offered any evidence that Al Halabi tried to pass documents to anyone. * * * San Jose Mercury News / AP: September 20, 2004 JUDGE DENIES MOTION TO DISMISS CHARGES AGAINST ARABIC TRANSLATOR Kim Curtis, Associated Press http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern _california/9714371.htm TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE (AP) - A military judge on Monday denied a defense request to dismiss charges against a former Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba who's accused of spying. Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, 25, is accused of attempting to deliver nearly 200 messages from detainees to an unidentified Syrian. If convicted, he could be sent to prison for life. He's also charged with failing to obey an order and lying to investigators. The naturalized American, who was born in Syria, was a supply clerk at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield until the military's demand for Arabic speakers increased sharply as a result of the war on terror and he was sent to Cuba for temporary duty. He was arrested in July 2003 as he headed to Syria to get married. The airman's father, Ibrahim Al Halabi who lives in Michigan, sat in the first row in court Monday. He did not speak to reporters. Al Halabi's lawyers argued Monday that U.S. Air Force prosecutors have dragged their feet in turning over classified material. "They weren't prepared in November. They weren't prepared in January. And they're not prepared as we stand here now," Maj. Kim London argued in court. "The government wants delays so it can be in a better position to prosecute this case, but they'll never be in a better position to prosecute this case because the evidence doesn't exist." The hearing was scheduled to resume Tuesday. Prosecutors already have dropped several charges against Al Halabi, including an aiding the enemy accusation that carried the death penalty as possible punishment. The Air Force also has acknowledged that most of the documents found in Al Halabi's possession when he was arrested were considered "for official use only," but were not classified. One document was classified "secret." Outside court, Donald Rehkopf Jr., a civilian defense lawyer, said the Air Force continues to pursue Al Halabi's case because it's "saving face." He said at least two dozen defense motions are pending, but none can be addressed in court until he receives copies of several documents the Air Force has yet to hand over. * * * Reuters: September 20, 2004 JUDGE DECLINES TO DISMISS US AIRMAN SPY CASE By Adam Tanner http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6283993 TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (Reuters) - A military judge denied a motion to dismiss spy charges against a Syrian-American airman on Monday despite defense arguments the government had failed to make a case over the past year. Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi, 25, is accused of carrying letters, jail maps and other documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where terrorism suspects are held. Halabi has spent 10 months in prison pending trial and 14 of the 30 original charges have already been dropped, as has the threat of the death penalty for aiding and abetting the enemy. Last week, the U.S. Army said it had dropped all charges against Army Reserve Col. Jackie Duane Farr, who served as an intelligence officer at Guantanamo and had been accused of trying to take classified material from the base. Charges against a third U.S. service member in connection with suspected security breaches at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Army Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain, have also been dropped. Since arresting Halabi in July 2003, the government has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in the case, including most recently the admission that the detainee letters that Halabi handled were not classified after all. His lawyers argue the government has dragged its feet on reviewing the classification of key documents to delay the case. PROSECUTION 'FAILED MISERABLY' Defense attorney Kim London told the military judge during a pretrial hearing on Monday: "They have failed miserably. Fraud was perpetuated by the government when they said they were prepared to proceed to trial." "They are not prepared to proceed to trial as we stand here today," she added. "The government stubbornly resists the truth." Judge Barbara Brand ruled that Halabi had not been denied a speedy trial, the latest in a series of rulings this year against dismissing the high-profile case. "There is no undue prejudice to the accused," she said. The ruling came after the case was delayed several times last week as lawyers and the judge held a series of meetings behind closed doors. The trial had been expected to begin last week, and is still being delayed by pre-trial motions, which the defense continued to submit on Monday afternoon. Chief prosecutor Lt. Col. Bryan Wheeler said the government was ready to go to trial. "We have a case," he said. Halabi, 25, a supply clerk, worked as an Arabic language translator at Guantanamo, where suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are held, between November 2002 and July 2003. Although not a trained linguist, the military needed fluent Arabic speakers to help run the prison camp. Halabi's father, Ibrahim al Halabi, 73, dressed in a white Muslim cap and a metal cane, appeared in court for the first time on Monday. * * * Salon -- September 17, 2004 SEYMOUR HERSH'S ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF BUSH'S WAR The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the US brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war. By Mary Jacoby http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/18/hersh_interview/ Sept. 18, 2004 -- Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Seymour Hersh has written more than two dozen stories for the New Yorker magazine on the secret machinations of the Bush administration in what the White House calls the "war on terrorism." His revelations, including an investigation of a group of neoconservatives at the Pentagon who set up their own special intelligence unit to press the case for invading Iraq, have consistently broken news. Arguably his most important scoop came last spring, when the legendary investigative reporter received the now infamous photos of prisoner abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq, as well as the explosive report on the abuse by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The story Hersh published in the New Yorker, followed by a report by CBS's "60 Minutes," created an international scandal for the Bush administration and led to congressional hearings. In a new book, "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh expands upon his work in the New Yorker to contribute new insights and revelations. He discloses how a CIA analyst's report on abuses against captured Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, made its way to the White House in 2002, putting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on notice two years before the Abu Ghraib scandal that human rights violations were taking place in U.S.-run prisons abroad. In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaconda, was botched in Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Billed at the time as a success story by the Pentagon, it was in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaida leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden. Hersh's story is well known. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 expose of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which American soldiers killed more than 500 civilians. He is the author of eight books, including 1983's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House." And, since 1998, he's been a staff writer for the New Yorker I visited with Hersh this week in his tiny, unadorned two-room office in downtown Washington, where he works amid a whirring fax machine, a constantly ringing phone and delivery men knocking on the door with packages. A map of the world, slightly off-kilter, is taped to the wall behind his desk, which is piled high with papers. He speaks quickly, answering questions before the sentences can be completed, and hopscotches through conversational topics, as if everything's a race against time. "I have some Brazilians coming in. You know, just to talk about ... wait! Turn it off for a second," he says, gesturing at my recorder. He shares with me a lead he's working on. He flashes me a look at an intriguing document before stealing it away. "OK, let's talk about the book. I've gone over the top here. I'm not pimping anymore. I'm now a full-fledged whore, with red paint," he says, pretending to smear rouge on his cheeks. He loosens his tie. "Let's get on with it!" * What is new in the book, and what is based on your published work? I'd say about 35 percent of the opening material on Abu Ghraib is new, maybe about 15,000 words, altogether about, I don't know what percentage. Maybe about a third, maybe a little less, is either new or revised or significantly changed. But the bulk of the book is the articles I did, put in a different form and combined in a different way by a very competent editor of mine. This book was edited by the New Yorker and fact-checked by the New Yorker. Everything that is new in the book was fact-checked by the New Yorker. * Who was the editor? Her name is Amy Davidson. She's a senior editor, and she's great. A man named John Bennet, who is a wonderful editor, was my editor for the first couple of years, and then Amy came on because John's good that way. John is very avuncular, and he wants other people to start editing significant stuff, because among other things, he's always stuck with the big pieces. It was fact-checked by the same people, and the publisher paid for it. And Remnick, to his everlasting credit, David Remnick the editor, agreed that even though there's a very good story at the beginning -- the whole Condi Rice meeting issue -- he said publish it in your book and go make some money. It was sort of nice of them. It reflects well on the New Yorker. His point was, your being out there reflects well on the New Yorker. We all fight for making a living. * To talk about the new revelations ... Let me tell you the one I like the most; aside from the obvious stuff about Abu Ghraib, there was a story I didn't write two years ago about Operation Anaconda. I didn't write it because, oh, a lot of complicated reasons. One, it was very hostile to our soldiers, and the military, and General [Tommy] Franks, and [Major Gen. Frank] Hagenbeck, a very nasty story. And then secondly, there was bad blood between the Marine Corps, and General Franks, and CentComm and the Air Force, and it just didn't, uh ... it's one of those stories. The real reason in a funny way is that even though my sources were angry in talking about it, it's one of the stories they really would have regretted, because you're talking about internecine warfare among the services. It's about boys ... anyway. * They would have regretted it? They would have regretted talking to me about that. In there is an account of the Marines insisting that General Franks sign an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, of how the Marines would be used. We're talking about in combat, this kind of war going on between the services. And, you know, I probably guess it was the right decision, because I had to do obviously an alternate history of the war. And obviously there were certain people talking to me. People on the inside know what's going on. And so, I probably agree it was OK to do it. But I felt bad when I saw [former Gen. Wesley] Clark later. I had talked to Clark about the story at the time. Then two years later I ran into him when he was running for president, or right before, and he said, "Whatever happened to that story?" I said, "Well, I just decided not to write it." And he said, "Well, you should have. It's your job." He's an amazingly straight guy. A difficult guy. "You should have." He basically told me, "Punk kid. You didn't know what you were doing." I also respect him because ... * Let's talk about some of these revelations. Oh, so that was the one I liked the most. * But why didn't you write it at the time? You thought it would be too hostile? No! There was, you know, it was a tough story about troops running from the battlefield, you know; it was just a tough story. [Hersh is referring to the lost battle of Anaconda.] I was writing a lot of other tough stories, and, uh ... it just didn't work. Let's put it that way. * Isn't that what a lot of the mainstream press get accused of -- certainly not you -- but holding back important information out of sensitivity for the feelings of the nation? Ain't none of us perfect. It just seemed at the time, some of the people who were talking to me at the time, it would cause a big stink, and some of the Marines who were talking to me would not talk anymore. I also know, in order to do the story right, I would have had to go find some of the guys who were in the mission ... There was a lot of reporting to do, and I don't know, I just didn't do it. * But now you've gone back and revisited it in the book? Oh yeah. Give me the book. I'll show you right where it is. So I'm not backing off. It was a story that should have been written. Of course I should have written it. * Let's talk about this anecdote about Vice President Cheney saying there would be no resignations [over the Abu Ghraib scandal]. Your publisher emphasized this in the press release, and I wanted to know ... Now, wait a minute. Are you asking about a press release? Excuse me. That's like asking me about a headline. * Just tell me why you feel it's important. What? Tell me why I feel it's important that Cheney called up? * What does it reveal? It's more complicated than you think. For one thing, it reveals that they're all as one. The notion that they're going to fire [Donald] Rumsfeld, as people actually entertained, is comical. After 9/11 he gets in this swaggering mode and says we're going to smoke those terrorists out of their snake holes. And then it's clear there's prisoner abuse and torture going on. But does Cheney call up and say, "Oh, my God! What's going on over there, Don? What kind of craziness are you doing to those prisoners? This is devastating to our campaign. What's going on?" I don't hear that. What I hear is, "Let's all pull together and get past it." Very interesting. * You're an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who ... I'm an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed. * Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration? Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change. * They thought it would happen quickly? Very quickly. I don't have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That's why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in -- which took them a long time -- they would drive practice runs, somebody told me. Again, I'm just saying what was told to me; this is not something I reported, but I was told pretty reliably, they were doing practice runs that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It's my belief always -- again this is not empirical, it's sort of my heuristic view -- that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 troops -- it wasn't about the numbers -- was, "Didn't he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn't we explain to him in the tank what we told the chiefs? This is the way it's going to be. Didn't he understand what it's all about?" He didn't get it. He hadn't understood what they meant. This was all going to fall down. It was all going to be peaches and cream. And Shinseki just didn't get it! It wasn't about the numbers. He wasn't a member of the clan. He didn't join the utopia crowd. * You've answered one of my questions. Let's elaborate on it. Clearly there's very little that's, well, in touch with reality in these policies. Ha, ha, ha. It's so easy for you to say that! * But it's not so clear actually. Many Americans ... I think I used actually ... I'll get you this word [grabs book from my lap and begins flipping through it] ... there was a "fantastical" quality to the White House's deliberations. Fantastical. That was the phrase I used. * Yes, I read that. And that was my next question. With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing ... Yes, one of his aides was assigned -- literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China -- to keep track of the lies, who knew what. I think they used to describe it as keeping track of what statements were made, but essentially it was who was being told what, because so many different people were being told different things. But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it's idealism that's dead wrong. It's like one of the far-right Christian credos. It's a faith-based policy. Only it wasn't a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish. * So you don't think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ... I used to pray it was! We'd be in better shape. Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn't conform to reality? You have an unrealistic policy. * It seems that they are very selective not only about what kind of information they present to the public but even in what they decide to believe in themselves. I think these guys in their naivete and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn't get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee's report's a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, "Were you pressured?" And they all say, "No, excuse me?" Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It's not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do. * Talk about the ... Wait. You're missing something now. The Iranian stuff. I think Iran probably had more to do with Chalabi's information than people know. * We know that Chalabi had Iranian agents on his payroll. Yeah, but, well, he admits to that. He had a villa in Tehran. But basically I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block. * Are you working on this now? Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm reporting on it. But I'm not working on it. I'm just -- it's too cosmic. * Was Chalabi the conduit? I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don't forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it's a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything -- vavoom! -- into the president's [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it? * Do you have any idea of the origin of the forged Niger documents that Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address as proof that Iraq was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons? I don't really know. I know that they think it was an inside job. And my idea is that there were people in the government who knew that you could give these guys [the neoconservatives] anything, and within three days, if it said the right thing, there would be a principals meeting [of the senior foreign policy officials] at the White House on it. And one idea would be to get them in a position where they really walked on their dongs, in a way. Give them some bad stuff. They'd have a big meeting about it and [the neocons] would finally be exposed as ludicrous. Nobody anticipated that [the forged documents] would end up in the State of the Union address. I mean, it's beyond belief. I don't believe in these conspiracy theories, about [Michael] Ledeen [a neocon operative] and these things. He's too smart for that. Because it was designed to be caught. * Do you think the responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes directly up to Rumsfeld? I think they [Rumsfeld and senior administration officials] had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits, and they chose not to. I don't think the CIA analyst who did the report was very explicit in his written document about the abuses. That isn't the way to get ahead. But he certainly told his peers there was a real mess there, so they know it. All she [Rice] had to do was put the word out there. The chain of command is very responsive. If you put out the word that you're not going to tolerate this crap, it's not going to happen. But that's not the word they put out. Nobody would have countenanced in his right mind Abu Ghraib. But then again, if you think a bunch of kids from West Virginia understood the way to the soul of an Arab man is to take off his clothes and photograph him ... they didn't know that. Somebody told it to them. And that's the thing about the military. In loco parentis. They have an obligation to take our children and protect them, not only from land mines but from doing stupid things that could land them in jail. * The book is filled with reporting that shows how newspapers either got it wrong, or simply accepted the official version of events. What do you think of the performance of the main newspapers people look to as sources of information? Well, so here I am, I'm busy trying to peddle a book and you're asking me to commit self-immolation! (Laughs). Well, all I'll say is, it speaks for itself. [ Mary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent. ] * * * Seattle Post-Intelligencer / AP: September 16, 2004 DISMISSAL URGED FOR 2 ON GUANTANAMO PANEL By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press Writer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/aplatin_story.asp?category=1102&slug= Guantanamo%20Terror%20Commissions SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Two members of a panel hearing cases of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay should be dismissed because their pasts may make them biased against the defendants, the presiding officer recommended. One man, Air Force Lt. Col. Timothy K. Toomey, is an intelligence officer who was involved in capture of suspects in Afghanistan. Alternate panel member Army Lt. Col. Curt S. Cooper admitted calling Guantanamo prisoners "terrorists." Army Col. Peter Brownback made the recommendations in a letter to commissions' appointing authority and obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday. The recommendation for their dismissal came after defense challenges last month at preliminary hearings for four Guantanamo prisoners charged with war crimes. "Specifically, his comments that the detainees in Cuba were terrorists, or words to that effect, might cause some to believe that he has prejudged the cases," Brownback wrote in the letter dated Sept. 15, 2004, and made in response to a series of challenges. Toomey's activities in Afghanistan could be seen as problematic, wrote Brownback, who recommended keeping panel members Marine Col. Jack K. Sparks Jr. and Marine Col. R. Thomas Bright - two members individually challenged because of their links with the war on terror. Sparks lost a reservist working as a firefighter in the Sept. 11 attack on New York City, and Bright assembled lists of detainees bound for Guantanamo. Brownback's recommendations came after an unexpected challenge from the government's top prosecutor, who joined defense attorneys in their assertion that Brownback's close relationship with the commission's appointing authority could be viewed as a conflict. Brownback said it was inappropriate for him to comment on challenges made to his own impartiality but said he had evaluated whether he could do the job. He is the only person on the five member panel with law experience. "To the best of my knowledge, there was not any item brought forth in voir dire (challenging of members) which might cause a reasonable person to believe that I could not provide a full or fair trial or to show that my impartiality might reasonably be questioned," Brownback said. Chief prosecutor Army Col. Robert Swann asked Brownback to evaluate his suitability. Brownback worked with the commission's appointing authority, John Altenburg, in Fort Bragg, N.C. He also spoke at a retirement roast for Altenburg and attended the wedding of Altenburg's son. Brownback's wife also worked in Altenburg's office. "We request that he (Brownback) closely evaluate his own suitability to serve as the presiding officer ... with particular attention focused on whether his impartiality might reasonably be questioned," Swann said in his filing. Altenburg is expected to decide on challenges to the panel members, including Brownback, by the first week of November. Only three members are needed to hold commissions, or trials, the first set to begin in December. Meanwhile, two alleged al-Qaida fighters on Thursday boycotted U.S. military hearings meant to decide whether they are being properly held as enemy combatants. Both prisoners, ages 26 and 28, allegedly fought against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said Navy Cmdr. Daryl Borgquist, a spokesman for the review tribunals. The younger detainee allegedly visited Osama bin Laden's home in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2001, Borgquist said. Without providing details, the military accused him of being associated with two suspects in the 2000 USS Cole warship bombing that killed 17 American sailors. The two cases brought to 23 the number of prisoners who have refused to attend the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, criticized by human rights groups and attorneys who say the hearings are shams and don't allow the men to have attorneys present. The tribunals are meant to decide whether each of the 585 prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be freed or are correctly held as combatants, a classification that allows fewer legal rights than a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions. They are separate from the military commissions that began last month. [ Associated Press reporter Alexandra Olson contributed to this report from San Juan. ] * * * The Guardian (UK) -- Thursday September 16, 2004 FAR GRAVER THAN VIETNAM Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale By Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1305360,00.html 'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends." Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong." Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan." W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy. "We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self- regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view." After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base. "If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents." "I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq." General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies." Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory." General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there." He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy." General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic." [ Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com - sidney_blumenthal@ yahoo.com ] * * * Reuters: September 16, 2004 U.S. Army Drops Charges Against Guantanamo Colonel By Will Dunham http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6258208 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has dropped all charges against a colonel who served as an intelligence officer at the Guantanamo prison and had been accused of trying to take classified material from the base, officials said on Thursday. Army Reserve Col. Jackie Duane Farr was the highest ranking of three U.S. service members charged in 2003 in connection with suspected security breaches at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 585 foreign terrorism suspects. All charges have now been dropped against Farr as well as Army Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain who ministered to prisoners, while the prosecution case against Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi, an Arabic language translator, has run into numerous troubles. The Army dropped charges against Farr of disobeying an order by transporting classified material without the proper security container, and making a false statement during an investigation, said Army Maj. Hank McIntire, a spokesman at the Guantanamo base. Instead, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo prison, on Aug. 27 imposed "nonjudicial punishment" in an administrative proceeding, McIntire said. The charges were dropped "to more quickly resolve the matter to serve the best interests of the military and Colonel Farr," McIntire said, adding there would be no further action taken against Farr. McIntire declined to reveal the nature of the punishment given to Farr. "Because of the Privacy Act, we can't give the specifics of anything that was imposed. We can just say it was resolved nonjudicially," McIntire said. Farr, who had directed the intelligence-gathering operation for U.S. personnel who interrogated Guantanamo prisoners, had faced up to seven years in prison if convicted. The Army has approved Yee's resignation from the military effective next January and will grant him an honorable discharge, said Eugene Fidell, Yee's lawyer. Yee is stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state. In March, the Army dropped all criminal charges against Yee, abandoning an espionage case that once included accusations in court documents of spying, mutiny, sedition, aiding the enemy and espionage. His exoneration was completed when the head of U.S. Southern Command in April dismissed Yee's noncriminal convictions for adultery and storing pornographic images on a government computer. Military prosecutors already have dropped 14 of 30 charges brought against al Halabi. Hearings on motions before his planned court-martial at Travis Air Force Base in California were scheduled for Tuesday and then Thursday of this week, but now have been pushed back to Monday. © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved. * * * The Guardian (UK) -- September 16, 2004 UK OFFICERS LINKED TO TORTURE JAIL By Richard Norton-Taylor http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1305594,00.html The Ministry of Defence has admitted for the first time that senior British officers were working closely with American commanders at Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad prison where Iraqi prisoners were systematically abused and humiliated. Two intelligence officers, Colonel Chris Terrington and Colonel Campbell James, were "embedded within" the US unit responsible for extracting information from Iraqi prisoners, the armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, disclosed. Col Terrington is said to have joined the intelligence chain of command at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, when many of the most serious abuses occurred. The admission came in a parliamentary answer to Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP who has been pursuing the government over what Britain knew about the serious abuse of Iraqi detainees at the jail. Mr Ingram's answer raises fresh questions about the degree of British involvement at Abu Ghraib prison, and previous explanations made by ministers. In a second parliamentary answer, Mr Ingram insisted that "at no time have United Kingdom officers had direct responsibility for supervising any of the US personnel posted to Abu Ghraib". Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, had suggested that Britain was involved in Abu Ghraib only when the abuses were exposed this year and three officers went to investigate them. Mr Price said yesterday that MPs should have been told immediately that British officers were integrated in the US chain of command running Abu Ghraib. "Ministers have clearly given us a false impression about British responsibility and involvement in relation to Abu Ghraib," he said. Mr Price, who called for an urgent statement on the issue, said it was unacceptable for ministers to "put the best possible gloss" on what he described as a "very disturbing" matter. The MP said Mr Ingram's insistence that no British officers had responsibility for supervising any of the Americans there was "completely contradicted" by evidence that was presented to an official US investigation into the abuses. According to a barely noticed transcript of the inquiry which emerged this month, British officers were directly involved in the intelligence command chain at Abu Ghraib. The claims were made during the interrogation of one of the officers accused in the scandal, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Jordan, the US director of the joint interrogation and debriefing centre at Abu Ghraib. Col Terrington was described as being second in command of intelligence at the prison and was told about abuses there. Asked about his "supervisory chain", Col Jordan replied: "Initially, sir, it was to Colonel Steve Bolts ... and then to General Fast and eventually it changed over to a new deputy, a British colonel, Chris Tarrington [sic]". Col Jordan was questioned in February by Major General Antonio Taguba, the US officer in charge of the investigation. Asked who was then his supervisor, he replied: "Colonel Campbell James, British colonel, just came on board". Asked whether he worked directly for him, Col Jordan responded: "I work directly, sir, I'm gonna tell you, on paper I work directly for him. But between you, me and the fencepost, I work directly for Gen Fast and keep Col James informed because [of the] British versus American pecking order". A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed yesterday that Col Terrington was in the "US intelligence chain of command". He added: "He was never in a post of command over Abu Ghraib or any aspect of it". British personnel had "no knowledge of any specific allegations" of abuse, the MoD said. * * * News.com.au / AAP: September 15, 2004 HICKS CAN'T GET FAIR TRIAL: LAW BODY http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10772764%5E1702,00.html (AAP) TERRORIST suspect David Hicks could not receive a fair trial under flawed United States military commission procedures, the Law Council of Australia said today. The council today released the report of barrister Lex Lasry, QC, who was the only independent Australian lawyer to observe the initial commission hearing for Hicks at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba last month. In his report, Mr Lasry said it would be virtually impossible for Adelaide-born Hicks to receive a fair trial under the flawed arrangements. Mr Lasry recommended that the Australian Government press the US to put Hicks before a court martial, the US civilian justice system or return him to Australia. "The Law Council, having reviewed Mr Lasry's report, is in full agreement with this view," Law Council president Bob Gotterson, QC, said. Mr Gotterson said the Government must pressure the US to remove Hicks from the military commission process. He said Hicks should be tried under an independent and properly constituted judicial process, and the same should apply for Sydney man Mamdouh Habib, who is also being held at Guantanamo Bay. At a preliminary commission hearing in Cuba last month, 29-year-old Hicks pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, conspiracy and aiding the enemy. "We believe the Australian Government must now make strenuous efforts to ensure any proceedings under which Mr Hicks might ultimately be tried take place in a properly constituted and independent court with conventional rules of evidence and a judicial appellate structure," Mr Gotterson said. In his report, Mr Lasry cited several reasons, which he said, made a fair trial for Hicks virtually impossible. He said the military commission was not independent in any sense that would generate confidence, as it was created and exclusively controlled by the executive of the US Government. Five of the six commission members had no legal qualifications and would be required to resolve both issues of fact, normally decided by a jury, and law, decided by a judge. Mr Lasry said rules of evidence were all but absent and those that did exist appeared to facilitate introduction of evidence which could not be tested by cross-examination. "The consequence is a likely unfairness that goes to the root of the fair trial issue," he said. "There is no viable appellate process which can impartially correct errors and remedy a miscarriage of justice." Mr Lasry said there was a strong relationship between the commission's presiding officer and the appointing authority, the US Government. He also said several commission members might have established views because of their former involvement with military operations in Afghanistan. Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001. Habib was detained in Pakistan in October of the same year. Only Hicks has been formally charged. * * * Reuters: September 14, 2004 INMATES SUE TO FORCE TRAINING FOR IRAQ INTERROGATORS By Gina Keating http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6236476 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Lawyers representing nine former Iraqi prisoners on Tuesday asked a federal judge in San Diego to ensure that U.S. defense contractor CACI International trains the interrogators it sends to Iraq in international laws against torture. The request for a preliminary injunction is the latest salvo in a class action lawsuit filed in June by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and two law firms on behalf of the former inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad who said they were tortured by American military personnel and private contractors. Titan Corp. of San Diego and CACI are accused of conspiring with U.S. officials to humiliate, torture and abuse detainees. The companies are accused of violating U.S. racketeering laws by maintaining a conspiracy about the abuse. John O'Connor of law firm Steptoe & Johnson, which represents CACI, predicted the judge would throw out the injunction request as an attempt to illegally interfere in the contract between CACI and the U.S. government. "The interrogators provided by CACI without exception satisfied all of the qualifications set forth in the (contract) issued to CACI by the United States government," O'Connor said in a statement. Titan spokesman Wil Williams said the company, which was not named in the preliminary injunction, trains the linguists it sends to Iraq in human rights protocols and the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. military launched several investigations into the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners after graphic images surfaced in the media showing naked prisoners simulating sex acts and being attacked by dogs. Seven U.S. military police soldiers and an intelligence specialist have been charged in the scandal. Employees from both Titan and CACI were named in a report on the abuses by U.S. Army investigator Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The former inmates' lawyers said they were prompted to seek the injunction by subsequent military reports that prisoner abuse had occurred as recently as July, and that the government had renewed CACI's contract without ensuring its interrogators are properly trained, said Jennie Green, a lawyer for the constitutional rights center. "The interrogation techniques used violate the most basic principles of international law, and...the courts must act to prevent such torture from continuing," Green said. * * * Los Angeles Times -- September 13, 2004 AS TRIAL NEARS, CASE AGAINST AIRMAN IS MARKED BY MISSTEPS * Investigator errors force the military to drop half the charges against a former translator. By Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-airman13sep13,1,4940498.story SACRAMENTO -- When military investigators arrested him last year after the short flight from Guantanamo Bay, the prospects looked dreary for Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi. He had a cache of classified documents and a ticket to Syria in his pocket. Allegations flew -- of espionage, aiding the enemy and attempting to pass off secret documents from the high-security military installation, home to hundreds of prisoners from the war on terrorism. But his court-martial -- scheduled to open Tuesday at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California -- begins with the military's case against him already damaged. Nearly half of the 30 original charges against Al Halabi have been dropped amid revelations of sloppy evidence-gathering and defense claims of overzealous prosecution against the Muslim airman, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Syria. Last week, authorities revealed that a review by Defense Department security experts of more than 200 documents Al Halabi took out of Guantanamo found that one qualifies as a national secret. Even before that announcement, Air Force Times editorialized that the military's performance was "inexcusable and amateurish." Al Halabi, 25, was one of three Muslims arrested last year on suspicion of playing a role in a reputed spy ring at Guantanamo Bay's high-security Camp Delta, which houses more than 600 prisoners believed to be aligned with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Military officials in March dropped prosecution of Army Capt. James Y. Yee, a Muslim military chaplain who served more than two months behind bars. Military officials expressed fears that a trial might reveal important national secrets, but critics speculated that the Army simply didn't have a good case. A third suspect, civilian translator Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, has been jailed for nearly a year, and his case is unresolved. As the Al Halabi trial opens, defense attorneys expect to press the military judge, Col. Barbara Brand, to dismiss the 16 remaining counts, which include attempted espionage and disobeying orders. If convicted, the youthful-looking airman could face up to life in prison. "We've said from Day 1: He's not a spy," said Donald Rehkopf Jr., a civilian attorney from Rochester, N.Y., who is part of Al Halabi's defense team. "All he is guilty of is being born in the wrong country and worshiping the wrong God." Military prosecutors are barred from commenting during the case, but an Air Force spokesman issued a release saying the government's main goal "remains the same: to ensure Senior Airman Al Halabi receives a fair and impartial court- martial." Al Halabi was apprehended in July 2003 at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Fla., as he returned to the U.S. after an eight-month stint as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo. He was carrying a plane ticket to Syria and $1,500 in cash. Agents also intercepted a box containing several classified documents, clothes and other personal items that Al Halabi had mailed to himself at Travis, his home base. Investigators accused him of planning the Syria trip to pass off secret documents, including more than 180 letters from prisoners typed into his personal computer, a map of the highly restricted prison camp, the flight paths of military aircraft into and out of the island enclave and information detailing the names and cellblock numbers of prisoners. Calling him technologically savvy, investigators warned that Al Halabi might have already dispatched secrets via e-mail. Al Halabi's attorneys say he was indeed going to Syria, to get married. They plan during the trial to call witnesses and provide documents verifying the preparations for the ceremony. Defense attorneys say the documents mailed back to the base or discovered in his luggage have proved to be innocuous or easily explained. For example, Al Halabi received permission from supervisors to type the translated letters from prisoners into his personal laptop because the military didn't have enough government computers to go around, defense attorneys say. Al Halabi spent more than nine months in jail after his arrest, but on May 12, he was ordered released and confined to base, where he has resumed his job as a supply clerk. A devout Muslim, he has asked to be allowed off base to attend weekly services, but his commander denied the request. Born in Syria, Al Halabi moved at 15 to the U.S. to rejoin his father and older siblings, who had immigrated for economic opportunity. He went to high school in Dearborn, Mich., a heavily Muslim pocket of suburban Detroit. After working in the family restaurant, Al Halabi chose a career in the military as a way to more easily afford a college education. The case has generated support among Muslims in California and Michigan. A group in Orange County, where Al Halabi's older sister lives, formed a nonprofit organization to raise more than $50,000 toward his defense. "We're praying all the charges against him will be dropped," said Shereen Sabet, a spokeswoman for the Airman Halabi Justice Committee. Heading into the trial, defense attorneys have argued that the case against Al Halabi springs in part from the role he and Yee played in airing concerns about human rights violations at the Guantanamo prison. Court records say that Al Halabi and Yee both drew attention on base because of complaints some had deemed anti-American. Although military investigators raised serious allegations after Al Halabi's arrest, the case has been plagued by human error in the months since. Tech Sgt. Marc Palmosina handled the investigation early on. But in an embarrassing moment for the Air Force, he was replaced after being arrested for allegedly mishandling classified documents. He also faced charges of rape and sodomy of a child under 12. Special Agent Lance Wega, a rookie investigator who took over the case, pressed suspicions that Al Halabi may have passed secrets over the Internet, even though a computer expert told the investigator there was no proof that classified material had been sent from the airman's laptop. An intercepted letter to Al Halabi from the Syrian embassy in Washington was initially mistranslated, prompting agents to theorize that the airman planned to go to Qatar to meet enemy agents. But defense attorneys say the letter only gave him permission to return to Syria for his wedding. Investigators also have been accused of mishandling the documents and personal items Al Halabi mailed home from Guantanamo. After going through the box to find what he called "smoking gun" evidence, Wega and other investigators broke out beers to celebrate. But they soon realized they should have worn gloves during the search. According to court testimony, they repacked the box, pulled on plastic gloves and then repeated the process, photographing it as they went. During recent hearings, defense attorneys also complained that the assistant trial counsel, Air Force Capt. Dennis Kaw, pressured a prosecution translator to withhold evidence that might help Al Halabi. Staff Sgt. Suzan Sultan testified during a hearing in June that she discovered an error in her translation of the Syrian embassy letter. When she approached Kaw to ask whether she could return to the witness stand to correct her error, the prosecutor urged her not to, she testified. Brand, the military judge, ordered an ethics review of the alleged misconduct by Kaw. The prosecutor has since left the Air Force. * * * The Guardian (UK): September 13, 2004 RUMSFELD'S DIRTY WAR ON TERROR In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects... By Seymour Hersh http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303294,00.html In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where an estimated 600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in steel-mesh cages that provided little protection from the brutally hot sun. Most had been captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Bush administration had determined, however, that they were not prisoners of war but "enemy combatants", and that their stay at Guantanamo could be indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for the White House, the Pentagon and the justice department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights under federal law or the Geneva convention. President Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring that the al- Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent with military necessity". But the interrogations at Guantanamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantanamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating. "He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantanamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added. There was no rational system for determining who was important. Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now". That autumn, the document rattled aimlessly around the upper reaches of the Bush administration until it got into the hands of General John A Gordon, the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, who reported directly to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and the president's confidante. Gordon, who had retired from the military as a four-star general in 2000 had served as a deputy director of the CIA for three years. He was deeply troubled and distressed by the report, and by its implications for the treatment, in retaliation, of captured American soldiers. Gordon, according to a former administration official, told colleagues that he thought "it was totally out of character with the American value system", and "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to the president". In the wake of the September 11 attacks, there had been much debate inside the administration about what was permissible in the treatment of prisoners and what was not. The most suggestive document, in terms of what was really going on inside military prisons and detention centres, was written in early August 2002 by Jay S Bybee, head of the justice department's office of legal counsel. "Certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against torture," Bybee wrote to Alberto R Gonzales, the White House counsel. "We conclude that for an act to constitute torture, it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." (Bush later nominated Bybee to be a federal judge.) "We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians," Gonzales, in turn, would tell journalists two years later, at the height of the furore over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "We face an enemy that lies in the shadows, an enemy that doesn't sign treaties." Gonzales added that Bush bore no responsibility for the wrongdoing. "The president has not authorised, ordered or directed in any way any activity that would transgress the standards of the torture conventions or the torture statute, or other applicable laws," Gonzales said. In fact, a secret statement of the president's views, which he signed on February 7, 2002 contained a loophole that applied worldwide: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world," the president asserted. John Gordon had to know what he was up against in seeking a high-level review of prison policies at Guantanamo, but he persevered. Finally, the former White House official recalled, "We got it up to Condi." As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice, in late 2002 there were a series of heated complaints about the interrogation tactics at Guantanamo from within the FBI, whose agents had been questioning detainees in Cuba since the prison opened. A few of the agents began telling their superiors what they had witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do with getting good information. "I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled, "that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them, and making them stand until they got hypothermia. The agents were outraged. It was wrong and also dysfunctional." The agents put their specific complaints in writing, the official told me, and they were relayed, in emails and phone calls, to officials at the department of defence, including William J Haynes II, the general counsel of the Pentagon. As far as day-to-day life for prisoners at Guantanamo was concerned, nothing came of it. The unifying issue for General Gordon and his supporters inside the administration was not the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, the former White House official told me: "It was about how many more people are being held there that shouldn't be. Have we really got the right people?" The briefing for Condoleezza Rice about problems at Guantanamo took place in the autumn of 2002. It did not dwell on the question of torture or mistreatment. The main issue, the former White House official told me, was simply, "Are we getting any intelligence? What is the process for sorting these people?" Rice agreed to call a high-level meeting in the White House situation room. Most significantly, she asked Secretary Rumsfeld to attend. Rums feld, who was by then publicly and privately encouraging his soldiers in the field to get tough with captured prisoners, duly showed up, but he had surprisingly little to say. One participant in the meeting recalled that at one point Rice asked Rumsfeld "what the issues were, and he said he hadn't looked into it". Rice urged Rumsfeld to do so, and added, "Let's get the story right." Rumsfeld seemed to be in agreement, and Gordon and his supporters left the meeting convinced, the former administration official told me, that the Pentagon was going to deal with the issue. Nothing changed. "The Pentagon went into a full-court stall," the former White House official recalled. "I trusted in the goodness of man and thought we got something to happen. I was naive enough to believe that when a cabinet member" - he was referring to Rumsfeld - "says he's going to take action, he will." Over the next few months, as the White House began planning for the coming war in Iraq, there were many more discussions about the continuing problems at Guantanamo and the lack of useful intelligence. No one in the Bush administration would get far, however, if he was viewed as soft on suspected al- Qaida terrorism. "Why didn't Condi do more?" the official asked. "She made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's going to take care of it." There was, obviously, a difference between the reality of prison life in Guantanamo and how it was depicted to the public in carefully stage-managed news conferences and statements released by the administration. American prison authorities have repeatedly assured the press and the public, for example, that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were provided with a minimum of three hours of recreation every week. For the tough cases, however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with detainee conditions in mid-2002, at recreation time some prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets, similar to straitjackets, with their arms locked behind them and their legs straddled by straps. Goggles were placed over their eyes, and their heads were covered with a hood. The prisoner was then led at midday into what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the adviser told me that there were photographs of the procedure - and given his hour of recreation. The restraints forced him to move, if he chose to move, on his knees, bent over at a 45-degree angle. Most prisoners just sat and suffered in the heat. One of the marines assigned to guard duty at Guantanamo in 2003, who has since left the military, told me, after being promised anonymity, that he and his enlisted colleagues at the base were encouraged by their squad leaders to "give the prisoners a visit" once or twice a month, when there were no television crews, journalists, or other outside visitors at the prison. "We tried to fuck with them as much as we could - inflict a little bit of pain. We couldn't do much," for fear of exposure, the former marine, who also served in Afghanistan, told me. "There were always newspeople there," he said. "That's why you couldn't send them back with a broken leg or so. And if somebody died, I'd get court- martialled." The roughing up of prisoners was sometimes spur-of-the-moment, the former marine said: "A squad leader would say, 'Let's go - all the cameras on lunch break.'" One pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive them around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they didn't know where they were. [...] I wasn't trying to get information. I was just having a little fun - playing mind control." When I asked a senior FBI official about the former marine's account, he told me that agents assigned to interrogation duties at Guantanamo had described similar activities to their superiors. In November 2002, army Major General Geoffrey Miller had relieved Generals Dunlavey and Baccus, unifying the command at Guantanamo. Baccus was seen by the Pentagon as soft - too worried about the prisoners' well-being. In Senate hearings after Abu Ghraib, it became known that Miller was permitted to use legally questionable interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, which could include, with approval, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonising lengths of time. In May 2004, the New York Times reported that the FBI had instructed its agents to avoid being present at interrogation sessions with suspected al-Qaida members. The newspaper said the severe methods used to extract information would be prohibited in criminal cases, and therefore could compromise the agents in future legal proceedings against the suspects. "We don't believe in coercion," a senior FBI official subsequently told me. "Our goal is to get information and we try to gain the prisoners' trust. We have strong feelings about it." The FBI official added, "I thought Rumsfeld should have been fired long ago." "They did it the wrong way," a Pentagon adviser on the war on terror told me, "and took a heavy-handed approach based on coercion, instead of persuasion - which actually has a much better track record. It's about rage and the need to strike back. It's evil, but it's also stupid. It's not torture but acts of kindness that lead to concessions. The persuasive approach takes longer but gets far better results." There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the earnest discussions inside the White House in 2002 about the good and bad of the interrogation process at Guantanamo. Rice and Rumsfeld knew what many others involved in the prisoner discussions did not - that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the president had signed a top-secret finding, as required by law, authorising the defence department to set up a specially recruited clandestine team of special forces operatives and others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law and snatch - or assassinate, if necessary - identified "high-value" al-Qaida operatives anywhere in the world. Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure. The programme was hidden inside the defence department as an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House. The SAP owed its existence to Rumsfeld's desire to get the US special forces community into the business of what he called, in public and internal communications, "manhunts", and to his disdain for the Pentagon's senior generals. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of the generals and admirals to act aggressively. Soon after September 11, he repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva convention. Complaints about the United States' treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said, in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation". One of Rumsfeld's goals was bureaucratic: to give the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and not the CIA, the lead in fighting terrorism. Throughout the existence of the SAP, which eventually came to Abu Ghraib prison, a former senior intelligence official told me, "There was a periodic briefing to the National Security Council [NSC] giving updates on results, but not on the methods." Did the White House ask about the process? The former officer said that he believed that they did, and that "they got the answers". By the time of Rumsfeld's meeting with Rice, his SAP was in its third year of snatching or strong-arming suspected terrorists and questioning them in secret prison facilities in Singapore, Thailand and Pakistan, among other sites. The White House was fighting terror with terror. On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. "Both were dirty," a former senior intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes, told me, "but it was pretty blatant." The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance. Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al- Qaida only by Osama bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison. RUMSFELD'S DIRTY WAR ON TERROR (Part 2) http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1303429,00.html Fredrik Laurin, a Swedish journalist who worked on The Broken Promise, extensively researched the leased Gulfstream jet that was used to take Zery and Agiza to Cairo. Laurin told me that he was able to track the aircraft to landings in Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Germany, England, Ireland Morocco, as well as the Washington DC area. It also made visits to Guantanamo. The company told Laurin that the plane was leased almost exclusively to the US government. Significantly, the records obtained by Laurin indicate that the Gulfstream apparently halted its overseas trips from May 5 2004 - the week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke - until July 7, when it flew from Dulles Airport in suburban Washington to Cairo. After the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed, a former senior intelligence official with direct information about the SAP gave me an account of how and why the top- secret programme had begun. As the American-led hunt for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden began to stall, he said, it was clear that the American intelligence operatives in the field were failing to get useful intelligence in a timely manner. With the pressure mounting, some information was being delivered via the CIA by friendly liaison intelligence services - allies of the United States in the Middle East and south-east Asia - who were not afraid to get rough with prisoners. The tough tactics appealed to Rumsfeld and his senior civilian aides. Rumsfeld then authorised the establishment of the highly secret programme, which was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets. The SAP - subject to the defence department's most stringent level of security - was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The people assigned to the programme recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from US elite forces - navy seals, the army's delta force, and the CIA's paramilitary experts. "Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target - a stand-up group to hit quickly," the former senior intelligence official told me. The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice. Fewer than 200 operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Myers [Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff], were "completely read into the programme", the former intelligence official said. "The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'" One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the programme was Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence. Cambone had worked closely with Rumsfeld in a number of Pentagon jobs since the beginning of the administration, but this office, to which he was named in March 2003, was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganisation of the Pentagon. Known for his closeness to Rumsfeld, Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA's inability before the Iraq war to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harboured weapons of mass destruction. Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programmes that were relevant to the war on terror. In mid-2003, the SAP was regarded, at least in the Pentagon, as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active programme," the former senior intelligence official told me. "As this monster begins to take life, there's joy in the world. The monster is doing well - real well" - at least from the perspective of those involved who, according to the former officer, began to see themselves as "masters of the universe in terms of intelligence". I was initially told of the SAP's existence by members of the intelligence community who were troubled by the programme's prima facie violation of the Geneva convention; their concern was that such activities, if exposed, would eviscerate the moral standing of the United States and expose American soldiers to retaliation. In May 2004, a ranking member of Congress confirmed its existence and further told me that President Bush had signed the mandated finding officially notifying Congress of the SAP. The legislator added that he had none the less been told very little about the programme. Only a few members of the House and Senate leadership were authorised by statute to be informed of it, and, even then, the legislators were provided with little more than basic budget information. It's not clear that the Senate and House members understood that the United States was poised to enter the business of "disappearing" people. The Pentagon may have judged the SAP a success, but by August 2003, the war in Iraq was going badly and there was, once again, little significant intelligence being generated in the many prisons in Iraq. The president and his national security team turned for guidance to General Miller, the "Gitmo" [Guantanamo] commander. Recounting that decision, one of the White House officials who had supported General Gordon's ill-fated effort to change prisoner policy asked me, rhetorically, "Why do I take a failed approach at Guantanamo and move it to Iraq?" By the autumn of 2003, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political and military misjudgments in Iraq was clear. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get tough with the Iraqi men and women in detention - to treat them behind prison walls as if they had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. General Miller was summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step beyond "Gitmoizing", however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly and exposed to sexual humiliation. "They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up - the black special-access programme - and I'm going in hot. "So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff." Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons, he would bring some of the army military intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices. "So here are fundamentally good soldiers - military intelligence guys - being told that no rules apply," the former official said. In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programmes, spread the blame. "The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the programme." When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11 we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism and created conditions where the ends justify the means." According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation - aspects of which were known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green - encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the insurgency. A senior CIA official confirmed the details of this account and said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA. Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib - whether military police or military intelligence - was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others - military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, CIA officers, and the men from the SAP - wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to General Karpinski, then the commander of the 800 military police brigade. "I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know," Karpinski told me. "I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later." The mysterious civilians, she said, were "always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out". Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. Military intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore "sterile", or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them apart," a source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organisations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom and who had the authority to give orders. By last autumn, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the CIA had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core programme in Afghanistan - pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets. And now you want to use it for cab drivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets.'" The CIA balked, the former intelligence official said: "The agency checks with their lawyers and pulls out," ending those of its activities in Abu Ghraib that related to the SAP. (In a later conversation, a senior CIA official confirmed this account.) The CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valued covert operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're taking a programme that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against al-Qaida, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an army of 135,000 soldiers." In mid 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva convention while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me in May 2004. "They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. [ ... ] The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur." The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. The JAG officers told him that, with the war on terror, a 50-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva convention had come to an end. In July 2004, I again spoke to Scott Horton, who has maintained contact with a network of JAG lawyers. He told me that Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies had pressured the army to conclude the pending investigations by late August, before the Republican convention in New York. Horton added that the politics were blatant. Pentagon investigations, he said, "have a reputation for tending to whitewash, but even taking this into account, the current investigations seem to be setting new standards". Rumsfeld's office had circumscribed the investigators' charge and also placed tight controls on the documents to be made available. In other words, Horton said, "Rumsfeld has completely rigged the investigations. My friends say we should expect something much akin to the army inspector general's report - 'just a few rotten apples'." But General Taguba's highly critical internal investigation into military prisons in Iraq - which, together with the shocking photographs of prisoner abuse, sparked the Abu Ghraib scandal in April - amounted to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of army leadership at the highest levels. The picture Taguba drew of Abu Ghraib was one in which army regulations and the Geneva convention were routinely violated, and in which much of the day- to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to army military intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Rumsfeld's most fateful decision, endorsed by the White House, came at a time of crisis in August 2003 when the defence secretary expanded the highly secret SAP into the prisons of Iraq. The roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal therefore lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few army reservists, but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-an-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism. [ This is an edited extract from Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M Hersh, published today by Penguin Press. To order a copy for £15.99 plus UK p&p (rrp £17.99), call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875 ] * * * The Guardian (UK): September 13, 2004 BUSH TEAM 'KNEW OF ABUSE' AT GUANTANAMO By Oliver Burkeman in Washington http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303105,00.html Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today. The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them. The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads. Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of international law - an officially "unacknowledged" programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantanamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent. A CIA analyst visited Guantanamo in summer 2002 and returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," a CIA source told Hersh. The analyst submitted a report to General John Gordon, an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser. Gen Gordon was troubled, and, one former administration official told Hersh "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to the president". Ms Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and called a high-level meeting at which she asked Mr Rumsfeld, to deal with the problem. But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-court stall", a former White House official is quoted as saying. "Why didn't Condi do more? She made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's going to take care of it." The investigation further suggests that CIA and FBI staff had already witnessed incidents at Guantanamo just as extreme as those that would subsequently be alleged by freed inmates. A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia." The secret "special access programme" facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention, was established following a direct order from the president. Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." Hersh's book reports that an army officer communicated concerns over abuses at Abu Ghraib both to General John Abizaid, the US central command (Centcom) chief at the time, and his deputy, General Lance Smith. The officer told Hersh: "I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons. Abizaid didn't say a thing. He looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, 'Move on. I don't want to touch this.'" Centcom has disputed the allegation. In an interview with the Guardian, Hersh provided evidence that the administration sought to evade the issue: he said codenames of some programmes were changed within hours of his original story appearing, presumably to maintain their secrecy. In a statement, the Pentagon said Hersh's investigation "apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources ... Thus far ... investigations have determined that no responsible official of the Department of Defence approved any programme that could conceivably have authorised or condoned the abuses seen at Abu Ghraib. If any of Mr Hersh's anonymous sources wish to come forward and offer evidence to the contrary, the department welcomes them to do so." Pressure has been building on the Pentagon over its detention policies after it emerged at a Congressional hearing last week that the administration is being accused of concealing up to 100 "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross, which must be granted access to prisoners of war and other detainees under the Geneva convention. Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been meant for Guantanamo. He said the measures ought to be contrasted with those of terrorists. "Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television?" he asked. "It doesn't." * * * Sun, September 12, 2004 Why West is losing By Eric Margolis -- Contributing Foreign Editor http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/09/12/ 626001.html Three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, America's politicians and media continue to gravely deceive the public about the so-called war on terrorism. Now the definitive book on terrorism has appeared that should be mandatory reading for every thinking person. It's called Imperial Hubris: Why The West is Losing the War on Terror. The cover simply identifies the author as "Anonymous," but he's already been widely identified in the American media as Michael Scheuer, a senior terrorism analyst for the CIA. It is unprecedented that a serving CIA officer was allowed to publish a book, one that is clearly a dramatic rebuke to the neoconservatives who drove the U.S. into two wars. Scheuer's work is a goldmine of information and brilliant analysis. It breaks taboos and sweeps away the clouds of lies about al-Qaida, Iraq and Afghanistan. He says U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious -- "we are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency -- not criminality or terrorism." The U.S. has made only "a modest dent in enemy forces." None of bin Laden's reasons for waging war on the U.S., writes Scheuer, "have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy (as President George Bush claims), but everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world," notably unlimited support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians and the destruction of Iraq. "For cheap, easily accessible oil, Washington and the West have supported Muslim tyrannies (Osama) bin Laden and other Islamists seek to destroy," Scheuer writes. "The war has the potential to last beyond our children's lifetimes and be fought mostly on U.S. soil." A coup for bin Laden Bin Laden, argues Scheuer, is widely viewed by much of the Muslim world, infuriated by American actions in the Mideast, as neither a terrorist or madman but as a skilled warrior, the sole Muslim leader standing up to predatory western powers. Ironically U.S. and British military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq "are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world," a prime bin Laden goal. Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq was "icing on bin Laden's cake." The threat today facing America "is the defensive jihad (holy struggle), an Islamic military reaction triggered by an attack by non-Muslims on the Islamic faith, on Muslims, on Muslim territory." Muslims are increasingly fighting back. The Muslim world believes it is under total attack led by Bush -- a massive effort to crush all who oppose U.S. domination, destroy Islam's inherent political role, eliminate Muslim charities, impose western values on the Islamic world and maintain puppet rulers -- "spreading democracy" in Bush's lexicon. Terrorism is merely the tactics of the poor fighting the rich. The ultimate taboo "U.S. military operations in the Muslim world," he adds, "validate bin Laden's contention the U.S. is attacking Islam and supports any country willing to kill or persecute Muslims." Scheuer, breaking the ultimate taboo, observes of Washington's "one-way alliance" with Israel that "Israelis have succeeded in lacing tight the ropes binding the American Gulliver to the ... Jewish state and its policies." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are lost causes, Scheuer concludes. The U.S. is totally unable to create legitimate governments in either chaotic nation, only puppet regimes, supported by American bayonets. If the U.S. stays, it will bleed endlessly; if it retreats, it faces political disaster. Washington, he charges, has no strategy and is merely "winging it." In one of his most acute insights, Scheuer explains the U.S. cannot, for all of its riches, buy its way to victory in Afghanistan or Iraq. "Honour is still the currency of value in the Middle East, more so than goods and services." Blood-links trump all other affiliations or loyalties. Honour is why the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the U.S., a man they regarded as their guest and a war hero, and why he has still not been betrayed in spite of a $25-million US reward in a nation where the annual income is $147. At least there is one person in Washington who understands the violence surrounding us -- and has the courage and patriotism to tell Americans the truth: Their own arrogance and ignorance are driving them into a no-win war against 1.3 billion Muslims. * * * WNEP-TV (Scranton, PA): September 12, 2004 PHILLY LAWYER LEADS ABUSE LAWSUIT AGAINST ABU GHRAIB CONTRACTORS http://www.wnep.com/Global/story.asp?S=595611&nav=8H3k PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A Philadelphia lawyer is among those spearheading a racketeering lawsuit accusing civilian contractors of conspiring to torture prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Attorney Susan Burke is working with a team of lawyers from around the country who have filed suit on behalf of anonymous detainees.They suit seeks payments for torture victims and a ban on future government contracts for two companies that the lawyers say were involved in the abuse.Burke has worked on activist lawsuits before. One sought to change the mental health system in Washington D.C. Another tried to improve transit access for the disabled in Maryland. Another tried to free Chinese dissidents.The 42-year-old partner at the law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker and Rhoads says she is an optimist who believes U.S. citizens have an obligation to make sure the country stays at the forefront of human rights movement. * * * Sacramento Bee: September 12, 2004 TRAVIS AIRMAN'S SPY CASE HAS STEADILY CRUMBLED By Sam Stanton and Denny Walsh, Bee Staff Writers http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/courts_legal/story/10717795p-11636252c.html Piece by piece, the Air Force case against spy suspect Ahmad I. Al Halabi largely has fallen away over the past year. After the Travis supply clerk was arrested in July 2003, Air Force investigators spoke darkly of a plot to deliver to Syria national defense secrets that "directly affected the United States' war against terrorists," and made alarmed reference to his possible role in a Muslim espionage ring operating at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But in a series of hearings that began in January, Al Halabi's defense attorneys have come forth with claims that the government fabricated and overstated evidence, as well as ignored and even hid information that might clear him. Of the original 30 charges, 14 have been dropped, including two counts of aiding the enemy that could have resulted in Al Halabi's execution. Sixteen charges remain, including espionage and lying to investigators, and if convicted of espionage, he still could face life in prison. But, with the trial phase of the Syrian-born airman's court-martial scheduled to begin this week at Travis Air Force Base, there are serious questions about what evidence - if any - the government has left to back up its claims that the 25- year-old naturalized citizen was spying for Syria. "They do not have any evidence at all," declared Air Force Maj. Jamie Key, one of Al Halabi's defense attorneys. "And they have never said at all whom they think he was going to give information to, or why." The Air Force has declined numerous requests from The Bee to discuss the case, saying that doing so could jeopardize Al Halabi's right to a fair trial. "The government's goal remains the same," an Air Force spokesman said in a written statement, in which he asked not to be named. "To ensure Senior Airman Al Halabi receives a fair and impartial court-martial." A slightly built man who wears wire-rimmed glasses and once was honored as "Airman of the Year," Al Halabi seems an unlikely candidate for the star role in an international espionage case. He worked as a supply clerk at Travis as a member of the 60th Logistics Readiness Squadron until November 2002, when his Arabic language skills led to a transfer to Guantanamo. There, he was asked to serve as a translator for suspected al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists being held at the military prison. The Guantanamo prison camp is a highly secure installation where virtually every document is considered classified. Even the release of detainees' names or identity numbers represents a violation of military secrecy. Al Halabi's work included translating letters the detainees sent and received, a task he performed using his personal laptop computer at his commander's direction. In downtime, Al Halabi worshiped and socialized with other Muslim service members and translators at the base, including his boss, Capt. James Yee, an Army chaplain. The close-knit character of the Muslim contingent bred suspicion and paranoia among other personnel at the base, according to defense claims, as did Al Halabi's expressions of sympathy for the detainees imprisoned there. In court documents, for example, Air Force investigators accuse Al Halabi of offering "unauthorized items of comfort" to detainees, including baklava pastries during a religious holiday. Investigators also accuse him of making "anti-American" statements, a reference to his voicing concerns about how the prisoners were treated. The suspicions grew after Al Halabi made arrangements to fly to Syria, where his attorneys say he planned to marry his Syrian fiancee and bring her back to the United States. Al Halabi's contact with the Syrian Embassy to arrange for his travel documents set off alarms in the Air Force, and by the time he left Guantanamo in July 2003, investigators had decided to arrest him. He was picked up en route to Travis, during a stopover in Jacksonville, Fla., where investigators said they found 186 detainee letters on his laptop and two detainee notes in his luggage, all of them classified. By then, the Pentagon had come to fear there was a spy ring operating at the camp in Cuba. Two months after Al Halabi's arrest, Yee was detained and charged with mishandling classified information. A month after that, a civilian translator whose family is from Egypt was charged with similar violations. The arrests generated worldwide news coverage, as did word from the Pentagon that security procedures at the prison were being reviewed. But, in a matter of months, defense attorneys had managed to raise serious doubts about whether a spy ring of any sort existed. The case against the civilian is pending, but the case against Yee unraveled entirely. The chaplain was arrested when he left the island with copies of detainee rosters and a list of the camp interrogators. But the charges were eventually withdrawn, and Yee was offered nonjudicial punishment for unrelated offenses. Ultimately, that action also was withdrawn. The captain returned to his regular duties, but then left the Army, saying the allegations had destroyed his career. Now, Al Halabi's attorneys are similarly seeking dismissal of the case against their client, a matter they plan to raise when the court-martial reconvenes Tuesday. And they have signaled that they plan to call witnesses to rebut claims of wrongdoing by their client. Al Halabi's lawyers had planned to call Yee as a witness, but the judge refused to allow his testimony under a grant of immunity. However, the defense apparently expects to call Yee's wife to testify as to why Al Halabi was carrying $1,500 in cash at the time of his arrest. The defense claims Yee had asked Al Halabi to take the money to Yee's wife in Syria, and she will "testify that this is a common practice in Syria." His lawyers also plan to present evidence that the airman's attempt to fly to Syria last summer was nothing more than a long-planned trip, well-known to his supervisors, to get married and bring his new wife to Travis. And they will call witnesses who served with Al Halabi at Guantanamo, and who are expected to testify they never were told that the materials they were translating were classified. The defense list also apparently includes an official from Syria who will testify that Al Halabi was not a spy for that nation. The most serious recent blow to the prosecution appears to be the Air Force's determination that the letters in Al Halabi's possession were not, in fact, classified. The defense long has contended that the top command at the prison improperly issued orders to classify virtually everything there, and one longtime military prosecutor thinks the case may now be in trouble. "Viewing it in the light most favorable to the government, I suppose it may have been the smart thing to do early on to classify as secret every piece of paper at the camp until you figure out what's what," said Timothy E. Naccarato, a retired Army colonel and former staff judge advocate. "Now that time has passed, it no doubt has become apparent what part of this material has no value to an enemy." Nacarrato, director of academic support at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, said the Air Force now must decide whether it is worth it to pursue the case. "They may decide they've extracted their pound of flesh at this point," he said. "Things could easily go from here to serious negotiations between the two sides. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some kind of plea bargain." The classification setback is just the latest in a string of revelations that appear to have weakened the government's case. Prime among those are defense claims that the lead investigator, in his zeal to gather damning evidence against Al Halabi, ignored warnings that he was overvaluing some evidence found among Al Halabi's belongings. An Islamic symbol the government maintained was a link to al-Qaida, for instance, turned out to be an ordinary religious item similar to a crucifix in Christianity or the Star of David for Jews. Evidence also has been introduced that the chief investigator, Special Agent Lance Wega, led his colleagues in a celebratory beer party as they handled key evidence in the case, then orchestrated a cover-up of the event. Perhaps the most damning allegation is that the government pursued the charges that carried the death penalty - contending that Al Halabi had attempted to e- mail classified letters to someone - even though the investigators were advised by a computer analyst that it was not true. The charge finally was withdrawn for lack of evidence. Other allegations from the start appeared marginal in an international spy prosecution. At one point, Al Halabi faced a bank fraud charge that carried a 30-year penalty and $1 million fine. The Air Force said it involved the airman's attempt to defraud seven different banks by submitting phony credit card information. But the defense later presented evidence that his applications had been accurate and that the banks had bungled their handling of them: either compressing his last name into one word, transposing his first name and last name, or confusing Al Halabi with his brother. Prosecutors withdrew the charge after the judge in the case, Air Force Col. Barbara Brand, rebuked them for what she called an "appalling lack of evidence." After 10 months of incarceration, Al Halabi was ordered released in May, and has returned to work as a supply clerk, confined to Travis. He will return to court Tuesday for a resumption of pre-trial hearings, including another attempt by the defense to have all of the charges dropped, this one hinging on the contention that he was illegally singled out based on ethnic origin. If that fails, selection of a panel of Air Force personnel, which will function as a jury does in a civilian court, is expected to begin later in the week. [ The Bee's Sam Stanton can be reached at 916-321-1091 or sstanton@sacbee.com ] * * * Houston Chronicle: September 11, 2004 BOOK SAYS BUSH OFFICIALS WARNED OF PRISON ABUSE By John H. Cushman Jr., New York Times http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2790432 WASHINGTON -- Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist. Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker magazine who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday. The book draws on the articles he has written about the campaign against terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hersh asserts that a CIA analyst who visited the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, the deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser. But when Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted. Hersh's account is based on anonymous sources, some of them secondhand, and could not be independently verified. Hersh also says that a military officer involved in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in November and reported it to two of his superiors, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the regional commander, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith. "I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons," the unnamed officer is quoted as telling Hersh. "Abizaid didn't say a thing. He looked at me -- beyond me, as if to say, `Move on. I don't want to touch this.'" Hersh also reports that FBI agents complained to their superiors about abuses at Guantanamo, as did a military lawyer, and that these complaints, too, were relayed to the Pentagon. Hersh's thesis is that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists" who have been charged so far, "but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism." In particular, Hersh has reported that a secret program to capture and interrogate terrorists led to the abuse of prisoners. In a statement posted on its Web site, the Pentagon said: "Based on media inquiries, it appears that Seymour Hersh's upcoming book apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources." The statement added that several investigations so far "have determined that no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have authorized or condoned the abuses seen at Abu Ghraib." That is essentially the same reaction issued by the Pentagon when Hersh first reported, in May, that Rumsfeld, with the White House's approval, established a secret program under which commandos would capture and interrogate suspected terrorists with few if any constraints, and that eventually this program's reach extended into the Abu Ghraib prison. Although the new book does not provide major new details on this claim, which has not been independently confirmed, Hersh does write that after his article describing the secret operation was published in May, "a ranking member of Congress confirmed its existence and further told me that President Bush had signed the mandated finding officially notifying Congress." In an introduction, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, defends Hersh's reliance on unnamed sources as unavoidable when reporting on intelligence matters, and says that in every case the magazine's editors "ask the reporter who the unnamed sources are, what their motivations might be, and if they can be corroborated." Hersh achieved prominence in 1969 when he revealed the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by Americans at the village of My Lai. * * * TomDispatch: September 9, 2004 THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF CIA TORTURE: AMERICA'S ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB By Alfred W. McCoy http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1795 From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval Europe's thumbscrews, rack, and wheel, for over 2,000 years anyone interrogated in a court of law could expect to suffer unspeakable tortures. For the last 200 years, humanist intellectuals from Voltaire to members of Amnesty International have led a sustained campaign against the horrors of state-sponsored cruelty, culminating in the United Nation's 1985 Convention Against Torture, ratified by the Clinton administration in 1994. Then came 9/11. When the Twin Towers collapsed killing thousands, influential "pro-pain pundits" promptly repudiated those Enlightenment ideals and began publicly discussing whether torture might be an appropriate, even necessary weapon in George Bush's war on terror. The most persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M. Dershowitz, advocated giving courts the right to issue "torture warrants," ensuring that needed information could be prized from unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles. Despite torture's appeal as a "lesser evil," a necessary expedient in dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation. As past perpetrators could have told today's pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the President's orders to "kick some ass," was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high target value" Al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis. As we learned from France's battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s, and Britain's Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s, a nation that harbors torture in defiance of its democratic principles pays a terrible price. Its officials must spin an ever more complex web of lies that, in the end, weakens the bonds of trust that are the sine qua non of any modern society. Most surprisingly, our own pro-pain pundits seemed, in those heady early days of the war on terror, unaware of a fifty-year history of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor were they aware that their enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those in the Bush Administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus. Torture's Perverse Pathology In April 2004, the American public was stunned by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As the scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New York Times columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps." These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even evidence of a breakdown in "military discipline." What they record are CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. A survey of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact, the lead agency at Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support its mission. These photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard interrogation procedures inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated globally, on executive authority, since the start of the President's war on terror. Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the UN and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the U.S has ratified. In battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most objectionable practices -- subversion abroad, repression at home, and most significantly torture itself. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted massive, secret research into coercion and the malleability of human consciousness which, by the late fifties, was costing a billion dollars a year. Many Americans have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects. While these CIA drug experiments led nowhere and the testing of electric shock as a technique led only to lawsuits, research into sensory deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps best described as "no-touch" torture. The Agency's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the seventeenth century -- and thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation. For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations." Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures -- strappado, question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of mockery." At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced pain Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective. Just as interrogators are often seduced by a dark, empowering sense of dominance over victims, so their superiors, even at the highest level, can succumb to fantasies of torture as an all-powerful weapon. Our contemporary view of torture as aberrant and its perpetrators as abhorrent ignores both its pervasiveness as a Western practice for two millennia and its perverse appeal. Once torture begins, its perpetrators, plunging into uncharted recesses of consciousness, are often swept away by dark reveries, by frenzies of power and potency, mastery and control -- particularly in times of crisis. "When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power," reads one CIA analysis of the Soviet state applicable to post-9/11 America, "they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures on the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy 'confession' and brutality may become widespread." Enraptured by this illusory power, modern states that sanction torture usually allow it to spread uncontrollably. By 1967, just four years after compiling a torture manual for use against a few top Soviet targets, the CIA was operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program that killed over 20,000 Viet Cong suspects. In the centers themselves, countless thousands were tortured for information that led to these assassinations. Similarly, just a few months after CIA interrogators first tortured top Al Qaeda suspects at Kabul in 2002, its agents were involved in the brutal interrogation of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners. As its most troubling legacy, the CIA's psychological method, with its legitimating scientific patina and its avoidance of obvious physical brutality, has provided a pretext for the preservation of torture as an acceptable practice within the U.S. intelligence community. Once adopted, torture offers such a powerful illusion of efficient information extraction that its perpetrators, high and low, remain wedded to its use. They regularly refuse to recognize its limited utility and high political cost. At least twice during the Cold War, the CIA's torture training contributed to the destabilization of two key American allies, Iran's Shah and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos. Yet even after their spectacular falls, the Agency remained blind to the way its torture training was destroying the allies it was designed to defend. CIA Torture Research The CIA's torture experimentation of the 1950s and early 1960s was codified in 1963 in a succinct, secret instructional booklet on torture -- the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, which would become the basis for a new method of torture disseminated globally over the next three decades. These techniques were first spread through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Public Safety program to train police forces in Asia and Latin America as the front line of defense against communists and other revolutionaries. After an angry Congress abolished the Public Safety program in 1975, the CIA worked through U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams to instruct military interrogators, mainly in Central America. At the Cold War's end, Washington resumed its advocacy of universal principles, denouncing regimes for torture, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture. On the surface, the United States had resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices. Yet even when Congress finally ratified this UN convention it did so with intricately-constructed reservations that cleverly exempted the CIA's psychological torture method. While other covert agencies synonymous with Cold War repression such as Romania's Securitate, East Germany's Stasi, and the Soviet Union's KGB have disappeared, the CIA survives -- its archives sealed, its officers decorated, and its Cold War crimes forgotten. By failing to repudiate the Agency's propagation of torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Memory and Forgetting Today the American public has only a vague understanding of these CIA excesses and the scale of its massive mind-control project. Yet almost every adult American carries fragmentary memories of this past -- of LSD experiments, the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, the murder of a kidnapped American police adviser in Montevideo who was teaching CIA techniques to the Uruguayan police, and of course the Abu Ghraib photographs. But few are able to fit these fragments together and so grasp the larger picture. There is, in sum, an ignorance, a studied avoidance of a deeply troubling topic, akin to that which shrouds this subject in post-authoritarian societies. With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a clandestine agency manipulating its government and deceiving its citizens to probe the cruel underside of human consciousness, and then propagating its discoveries throughout the Third World. Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United States moved quickly through the same stages (as defined by author John Conroy) that the United Kingdom experienced after revelations of British army torture in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first, minimizing the torture with euphemisms such as "interrogation in depth"; next, justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or effective; and finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a few bad apples." Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed our own bad apples, those seven Military Police. In July, the Army's Inspector General Paul T. Mikolashek delivered his report blaming 94 incidents of "abuse" on "an individual failure to uphold Army Values." Although the New York Times called his conclusions "comical," the general's views seem to resonate with an emerging conservative consensus. "Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class," said Republican Senator Trent Lott. "You don't get information that will save American lives by withholding pancakes." In June, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 35% of Americans felt torture was acceptable in some circumstances. In August, Major General George R. Fay released his report on the role of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations about the reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque military prose. After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000 documents, the general intimated that this abuse was the product of an interrogation policy shaped, in both design and application, by the CIA. Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the Abu Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable incidents of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation. Moreover, these "routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and severe abuses to occur." After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay was forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question: what was the source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that led to torture during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered throughout his report are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead from the White House to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush gave his defense secretary broad powers over prisoners in November 2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July 2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003. In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's report, when read closely, traced the source of these harsh "non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a flouting of military procedures by CIA interrogators "eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib," thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees "occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized for DoD operations." With their exemption from military regulations, CIA interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique" and extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In sum, General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. military. Had he gone further, General Fay might have mentioned that the 519th Military Intelligence, the Army unit that set interrogation guidelines for Abu Ghraib, had just come from Kabul where it worked closely with the CIA, learning torture techniques that left at least one Afghani prisoner dead. Had he gone further still, the general could have added that the sensory deprivation techniques, stress positions, and cultural shock of dogs and nudity that we saw in those photos from Abu Ghraib were plucked from the pages of past CIA torture manuals. American Prestige This is not, of course, the first American debate over torture in recent memory. From 1970 to 1988, the Congress tried unsuccessfully, in four major investigations, to expose elements of this CIA torture paradigm. But on each occasion the public showed little concern, and the practice, never fully acknowledged, persisted inside the intelligence community. Now, in these photographs from Abu Ghraib, ordinary Americans have seen the reality and the results of interrogation techniques the CIA has propagated and practiced for nearly half a century. The American public can join the international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy; or in its desperate search for security, the United States can continue its clandestine torture of terror suspects in the hope of gaining good intelligence without negative publicity. In the likely event that Washington adopts the latter strategy, it will be a decision posited on two false assumptions: that torturers can be controlled and that news of their work can be contained. Once torture begins, its use seems to spread uncontrollably in a downward spiral of fear and empowerment. With the proliferation of digital imaging we can anticipate, in five or ten years, yet more chilling images and devastating blows to America's international standing. Next time, however, the American public's moral concern and Washington's apologies will ring even more hollowly, producing even greater damage to U.S. prestige. Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers, a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military. He will publish a fuller version of this essay in The New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004). Copyright 2004 Alfred W. McCoy * * * Toronto Star: September 9, 2004 THE SURREAL WORLD OF BUSH By Haroon Siddiqui http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename= thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1094681410522&call_pageid= 968256290204&col=968350116795 Politicians don't always deliver what they promise. But George W. Bush is in a league all his own. He says one thing, does another and often manages the exact opposite of what he intends. While politicians play up what suits them and downplay what doesn't, he is unique in shutting out reality altogether. He won't see what he doesn't want to see, even if others do. Also, while politicians learn on the job and go from the stupid to the sensible, he seems to travel in the opposite direction. He said post-9/11 that he was going to isolate terrorists but ended up isolating America. He attacked Afghanistan to crush Al Qaeda but spawned its branches or, worse, copycat outfits all over the world. He invaded Iraq to capture non-existent weapons of mass destruction, while his other two axis of evil nations, North Korea and Iran, were the ones developing nuclear weapons. He talked tough on Iran but it was North Korea that got busy and made two nuclear bombs. He saw his war on Iraq as a warning to other states not to develop lethal weapons but finds his credibility so eroded he can't convince others about the seriousness of Iran's nuclear intentions. He went into Iraq to squash a non-existent terror connection and ended up sprouting widespread terrorism. He ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror, only to replace it with that of thousands of terrorists. He liberated Iraqis but killed nearly 20,000 of them. He promised them the rule of law but created the rule of looters, rapists and hostage-takers. He pledged democracy but postponed elections to impose a CIA agent as prime minister. He promised Iraqis freedom but muzzled the independent Al-Jazeera and gave $48 million to a Florida firm to modernize Saddam's propaganda machine so it can serve as the propaganda arm of the American occupation. He hailed the axing of the death penalty in Iraq as one of the first acts of the American occupiers last year, but has consented to its reinstatement by the new U.S.-appointed satrapy in Baghdad. He planned to replace the secular Baathists with secular democrats but strengthened the clerics ? both among the Shiites and the minority Sunnis. He needed the help of moderates among them but undermined the country's most influential moderate, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and elevated the militant Moktada Al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has now shifted its insurgency from Najaf to the Shiite Baghdad slum of Sadr City. Bush aimed for secular models of local governance but handed over self-rule in the Sunni cities of Falluja, Ramdi, Samarra and Baquba to fundamentalists who will likely never give it up without a bloodbath. He routed the Taliban from Kabul but consented to Taliban-like rule by warlords in parts of Afghanistan and mullahs in parts of Iraq, especially in Falluja, where they are punishing suspected criminals with lashes in public squares. He sought military control of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf, Kufa and Karbala but withdrew American troops, twice. He wanted power consolidated in the hands of the American ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, and pliant prime minister Iyad Allawi, but discovered that while they have all the military gadgetry at their command, the political power has shifted to the mosque. He wanted a pro-American and pro-Israeli Iraq but has created a virulently anti- American and anti-Israeli nation whose hostility seems set for a generation or two. He claimed credit for the presence of the Iraqi soccer team at the Olympics, only to have the players publicly berate him as a slaughterer of innocents in Iraq, and see Greek anti-American protesters force the cancellation of Colin Powell's presence at the closing ceremony in Athens. He continues to portray the American occupation of Iraq as an instrument of development, even as only 3 per cent of the $18 billion allocated by Congress for infrastructure has been committed so far and some basic services remain in worse shape than during Saddam's era. He advocates democracy for Arabs but ignores its most basic principles in dealing with terror suspects at home, while violating the Geneva Conventions in dealing with prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He says the American economy is strong despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: fewer jobs than when he took over, 4.3 million more people in poverty (for a total of 36 million), 5 million more people without health insurance (total 45 million), and a record number of people facing the prospect of going bankrupt. He says he honours the service of John Kerry in Vietnam but has his entourage tear at the man's honourable record. In short, we are dealing with a president who seems to be operating beyond the realm of rationality. [ Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca ] * * * IPS: September 8, 2004 RETIRED BRASS CALL FOR INDEPENDENT TORTURE PROBE By Jim Lobe http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25402 WASHINGTON, Sep 8 (IPS) - Adding their voice to a steadily growing clamour, eight retired generals and admirals have called on Pres. George W. Bush to appoint a bipartisan, independent commission to conduct a comprehensive investigation of U.S. detention and interrogation practices in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In a letter to Bush, the former flag officers, most of whom reached the top ranks of their services' legal divisions, said investigations to date, including those headed by two former Pentagon chiefs and that released their findings last month, were too limited in their mandate and could not be considered truly independent. "If we are to get to the truth of what happened -- and to make sure this treatment is never repeated -- we need a comprehensive investigation and conducted by those whose actions are not at issue," said Rear Admiral John D. Hutson (ret.), who served as the Navy's Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000 and now heads the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. "The investigations to date have failed to address senior military and civilian command responsibility and in doing so separate culpability from responsibility," he said. "This is antithetical to the way the military operates." Other signers included Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar, formerly head of the U.S. Central Command; Gen. James Cullen, who served as former Chief Judge of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals; Gen. David Brahms, senior legal adviser to the Marine Corps, 1983-88; Maj. Gen. John Fugh, the U.S. Army's former Judge Advocate General; and Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, a former Inspector General of the Navy. The letter, which was released at a press conference sponsored by Human Rights First (HRF), formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, marks the latest in a string of calls by outsiders for an independent investigation of the abuses that first came to light in April when news media published photos of the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees held at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Since then, successive Pentagon-ordered inquiries, including the court-martials of seven soldiers who were allegedly involved in those abuses, have uncovered a much broader pattern of abuses and violations of the Geneva Conventions, stretching from the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Afghanistan. In August, 130 prominent jurists, including 12 former federal judges and a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), released a blistering statement against government lawyers -- virtually all political appointees -- who had drafted memos that appeared designed to justify torture and other ill-treatment in the "war on terrorism". Some analysts believe the memos, which have since been explicitly disavowed by the administration, laid the groundwork for many of the abuses that followed. "The most senior lawyers in the Department of Justice, the White House, Department of Defense, and the vice president's office sought to justify actions that violate the most basic rights of all human beings," according to the jurists, who also included eight past presidents of the American Bar Association (ABA). The statement was itself followed up by the approval by the ABA, which represents some 400,000 U.S. attorneys, of a resolution that condemned the government's treatment of detainees which "has brought shame on the nation and undermined our standing in the world". The resolution also noted that the public had still not been adequately informed about the extent of prisoner abuse despite clear indications of "a widespread pattern of abusive detention methods". "We do not yet know who is being detained, where they are, what are the conditions of their detention and interrogation," the lawyers charged. Since approval of the resolution, two other investigations -- one by the Army and a second chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger -- have concluded that abuses were more widespread than the administration had previously admitted and that top civilian leaders, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, bore at least indirect responsibility through what the latter called a "leadership failure." In fact, analysts who pored through the two documents, particularly the Schlesinger report, found that the administration's memos and its initial determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to suspected members of al Qaeda and the Taliban did indeed help set the stage for subsequent abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those two reports in turn prompted the flag officers' letter, which stressed that none of the some 100 criminal, military and administrative inquiries launched so far, including the Schlesinger panel, were sufficiently broad and independent to paint the kind of comprehensive picture of the abuses and their causes that would be needed to ensure that they do not happen again. "Investigations that are purely internal to the military, however competent, cannot examine the whole picture," the letter stated, adding that "by their nature (they) also suffer from a critical lack of independence. But that has been exactly the case in many of the abuse inquiries to date, including the investigative (Schlesinger) 'panel' that released its report in late August 2004. "That panel was comprised of four members of the Secretary's own Defense Policy Board -- members selected by ... Secretary (Rumsfeld) himself," the letter noted, adding that it also lacked subpoena powers. Democrats in Congress have also called repeatedly for an independent bipartisan investigation on the level of the 9/11 Commission inquiry, but they have been rebuffed by their Republican colleagues, as well as the administration which had also opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission and subsequently fought efforts to expand its powers to gain classified information and question top officials under oath. HRF, which, along with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), has also called for an independent commission, reiterated that position Wednesday in a new report called "Getting to Ground Truth: Investigating U.S. Abuses in the 'War on Terror'".. The 28-page report notes that the various investigations to date have revealed striking contradictions which need to be resolved. The Army's Inspector General, for example, was "unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse", while, in the latest Army report, Maj. Gen. George Fay found that "leader responsibility and command responsibility, systemic problems and issues ...contributed to the volatile environment in which the abuse occurred". Similarly, two Army investigations found that the abuses in Abu Ghraib resulted from the acts of a small number of soldiers and individuals and in some cases failures of a few leaders to enforce discipline. The Schlesinger panel, on the other hand, reached the opposite conclusions, noting that "the abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" -- which, however, the panel was not empowered to investigate. Without resolving these issues, said HRF's Washington director, Elisa Massimino, the relevant agencies will not be able to ensure that the abuses will not recur. (END/2004) * * * USA Today: September 8, 2004 GUANTANAMO 'SPY RING' CASE TAKES BIG HIT By Laura Parker, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-09-07-espionage-alhalabi_x.htm Military prosecutors who accused an Air Force translator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of taking part in a spy ring that tried to pass more than 200 secret documents to U.S. enemies now say that only one of the documents was secret, the Air Force said Tuesday. The prosecutors' move, six months after the collapse of a case against a Muslim chaplain in the same probe, is fueling questions about whether there ever was a spy ring at Guantanamo. (Related story: Errors in investigation erode espionage case) A court-martial against Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi is still scheduled in California on Tuesday. He faces 16 counts -- including attempted espionage, lying to investigators and disobeying orders -- and could face life in prison. But the prosecutors' concession has led Al Halabi's lawyers to call for some counts to be dismissed, and military law specialists say it has stripped much of the backbone from the charges. "This case is gone," said Eugene Fidell, a military law specialist who represented Army Capt. James Yee, the chaplain who was threatened with execution before espionage charges were dropped against him. "There's no ring and no spies. ... It suggests people didn't do the kind of homework they should have done." Lawyers for Al Halabi, who was arrested in July 2003, have argued that the hundreds of pages of documents he had -- mostly letters from detainees at the camp for suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives -- shouldn't have been designated as secret. The Air Force said Tuesday that military and security experts have determined most documents in the case "are considered 'For Official Use Only,' but are not classified. Of these documents, one is considered classified at the 'Secret' level. This document relates to some ... of the charges." Al Halabi, a Syrian native and naturalized U.S. citizen, was jailed for 10 months before he was released in May. He is restricted to Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, where he is stationed. When he was arrested, he had 186 letters in his laptop computer and two handwritten notes, all from prisoners. Agents later intercepted a box he had mailed to his Travis address. A document found in the box is still considered classified. Prosecutors have said Al Halabi intended to go to Syria, possibly to pass documents to U.S. enemies. Al Halabi's lawyers say he was going there, but only to get married. They say he had the documents as part of his work as a translator. Al Halabi's lawyers also say Al Halabi and Yee were charged after complaining about how detainees were treated. * * * USA Today: September 8, 2004 ERRORS IN INVESTIGATION ERODE ESPIONAGE CASE By Laura Parker, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-09-07-gitmospy-errors_x.htm It was a shocking allegation: U.S. servicemen at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba were spying on America, and secretly helping suspected terrorists held there. That was the military's claim a year ago when it filed charges that ominously described a spy ring that was sympathetic to suspected al-Qaeda operatives and Taliban soldiers held in a military prison at the base. But then in March, the Army abruptly dropped attempted espionage charges against Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo whom authorities had described as the spy operation's "big fish." Military officials said that pursuing a case against Yee would force them to reveal national secrets; critics questioned whether the Army really had a case. Now, the case against the second man charged in the spy ring, Air Force translator Ahmad Al Halabi, appears to be foundering as well -- just six days before his court martial is set to begin in California. Prosecutors who accused Al Halabi of trying to pass more than 200 secret documents to U.S. enemies have not produced evidence that he tried to pass secrets to anyone. And now, they say that all but one of the documents Al Halabi had are not, in fact, "classified." The prosecutors' move is the latest turn in a case that has been troubled almost from the start, according to military court papers obtained by USA TODAY. Al Halabi's attorneys portray the case as a wayward product of religious bigotry, hysteria about terrorism and a shoddy investigation led by an ambitious probationary agent. The attorneys say overzealous prosecutors turned error into fact to create a far-fetched espionage plot. The defense attorneys, led by Don Rehkopf of Rochester, N.Y., suggest in a 59- page brief that Yee, Al Halabi and others were targeted because they complained that the military was mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo. The attorneys argue that Yee and Al Halabi were punished for raising questions about conditions at Guantanamo that have since become public in the wake of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. "One of the reasons (in addition to rank religious bigotry) for the government's bizarre theories...was the government's belief that one of the 'Muslims' was going to engage in 'whistleblower' type activity regarding allegations of human rights violations, inhumane conditions driving scores of GTMO captives to attempt suicide, and the actions (and over-reactions) of GTMO staff in quelling a prison riot amongst the captives," the defense brief says. "Thus by taking a ... pre-emptive strike against some of the Muslim staff, the chain-of-command could divert attention away from the plethora of problems plaguing GTMO." The document did not elaborate on what Yee and Al Halabi complained about. When the two arrived at Guantanamo Bay in November 2002, the base was commanded by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a proponent of aggressive interrogation techniques who later was in charge of Abu Ghraib. Since Guantanamo's prison for foreign detainees in the war on terrorism opened in January 2002, at least 34 prisoners have attempted suicide. The Pentagon is investigating eight incidents of alleged abuse. But last year, before any of that became public, complaints by Yee and Al Halabi were viewed as "anti-American" by some at Guantanamo, court papers say. Witnesses say Al Halabi was known to some non-Muslims at the base as a "detainee lover." Air Force spokesmen declined to comment on the case; they said they did not want to interfere with Al Halabi's right to a fair trial. A Syrian native and naturalized U.S. citizen, Al Halabi, 25, joined the Air Force in 2000 and worked as a supply clerk at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento before he was assigned to work as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo. In court documents, prosecutors, led by Lt. Col. Bryan Wheeler, have cast Al Halabi as a technologically savvy spy with links to al-Qaeda. They say he was caught "red handed" with classified documents on his laptop -- including 186 letters to and from prisoners -- and that when he was arrested at Jacksonville Naval Air Base on July 23, 2003, Al Halabi was en route to Syria, possibly to deliver classified material to U.S. enemies. Prosecutors have suggested that Al Halabi's Syrian relatives and Yee's Syrian wife, Huda Suboh, could have been possible conduits through whom Al Halabi might pass secrets. Al Halabi's attorneys counter that his only contact with alleged al-Qaeda operatives occurred through his legitimate work as a translator for the military. They say that when he was arrested, Al Halabi was going to Syria to get married, not to do anything illegal. Al Halabi is still charged with 16 counts, including attempted espionage, lying to agents and disobeying orders. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. Prosecutors have said that a second probe of Al Halabi is underway, but they have provided no other details about it. In one brief, prosecutors say they are not required to produce information from that probe, even though the defense has requested to see it. "They can investigate until Hell freezes over; the kid wasn't a spy," Rehkopf says. "That is a figment of their imagination. They've been watching too much I Spy." Tensions at Guantanamo In the short-lived Yee case, military prosecutors never detailed what evidence, if any, they had against the chaplain. But the Al Halabi case has produced hundreds of pages of documents that shed light on what triggered the Guantanamo spy probe. The briefs submitted by prosecutors and defense attorneys reveal tensions among Muslim and non-Muslim linguists in Guantanamo's translator operation that fueled suspicions about Al Halabi, Yee and other Muslim translators. The court papers also portray a criminal probe so riddled with errors that 14 of the initial 30 charges against Al Halabi have been dropped -- including aiding-the-enemy charges that carried the death penalty. The probe was led by Special Agent Lance Wega, a civilian investigator who had completed training as an agent for the Air Force's Office of Special Investigation a month before he tackled Al Halabi case in May 2003. The case briefly was supervised by a more senior agent, Tech. Sgt. Marc Palmosina, who has since been charged with counts of rape, sodomizing a child under the age of 12, and allegedly mishandling classified documents involving the conflict in Afghanistan. Wega was called to Guantanamo from Travis after an Army intelligence officer reported "suspicious" activity by Al Halabi on May 14, 2003. A disposable camera belonging to Al Halabi had been found to contain snapshots of the prison camp; Guantanamo personnel are not allowed to take such photos. By then, Al Halabi had been at the base for six months. He had arrived on Nov. 15, 2002, at a time when the translator operation lacked staff and equipment, and was working around-the-clock to reduce a large backlog of untranslated mail to and from prisoners. Al Halabi and other translators were told they could translate the letters into their laptops. The 186 letters found in Al Halabi's laptop, which form the basis for one of the attempted espionage charges, were translations from that period. Between May and Al Halabi's arrest in July, Wega and other agents pieced together their portrait of him. Some of Al Halabi's colleagues fed the agents morsels from casual chats in which Al Halabi had criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East and had empathized with Palestinian suicide bombers. One odd nugget that made it into the investigators' notebooks involved an exercise Al Halabi had done while he was in a college psychology class at Travis. Students were asked to describe what they would do if they were invisible. Their answers included robbing banks and sneaking into locker rooms. Al Halabi said he would collect information on people. This took on a new meaning in light of the counter-intelligence probe. The agents also secretly searched Al Halabi's rooms at Guantanamo and Travis. They seized old love letters, Arabic writings and videos, religious articles, and a stack of 32 credit and bank cards. They found a photocopied page containing an Arabic symbol they believed was linked to al-Qaeda. The defense disputes this and says it's a commonly-used symbol. The agents traced Al Halabi's wanderings on the Internet. They counted 14 e-mail accounts in four countries; the defense disputes this tally. They visited Al Halabi's personal Web site, which he created as part of a community college course, and declared it to be "sophisticated" because they erroneously thought it had "password protected" pages where he could post secret information. It turned out that clicking the letter "R" on the main page brought up a page of photographs of Rania, Al Halabi's fiancee. They found computer gear that "a spy would want to use," papers say. An encrypted e-mail sent on a Zip disk attracted investigators' attention. But Al Halabi had bought the disk used; the e-mail had been sent by its previous owner. Four days after the Guantanamo search, Al Halabi was arrested. Besides the prisoner letters in his laptop, he had an airline ticket to Syria and $1,500 in crisp, $100-dollar bills. During a four-hour interrogation, Al Halabi was told that he could face the death penalty. He was held in a military jail in California for the next 10 months. Freed last May, he is restricted to the base. In Wega's view, Al Halabi was merely "the little fish" in the spy ring. The larger target was Yee, who was arrested seven weeks later, on Sept. 10, 2003. Yee was held in solitary confinement for 76 days and threatened with the death penalty before the military dropped the case against him. Yee's arrest made worldwide news, in part because Yee is a West Point graduate. By contrast, Al Halabi's arrest barely made a ripple with the media. His family members, gathered in Syria for his wedding, did not know where he was for 10 days. Intercepted mail Wega's team continued to investigate. In early September, agents intercepted a letter sent to Al Halabi from the Syrian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The letter initially was mistranslated and led investigators to speculate that Al Halabi planned to desert the Air Force and travel to Qatar to meet enemies, court papers say. Al Halabi's attorneys say the letter simply gave Al Halabi permission to return temporarily to Syria. The investigators also intercepted a box Al Halabi had mailed himself from Guantanamo. Inside, they found 60 pages of materials that, until last week, prosecutors said were classified. The papers included a cell roster with prisoners' names, a partial map of the prison and a copy of various orders, including information about the movement of prisoners to and from Guantanamo. To Wega, the box provided "the smoking gun" in the case, court papers say. In outlining their case against Al Halabi, prosecutors cited his computer gear and Internet activity as evidence of technological prowess. The danger Al Halabi poses to national security, they wrote in one brief, is "what he knows and his ability to transmit it." The prosecutors also wrote that Al Halabi's statements of concern about the prisoners provide "strong evidence of the accused's motive to help the detainees." They were dismissive of Al Halabi's wedding plans; in briefs they called it as his "alleged wedding." To prosecutors, the $1,500 cash made Yee's wife, Suboh, a suspect. Al Halabi's attorneys say he was taking the money from Yee to give to Suboh, who had gone home to Damascus to visit her parents while Yee was on duty at Guantanamo. But in court papers, prosecutors say the cash is part "of the overall body of evidence." And in a brief that has been ridiculed by the defense, the prosecutors say that even if Al Halabi's explanation was true, it was still a crime. "These facts actually support the United States' contention that (Al Halabi) was attempting to deliver sensitive and/or classified defense materials to a citizen of a foreign government, namely Syria, because Ms. Suboh...was a citizen of Syria," prosecutors say. Damaged credibility Al Halabi's attorneys say that at a time of heightened concern about national security, the military has taken ordinary events -- a young man's use of a computer, his plan to travel to his native country, his upcoming wedding -- and turned them into something sinister. The reasons, they say, are rooted in racism and fear. "This case has been a farce/comedy since Day One," says Rehkopf. "There is zero evidence and they know there is zero evidence." The prosecution's credibility has been hurt by errors that investigators made. For example, in examining Al Halabi's laptop, agents initially thought he had e- mailed classified documents to someone. That wasn't the case. Investigators soon learned that they had mistaken jumbled bits of text lodged in the laptop's hard drive for e-mails. But in the crucial first weeks of the probe, when the Air Force was still pushing for the death penalty against Al Halabi, Wega continued to press that allegation. In a Sept. 5, 2003, affidavit, Wega wrote that an ongoing computer analysis had "uncovered evidence indicating four of these translated documents may have been posted to the World Wide Web, or e-mailed to unknown parties." Yet court papers indicated that nine days earlier, a computer forensics specialist had told Wega that he could not conclude that any classified material had been sent from Al Halabi's laptop. Court briefs reveal other errors by investigators: • An initial charge, later dropped, accused Al Halabi of lying about his citizenship. Actually, he became a U.S. citizen in 2001. Agents who searched his Travis dorm room did not find his citizenship papers in a desk drawer. • An initial charge, also dropped, accused him of delivering baklava to the prisoners; he did not do so. Investigators confused him with another worker at the base, who was following orders. • A charge of bank fraud was dropped after agents learned the garbled spellings of Al Halabi's name on credit cards was not evidence he had attempted to trick banks into giving him more credit. As the investigation continued, Suzan Sultan, an Air Force linguist, was called in to translate the Arabic materials seized from Al Halabi's room. She was asked to look for links to terrorists, but found none. She said later that investigators pressed her to keep trying. "I felt like they wanted me to tell them, 'Yeah, this is encouraging terrorism,' or 'This is al-Qaeda,' " she said in a deposition. Sultan also described watching the agents open the box that Al Halabi had mailed to himself from Guantanamo. They pulled out some of the contents, then broke out some beer to celebrate when they discovered the classified documents, she said. Then, realizing they had failed to properly handle this crucial evidence, they repacked the box, donned gloves and reopened it, this time taking photographs to document each step. When she expressed concerns to another Air Force investigator, he told her that "Agent Wega is really pressing this because he wants to have ... a high-priority case." He added that Wega's proving Al Halabi was involved "in some kind of conspiracy ...would be very good for his career." Sultan was so bothered by the episode that she contacted the defense team last April and provided those details in a deposition. 'Classified documents' The battle over documents' classification status has raged since the case began. The military has repeatedly changed reasons for classifying certain documents. The attempted espionage charges accuse Al Halabi of trying to deliver the 186 prisoner letters, the two handwritten notes and the 60 pages of documents found inside the box. Three other counts accuse him of mishandling those documents. Al Halabi's attorneys long argued that the military "over-classified" many documents at Guantanamo. The attorneys also say that the military's changing reasons for classifying the now-unclassified prisoner letters illustrate the dubious nature of its claims. After Al Halabi's arrest, prosecutors said the copies of prisoner letters found on his laptop were classified because they contained inmate identification numbers. Two months later, the military said the names alone were classified. By March, the military was saying that neither the names nor identification numbers were classified, but the reason the letters were classified was classified. And now, prosecutors say, the letters are not classified. * * * Biloxi Sun-Herald: September 7, 2004 POLICY LET U.S. HOLD DETAINEES IN SECRET, MILITARY OFFICERS SAY By Elise Ackerman, Knight Ridder Newspapers http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/9602584.htm WASHINGTON - (KRT) - It was standard operating procedure for the Army to hold some detainees in secret in Afghanistan for up to several months without reporting them to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to military officers familiar with the policy. A similar practice was later used at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where the physical and sexual abuse of detainees prompted the Department of Defense to launch several sweeping investigations of its detention policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, three recently completed Pentagon investigations didn't examine the Army's practice of holding secret detainees, now known as "ghost detainees," and whether it may have contributed to abuse. One of those reports was compiled by Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, who's currently the inspector general of the Army. He commanded ground forces in Afghanistan at the time the policy was adopted, but didn't mention the policy when he told the Senate Armed Service Committee in July that his review had found no evidence of ghost detainees. Mikolashek declined through a spokesman to answer questions about the policy or his July testimony. Three other generals who served in Afghanistan and would've been responsible for approving the extended detention of unregistered detainees either declined to be interviewed or didn't respond to requests. "Secret detention is the gateway to torture," charged Reed Brody, the legal counsel of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group that's documented mistreatment at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. "History shows that when people are taken off the books, that is when they are most vulnerable to all kinds of abuse." Army and Department of Defense spokesmen declined to comment on the ghost detainee policy or acknowledge its existence. The policy was described to Knight Ridder in varying levels of detail by three military officers who all spoke on the condition of anonymity. A former interrogator also described the policy in a recently published book. According to their accounts, the policy was developed following the rout of the Taliban and after coalition forces installed their headquarters at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to fight the remnants of the Taliban and to pursue Osama bin Laden. The policy was written in June 2002. Six months later, two detainees were killed at Bagram. Neither of the detainees appeared to have been given a serial number, making it impossible for the International Committee of the Red Cross to know they existed and request an interview with them. One died after he was hung by his arms from the ceiling for days. Another was beaten and died of associated injuries. The Army said it's preparing to identify a group of military intelligence officers and military police officers responsible for the abuse. Members of the same military intelligence unit that are implicated in the deaths and abuse at Bagram were later involved in abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to a report first published by Knight Ridder and subsequently confirmed by two major investigations by the Army and the Department of Defense. Congressional hearings on detainee policies and abuse continue this week. In July, Mikolashek, who's now the Army's inspector general, was called before the Senate Armed Services Committee to testify about an extensive review he conducted of detainee operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and the United States in response to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked about a March investigation led by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba that found "on at least one occasion" soldiers had moved six to eight detainees around the Iraqi prison in an attempt to hide them from the Red Cross. "Did you examine this issue?" Reed asked. "During the conduct of our inspection, we found no evidence of the so-called ghost detainees," Mikolashek said. "But there is evidence that they did exist," countered Reed, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger. "There is evidence that that is contradictory to our obligations under the Geneva Conventions." The military officers who spoke with Knight Ridder said the Army policy at Bagram Air Base placed every detainee who was brought into the facility in temporary limbo for up to two weeks. At least half a dozen detainees were held longer than two weeks, they said. The two-week delay gave interrogators time to screen detainees captured by the anti-Taliban northern alliance or coalition forces for intelligence value before releasing their names to the ICRC. Though the International Committee of the Red Cross promised confidentiality, the Army was afraid the organization would leak vital intelligence to the enemy. If coalition forces captured an enemy fighter with information about the location or movements of al-Qaida or Taliban leaders, keeping the fighter's status as a detainee secret was seen as crucial to the success of a raid. The officers emphasized that the delay also served a humanitarian goal, because detainees who had no intelligence value could be released without going through procedures that sometimes involved approval from Mikolashek's headquarters in Kuwait or from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office. By June the process had been formalized in a written SOP, or standard operating procedure. For the first two weeks, detainees were classified as "Persons under U.S. control" and given a temporary internee number beginning with "T." "The whole idea was to create a sort of limbo status, a bureaucratic blank spot where prisoners could reside temporarily without entering any official database or numbering system," a senior interrogator at Bagram who goes by the pseudonym "Chris Mackey" wrote in "The Interrogators," a book about his experience serving in Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002. If a detainee had no apparent intelligence value, he was released. Detainees who had some intelligence value were given an Internee Serial Number, or ISN, and logged into the official database. If they appeared to have high intelligence value, they were classified as PUC HVTs, or "persons under U.S. control (who are) high value targets" and held in isolation for up to three months while questioning continued. The International Committee of the Red Cross wasn't allowed to interview these detainees. The officers said they knew of about eight cases of extended detention in Afghanistan and that each was approved by a commanding general. "In most cases the reasons for doing it were more practical than anyone could imagine," one officer said. For example, the delay could be useful if a "high value target" spoke a dialect that was difficult to understand or he shared the same name as a suspected terrorist and had a story that was difficult to confirm. "It wasn't as if we were trying to hide the detainees as if they didn't exist," the officer said. "They were reported at all times to the chain of command." The officers said they knew of no detainees who were abused and that every effort was made to cooperate with the ICRC, including allowing ICRC officials to see detainees but not talk to them. The ICRC denied agreeing to a "view only" policy in Afghanistan and said its officials repeatedly asked to speak to everyone held in relationship to the conflict. "In some parts of the world, the ICRC's ability to see and talk to every detainee quite literally serves as a life insurance policy: If we were not there to do our work, there is a risk that people would simply disappear," said Amanda Williamson, a Washington-based spokeswoman. The Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of prisoners of war, give the ICRC access to "all premises" or "all places" occupied by prisoners of war and other detainees as well as the right to interview them without witnesses. Because the Red Cross promises cooperating governments full confidentiality, Red Cross spokesmen couldn't address the specific issue of whether the organization had protested the ghost detainee policy at Bagram. But a report written by two Army generals and released last month shows the Red Cross was vocal about a similar policy in Iraq that barred it from speaking to prisoners at Abu Ghraib by citing a narrow exemption to the Fourth Geneva Convention known as Article 143. The exemption says Red Cross visits can be prohibited only "for reasons of imperative military necessity, and then only for an exceptional and temporary measure." According to an investigation conducted by Maj. Gen. George Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones, Article 143 was cited eight times during an ICRC visit in January 2004 and nine times during a visit in March 2004. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an Army spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq, said Article 143 was no longer being used to prevent the ICRC from talking with detainees. He said everyone brought to Abu Ghraib is now properly registered. The ICRC challenged the use of Article 143 in the case of a Syrian detainee who had been interrogated for more than four months. Viewed as a "special project," the detainee, who was a suspected member of al- Qaida, was kept in a totally dark cell about 2 meters long and 1 meter wide and without a window, latrine, water tap or bedding. A picture of "Gollum," the character from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, was posted on the door of his cell. Fay-Jones investigators later uncovered a photograph showing the Syrian detainee kneeling on the floor, with his hands bound behind his back, being confronted by a black military dog. Col. David Howlett, the top military lawyer for Gen. Paul Kern, who oversaw the investigation conducted by Fay and Jones, said not all the Article 143 detainees were ghost detainees, because some of the detainees who weren't permitted to talk to the ICRC were properly registered. The Fay-Jones investigation found evidence of eight ghost detainees. One, Manadel al Jamadi, died from injuries he received during his capture while he was being interrogated in a shower stall at Abu Ghraib. It wasn't clear whether the Syrian detainee was also a "ghost." The Fay-Jones report recommended further investigation of ghost detainees by the inspectors general of the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, which also held unregistered prisoners. * * * Reuters: September 7, 2004 KEY DOCUMENTS IN U.S. AIRMAN SPY CASE NOT SECRET By Adam Tanner http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6171482 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A military translator accused of espionage at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, asked a military judge on Tuesday to drop some charges after the prosecution acknowledged detainee letters found in his possession were not classified. Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi is accused of carrying the letters, jail maps and other documents from the prison where terrorism suspects are held. The supply clerk worked there as an Arabic translator between November 2002 and July 2003. The defense said it received a document last week from the military prosecutors, who have already dropped 14 of 30 charges brought last year, saying the letters were not classified. "Since the very beginning of this case, Senior Airman al Halabi's defense counsel have maintained that it would be impossible for the letters and translations to be classified based upon the simple fact the letters were created by people with no security clearances or access to classified materials," attorney Donald Rehkopf said in a statement. In a filing received by the court on Tuesday, the defense asked for a dismissal of related charges. "Senior Airman al Halabi stands to be the first person to ever go to trial on allegations of attempted espionage when the government cannot identify a single person or entity on this planet who (he) was supposedly committing espionage for," the court document read. The chief military prosecutor at Travis Air Force base north of San Francisco declined to comment. But a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command confirmed that most documents in the case were not classified. "Some of the charges against Senior Airman al Halabi involve classified documents," said the spokesman at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. "A team of Department of Defense intelligence and security experts reviewed these documents and determined that most are considered 'For Official Use Only,' but are not classified. "Of these documents, one is considered classified at the 'Secret' level. This document review relates to some but not all of the charges against Senior Airman al Halabi." The defense filing alleged that the U.S. government was moving against Halabi because of his Syrian origins. Defense lawyers have unsuccessfully sought a dismissal of charges on several previous occasions but Halabi still faces a maximum sentence of life without parole. His trial is scheduled to begin at Travis Air Force Base on September 14. * * * Seattle Post-Intelligencer: September 6, 2004 DETROIT TERROR CASE SHOWS SNARES By Curt Anderson, Associated Press Writer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110 &slug=Prosecuting%20Terror WASHINGTON (AP) -- The collapse in Detroit of the Justice Department's first post-Sept. 11 prosecution of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell has left the Bush administration with few high-profile major criminal victories in the war on terrorism - and a growing list of losses and questionable cases. Justice Department officials insist their record since the 2001 attacks reflects a successful strategy of catching suspected terrorists long before they can launch deadly plots, even if that involves charging them with lesser crimes. Yet some legal experts and Bush administration critics say many such cases are pumped up by overzealous prosecutors. "There's been a tendency of the Justice Department to act overly aggressively, to hold news conferences, to seek headlines, but when the facts come out they are often shown to be exaggerated," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and frequent critic of Bush administration counterterrorism policies. According to the latest available figures, the Justice Department since Sept. 11, 2001 has charged more than 310 people in terrorism-related cases and won 179 convictions - many for such relatively minor infractions as document and credit card fraud and immigration violations. With fighting terrorism a cornerstone of President Bush's re-election campaign, the Bush administration has been unapologetic in its aggressive approach. Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly said the best evidence that the strategy works is that no terror attacks on U.S. soil have occurred since Sept. 11. "You have to have a zero-tolerance policy for anything that could germinate into a terrorist plot or facilitate a terrorist plot," said U.S. Attorney David Kelley of New York. "We've been rooting out people before things get too far along. Our success in that area has likely led to some disruption activity." In the Detroit case, the Justice Department agreed last week with defense lawyers that charges of material support for terrorism should be dropped against two men who were convicted in the first major terrorism prosecution after the attacks. A lengthy internal probe uncovered prosecutorial misconduct that included withholding evidence that tended to bolster the men's claims of innocence. Problems have recently cropped up in a number of other high-profile cases: -In Portland, Ore., lawyer Brandon Mayfield was held for days as a material witness in May after the FBI mistakenly said his fingerprint matched one found on a plastic bag connected to the deadly terror bombings in Madrid, Spain. Closer inspection proved the supposed match wrong. -Two leaders of a mosque in Albany, N.Y., were released on bail Aug. 25 after a federal judge concluded the men were not as dangerous as prosecutors alleged. The evidence included a notebook found at an Iraqi terrorist camp that investigators initially said referred to one man as "commander;" FBI translators later said the reference probably means "brother." -A Saudi college student in Boise, Idaho, was acquitted in June on charges of giving terrorists material support by creating an Internet network that prosecutors claimed fostered Islamic extremism and helped them recruit. "There was no clear-cut evidence that said he was a terrorist, so it was all on inference," juror John Steger said after the verdict. In addition to those cases, the only person charged in the United States in the Sept. 11 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, has continued to knot up the court system by insisting on access to captured al-Qaida leaders he says can prove his innocence. His case is on hold pending resolution of that question. And one of two U.S. citizens whom Bush declared an enemy combatant - Yaser Esam Hamdi - is about to be returned home to Saudi Arabia in a deal being negotiated by his defense lawyer and the government. Officials say Hamdi's use as a source of intelligence has been exhausted. The other such person, Jose Padilla, was arrested with great fanfare in an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States. The government now says he actually intended to fill apartments with natural gas and blow them up, and it's unclear if the government will charge Padilla with a crime. Among the main domestic successes claimed by the government: -Guilty pleas by six Yemeni-American men in Lackawanna, N.Y., on charges stemming from their attendance at al-Qaida training camps; -Guilty pleas from a group of Muslims in Portland, Ore., who sought to join Afghanistan's Taliban in fighting U.S. forces -Conviction of attempted airline "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. Kelley, the federal prosecutor, said authorities cannot afford to wait until people with shadowy ties to terrorists move into the overt phase of launching an attack. "If we had a really bona fide terrorist, it might be somebody who had just pulled a trigger and you'd have thousands of people dead," he said. * * * Channel NewsAsia: September 6, 2004 AUST GOVT ACCUSED OF "POLITICAL" CONCERN OVER GUANTANAMO TRIALS http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/105193/1/.html SYDNEY (AFP) - New concern by Australia's government about the fairness of the trial of so-called "Aussie Taliban" David Hicks may be politically motivated, his father and an opposition politician said. Although Foreign Minister Alexander Downer insisted that the apparent change of heart had nothing to do with the October 9 general election, Hicks's father and shadow attorney general Nicola Roxon accused the government of playing politics. Australia was one of the few countries to have expressed satisfaction with the US military commission process at Guantanamo Bay, even suggesting it might adopt the controversial commissions itself for terrorist trials. But in an apparent volte-face on Sunday, Attorney General Philip Ruddock said observers at a preliminary hearing for Hicks and other detainees had expressed reservations. Ruddock said Australia would seek "some improvements". Downer said Monday that this did not mean that Australia wanted the hearings stopped. "We sent observers from my department and the attorney general's department to that preliminary hearing and we've got the report back from them," Downer told national radio. "Just on some of the procedural matters we are going back to the Americans this week to ask them to clarify those procedural aspects, not to abandon the military commission though." But Hicks's father Terry Hicks asked why the government only expressed concern now when legal experts have been questioning the fairness of the proceedings for months. Britain, another key US ally, has expressed concern about justice at the trial. "It's possibly political with the election now set for October, to try to appease the public who have been saying it's unfair," Terry Hicks said in his home city of Adelaide. David Hicks is one of two Australians held in Guantanamo Bay. The second, Mamdouh Habib, has yet to face the controversial hearings. Ever since their capture in 2001, Australian newspapers have closely monitored their cases. At a preliminary hearing last month, which his father and stepmother attended, Hicks pleaded not guilty to all charges. Hicks, a 29-year-old convert to Islam, is charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy by fighting alongside the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Opposition Labor Party leader Mark Latham called for Hicks and Habib to be brought back to Australia for trial. "I think it makes the point that the Australian people should have been dealt with under Australian processes in the first place," Latham said. "The government shouldn't have given away our legal sovereignty to another country." Ruddock's opposition counterpart, Roxon, accused the government of "election cosmetics". From the United States, Hicks's US lawyer Major Michael Mori said he hoped the US authorities would heed the Australian government's new concerns. Hicks's Australian lawyer Stephen Kenny said the government had clearly been dishonest with the public. "They've been telling the Australian people it (the commission) incorporated the safeguards of our criminal justice system -- it never did. They clearly lied about that," Kenny said. "If they had legal advice to show it was fair, I challenge them to bring it forward because I don't believe any Australian lawyer would have provided such advice. * * * Seattle Post-Intelligencer / AP: September 4, 2004 GENERAL BLAMES PRISON ABUSE ON COMMANDERS By Jim Krane, Associated Press Writer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apwashington_story.asp?category=1151 &slug=Iraq%20Prisoner%20Abuse BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The Army general who once ran detention operations in Iraq said a "conspiracy" among top U.S. commanders has left her to blame for the abuses of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade, said she fears more senior Army generals may escape punishment, even though they issued or approved guidelines on the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Karpinski said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press that she was unfairly cited by a report issued last month by an independent panel of nongovernment experts headed by former defense secretary James Schlesinger. The Schlesinger report blamed Karpinski for leadership failures that "helped set the conditions at the prison which led to the abuses." She failed to ensure that Iraqi prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and failed to deal with ineffective commanders below her. It recommended that she be relieved of command and given a letter of reprimand, which would essentially end her career. The panel also said disciplinary action "may be forthcoming" against Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the Army's 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which was assigned to Abu Ghraib last year. That recommendation may allow top generals in Iraq to sidestep punishment, Karpinski said. Those she said might avoid sharing responsibility are Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former land forces commander in Iraq; his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski; Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the former head of military intelligence here; and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander for detention operations in Iraq. "It was a conspiracy all along," Karpinski said. "Sanchez and Miller and likely Fast had fallback plans and people to blame if anything came unglued." Fast, Wojdakowski, Sanchez, as well as Karpinski are criticized in the Schlesinger report and a subsequent Army investigation led by Maj. Gen. George Fay. Karpinski has denied knowing about any mistreatment prisoners until photographs were made public at the end of April showing hooded and naked prisoners being tormented by their U.S. captors. The Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled a hearing for Thursday to consider the Fay and Schlesinger reports and likely raising questions about which, if any, senior military officials should share blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib. Fast and Miller declined to comment on the report or Karpinski's allegations. Sanchez, Wojdakowski and Pappas could not be reached. Karpinski said she was snared in a Catch-22 situation. Allowing the tougher methods of prisoner interrogation to go ahead as recommended by Miller and approved by Sanchez landed her in trouble. But, she said, if she had disregarded those guidelines, she would also be in trouble. "Can't win," she said. Karpinski complained that Schlesinger's investigation gave her an only perfunctory opportunity - an interview of less than an hour - to rebut the allegations and defend her leadership. Karpinski also scoffed at the Schlesinger report's finding that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials can be faulted for failed leadership and oversight, even though the report's conclusion finds that Rumsfeld bears no direct responsibility for the abuses. The general said the report's focus on Rumsfeld was "clearly done as a show of unbiased investigation techniques" to bolster its credibility. In fact, Karpinski may not be the only Army general whose career suffers - or ends - because of the Abu Ghraib abuses. Observers have said they believe the probe could eventually reach the others. Investigators concluded that the other generals are partly responsible, but not legally culpable, for the abuse last fall. Sanchez and Wojdakowski are cited in an Army investigation for failure to "ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations" in Iraq. Sanchez, who returned in June to his command of Army 5th Corps headquarters in Germany, has already been passed over for promotion to a four-star slot as chief of Southern Command because of Rumsfeld's expectation that Sanchez would face trouble in a Senate confirmation hearing. --- On the Net: The Schlesinger report at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2004/d20040824finalreport.pdf The Fay report at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2004/d20040825fay.pdf * * * Los Angeles Times: September 2, 2004 GUANTANAMO FARCE Editorial http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed- detainees2sep02,1,5816971.story The Bush administration is ignoring, if not defying outright, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that all terror suspects must be able to challenge their imprisonment. The opening round of detainee military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay last week resembled something between a Mel Brooks farce and the kangaroo courts of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Maybe Captain Kangaroo courts. The proceedings didn't look anything like justice, military or otherwise. Meanwhile, two U.S. citizens still sit in military brigs, isolated from their lawyers and months if not years away from the hearings the high court says they deserve. The U.S. criminal justice system, including its military stepchild, is supposed to stand for due process, impartiality and openness. These are the same principles, after all, that U.S. troops are fighting -- and dying -- to seed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the slapdash preliminary hearings for the first four of some 600 Guantanamo detainees violated basic tenets of fairness. The tribunals are an ad hoc invention, authorized by President Bush three years ago when he rejected the established military court-martial system and the federal criminal courts, either of which would have worked more smoothly. As a result, military officials have few precedents to follow and last week seemed confused about which rules or legal procedures applied. Members of these tribunals -- the jury, in effect -- are military professionals appointed by the Pentagon. The tribunal's chief officer is a retired Army judge, the only member of the panel with legal training. He is both the judge and a jury member, ruling on motions and voting with the five other commissioners. In a criminal court, the lay jury decides the facts and the judge rules on questions of law. Here, however, tribunal members decide on both. Yet the five nonlawyers were clearly befuddled last week when asked to define concepts such as due process and reasonable doubt. The cards are stacked against detainees in other ways too. Government prosecutors got spacious quarters and their own staff to prepare for the hearings. Military defense lawyers were crowded into one room. Midway through the week, the conference table they all shared was removed. The Arab interpreters were so incompetent that the proceedings resembled a game of "telephone," in which the message veered closer to gibberish with each repetition. Yet this game is about men's futures. Given the confusion, officials must feel justified in limiting reporters to pen and paper, which might as well be quill and parchment. No photographic, video or audio recordings of the hearings will ever be released. From the government's perspective, perhaps the less that Americans know of these bumbling proceedings, the less they'll care. The two U.S. citizens that Bush has labeled as enemy combatants, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, haven't gotten even this much. Years after their arrests, each remains in a military brig, often in solitary confinement. Even after the Supreme Court's declaration that they have a right to a hearing, government lawyers outrageously are fighting every lower court petition filed by lawyers retained by the men's families. And still the government has filed no charges against Hamdi or Padilla. The Supreme Court made itself clear in its June rulings: Terror suspects are entitled to at least bare-bones due process. For government lawyers to insist otherwise is unprecedented. Their assertion probably doesn't scare terrorists, but it throws a pall on the lush praise for U.S. freedoms that decorate the Republican National Convention. * * * ABC (Aus) -- September 1, 2004 LAWYERS REQUEST RULING ON GUANTANAMO BAY MILITARY COMMISSIONS http://www.abc.net.au/ra/newstories/RANewsStories_1189853.htm Lawyers for Australian terror suspect David Hicks, who last week appeared before a United States military commission at Guantanamo Bay, have asked the US Federal Court to rule on the process. Our Washington correspondent, John Shovelan, says the lawyers are seeking a hearing and a ruling on the commission process. They want the court to declare the commission process unfair and order Mr Hicks' release. It is the first civilian court action taken by Mr Hicks' defence team since the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees at the US military base in Cuba had the right to appeal their detention. Mr Hicks' Pentagon-appointed lawyer, Major Michael Mori, says he hopes the court will have a chance to rule on the commission process. "We need a Federal Court to step in and say that an unfair justice system is not going to be tolerated," Major Mori said. The court action was taken only after a Chicago-based law firm offered to work on the case on a pro bono basis. David Hicks has been held at Guantanamo Bay since his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001. He has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy, and will go on trial next January. * * * * * * * * *