Patrick’s Notebook

Waterboarding Got White House Nod

By Joby Warrick, Washington Post — 15 October 2008

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.”

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.

Continue reading ‘CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos’ »

The Pentagon’s Expansion Will Be Bush’s Lasting Legacy

By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch.com — 27 May 2008

A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics — a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon’s massive bulk-up these last seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. “The Pentagon” is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War about what role U.S. military power should play in a “unipolar” world? Was U.S. supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic “peace dividend” thrown into the bargain)? Or was the U.S. to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of “humanitarian interventions”? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world’s sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 decisively ended that debate. The Bush administration promptly declared total war on every front — against peoples, ideologies, and, above all, “terrorism” (a tactic of the weak). That very September, administration officials proudly leaked the information that they were ready to “target” up to 60 other nations and the terrorist movements within them.

Continue reading ‘Entrenched, Embedded, and Here to Stay’ »

Majority of people surveyed in 17 different countries have doubts about official story

By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet — 10 September 2008

A new global poll conducted across 17 countries has found that less than half of those surveyed believe Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks, with a full 15 per cent believing that the terrorist outrage was directly perpetrated by the U.S. government.

On the eve of the 7th anniversary of 9/11, the poll underscores how a majority of people still do not buy the official story, despite numerous attempts to reinforce the explanation that 19 hijackers at the behest of Osama bin Laden were the culprits behind the plot.

“The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001,” reports Reuters.

Overall, 46 per cent of those surveyed believed the attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda, 25 per cent do not know who carried out the attacks, 15 per cent state the U.S. government was behind the attacks, 7 per cent blame Israel and a further 7 per cent blame other perpetrators.

The poll, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, reveals that people in Mexico lay the blame on the U.S. government (30 per cent) in numbers just 3 per cent less than Al-Qaeda (33 per cent).

Continue reading ‘Global Poll: Less Than Half Believe Al-Qaeda Behind 9/11’ »

By Gareth Porter, IPS — 26 March 2008

– The escalation of fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and their Shiite rivals, which could mark the end of Moqtada al-Sadr’s self-imposed ceasefire, also exposes Gen. David Petraeus’s strategy for controlling Sadr’s forces as a failure.

Petraeus reacted immediately to Sunday’s rocket attacks on the Green Zone by blaming them on Iran. He told the BBC the rockets were “Iranian provided, Iranian-made rockets”, and that they were launched by groups that were funded and trained by the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Petraeus said this was “in complete violation of promises made by President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts”.

Petraeus statement was clearly intended to divert attention from a development that threatens one of the two main pillars of the administration’s claim of progress in Iraq — the willingness of Sadr to restrain the Mahdi Army, even in the face of systematic raids on its leadership by the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies.

The rocket attacks appear to have been one of several actions by the Mahdi Army to warn the United States and the Iraqi government to halt their systematic raids aimed at driving the Sadrists out of key Shiite centres in the south. They were followed almost immediately by Mahdi Army clashes with rival Shiite militiamen in Basra, Sadr City and Kut and a call for a nationwide general strike to demand the release of Sadrist detainees.

Even more pointed was a strong warning from Sadr aide Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammedawi to the United States as well as to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), whose Badr Organisation militiamen, in the uniforms of Iraqi security forces, have targeted the Madhi Army throughout the south. “They don’t seem to realise that the Sadrist trend is like a volcano,” he told worshippers Friday in Kufa. “If it explodes, it will crush their rotten heads.”

Continue reading ‘Sadr Offensive Shows Failure of Petraeus Strategy’ »

By Ron Paul, LewRockwell.com — 25 March 2008

– Five years ago last week, the US military’s “shock and awe” campaign lit up the Baghdad sky. Five years later, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly four thousand Americans dead, we should pause and reflect on just what has been gained and what has been lost.

From the beginning, the march to war was paved with false assumptions and lies. Senior administration officials claimed repeatedly that Iraq was somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. They claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They manipulated the fear of the American people after 9/11 to further a war agenda that they had been planning years before that attack. The mainstream media was complicit in this war propaganda.

Nearly ten years ago, long before 9/11, I requested the time in opposition to the fateful Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, where I then stated on the Floor of the House of Representatives, “I see this piece of legislation as essentially being a declaration of virtual war. It is giving the President tremendous powers to pursue war efforts against a sovereign Nation.” Less than five years later we were invading Iraq.

Five years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead; some two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees; and the Iraqi Christian community – one of the oldest in the world – has been decimated more completely than even under the Ottoman occupation or the rule of Saddam Hussein.

On the US side, nearly four thousand Americans have lost their lives fighting in Iraq and many thousands more are horribly wounded. Our own senior military officers warn that our military is nearly broken by the strain of the Iraq occupation. The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed by the volume of disability claims from Iraq war veterans.

Continue reading ‘On Five Years in Iraq’ »

Calls restrictions unconstitutional

By Charlie Savage, Boston Globe — 30 January 2008

– President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

Bush made the assertion in a signing statement that he issued late Monday after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. In the signing statement, Bush asserted that four sections of the bill unconstitutionally infringe on his powers, and so the executive branch is not bound to obey them.

“Provisions of the act . . . purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief,” Bush said. “The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.”

One section Bush targeted created a statute that forbids spending taxpayer money “to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq” or “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

Continue reading ‘Bush asserts authority to bypass defense act’ »

Official Had Implicit Approval, Lawyer Says

By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post — 16 January 2008

–In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members.

The tapes had been sitting in the station chief’s safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had pushed for the tapes’ destruction in those years and a secret debate about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted on those requests. This time was different.

The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA’s then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.

Continue reading ‘Story Behind CIA Tapes’ Destruction’ »

‘We’re an empire and when we act, we create our own reality’

How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.

By Christian Salmon Le Monde diplomatique — 1 January 2008

– A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ” (1).

Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)” (2).

The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.

Continue reading ‘Scheherazade in the White House’ »

By Paul Craig Roberts — 28 December 2007

– At Christmas time it has been my habit to write a column in remembrance of the many innocent people in prisons whose lives have been stolen by the US criminal justice (sic) system that is as inhumane as it is indifferent to justice. Usually I retell the cases of William Strong and Christophe Gaynor, two men framed in the state of Virginia by prosecutors and judges as wicked and corrupt as any who served Hitler or Stalin.

This year is different. All Americans are now imprisoned in a world of lies and deception created by the Bush Regime and the two complicit parties of Congress, by federal judges too timid or ignorant to recognize a rogue regime running roughshod over the Constitution, by a bought and paid for media that serves as propagandists for a regime of war criminals, and by a public who have forsaken their Founding Fathers.

Americans are also imprisoned by fear, a false fear created by the hoax of “terrorism.” It has turned out that headline terrorist events since 9/11 have been orchestrated by the US government. For example, the alleged terrorist plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower was the brainchild of a FBI agent who searched out a few disaffected people to give lip service to the plot devised by the FBI agent. He arrested his victims, whose trial ended in acquittal and mistrial.

Many Europeans regard 9/11 itself as an orchestrated event. Former cabinet members of the British, Canadian and German governments and the Chief of Staff of the Russian Army have publicly expressed their doubts about the official 9/11 story. Recently, a former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, said in an interview with the newspaper, Corriere della Sera (November 30, 2007), that “democratic elements in America and Europe, with the Italian center-left in the forefront, now know that the 9/11 attack was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad in order to blame the Arab countries, and to persuade the Western powers to undertake military action both in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Continue reading ‘We Are All Prisoners Now’ »

Russia’s Foreign Minister says the country has no proof that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons programme. This follows a U.S. intelligence report clearing Tehran of developing atomic bombs. Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency believes the crisis could be solved diplomatically.

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad hailed the report as proof of the peaceful nature of his country’s nuclear programme. But U.S. President George W. Bush continues to insist that the issue remains a global problem.

“The Iranian government has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions, especially the covert nuclear weapons programme pursued into the fall of 2003, which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge,” Bush said.

At the same time, experts in the United States maintain that President Bush’s accusations are groundless.

Joseph Cirincione, Senior Fellow and Director of Nuclear Policy at the Washington- based Center of American Progress, says it’s a “very embarrassing” situation for the Bush administration.

Continue reading ‘No proof Iran had nukes: Russia’ »

From Stratfor:

– There is speculation arising that the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report stating that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 is part of a campaign launched by individuals in the U.S. intelligence community to sabotage the strategy set out by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in dealing with Iran.

Such an incendiary action would only take place if the Bush administration were seriously planning military action against Iran. The rationale behind this theory is that the intelligence community, still feeling the burn from its reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would want to set the record straight and clear its name before the administration took action.

However, Stratfor highly doubts this to be the case. The risks for the United States to carry out military action are far too great, particularly at a time when Washington actually has a real chance of making progress in its negotiations with the Iranians over Iraq. Moreover, Stratfor believes that a unanimous document from 16 different intelligence agencies makes this sort of bureaucratic back-biting unlikely. Instead, the release of the NIE is more likely linked to the larger negotiations taking place between Iran and the United States.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released today concludes that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” It adds that “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007,” and the country is “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.”

The assessment, which relies on data collected through Oct. 31, was reportedly completed in 2006, but was blocked by administration officials who wanted it to be more in line with Vice President Cheney’s hardline views.

As The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum notes, the NIE’s “basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House” at least by last year, when the document was finished. Yet even in the past two months, the administration has continued to push its faulty, inflammatory rhetoric and claim that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Some examples:

“So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.” [Bush, 10/17/07]

“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. … The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.” [Cheney, 10/21/07]

Continue reading ‘Despite Knowledge That Iran Halted Nuke Program, White House Continued To Warn Of False Threat’ »

Since coming into office in 2001 the Bush administration has advocated and implemented the use of regime change as a means of spreading democracy in the world while at the same time overthrowing democratically elected governments in the process. To add to this list, earlier this week the Venezuelan counterintelligence agency exposed a CIA operation meant to destabilize the Chávez government by manipulating the political process of the upcoming December 2, constitutional referendum. More on this later.

Abundant evidence has shown that from the earliest days of the Bush administration, planning was already in place to facilitate a regime change and preemptive invasion of Iraq. But prior to the Iraq invasion, under the guise of the war-on-terror, was the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, in which the ruling Taliban government was toppled and the puppet Karzai government was installed.

Following this success was the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt against Hugo Chávez which was orchestrated by then assistant Secretary for Western Affairs, Otto Reich and long time administration official Elliot Abrams. Although short lived, the White House installed right wing sympathizer and confidant Pedro Carmona as president, but after two days Chávez was once again restored to power.

The next in line, of course is the infamous Iraq invasion and regime change of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Amid fabricated intelligence, fear mongering and deliberate false accusations of weapons of mass destruction, the US military was unleashed against the Iraqi people who already had suffered under the cruel and repressive sanctions of the US for the past 10 years but now faced the militaries road-rage road-race from Kuwait to Baghdad, in which tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children were shot, bombed or deliberately run over by the convoys of the coalition of the killing. Following the ouster of the Hussein government, the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by Paul Bremer seized power for 14 months and looted the Iraqi people of billions of dollars of wealth and natural resources until an Iraqi based complicit puppet regime lead by Nouri al-Maliki was ultimately installed.

Continue reading ‘Bush-Cheney Regime Change Machine’ »

One week ago every news outlet; newspaper, tv, radio, was covering the story of Alan Greenspan’s remarks that ‘the Iraq war is largely about oil’. Although this was a sentiment privately held by many, the idea that the US invasion of Iraq was motivated by oil or even by economic considerations was continually marginalized and ascribed to the lunatic fringe and conspiracy theorists. After-all Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. He had aluminum tubes and mobile labs. And, somehow that was never fully explained, Hussein and the Iraqi regime were in many ways responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

But then Greenspan comes out and says he’s ‘saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows‘ – and thats where the story ended. Come on, this is Alan Greenspan, the man who as head of the federal reserve junta could alter the economic tidal flows with a single comment, prediction, or policy edict. The very nuance of his observations; was it a froth, or a bubble; could mean the difference between a market rally or a sell-off. But the story just ended.

If what he was saying was true it would mean that tens of thousands of innocent lives and billions of US tax dollars were squandered for the aggrandizement of the corporate plutocracy, and not just oil, but also defense contractors, the intelligence industry and support services like Haliburton. If what he was saying was true the very top level of the administration: Bush, Cheney, Rice, stood the most to gain financially as their fortunes are closely tied to those industries. But the story just ended.

No congressional investigations? How can this be? Even the Michael Vick case got a congressional hearing. And that guy was only fighting dogs. How is it that the potential fraud and deceit at the highest levels of the US administration does not pique the interest of anyone? Britney Spears, OJ and the Blackwater murderers got more air-play then the war-for-oil story. How can this be, unless it’s absolutely true?

Sherwood Ross
Special to the Middle East Times
September 17, 2007

MIAMI, FL, USA – 

In the most massive racial profiling since Japanese-Americans were herded into detention camps in World War II, the Bush administration after 9/11 required 80,000 Arab and Muslim foreign nationals living here to be photographed, fingerprinted and subjected to “special registration,” The Nation magazine said. The publication reports an additional 8,000 foreign nationals were sought out by the FBI for interviews and more than 5,000 foreign nationals were put in “preventive detention” – a total of 93,000 people made to register, subjected to interview, or jailed.

“Yet as of September, 2007, not one of these people stands convicted of a terrorist crime,” says an article titled, “Why We’re Losing The War on Terror.” Reading the data it presents, though, and examining other reliable sources, raises the question of whether the “terrorist threat” to USA isn’t wildly exaggerated or an outright fabrication.

Here’s why:

The above-cited pattern of dragnet arrests without trials or convictions is being repeated across the Middle East with like results. The Bush regime is literally framing thousands of innocent men and boys to make it appear they constitute a “terrorist” threat to America. Yes, boys, some as young as eight.

According to Nation magazine co-authors David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and Jules Lobel, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, the Bush regime has little to show in the way of convictions of those it imprisoned in Guantanamo, which ex-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld trumpeted housed “the worst of the worst.”

Continue reading ‘Is ‘Terrorist Threat’ To America Another Bush-Cheney Fabrication?’ »