Happy St. Valentines Day… 8P

Law Organization Objects To Spy Strategy
By Denise Royal
February 14, 2006 10:23 a.m. EST

Chicago, IL (AHN) – The American Bar Association objects to President Bush’s domestic spying program. The lawyers’ group accuses the White House of exceeding his power, and is calling for special court warrants for similar spying in the future.

The Bush Administration says warrant-less eavesdropping is legal under the President’s constitutional powers as commander-in-chief and congressional authorization for the use of military force adopted days after the September 11 attacks. The program bypassed secret courts created under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA) that grant warrants.

The ABA’s resolution calls on Mr. Bush “to abide by the limitations which the Constitution imposes on a President” to make sure national security is protected in a way that is consistent with constitutional guarantees. It opposes “any future electronic surveillance inside the United States by any U.S. government agency for foreign intelligence.”


UN report damns Guantanamo jail
Tuesday 14 February 2006, 4:37 Makka Time, 1:37 GMT

An investigation into the prison at Guantanamo Bay says the US committed acts amounting to torture, including force-feeding and prolonged periods of solitary confinement.

The report by five human rights experts from the UN accused the US of violating the detainees’ rights to a fair trial, to freedom of religion and to health.

It recommended that the US close the detention centre and revoke all special interrogation techniques authorised by the US Department of Defence.

The draft report said: “The apparent attempts by the US administration to reinterpret certain interrogation techniques as not reaching the threshold of torture in the framework of the struggle against terrorism are of utmost concern.”

US officials rejected the report, saying it was riddled with errors and treated statements from detainees’ lawyers as fact.

Its most significant flaw, officials said, was that it judged US treatment of detainees according to peace-time human rights laws.

US position
The US contends that it is in a state of conflict and should be judged according to the laws of war.

An official from the US State Department said: “Once you fail to even acknowledge that as the legal basis for what we’re doing, much of the legal analysis that follows just doesn’t hold.”

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the US has not formulated an official public response.

The draft report was delivered to the US on 16 January. It was first disclosed late on Sunday by the Los Angeles Times, and a copy was obtained by journalists.

The five experts have mandates that cover torture, freedom of religion, health, independent judiciary and arbitrary detention. They started working together in June 2004 to monitor conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

Important UN group
They were appointed to their three-year terms by the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission, the global body’s rights watchdog.

The US holds about 500 people on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban government at the base in Guantanamo. It has filed charges against 10 detainees.

The draft report, which will be presented to the next session of the commission, dismissed the US claim that the “war on terror” constitutes an armed conflict.

It also said the detainees at Guantanamo Bay had a right to challenge their detention, and that right was being violated.

Criticism
The report said: “In the case of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, the US executive operates as judge, as prosecutor, and as defence counsel. This constitutes serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial.”

The five experts had sought invitations from the United States to visit Guantanamo Bay since 2002. When it was offered last year, they turned it down because they were told they would not be allowed to interview detainees.

On Monday, US officials faulted the experts for rejecting the invitation, saying it undermined the accuracy of their findings.

Uighur case
Meanwhile, lawyers for two Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay want a federal appeals court to order their release inside the US.

In court papers filed on Monday, lawyers for Abu Bakker Qassim and A’Del Abdu al-Hakim, captured in Pakistan in 2001, said they should be released because the US military found that they are not “enemy combatants”.

The lawyers want the appellate court to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who ruled in December that the men are being detained illegally but said he could not force the U.S. government to release them.

The two men, along with several other Uighurs, have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 because the US government has been unable to find a country willing to accept them. US officials cannot send them back to China because of the possibility they would be tortured or killed.


Guantanamo Bay inmates ‘tortured’

Treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay constitutes torture in some cases and violates international law, a leaked UN draft report says.

The document, seen by the Los Angeles Times, suggests that investigators will recommend the prison camp is shut down.

It also questions the legal status of the camp and the classification of detainees as enemy combatants.

The US State Department has criticised the draft report as “hearsay”.

‘Force-fed’
The Los Angeles Times published the draft report in its paper on Monday and spoke to one of the authors, the UN special raporteur on torture, Manfred Novak.

“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government. There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture,” Mr Nowak told the LA Times.

The report suggests some of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay meets the definition of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture.

This includes the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes and the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques such as prolonged solitary confinement and exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light.

The UN team also questions the legal status of the Guantanamo camp.

It says insufficient effort has been made to prove that the inmates really are enemy combatants.

It also recommends the prison camp is shut down.

“The US government should close Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay,” the report says. “The US government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial … or release them without further delay.”

‘Spurious claims’
Mr Nowak was one of five UN envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families during the past 18 months.

nvestigators rejected an invitation to tour the base in Cuba because they would not have been allowed to interview the prisoners directly.

The US State Department has criticised the findings.

“Just because they decided not to take up the US government on the offer to go to Guantanamo Bay does not automatically give [them] the right to publish a report that is merely hearsay and not based on fact,” spokesman Sean McCormack said.

UN officials will include responses from the US government before the report is officially released at the end of the week.

Mr Nowak says that nothing of substance will be altered when the final report is issued.

The investigation was ordered by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

The camp at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects, many of them captured in Afghanistan.

It currently houses around 500 suspects.


Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say
By Larisa Alexandrovna
February 13, 2006

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame’s work. Their accounts suggest that Plame’s outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program.

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan’s nuclear “father,” A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.

Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of the Administration’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.

The damages
Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame’s work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in “severe” damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA’s ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

Plame’s team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan’s network in the course of her work on Iran.

While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.

Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a “counter intelligence assessment to agency operations” was conducted on the orders of the CIA’s then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.

Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.

“An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment,” Johnson said. “That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA.”

One former counterintelligence official described the CIA’s reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: “[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public,” the source said. “They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed.”

The source described the findings of the assessment as showing “significant damage to operational equities.”

Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described “operational equities” as including both people and agency operations that involve the “cover mechanism,” “front companies,” and other CIA officers and assets.

Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to “ten years” in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson’s identity.

A.Q. Khan
While Plame’s work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.

Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.

The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.

According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan’s dismissal.

“It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem,” Pike said. “It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States’ chief regional ally in the war on terror.

The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame’s work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House’s decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran’s possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.


Bush’s Social Security Sleight of Hand
By Allan Sloan
Wednesday, February 8, 2006

If you read enough numbers, you never know what you’ll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You’re not alone. Bush didn’t pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.

First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security,” even though, as I said, he’d never submitted specific legislation.

Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress “to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” adding that the commission would be bipartisan “and offer bipartisan solutions.”

But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget.

“The Democrats were laughing all the way to the funeral of Social Security modernization,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy told me in an interview Tuesday, but “the president still cares deeply about this. ” Duffy asserted that Bush would have been remiss not to include in the budget the cost of something that he feels so strongly about, and he seemed surprised at my surprise that Social Security privatization had been written into the budget without any advance fanfare.

Duffy said privatization costs were included in the midyear budget update that the Office of Management and Budget released last July 30, so it was logical for them to be in the 2007 budget proposals. But I sure didn’t see this coming – and I wonder how many people outside of the White House did.

Nevertheless, it’s here. Unlike Bush’s generalized privatization talk of last year, we’re now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.

In the first year of private accounts, people would be allowed to divert up to 4 percent of their wages covered by Social Security into what Bush called “voluntary private accounts.” The maximum contribution to such accounts would start at $1,100 annually and rise by $100 a year through 2016.

It’s not clear how big a reduction in the basic benefit Social Security recipients would have to take in return for being able to set up these accounts, or precisely how the accounts would work.

Bush also wants to change the way Social Security benefits are calculated for most people by adopting so-called progressive indexing. Lower-income people would continue to have their Social Security benefits tied to wages, but the benefits paid to higher-paid people would be tied to inflation.

Wages have typically risen 1.1 percent a year more than inflation, so over time, that disparity would give lower-paid and higher-paid people essentially the same benefit. However, higher-paid workers would be paying substantially more into the system than lower-paid people would.

This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security’s political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned benefit.

Bush is right, of course, when he says in his budget proposal that Social Security in its current form is unsustainable. But there are plenty of ways to fix it besides offering private accounts as a substitute for part of the basic benefit.

Bush’s 2001 Social Security commission had members of both parties, but they had to agree in advance to support private accounts. Their report, which had some interesting ideas, went essentially nowhere.

What remains to be seen is whether this time around Bush follows through on forming a bipartisan commission and whether he can get credible Democrats to join it. Dropping numbers onto your opponents is a great way to stick your finger in their eye. But will it get the Social Security job done? That, my friends, is a whole other story.


Oops! – Bush Unaware Mikes Were Still On
Sat Feb 11, 10:08 AM ET

CAMBRIDGE, Md. – The eavesdropping tables were turned on President Bush on Friday. The president apparently believed he was speaking privately when he talked about listening in without a warrant on domestic communications with suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas. But reporters were the ones doing the listening in this time.

The incident happened at a House Republican retreat. After six minutes of public remarks by the president, reporters were ushered out. “I support the free press, let’s just get them out of the room,” Bush said, intending to speak behind closed doors with fellow Republicans and take lawmakers’ questions.

When reporters left, Bush spoke about the National Security Agency program that he authorized four years ago and which has drawn criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.

However, the microphones stayed on for a few minutes. That allowed journalists back at the White House to eavesdrop on Bush’s defense of the eavesdropping. His private statements were basically no different from what he’s said in public.

“I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions,” Bush began. “First of all, I expect this conversation we’re about to have to stay in the room. I know that’s impossible in Washington.”

He was right.