Rohrabacher *Hearts* Torture

In a hearing with Canadian national Maher Arar who was mistakenly apprehended at JFK airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for months until it was finally discovered that he was an innocent man - Dana Rohrabacher attempts to justify what was done to Arar. To him arresting people and deporting them to countries besides their own which participate in barbaric practices is a "reasonable" response to the "slaughter" of 9-11. Y'see the only thing they did wrong was that Arar was innocent, not that kidnapping and torturing people is wrong. Always!



Rohrabacher attempts to make the arguement that what happened to Arar must have been simply "A mistake" similar to that a "Friendly Fire" incident, and then continues to justify the U.S. action by saying that such incidents may be unfortunate - but they are a natural result of committing out troops to military action, and that if we failed to do this others would suffer. He then states that "No innocent person" should have to suffer through what Arar describes, and then likens the state as "gruesome a the tyranny" of communist political prisoners.

Never does he consider the irony that he himself has just admitted that America has sunk to the level of communist tyranny. We have become the Iron Curtain and the Banana Republic where innocent people can literally be "Disappeared".

Yet, Arar is far from the only innocent person to have been caught in this "Terror Net", many of whom have confessed to anything they were told to say after weeks and months of torture - one of those people was Ibn Sheik al-Libi, another was Curveball, both of whom contributed to creating the false impression that Iraq was maintaining WMD's and WMD programs which has so far led to the death of far more Americans than were killed on 9-11.

Another irony that Rohrabacher never acknowledges.

Vyan

Through the Looking Glass...

I had a dream the other night - nightmare actually. It was absolutely horrible. Terrifying.

Everything seemed normal. People went to work. Lived their daily lives. They seemed oblivious, but something was deeply, sickly wrong. It hung like a thick invisible cloud over me, my friends, family - over the country. I looked around to see what it was, but I could only see glimpses. Awful images in the corner of my eye that were far too devastating to face directly. An awful tragedy. The screaming of jets overhead followed by thousands dead in thunderous column of smoke, fire and dust. Bodies crushed into powder.

I turn away, but everywhere I look - it's worse.

The sounds of machines, tanks, explosions, far over the hill - out of sight - out of mind. Cordite burns my nose. Blood trickling into the gutters. Getting thicker every hour. Not too quickly so that the people walking by notice. They still shop, and dine alfresco - they still laugh - but they can smell it. I know they can.

I can see a TV. The News doesn't explain the blood. They speak of weapons not found. Urgent Memos ignored. Meetings not held. Desperate requests for assistance and a change in strategy unheeded. The President talks about our enemies and their relentlessness. He says that we are in the midst of a great stuggle of civilizations, one we can not afford to lose. He rails at those who disagree with him, even within his own party and says it's "Unimaginable to think"...anything other than what he tells us to think. He says that the opposing party has grown weak, would "appease" that enemy. His Secretary of Defense warns of their "Moral Confusion". The Speaker of House says they want to coddle terrorists.

War heroes are accused of being cowards if they dare criticize the President and his policies. Diligent CIA operatives working to uncover the missing weapons have their covers blown for the sake of political expediency. Jobs to help the public and reconstruct the destruction of war are doled out based on someones political leanings, not their qualifications.

A young woman walks into a shopping center, opens her jacket to reveal blocks of some substance taped to her body and then disappears in a flash of light and smoke. The screams are deafening. It happens again. And again... and again.

Through the thickening smoke I see children being raped by soldiers with our flag on their shoulder.

I see innocent men, women and children being rounded up - hooded, freezing, doused in cold water, nearly drown while held upside-down, buffetted by loud noises - unable to sleep for days, weeks even - some are sexually assaulted, but no one hears their cries. No one can move to aid them.

No judge will take their case. No trial is scheduled. No charges filed. No relief is possible. Habeaus Corpus is obliterated, like in the country of some third-world tin-pot dictator. But that country is now our home.

The sound becomes background noise against the sound of the traffic, everyone is too busy... in too much of a hurry to worry about that nagging inch on the back on their ear. So they shove the earphones of an IPOD into them. 2000 songs in your pocket - more than enough to cover up the smoke, the stench, the blood. It's too much trouble to scratch that inch, too dangerous. And when the IPOD stops working they keep themselves too busy to be concerned by watching the unfolding mystery and saga of a latest lone single missing blonde teacher/cheerleader/bride/debutante/pagentress/ex-model/stripper.

Shocking Bread. Aweful Circuses.

Our leaders bleat about a "Culture of Life" yet hundreds of thousands are slaughtered by warring tribes in Africa and our government does nothing, then vows to stay the course on that plan of inaction.

A massive storm approches and leaves a devastated American city in it's wake. Those who promised to protect us, to shelter us from such storms - stand by and withhold supplies while the city drowns in it's own sewage. More thousands die. Some claim the survivors are better off living as homeless "refugees" than in poverty. Only a few are offended by the crassness of the remark.

I feel like I'm being watched. I want to call someone, but I'm afriad. The phones are tapped. All of them. No warrants are issued, none are needed the President claims. Our emails are being tracked. Our libraries are being monitored.

We have to be afraid of what we say, who we talk too, how we think. I refuse, knowing that it puts everyone I love at risk. But the real truth is - no one is listening. Not anyone that counts. Not the public, they've gone voluntarily deaf and blind to the carnage.

One lone broadcaster dares to speak up, only to become the target of a mock domestic terrorist attack.

Allegations of voter fraud abound, but aren't taken seriously. We try to fence ourselves off from the world, but the real dangers are from inside the walls, not outside.

Yet -- at the same time, a male prostitute pretending to be a reporter can walk in and out of the White House a hundred times and no one notices. Congressmen are taking bribes from one of the White Houses best friends, Cavorting with hookers, even soliciting from the male teenage pages who attend them. No one in Congress asks what happened to the armor our troops were supposed to receive, no one asks why their water is contaminated, no one asks why civilian contractors receiving 5-times their pay for doing the same job, while the red-ink side of the ledger is starting to cover the entire page and flow directly into the torrent of blood filling the gutters. American blood and Iraqi blood. Our blood. Our treasure. Wasted.

It seems there's no way to staunch the flow. No way to end the suffering. Even with the ruling party now in complete, total disgrace and failure it still seems that they just might retain control, barely - How is that even possible? How is that even conceivable?

And still from the people there is no outcry - oh, surely in some corners I can hear the frustration, the rage building - but only on the so-called "lunatic" fringes. The average person, living the Walmart-life, feeling safe and secure in their ignorant bliss - I hear nothing, until I wake up screaming.

At which point I realize, as of course you well know if you've read this far, it was no dream.

But it is indeed, a nightmare.

Vyan

Abu Gonzales: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

From the New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 -- In an embarrassing turnabout, the Department of Justice backed away Wednesday from a denial by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales of responsibility for the treatment of a Canadian who was seized by American authorities in 2002. The man was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and beaten.
Skip to next paragraph

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission's finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Mr. Gonzales replied, "Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria." He added, "I'm not aware that he was tortured."

We're not responsible...

I'm not aware...

What a load of bull feces. Just for the record who is Maher Arar and where has he been the last five years?

Maria C. LaHood, Mr. Arar's lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, called Mr. Gonzales' comments "unbelievable."

"I had hoped that they would actually step up and say, `We made a mistake, we accept the report's findings, we clear Mr. Arar's name and we apologize,' " Ms. LaHood said.

Mr. Arar, now 37, is a former telecommunications engineer who was born in Syria but did not live there after his teenage years.

In September 2002, as he changed planes at Kennedy International Airport in New York on his way home to Canada, he was detained because his name was on a terrorist watch list. His name was included on the basis of incorrect information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he was linked to Al Qaeda, the commission found.

Let always remember that our police and intelligence gathering agencies are completely infallable -- don't let a little glitch like this undermine our confidence in these fine people. It's not like bad and inaccurate information has ever put us in any awkward or embarrising positions in the past, right Colin?

The attorney general's comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar's supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

Ah, but there is an excuse -- you see the right hand of our war on common sense (Gonzales), and our left hand (Michael Chertoff) simple didn't exchange memos on which innocent person their predecessors (Ashcroft and Ridge) have had waterboarded. And why should they anyway?

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.

[All snark aside, let's assume for a second that Gonzales deserves the benefit of the doubt that Arar didn't receive - and take him at his word that he honest didn't know and that the DOJ had nothing to do with it. OK, fine. Is there a single serious person who doesn't think that he should have fucking known?!!! Isn't this like - his freaking job - and stuff?) And what does the terrorist scumbag innocent man in question have to say about it all?

Asked about Mr. Gonzales's remarks, Mr. Arar said in an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio that American officials had sent him to Syria despite his protests that he would be tortured there.

"The facts speak for themselves, you know," Mr. Arar said. "The report clearly concluded that I was tortured. And for him to say that he does not know about the case or does not know I was tortured is really outrageous."

Thank God we haven't already had cases like that of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr aka Abu Omar (who was apparently kidnapped by the CIA in Italy and sent to Egypt where he claims to have been tortured until they discovered he knew nothing and was released) or that of Pultizer Prise winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein (who has been held incommunicado by U.S. Forces in Iraq for the last five months - despite clear indications that he had helped other reporters escape from insurgents - not the reverse as the military contends).

Praise JESUS - we are so lucky we haven't had a couple dozen people die in custody from mistreatment, people who hadn't received a hearing or a lawyer and whom we have no way to confirm their whether they had just planted an IED or failed to yeild to a cross walk sign.

I'm so glad BushGov is on the case, I'll just bet you bin Laden is shaking in his cave right now.

[Except that he's now under the protection of a treaty between the Taliban and Pakistan and doesn't need to live in a cave anymore, isn't likely to get "picked up in a random sweep" and be extremely rended to anywhere except a nearby hot tub!]

Heckuvajob, Bushie!

Vyan

Hayden admits Bush political leaders trumped up WMD Intel

The main focus on today's confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden as Director of Central Intelligence have ostensibly been on the various and sundry NSA Scandals which have recently emerged, but Thinkprogress points out one section of his testimony which apparently cuts the Bush Admin to the quick on pre-Iraq War WMD claims.

Ever since AG Gonzales hinted during his Senate testimony that Bush may indeed have spied on domestic calls, the NSA have been an explosion waiting to go off. But Hayden's testimony today shows that the fuse has been quite a bit longer than previously foreseen.

Transcript:

Sen. LEVIN: Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith, established an intelligence analysis, so within his policy office at the Defense Department. While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office approach to intelligence analysis?

HAYDEN: No, sir, I wasn't. I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn't comfortable.

Further commentary by Thinkprogress

What Hayden makes clear is that, despite Bush's assertion that the pre-war intelligence process "broke down," the false intelligence about Iraq's connection to al Qaeda was intentionally fabricated by political leaders, not intelligence analysts. Feith, Wolfowitz, and others in the Pentagon set up a stovepipe "to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership" to make the case for war. Hayden and other intelligence experts got steamrolled when it mattered most.

As has been repeatedly noted it was not a case where intelligence analyst had to be "intimidated" into changing their view -- people like Feith were running their own independent intelligence operation through the Defense Intelligence Agency and portions of the State Department. These people were intent to find the evidence they wanted and use each an every scrap they located - no matter how dubious it might have been - to promote the story that Iraq was an imminent threat.

This yet again shows why Sen. Pat Roberts has been delaying the Phase II portion of the WMD/intelligence investigation for over two years. It's why both the Robb-Silberman Commission and previous Senate investigations were prohibited from asking this very question -- the Administration already knows the answer.

Whether the various and sundries Special Access NSA programs currently underway are legal or not remain a hot topic. AT&T's attorney argues that they received a Special Letter from the Attorney General which legally authorized their cooperation in lieu of a Warrant. This is quite interesting since it appears the NSA refused to do exactly the same thing for QWEST when they asked for it.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. Attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events

This diary here points out how the NSA actually already had a more effective and much more responsible Clinton era program in place prior to 9/11, but that program was shutdown by -- General Michael Hayden.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON // The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. Phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

Feel free to send any wingnut acquaintances you have this Baltimore Sun story whenever they claim - "We can't abide by the strict letter of the law and fight al Qaeda at the same time" or "Clinton did nothing to fight terrorism".

It may be very well that Hayden was "uncomfortable" with this decision just as he was with the actions of Feith et al in the pre-Iraq War run-up - but being a good little soldier, he did what he was ordered to do by his superiors (i.e. Cheney and Bush) He may be fairly candid now during his confirmation hearings, but he's also made it quite clear that he will do whatever it is that the Commander-in-Chief requires of him.

A pure "Yes, man" through and through - just like (General) Colin Powell who permanently shredded his own credibility for all time with his command performance before the UN in 2002.

Let us recall just another reason why Qwest was reluctant to participate in this program:

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles, -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

This naturally explains the thousands of bogus leads that the FBI was complaining about in January.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

So we have the scenario that prior to the Iraq War the Bush Administration threw out good intelligence (such as Joe Wilson's) in favor of bad intelligence, a fact that has also been confirmed by 27 Year CIA vet Ray McGovern, former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, State Dept Intelligence Analyst Greg Theilman, former Pentagon Special Plans Aid Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, former European CIA chief Tyler Drumheller and former CIA intelligence Officer Paul Pillar.

This is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior on their part and there no reasonable indication that it's going to end anytime soon. These issues (poor WMD intel and the avoidance of FISA) are linked by the same dangerous extralegal pathology.

In his response to the Hayden hearings so far, Christy at Firedoglake points to comments by Bruce Fein which seem to bear repeating.

The Bush Administration is doing everything it can to prevent any of the illegally collected data and information from being used in any courtroom context, because they do not want to have to face the consequences of a constitutional challenge to their failure to obtain a lawful warrant. Think about that for a moment -- Bruce Fein is no liberal, he is a very conservative Reagan Republican, having worked in the DoJ as Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration.

And he is saying, out loud, that the Bush White House is avoiding constitutional scrutiny because they know -- they KNOW -- they will be shown to be what they are. Lawbreakers.

They realize that everything they've done to skirt the law and bypass judicial scrutiny would present them with a massive fruits of the poison tree catastrophe in a court of law. If the NSA is sharing it's data with the FBI - and we know damn well they are - they can not present that evidence in court, or even acknowledge that they used illegally gathered evidence to target a specific individual without that case being tossed out of the court on it's ear.

This road only leads one direction.

They simply aren't going to take these cases to court, except for "show trials" like Moussuaoui. They're going to use the FBI to do surveillance - then if they decide on a whim that the situation is serious enough, perform a rendition followed by indefinite detention of that subject - even if they happen to be an American Citizen - to the secret military gulag of their worst nightmare for a little bit of the ole' waterboarding. Without judicial review. Without trial. Without appeal. Without oversight. Without hope.

This is not a hypothetical, there are strong indications that it's already been happening -- and if it did, the last thing that would happen would be a paper trail.

The likelihood of them doing this to the "right" person is about as strong as the possibility that we're going to finally find those mobile labs "North, South, East and West somewhat of Tikrit and Baghdad" almost three years after the fact.

They invaded the Wrong Fucking Country for Christ sake... you think they're really going to care if they capture the wrong terrorist suspects?

The sad part is that this is pretty much common knowledge at this point -- and the resulting outrage (outside of highly Democratic circles) is practically nonexistent. This is how the Wingnut Brigade fights terrorism - no holds barred and wiping their ass with the Constitution as they storm through, Jackboots akimbo.

What and who are they going to mistake for an imminent threat next?

And how many more innocent people will suffer for it while the real terrorist laugh at our continued ineptitude?

[Update: Even short of my admittedly worst case scenario of unchecked renditions of American Citizens above, there is also the very real danger of thousands of FBI Files that have been generated from this practice. Remember when the Clinton White House inadvertently gained access to a several hundred FBI files due to a Secret Service Screwup? (They had used an out of date White House Access List) Magnify that situation by the order of thousands! Filegate: dogged the Clinton's for years with allegations that they planned to use these files against their political rivals - well guess whose got the files now, and just who are their rivals? That's right kiddies - Quakers, Peace-Mongers, Greenpeace, War Protestors, Journalist, Congress, and y'know - US!)

Vyan