Alberto Gonzales

Gonzales & Ashcroft Still Defend Waterboarding

Bob Fertik — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:21:53 -0400

On April 27, MSNBC's Dan Abrams interviewed former AG's John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales before a cheering rightwing audience at American Jewish University. Both Ashcroft and Gonzales continue to insist waterboarding was legal when authorized by DoJ lawyers under their supervision. (Full transcript.) Will their hyper-legal defenses keep them out of jail? Stay tuned...

Abrams: Judge Gonzales, I’m going to ask you a very direct question. And it relates to something you just said. Do you believe waterboarding is torture?

AG: Here’s what I’ll say. I think that the U.S. government provided advice to CIA interrogators based upon the best legal reasoning by the lawyers in the Department of Justice. Was it torture, when that advice was given? No. Were the interrogations harsh? Yes. Did they save lives? Absolutely.

[Applause]

Did they get it right? I’m asking your legal opinion. Waterboarding is—they define it in all the memos how waterboarding is defined—and if we need it defined I’m happy to read from it—how torture is defined. Do you think legally that waterboarding is torture?

AG: Dan, when I served in the administration, the position of the administration was that under certain conditions and circumstances, this technique would be lawful.

Now that you’ve had some time to think about it. You’ve been out of office for a while, and you get the opportunity to look back with 20/20 hindsight. Do you look back and do you say to yourself, we got that one right?

AG: Wouldn’t it be great, if all of us in public service, could go back and correct any mistakes that we may have made on behalf of the American public?

Well, you’ve got the opportunity right now.

AG: —We don’t have that opportunity.

You have the opportunity to say you know what, we blew it. We messed this one up, we got this one wrong.

AG: I will say that I made my fair share of mistakes in government. But I will also say that I, and the people that I work with, took actions to the very best of our abilities to protect our country in a very difficult period in our nation’s history. [Applause.]

Let me follow this. The U.S. military prosecuted our own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines, tried the Japanese for war crimes for using it against the Allies and the U.S. troops in WWII. And yet, we’re suggesting that it’s not torture. [Applause]

JA: First of all, the word waterboarding can be defined in a lot of ways.

Let’s talk about the definition that was used in these memos—this is a legal document—of the definition of waterboarding. “Lying on a gurney that is inclined with an angle of 10-15 degrees from horizontal, with the detainee on his back. . . head toward the head end of the gurney, cloth pasted over the detainees’ face, and cold water poured on the cloth approximately 16-18 inches—this is the definition. The question is—

AG: Dan, the opinions have been withdrawn. There are no longer binding position of the department…

I understand that, but that doesn’t mean, as lawyers, we can’t sit and discuss whether this was a correct legal assessment. Because it seems to me, in my opinion, that it is impossible to explain how this particular procedure would not be considered torture. [Applause]

JA: Members of the department went and underwent the procedure.

Once or twice, not 266 times.

JA: Many members of our military in training undergo the procedure—

Once or twice.

JA: Were you there?

No, the memos explain it. It’s once or twice.

JA: OK. I don’t know how many times they underwent it. Let me just put it this way. We relied—I relied—on the best judgments of the lawyers in the department. There are 110,000 employees in the department, the lawyers are expert, and they came up with an opinion that became part of a memo. Later, some lawyers came to me and said "We’re not confident that that memo best expresses the law here." And I said to myself, "Well, I’m the attorney general, and if we have stuff out there that’s not the best expression, we ought to amend it. We ought to get the best information we can." You know we’re in a war, you give it to the president, you give information to the other individuals, but you say, you know, they deserve the best judgment. They reworked the memo, and they came a second time, these professionals did, and according to the definition of torture, they came to the conclusion that the procedure as provided along with the advice to our personnel did not amount to legal torture.

Did they get it wrong?

JA: I don’t think they got it wrong. It’s different now.

It’s different in what sense?

JA: Because the law has been changed. [John Ashcroft called me after the event to correct a mistake he made. He wanted to let me know that, in retrospect and after conducting more research on the matter, he realized that no such change in the law was ever enacted.]

The definition of torture?

JA: Yes! The definition of torture.

So the answer then, it sounds like, is the only reason you still believe the legal assessment was correct was because there’s been a change in the law?

JA: I believe that the work of the department by these professionals came to the right conclusion.

That waterboarding is not torture.

JA: That, as described, and as commented on in their memorandum, that it was not torture.

Judge Gonzales, are any of the following torture, and these were all things that were in the memo.

AG: Dan, I’m not—

Nudity, facial grasp, facial slapping, abdominal slap, cramped confinement, stress positions, water dousing—including 41-degree water—sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. Are any of those torture?

AG: Dan, as John said, and again I’m [saying] that what you’re reading from represents the work of the department. The lawyers within the department looked very, very carefully at the words of the statute, looked at the conditions and circumstances in which these procedures would be undertaken, and rendered a legal conclusion that under these circumstances, it would not violate the statute. Now, my understanding of the legal positions of the department has now been changed. So we can spend all evening debating the merits of a legal opinion of the Department of Justice, which by the way, opinions get changed—I don’t want to say all the time—but it’s not unusual to have opinions change and be modified as conditions change, as administrations change, as the Supreme Court renders a decision, opinions change.

[Applause]

So let me ask, in your view, this was a close call. It sounds like you’re saying this was a close call because there was a legal judgment made, and you think that they made the right call.

AG: It was a very close call. These are very, very difficult issues.

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?

dlindorff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:31:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out.
But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly
wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the
NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush
Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper
conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli
government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s
warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her
being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone
conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and
ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold
off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James
Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’
phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly,
the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged
Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage
charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby
accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman
is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy
of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to
have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a
wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to
name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of
the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to
say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times,
which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI
to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom
the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary
glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the
centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments
to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for
members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were
doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli
government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning,
and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they
flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost
immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion
of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities
themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep.
Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part
of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even
if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government
is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted
monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978,
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in
direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and
subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using
the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war
activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such
police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens
abroad.

President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly
order the NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going
through the FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the
cooperation of the nation’s several telecom companies in splicing in
routers at their switching hubs to make it possible to monitor all
conversations moving across the wires and the internet. It seemed to
some observers, myself included, that the only reason the
administration could have had for bypassing the FISA court (which over
30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of government
spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying that
would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration’s public
stance that everyone was either “with us or against us,” and that
critics of the administration’s “War on Terror” or of its plans to
invade Iraq, were “unpatriotic” or “soft on terror,” that congressional
opponents of the administration would be obvious—and indeed
irresistible--targets of that surveillance.

Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above
using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it
becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department
investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims
of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly
extorted or otherwise compromised.

The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control
the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised
by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.

The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless
electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in
the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the
political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or
worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the
records. Every citizen concerned about the fate of American democracy
should demand that his or her senators and representative promptly call
for such a public probe.

It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has
been reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or
imagined spying by the NSA.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Seeing Darkness, Conjures Up the Mists of Time

dlindorff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:56:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night,
when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood,
went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people
into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in
shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried
to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town
were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city’s ruins, which
were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to
rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it, I at the time still felt
that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After
all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation
and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of
Jews—even German Jews who were their own neighbors--of Gypsies, of
gays, and of course, of Communists, and had launched a war that
ultimately killed 10s of millions of people around the world.

I mention all this because one thing I noticed back then, not among
young people in Germany, but among adults my parents’ age and older,
was a widespread denial about what Germany had done. And I remember
feeling, as many Americans and Europeans still do, and as many Chinese
and other Asians still feel about Japan, that these two countries have
never been willing to face up to the crimes that they, as a nation,
permitted to happen in their names.

Older and wiser now, I am well aware that our own country has
committed many crimes, some on a scale approaching those of Germany and
Japan: the near extermination of Native Americans, the mass,
centuries-long enslavement and cultural and physical destruction of
millions of African slaves, the use of nuclear bombs on civilian
targets, the decade-long saturation bombing and herbicidal poisoning of
most of Indochina…

It’s a long and terrible list, and for the most part, in our
schools, in our politics, in our histories, we don’t talk about, and
even justify and deny our own atrocities.

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse.
Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the
so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the
9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain
of command that set the country on this criminal course, President
Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in
our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who
committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the
CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would
not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper
authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue
those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have
fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement,
and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his
Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were
responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its
authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of
a war crime itself.

Now I don’t want to equate America’s torture of a few hundred or a
few thousand captives by making them endure waterboarding or by placing
plastic neckbands and leashes on them and slamming their heads into
walls, with what the victims of Buchenwald or Auschwitz endured, but
that is really not the issue. The issue is, do we as a nation now
subscribe to the idea that the way to deal with evil perpetrated by
ourselves is to bury it?

Isn’t that precisely what we have been for decades accusing the
Germans and the Japanese of doing: burying in the mists of time their
criminal behavior as a people and as a nation?

And now our president—whose own wife and daughters are descendants
of slave victims of another era of American atrocities—is telling us we
should do the same thing as Germany and Japan: forget and move on.

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Let's shine a light. Sign the petition: No Amnesty for Torturers!

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest work
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:32:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the
desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were
almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the
Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment).
Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have
been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to
justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted
(not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was
used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union
address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining
uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing
uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine
out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the
first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards
actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time,
even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the
Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged
goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and
Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a
nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of
centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years,
and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a
bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to
America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that
an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term
imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to
which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg
Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that
no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an
imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a
deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an
imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of
Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get
mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the
earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom
believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for
not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of
Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they
might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know
now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the
yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did
editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New
York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that
the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will
probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that
claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to
be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation
into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over
4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing
administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their
lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal
Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments.
But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful
ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the
press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a
justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on,
is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not
just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our
media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/38360';
digg_title = "White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\nA new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.\r\n\r\n What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.";
digg_skin = 'standard';

Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture: No One Can Be Above the Law

dlindorff — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:02:07 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional
wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not
seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for
crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and
promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

Take that pillar of conventional thinking, the New York Times.
A lengthy December 18 editorial laid out a solid case that approval for
torture had come from top Bush/Cheney administration officials, and
then concluded that “A prosecutor should be appointed to consider
criminal charges against top officials in the Pentagon and others
involved in planning the abuse.” But then the paper’s editors went on
after that to give Obama a pass, saying, “Given his other problems—and
how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues
early in the campaign—we do not hold out real hope Barack Obama, as
president, will take such a politically fraught step.” In the view of Times’
conventional-thinking editors, it would appear that the American
government cannot be expected to prosecute criminals and fight a
recession at the same time.

There is no mention of the obvious point that if crimes have been
committed—and in the case of the authorizing of torture, which is
banned by both international treaties to which the US is a signatory,
and by US law, which folded the torture bans into the US Criminal Code
for good measure, they clearly have been—-the president and his
incoming attorney general have a sworn obligation to prosecute them.
That’s what “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” means,
after all.

A “politically fraught” step? That should apply to not prosecuting criminals, should it not?

Note here that for the Times, and for the rest of the
conventional thinkers who have reduced corporate journalism to such
thin gruel that no one bothers with it any more, “politically fraught”
refers exclusively to the idea that the Right will supposedly be riled
up at any effort to prosecute war criminals in the outgoing
administration. If people on the Left, or even the center, large
numbers of whom believe strongly that the current administration should
be held accountable for its crimes, get upset because there is no
effort to prosecute them, that doesn’t count as “politically fraught.”

A new torture report, just released by the current, only narrowly
Democratic, Senate Armed Services Committee, has definitively laid the
blame for the sickening campaign of torture of captives by American
military personnel and CIA agents, on officials all the way up to
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chief of Staff Richard
Myers, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington,
White House legal counsel (and later attorney general) Alberto
Gonzales, and others. It really traces the approval directly up to
President Bush, noting that it was Bush’s signing of an executive order
on February 7 2002, exempting captives in the so-called (and loosely
defined) “War” on Terror from protections of the Geneva Conventions,
which authorized the military’s and CIA’s descent into rampant, brutal
lawlessness.

Others, myself included (in my book The Case for Impeachment,
co-authored with Stanford University law professor Barbara Olshansky,
and published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press), have long argued that
both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are guilty of war crimes,
especially for their authorization, condoning, encouraging, protecting,
and failure to halt and to punish the practice of torture by American
forces under their control. But here we have a bi-partisan committee of
Congress finally, belatedly, making the same case. How can the new
incoming president and commander in chief not order a criminal investigation of all of those responsible
for crimes that not only were grievous violations of US and
international law, but that, by the admission of key American military
leaders, led to practices at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib which
were “the first and second identifiable causes of US combat deaths in
Iraq.”

On its face, I would submit that if as president Obama blocks
prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration war criminals, it will be the
wounded American soldiers and their relatives, and the relatives of
Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of fighters in
those countries who were recruited into battle by the images of the
torture and abuse who will make his decision “politically fraught.”
(And let’s not forget that failure to prosecute torture violations is
itself a war crime—making Obama himself potentially culpable should he
fail to act.)

I have spent the last two and a half years actively promoting the
idea that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached
for their crimes against the Constitution, their manifest abuses of
power, and their actual statutory crimes, such as torture and lying to
Congress. Thanks to the political cowardice of the Democratic majority
in the House of Representatives, under the craven leadership of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the gutlessness of House Judiciary Chairman
John Conyers, the impeachment that was so richly deserved did not
happen. But my failed quest for impeachment does not mean that calls
for criminal indictment for crimes committed should be equally quixotic.

It’s one thing for a bunch of politicians in Congress to decide that
impeachment would be “too divisive,” or to decide that they “don’t have
the votes” to win an impeachment vote in the House or conviction in the
Senate, and therefore to oppose even trying to make the case (I
disagree with that argument completely, and note that it could as
easily have been made in 1973 or early 1974 with respect to Richard
Nixon, in which case he never would have faced an impeachment hearing
in the House or been run out of office for his crimes). But it’s
another thing entirely to argue, as the conventional media drones are
arguing, and as President-Elect Obama has been saying, that there can be no
prosecution of people in the Bush/Cheney administration for crimes
committed during their two terms of office.

What kind of message is this sending to the world, and to the
citizens of the United States? If you commit a crime and you are
important enough, it’s not prosecutable in America?

This is taking the “too big to fail” argument that is being used to
justify the bailout of failed enterprises like AIG, Citicorp, JP
Morgan/Chase, and soon GMC and Chrysler, and turning it into “too big
to prosecute” in the case of politicians.

“No one is above the law” used to be a proud motto of the US legal
system. Now we are about to have our first president who is a constitutional
scholar, and he appears ready, with the backing of the conventional
media, to change that motto to: “No one is above the law, except for
presidents, vice presidents and their top staffs.”

The right answer, of course, is simple. The new president and the
Congress should appoint a special prosecutor and authorize him or her
to determine if there have been crimes committed by the prior
administration, and then, if such crimes are found to have occurred, to
prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Once such a prosecutor
is appointed, the White House and Congress should step aside and let
justice take its course.

As for the media, they should stop giving the new president a pass. Instead of, like the Times,
saying they “do not hold out real hope” of such a step being taken,
they should, in editorials, be demanding that it be taken. Meanwhile,
in their news pages, they should be hard at work digging out the
evidence of those crimes, and of the damage done by them.

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Cheney and Gonzales Indicted in Texas

Bob Fertik — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:35:12 -0500

Wow!! Breaking news from South Texas (h/t Faiz Shakir):

Vice President Cheney indicted by Willacy County grand jury
By Emma Perez-Trevino, The Brownsville Herald

A Willacy County grand jury under District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra returned multi-count indictments Monday against Vice President Dick Cheney, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, plus several other public officials.

The indictment accuses Cheney and Gonzales of engaging in organized criminal activity. It criticizes Cheney's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees by working through the prison companies.

Gonzales is accused of using his position while in office to stop an investigation into abuses at the federal detention centers.

Another indictment charges state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. with profiting from his public office by accepting honoraria from prison management companies.

Also indicted are state District Judges Janet Leal, state District Judge Migdalia Lopez, The GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corporation), former U.S. Attorney Mervyn Mosbacher, Gus Garza and Gilberto Lozano.

They all face a stream of criminal charges including abuse of office, profiting from office, and murder.

For more information on this story, read Wednesday's The Brownsville Herald.

I can't wait for tomorrow's Herald!

Of course the best part of a Texas indictment is that it can't be blocked through a Presidential pardon. But we'll see if "tough-on-crime" Gov. Rick Perry decides s to go soft for his powerful friends...

Update 1: Scott Horton writes

I spoke with the District Attorney involved, Juan Angel Guerra, earlier this year. He claimed he had been targeted himself by a criminal investigation designed to stop his probe of corruption relating to a federal prison project. I wasn’t able to make sense of the matter, and, after reading the AP report, still can’t. But Cheney and Gonzales should definitely be investigated, and the charges sound just right.

Update 2: Steve Benen says Guerra is a kook:

The AP report noted that the indictments "have not yet been signed by the presiding judge, and no action can be taken on them until that happens." And that, of course, is unlikely to ever happen.

The prosecutor in question is Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra, who's apparently developed a reputation for being something of a ... how do I put this gently ... legal eccentric. A lawyer for Democratic state Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr., who is also charged in the Cheney/Gonzales indictment, called Guerra a "one man circus."

The description seems to fit. David Kurtz noted that Guerra even got himself arrested not too long ago.

As it happens, Guerra sought re-election as a district attorney, but lost (badly) in a Democratic primary back in March. With his term nearly complete, it appears that he's scurrying to get some 11th-hour indictments against his enemies off his to-do list.

I don't doubt there are many Bush administration detractors who'd be thrilled to see Cheney and Gonzales get indicted, but this probably isn't a development to get excited about.

The Bolten-Fielding Administration

Bob Fertik — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:52:01 -0400

So who threw Gonzo under the bus? Obviously it wasn't Bush, who was clearly furious when he delivered his extremely brief remarks - in strong contrast to his public display of affection for Karl Rove.

Rather, it looks like the dirty deed was done by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and White House Counsel Fred Fielding, according to the NY Times.

The officials said he offered his resignation on Friday in a brief telephone conversation with Mr. Bush, who was at his ranch in Crawford, and that the president immediately accepted the resignation. On Sunday, Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to the ranch for a consoling lunch where the resignation was confirmed.

But other Republicans close to the White House and Mr. Gonzales offered a different account, suggesting that the attorney general was eased out and that the process leading to his departure unfolded over several months as Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, concluded that Mr. Gonzales had become a liability and quietly pushed for him to step down.

Mr. Gonzales had his defenders at the White House, chiefly Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser. The officials said that when Mr. Rove announced that he was leaving, Mr. Gonzales lost a protector.

“He was being protected, in large measure by Karl,” said a Republican close to the White House. When Mr. Rove left, the Republican said, “It further exposed that the only thing that was standing with him was the president of the United States.”

White House spokespeople said Monday that Mr. Bolten had not orchestrated Mr. Gonzales’s resignation. [Yeah like he's going to admit it - gimme a break.]

The likelihood that Mr. Gonzales was pressed to leave was strengthened by the shock the announcement caused at the Justice Department. Mr. Gonzales had told no one he was thinking about stepping aside and did not inform his chief of staff, Kevin O’Connor, until Sunday afternoon.

So how much unseen power are Bolten and Fielding actually exerting? And who wins when Cheney disagrees with them?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Gone-zo

Bob Fertik — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:03:19 -0400

NY Times has the scoop:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not announced immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the resignation had not yet been made public.

Gonzales' resignation comes in the face of a serious effort to impeach Gonzales, led by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and 27 co-sponsors. Our own Impeach Gonzales petition has over 55,000 signatures.

The TV coverage is a fascinating contrast to the resignation of Karl Rove. Gonzales, after all, was simply taking his orders from Rove - but Rove left the White House as a conquering hero, while Gonzales is leaving as an incompetent and corrupt hack.

Of course Gonzales (like Rove) is also a criminal, having authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping, and the politicization of the Justice Department - all of which are felonies. Now that Gonzales no longer has the power to investigate himself, it is critically important that Congress and/or a Special Prosecutor fully investigate Gonzales' crimes.

David Swanson says Congress needs to do a few things:
1. Refuse to confirm a new AG until the White House complies with all subpoenas
2. Recognize what the threat of impeachment achieved in the case of Gonzo
3. Start impeaching Cheney ASAP

What's your advice for Democrats in Congress?

Update 1: Gonzo's likely temporary replacement is Paul Clement, a far-right ideologue:

Clement, who grew up in suburban Milwaukee, has a perfectly appointed conservative résumé.

The youngest child of an accountant father and a stay-at-home mother, Clement attended Georgetown University, where he studied international economics and cut his political teeth with two internships, first for then-Sen. Bob Kasten, R-Wis., and then in the Ronald Reagan White House.

After graduating, Clement deferred law school, while earning a masters degree in economics from Cambridge University. In 1989, he began at Harvard Law School, where he served as Supreme Court editor for the Harvard Law Review. Clement went on to prestigious clerkships for GOP appointees Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 1994, he accepted a job in the D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis, working in the high-powered appellate group led by one-time D.C. Circuit Judge and Solicitor General Kenneth Starr.

Clement called to take the job on the same day Starr signed on to serve as independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation. The senior partner’s absence worked out well for Clement, giving him the opportunity to play larger roles in cases and even argue two appeals as a young associate.

After 2 1/2 years at the firm, however, Clement found himself growing antsy. With Democrats in the White House, he took a job with Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri. Accepting a staff position on the Hill was an unconventional career move for an appellate practitioner, but ultimately sharpened Clement’s focus on pure litigation….

During his brief return to private practice, Clement collaborated with the conservative American Center for Law & Justice on two amicus briefs in Bush v. Gore, supporting George W. Bush on behalf of Republican voters….

Aside from [Ted] Olson, Clement is the only noncareer attorney in the solicitor general’s 19-lawyer office. The post for a political deputy was created in the early 1980s, in part to handle cases with an ideological edge. Clement’s unique role, as a top appellate litigator and trusted political aide, made him the natural candidate to assume responsibility for the DOJ’s terror docket, once it was consolidated in the solicitor general’s office.

Publicly, Clement has forcefully argued that the president has broad power in wartime to imprison those he deems enemies, indefinitely and without access to legal counsel. Clement’s allies suggest that behind closed doors he may counsel a more moderate stance.

No way in hell should Democrats accept him.

Update 2: The Busheviks are having a very hard time finding a permanent replacement. They floated Michael Chertoff's name over the weekend, but as Christy points out,

FEMA has lost and/or failed to account for a sum of money that is almost half of DHS’s entire budget

Chertoff would have a bit of a problem explaining that at confirmation hearings, so scratch his name off the list. Chertoff also defended alleged terrorist financier Dr. Magdy Elamir.

Other names include Ted Olson, who was far too visible during Clinton's impeachment and Bush v. Gore to be acceptable to Democrats.

The only acceptable name being mentioned is James Comey, but he has real integrity and would actually prosecute high crimes like torture and warrantless wiretapping - so there's no way in hell that Bush would nominate him.

Politico's Mike Allen, who is Karl Rove's ventriloquist's dummy, is pushing Fran Townsend, so keep an eye on her.

Speaking of Rove, when he running the White House there was a firm rule against letting someone resign without naming his replacement on the spot. So the absence of a designated successor shows Rove's successor Ed Gillespie doesn't have to clout that Rove had. As a result, we're is a free-for-all between various rightwing factions within the GOP.

Update 3: Here are the statements from leading Democrats:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Commtitee:

"A Special Prosecutor must still be appointed to investigate the Attorney General's false statements to Congress and to investigate the apparent criminal violations of law by Attorney General Gonzales and others, including President Bush, by initiating the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program."

That's good - but what about torture? And what about continuing investigations by Nadler's House Judiciary Committee, since no Special Prosecutor is likely?

Update 4: John Nichols nails it as always:

As Counsel from 2001 to 2005, Gonzales blocked requests from the General Accounting Office for information about Enron officials meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. He refused requests from congressional committees for information that the House and Senate had a right -- and a need. He made the legal case for torture, despite the fact that the Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment. He outlined schemes for subverting the judicial system and its rules by making terror suspects eligible for military tribunals. He helped convince Bush to refuse to afford prisoners held at Guantanamo the basic protections afforded prisoner-of-war under treaties the United States had accepted as the law of the land.

As the nation's 80th Attorney General -- a position he took in February, 2005, after the Senate vote 60-36 to confirm his nomination -- Gonzales extended his representation of Bush into should be an independent federal agency. He defended the president's authorization of an illegal warrantless wiretapping program. He accepted the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects from U.S. custody to that of torture regimes. And he turned the Department of Justice into an extension of Karl Rove's White House political shop.

Revelations about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions opened up an investigation that has begun to confirm a broad scheme to politicize the Justice Department's work in the area of voting rights -- a scheme apparently designed by Rove to suppress turnout by minorities and others who might vote Democratic...

The essential question with regard to Gonzales remains the same as the question that Leahy laid down when Rove said he would go: What are these people so desperate to hide?

The answer is that, just as Gonzales and Rove served Bush rather than the Constitution, they now seek with their resignations to protect Bush -- and Vice President Cheney -- from investigations that are necessary to any serious effort to restore the primacy of the founding document in the affairs of the nation.

Only a continued inquiry into the lawlessness of the soon-to-be-former Attorney General will achieve what is the essential purpose of this Congress: the restoring of the rule of law to a country deeply damaged by petty little men who chose personal loyalties and political expediency over their duty to the Republic.

Will Sponsors of Gonzales' Impeachment Join in Sponsoring Cheney's?

Chip — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:30:18 -0400

Congressional representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have sponsored H. Res. 589, a bill to impeach Alberto Gonzales. Will they also sign on to H. Res. 333, to sponsor Dick Cheney's impeachment? Why not thank them for sponsoring H. Res. 589, and ask them to sponsor H. Res. 333? Is YOUR rep listed? See the list here!