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FBI to Examine LA Immigration Rally
Protesters give their thoughs on the world today, all while retreating from rubber bullets and tear gas.
Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts
Friday, May 4, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Move over CIA. The FBI tortures, too.
Published on Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Guest Opinion: FBI outsourced dirty work to secret Ethiopian prisons
While we have been awash in news stories about the firing of U.S. attorneys, Don Imus and the Virginia Tech horror, how many Americans know that the FBI and, to a lesser extent, the CIA have been interrogating suspected terrorists in secret prisons in Ethiopia? An ally in our combating terrorism, Ethiopia is also notorious for abusing prisoners, including torturing them. Among those held recently there is an American citizen.On April 5, the Associated Press reported that Ethiopia was under pressure "to release details of detainees from 19 countries ... including women and children (who) have been transferred secretly and illegally. An investigation by the Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees."
As John Sifton, a deeply experienced researcher at Human Rights Watch said on the national Democracy Now radio and Internet program (April 5), these suspects would previously have been held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay or the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. But "the Bush administration has shifted gears, and now they have the FBI interrogating people ... by local forces, the Ethiopians, the Kenyans ... That's why we call it a sort of outsourced Guantanamo." These interrogations purportedly are to weed out al-Qaida conspirators and cells in the Horn of Africa.
U.S. citizen imprisoned
The American prisoner, Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., held since late January, was questioned several times by FBI agents - as American officials admit - without being charged and without having a U.S. consular official present, or an attorney. But Meshal has a very active and properly indignant attorney in Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. On April 2, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanding she get the Ethiopian government to release his client. Also, writing to Rice was Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., about his constituent, Amir Meshal:
"Our government," Holt told Rice, "cannot allow an American citizen to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process." As of this writing, Rice has not replied to the congressman.
Fortunately, Holt is chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. I expect that in addition to finding out why his constituent was outsourced to Ethiopia, the congressman will also ask FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director Michael Hayden and other high-level intelligence officials why they have been directly responsible, in this case of an American citizen, for working with the Ethiopian government to violate international law - and the very basis of our system of justice, due process. (If they are not directly responsible, who's running their shops?)
It also would be very useful - and indeed necessary - if our rule of law is to have credibility at home and in the world - to find out from the president and Dick Cheney how they justify this outsourcing of an American citizen to an Ethiopian dungeon.
Meanwhile, what's happening to American citizen Amir Meshal? In a dispatch from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 12, The Washington Post quoted FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, who "confirmed that there were no charges against Meshal, and State Department officials said the FBI told them that no charges were pending." So, Meshal was set to be released from the secret prison and flown back to the United States where, unlike in Ethiopia, every citizen is guaranteed due process of law.
Not so fast. The same Washington Post story revealed that Meshal is still imprisoned. (As of this writing, he remains in his cell.) Why? "State Department officials booking his flight discovered that his name had been placed on a no-fly list at the request of the FBI and no airline would take him, U.S. officials said."
Secret military tribunal
Then, on Friday, April 13, Amir Meshal did get out of that lockup - to be hauled before an Ethiopian military tribunal. The New York Times on April 14 added: "No news media or members of the public were allowed at the hearing (before the military tribunal), and American officials said that they, too, were barred from attending. Ethiopian officials did not disclose details. Ethiopian Foreign Ministry officials said they were not authorized to talk about it."
Last year, the president said that no one was still being held in CIA secret prisons although they remain open, as permitted by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. On what authority has - as reported by the Washington Post - "the FBI carried out interrogations of dozens of detainees in Ethiopian secret prisons"?
What about American citizen Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J.? Has his citizenship been suspended?
Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, wrote this column for Newspaper Enterprise Association.
Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Students Heckle Gonzales at Harvard
What? The Reich arrested no one? Now that's news.
Related
Four students arrested for heckling FBI director
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Sunday April 29, 2007 12:46 PM
Related
Four students arrested for heckling FBI director
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Sunday April 29, 2007 12:46 PM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - A small group of student protesters, including one wearing a black hood and an orange jumpsuit, heckled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as he posed with old classmates Saturday during their 25-year Harvard Law School reunion.
``When the photographer was getting everybody set up and having people say 'cheese,' the protesters yelled: 'say torture, instead,' 'resign' and 'I don't recall,''' said Nate Ela, a protester and third-year student.
Law school spokesman Mike Armini said the impromptu protest was so small that some of those attending the photo shoot did not notice it.
Ela said the protesters followed Gonzales into the law school's library, chanting ``shame'' and ``resign,'' before the attorney general's security detail took him to his motorcade.
Gonzales was at the university to deliver a lunchtime speech, a visit that was unannounced to students. But word spread quickly after his motorcade and security detail were spotted.
``The departure was clearly undignified,'' said Thomas Becker, a second-year law student who wore the black hood and orange jumpsuit during the protest. ``He looked really annoyed.''
A Department of Justice spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Gonzales is resisting pressure to resign as lawmakers question whether he could effectively run the Justice Department amid the controversy over the firings of eight prosecutors.Friday, April 27, 2007
Echoes of Terror Case Haunt California Pakistanis
LODI, Calif., April 24 — Khalid Farooq has shunned the low-slung yellow bungalow that serves as the Pakistani community’s mosque here for nearly two years, ever since a father and son who worshiped there were arrested on suspicion of being foot soldiers for Al Qaeda.
If he runs an errand at someplace like Wal-Mart, away from the neat, tree-lined streets that constitute the heart of Lodi’s Pakistani neighborhood, Mr. Farooq trades his traditional baggy clothes for standard American attire, he said, as often as four times in one day.
“Something has changed in the air; it’s a scary time,” said Mr. Farooq, who first arrived to work in the flat, black fields that surround this town 25 years ago. “We don’t want to talk; we’re all afraid.”
The tide of fear rolled in and has never quite receded after an informant incriminated two Lodi men, Umer Hayat, an ice cream truck driver, and his son Hamid, who were arrested in June 2005. Their trial ended a year ago with the younger Mr. Hayat, 24, convicted of providing material support for terrorism by attending a training camp in Pakistan. His lawyers recently began seeking a new trial based on arguments that the jury was tainted.
Members of the Pakistani community here distrust one another almost as much as they do outsiders. Even now, residents with evidence of sudden wealth, like a new car, are immediately rumored to be on the F.B.I.’s payroll. Anything connected to the government is inherently suspect.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Are Some of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Members... SPIES?
Federal Probes Target Intelligence Lawmakers
April 24, 2007 9:18 AM
Since 2005, four sitting members of the House panel entrusted with the nation's deepest secrets have come under FBI scrutiny.
The committee, known formally as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI, for short), reviews classified budgets and operational plans for the CIA, the NSA and other so-called three-letter agencies.
Unlike nearly everyone else who works with the nation's deepest national security secrets, lawmakers on intelligence committees undergo no background checks, no polygraphs and no lifestyle audits. They are automatically waived in to review everything from secret satellite data to nuclear weapons intelligence.
"That means the people who serve on that committee have to have the highest integrity possible," said Vince Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and case officer.
Following the FBI's raid last week on the offices of an insurance company owned by his wife, Renzi stepped down from the intelligence panel.
Whether or not the FBI finds any evidence of wrongdoing, experts say the recent probes are troubling.
"Name the one committee you don't want any corruption on," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C.-based group which watchdogs congressional spending.
"There's a special obligation that comes with [serving on] that committee," Cannistraro concurred.
At least two investigations into HPSCI members have involved allegations of bribes-for-contracts schemes between lawmakers and intelligence contractors. Former California GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is in jail for taking millions in bribes in exchange for funneling government contracts.
Newly-elected Nevada governor and former Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., currently faces an investigation into whether he improperly helped a friend's contracting firm get business, payments and favored treatment from national security agencies and officials.
Through his lawyer, Gibbons has said he is confident "that all of this is going to be favorably resolved."
In Arizona, Renzi is suspected of taking a $200,000 payment from his business partner for using the power of his office to force the purchase of his business partner's land at an unreasonable price. Renzi has denied the charges and said the FBI raid on his wife's insurance business as "the first step toward getting the truth out."
In 2005, the FBI reportedly opened an investigation into whether Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., then the senior Democrat on the committee, cut an improper deal with a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in exchange for supporting her bid to head the committee. Harman has denied wrongdoing, and the probe has reportedly stalled since failing to find evidence of wrongdoing.
Cannistraro, who once served as a clandestine CIA case officer in the Middle East and elsewhere, said it's painful for those who make careers out of learning and keeping the nation's secrets to hear stories of the corruption, both proven and alleged, that have recently dogged the very lawmakers to whom they entrust their secrets.
"They get disturbed by it," the 27-year CIA veteran told ABC News. "They're not in a position to tell the committee they can't have [certain] intelligence. It's theirs by statute."
April 24, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (11)
Delays in Renzi Case Raise More Gonzales Questions
By JOHN R. WILKE and EVAN PEREZ
April 25, 2007; Page A2
WASHINGTON -- As midterm elections approached last November, federal investigators in Arizona faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said.
April 25, 2007; Page A2
WASHINGTON -- As midterm elections approached last November, federal investigators in Arizona faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said.
The delays, which postponed key approvals in the case until after the election, raise new questions about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or other officials may have weighed political issues in some investigations. The Arizona U.S. attorney then overseeing the case, Paul Charlton, was told he was being fired in December, one of eight federal prosecutors dismissed in the past year. The dismissals have triggered a wave of criticism and calls from Congress for Mr. Gonzales to resign.
Investigators pursuing the Renzi case had been seeking clearance from senior Justice Department officials on search warrants, subpoenas and other legal tools for a year before the election, people close to the case said.
The Justice Department denied any foot-dragging in the Renzi case. "There was no such delay," said Bryan Sierra, a spokesman. Mr. Gonzales has said none of the firings of U.S. attorneys was related to corruption cases, and that the department is committed to pursuing such cases. Public-corruption staffing and prosecutions nationwide have increased during his tenure.
IN SUMMARY
• The Issue: Whether a congressional corruption case was delayed last year before the November election.
• The Background: Since 2005, Arizona Rep. Renzi has been under federal investigation for land deals linked to legislation.
• The Outlook: The case could raise new questions about whether Bush administration officials weighed political concerns in their pursuit of politically sensitive cases.
• The Background: Since 2005, Arizona Rep. Renzi has been under federal investigation for land deals linked to legislation.
• The Outlook: The case could raise new questions about whether Bush administration officials weighed political concerns in their pursuit of politically sensitive cases.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), a Judiciary Committee member who has called for Mr. Gonzales's resignation, said his panel is planning to pursue whether the Renzi case was a factor in Mr. Charlton's firing. "I'm not saying there's evidence and I'm not making allegations," Mr. Schumer told reporters Monday. "But it's something we should look into."
Complex investigations commonly take a year or more, and it isn't known what issues figured in the Renzi case. Many details remain shrouded in the secrecy of a Tucson grand jury that has been at work since last year. Court filings remain under seal. The precise sequence of events likely won't become public unless formal charges are filed.
But the investigation clearly moved slowly: Federal agents opened the case no later than June 2005, yet key witnesses didn't get subpoenas until early this year, those close to the case said. The first publicly known search -- a raid of a Renzi family business by the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- was carried out just last week.
Mr. Renzi is the subject of a criminal inquiry into land deals, among other things. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that federal agents are focusing on a $200,000 cash payment Mr. Renzi received from a former business partner in 2005 following a land sale that was to be part of a proposed government land-exchange bill.
A lawyer for Mr. Renzi, Grant Woods, has denied any impropriety and said that the money was repayment of a debt, not a kickback. In a statement last night, Mr. Renzi denied wrongdoing, calling recent stories about the investigation "conjecture and false attacks" and saying that "none of them bear any resemblance to the truth." But he said he intends to "take a leave of absence" from all of his committee posts, including the natural-resources committee and House intelligence panel.
Normally, local U.S. attorneys may seek court approval for warrants and wiretaps without Washington's approval. But the Renzi case -- like many that involve members of Congress -- is being handled jointly by the local U.S. attorney and the department's public-integrity section. In such cases, a senior department official must approve requests for wiretaps and warrants and other formal legal steps.
People briefed on the case said investigators in Arizona asked Washington for clearance -- among other tools -- for a wiretap of Mr. Renzi's telephones, a highly unusual step against a sitting member of Congress, months before Election Day. The wiretap eventually was approved, and was in place by late October, these people said.
On Oct. 26, just days before the election, two political Web sites carried the first public word of the probe. In subsequent news accounts, an unidentified Washington law-enforcement official described the matter as "preliminary." Few details emerged, but the leak disrupted prosecutors' wiretap.
Meanwhile, Mr. Renzi, first elected to Congress in 2002, was fighting to hold on to his seat. In September, President Bush hosted a fund-raiser in Scottsdale on his behalf. About the same time Mr. Charlton was added to a list of prosecutors "we should now consider pushing out," wrote Mr. Gonzales's then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, in a Sept. 13, 2006, email to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. The email is among thousands that the Justice Department has released in response to congressional inquiries into the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.
In November, Mr. Renzi won re-election to a third term, beating his challenger by 51% to 44%. A month later, on Dec. 7, Mr. Charlton was told he was being dismissed. Two weeks later, he emailed William Mercer, a senior Justice Department official: "Media now asking if I was asked to resign over leak in Congressman Renzi investigation." He asked for advice, but never got a response, according to the emails released by the Justice Department.
Mr. Sierra, the department spokesman, said it would be inappropriate to comment on any ongoing case. Generally, though, cases move along on their own pace, he said. "We don't operate under artificial deadlines," he said. "To artificially put deadlines or to rush the time could damage the integrity of the investigation."
Brian Roehrkasse, another Justice Department official, said the department under Mr. Gonzales "has never retaliated against a United States attorney for conducting or failing to pursue a public corruption investigation."
Mr. Charlton, a Republican with 16 years as a federal prosecutor, was named by President Bush in 2001 to lead the Phoenix office. Now in private practice in Phoenix, he has refused to discuss any details of the Renzi investigation -- even when asked about it at a March 6 hearing of the House judiciary committee.
Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Mr. Renzi Offers Field To Mining Companies; Grand Jury Is Active
US Congressman under FBI investigation
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JOHN R. WILKE
April 21, 2007; Page A1
![[Rick Renzi]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uUYUmJkwPPA7gyZJNTwjtwkYCOtOr0gGln1ZUKV6jbIDeleVwc4S4kcbozfk-WhFOWRaw-ss7W1hekVP_FjvKydJkfAUcI5JGYVV6YXyXe6ziU7rfBEoxaHndQg3KAIxvNI-HV9efRJChpeDBEkJ1A2A=s0-d)
![[AZ Map]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vUKro2NO93kMFYSYUhR_PzkNFhxzUFvtRdQ_589iXZFSj5S3ngebHpLvXYhBI0LNt-uLERfAt4YAJf4UeUSXUu-IKR4h10o_85_RFbEOH7pEkazpz8QTdTQk7AqBVXnsw2FTtNPGn2BVZEldAfjeRbkWQ=s0-d)
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JOHN R. WILKE
April 21, 2007; Page A1
SUPERIOR, Ariz. -- As they dig for nickel, copper and other commodities in the far corners of the earth, the world's largest mining companies, Rio Tinto PLC and BHP Billiton Ltd., are used to solving geological problems. Here, though, the problems they encountered were political.
North America's largest copper lode is believed to be buried more than a mile beneath Apache Leap, the stark red cliffs that loom above this storied Old West town about an hour east of Phoenix. Resolution Copper Co., a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, wants to mine it. But first it needs Congress to approve a federal land exchange, under which Resolution would swap 5,000 acres of private land for 3,000 acres of public land near its planned mine.
In exchange for supporting the bill, the local congressman, Rick Renzi, a Republican, insisted on something in return: He wanted Resolution to buy, as part of the land swap, a 480-acre alfalfa field near his hometown of Sierra Vista, according to documents and people involved in the deal.
Resolution executives refused. For starters, they thought the land was overpriced, people close to the deal say. More troubling, they discovered it was owned by Mr. Renzi's former business partner, these people say.
Resolution wasn't the only party troubled by the congressman's demands. His chief of staff resigned and began cooperating secretly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to witnesses and others close to the case. The FBI began a preliminary inquiry that was first reported in October, just before Mr. Renzi was elected to a third term.
That investigation has now become a formal public-corruption probe by a federal grand jury in Tucson. On Thursday, the grand jury authorized a search warrant of a Renzi family business. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Mr. Renzi received a cash payment from his former business partner, funneled through a family wine company, after a second investor group pursuing an unrelated land swap agreed to pay $4 million for the alfalfa field, according to people contacted in the course of the two-year investigation.
Mr. Renzi denies any wrongdoing and says that he intends to cooperate with the investigation. The search of the family business, he said in a statement Friday, is "the first step toward getting the truth out." His lawyer says the cash payment he received was to settle an unrelated debt.
The case could add fuel to the firestorm over the Bush administration's firing of federal prosecutors late last year. Paul Charlton, the U.S. Attorney who had been overseeing the case, was among those dismissed at the behest of the White House. A spokesman for Mr. Renzi dismissed as "a political hatchet job" the suggestion that Mr. Charlton's firing was connected to the probe of Mr. Renzi. On Thursday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress that none of the dismissals were politically motivated, and said the Justice Department is committed to battling corruption.
The Renzi case is the latest in a wave of public-corruption investigations of local and federal officials. At least five members of Congress -- three Republicans and two Democrats -- are now under federal criminal scrutiny. Two former members, both Republicans, have gone to prison in the past year. Voter polls have suggested that the investigations were one reason Republicans lost control of Congress last November.
The Renzi case spotlights the potential for abuse in the murky world of legislated land swaps, which have become more common in recent years. Thousands of acres of public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars change hands each year through narrow special-interest bills. There is little public scrutiny, and often no vote is recorded in Congress. Some swaps serve public goals, such as protecting wild habitat. Others enrich private interests at taxpayers' expense, sometimes sidestepping federal rules in the process.
The proposed Arizona land exchange would sweep aside a 1954 order by President Eisenhower protecting national forest in the area, including Oak Flats, a campground located above the proposed mine. "Yet another piece of land that was being 'permanently' protected is being put on the block because a private interest has use for it," Janine Blaeloch, director of the nonprofit Western Lands Project, complained to Congress last year.
Resolution, which declined to comment about its contacts with Mr. Renzi, has said it hopes to sink 7,000-foot shafts into the ground to reach the rich vein of copper ore. It has worked for years to win support for the mine, reaching out to local officials, environmentalists and rock-climbing groups. Arizona's governor and most members of its congressional delegation are backers. The governor told a Senate hearing last year the project could bring 1,000 jobs and $1 billion or more to the state's economy.
Although Superior has long been a mining town, it has escaped some of the ravages of open-pit mining that have scarred nearby towns. It is rich in natural beauty, including otherworldly rock formations and steep cliffs that draw thousands of climbers each year. Mayor Michael Hing sees the new mine as a way to escape the boom-and-bust cycles that have whipsawed the town for more than a century, ever since silver was discovered in 1875 at the Silver Queen mine and hundreds flocked to town, including famed gunslingers Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.
In order to secure the use of the government land for mining, Resolution has proposed buying a number of parcels elsewhere and transferring them to government entities for uses completely unrelated to mining. The town of Superior, for example, would get title to the town graveyard, now on federal land. Climbers would get another place to explore. Resolution says the vast Apache Leap rock escarpment -- so named because Apache warriors on horseback are said to have jumped to their deaths to evade capture -- would be protected. The San Carlos Apache tribe opposes the mine, citing concerns that culturally significant areas would be disturbed.
Mr. Renzi told Resolution in 2005 that his support for the land swap would hinge in part on whether it helped fulfill a goal to cut water consumption along the San Carlos River, which slices through the desert far from the mining area, in southern Arizona, participants in the deal say. Fort Huachuca, a big U.S. Army base nearby, was under court order to cut water consumption, and it had been seeking help to retire farmland near the river. Mr. Renzi has longstanding ties to the base, the economic engine of the area. He grew up near it, and his father, retired U.S. Army Gen. Eugene Renzi, is its former commandant, now employed by one of its largest contractors, ManTech Corp.
Resolution proposed buying and handing over to the government thousands of acres of bird and wildlife habitat along the banks of the San Carlos, which would further the water-conservation goal.
In early 2005, however, Resolution balked at buying the 480-acre alfalfa field owned by Mr. Renzi's business partner, James Sandlin. Mr. Renzi then turned to another investment group, called the Petrified Forest group, that was looking to put together a unrelated land swap. That group, which included Bruce Babbitt, the former governor, agreed that April to buy the patch of farmland for nearly $4 million, says Philip Aries, a land-swap expert that was part of the group.
"Congressman Renzi told me that the purchase of the Sandlin parcel was a matter of national security, and that it was key to ensuring the viability of Fort Huachuca," Mr. Aries says. "He said that if we were to buy it before" upcoming hearings about the possible closure of the base, "he would give our swap priority -- a 'free pass,' he said, would be sure to get through the Natural Resources Committee," thereby ensuring its approval.
Mr. Aries says that after his group's purchase of the alfalfa field went through in 2005, Resolution complained that the Petrified Forest group had gotten priority treatment, and Mr. Renzi dropped his support for that group's land swap.
Mr. Aries, Resolution executives and others involved in the proposed transactions have been interviewed about the matter by the FBI, people close to the case say. Mr. Aries declines to discuss those conversations, or other details of his group's dealings with Mr. Renzi. Mr. Sandlin, the former owner of the alfalfa field, declines to comment.
Public records show that Mr. Sandlin and Mr. Renzi became business partners in 2001, when Mr. Sandlin bought shares of Fountain Realty & Development, one of Mr. Renzi's companies. In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Sandlin paid his partner between $1 million and $5 million for Mr. Renzi's stake in that business, according to House financial-disclosure records.
In 2004, a Federal Election Commission audit found that Mr. Renzi had received a total of $369,000 in illegal corporate funds from Fountain in the 2002 election cycle. It found that Fountain had shifted $131,000 of this through Mr. Renzi's personal accounts to the Renzi for Congress campaign account -- and that at least $70,000 of it was put back into Mr. Renzi's personal account.
Mr. Sandlin bought the alfalfa field in 2003 for about $1 million, land records show. The farmland, more than a mile wide, with mountains rising on two sides, lies fallow today.
One focus of the FBI's current investigation is whether Mr. Renzi profited from the sale of Mr. Sandlin's land to the Petrified Forest group, people close to the case say. Federal investigators have been asking questions about a May 2005 payment of $200,000 from Mr. Sandlin to Mr. Renzi, which was sent the same day that Mr. Sandlin received the first payment from the Petrified Forest group, these people say. The payment went to a wine company owned by Mr. Renzi, which was sold to his father days later, public records show.
Phoenix lawyer Grant Woods, one of Mr. Renzi's attorneys, said Friday that Mr. Sandlin sent Mr. Renzi the $200,000 to settle a debt stemming from a previous business transaction involving land in northeast Arizona. "The note was due, and he had to pay it off," Mr. Wood said. He said Mr. Renzi was not pushing the sale of the Sandlin property to help his former business partner. "He was working to solve the water problems of the San Pedro River and help save Fort Huachuca," Mr. Woods said. When Mr. Renzi was pressing Resolution and then the Petrified Forest group to buy the land, "he did not know Mr. Sandlin had an interest in that land," Mr. Wood said.
Executives of Resolution and participants in the Petrified Forest group are cooperating with the FBI in its investigation, people close to the case said. The Petrified Forest group is not being investigated for any possible wrongdoing.
The FBI is also looking into the congressman's dealings with Fort Huachuca, these people say.
Mr. Renzi said Friday he would take a leave of absence from the House intelligence committee "until the matter is resolved." John Boehner, the House Republican leader, had warned colleagues in a letter earlier this year that "clear likelihood of serious transgressions will lead to suspension from important committee positions; guilt will lead to immediate and severe consequences," according to Congressional Quarterly.
Mr. Renzi continues to serve on the House Natural Resources Committee, which handles land-swap legislation.
Resolution is pressing ahead with its effort to line up congressional support for a land swap. Bruno Hegner, who was Resolution's president when Mr. Renzi proposed that the company buy the alfalfa field, was so troubled by the incident that he wrote a letter detailing what happened and mailed it to himself, people close to the case said. He wanted a postmarked record of what occurred, these people say. That letter is now in the hands of the FBI, they say.
Write to John R. Wilke at john.wilke@wsj.com
Thursday, April 19, 2007
New Phil Giraldi article about Sibel Edmonds, Waxman
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi has a new piece out in the April 23, 2007 print edition of the American Conservative about Sibel Edmonds and our call to have Henry Waxman hold hearings into her case.
Giraldi is an expert in Sibel's case and features prominently in the new film about Sibel, Kill The Messenger.
I've electronically liberated the article in full, all errors are mine etc.
California Congressman Henry Waxman's Oversight & Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations that the Bush administration might be concealing something about the Niger document forgeries, that it maliciously outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, and that it has looked the other way over massive fraudulent contracting in Iraq. These investigations are admirable and very much in the public interest. He has been less interested in pursuing another matter, however. FBI whistle blower Sibel Edmonds and her numerous supporters both inside and outside of government have been urging Waxman to hold open hearings on her claims regarding malfeasance and corruption among high-level government officials.
Edmonds is subject to a State Secrets Privilege gag order initiated at the request of the Pentagon and State Department, but she has recently elaborated on her allegations, stating that investigations already carried out by the FBI would demonstrate that three former senior officials were involved in illegal weapons sales and other activities that would justify charges of espionage and possibly even treason against them. The three are leading Pentagon neoconservatives Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, as well as former State Department number three Marc Grossman. Edmonds is no crackpot and is considered to be a credible witness, most of whose charges were substantiated both by former FBI officials in 2002 and by the Department of Justice in 2005. Waxman appears to be uninterested in pursuing the matter, however, possibly because Israeli officials and the country's defense industry are believed to have been involved in the weapons diversion activity.
Congressman Waxman is regarded as close to Israel's principal lobby, AIPAC, and even promised Jewish voters back in November 2006 that there would be no Democratic congressional committee chairmen involved with Middle Eastern policy who were not completely supportive of Israel.
As Giraldi says in Kill The Messenger:
All of these people (Perle, Feith) have been investigated by the FBI at one point or another for passing secret information to Israel.I'm not yet ready to write-off the possibility that Waxman will hold hearings into Sibel's case. He has previously promised to do so, and we haven't yet heard from his office that he won't hold hearings. Congress has been in recess for the past two weeks and we'll be attempting to get him on the record one way or other this week. I've been told that a number of prominent-ish people tried to get Waxman to go on the record on Monday (yesterday) in response to Giraldi's new article to no avail - but surely he can't maintain that position, so in the meantime, no news is good news.
In no cases were any of them convicted. The prosecutions were dropped… in my opinion because of political pressure not to get into this kind of case that involves
'Israel' and 'Espionage'.
Oh - and for those of you who are saying 'Huh? AIPAC? Israel? I thought Sibel's case was about Turkey and the American Turkish Council (ATC)!' Sibel says that both AIPAC and the ATC both essentially operate as fronts for the same criminal organization. Or as Giraldi put it in his earlier article about Sibel's case:
On one level, (Sibel's) story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection.I'll keep you updated, of course. Stay tuned, and thanks for your help & support, again.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Feds May Move On Local Mosques
A new FBI case against terror suspects could be set to rock the Bay Area
By Najeeb Hasan
After 23-year-old Lodi resident Hamid Hayat was convicted last year of training at a terrorist camp in Pakistan, government officials warned that terror investigations in Northern California were ongoing.
Now, members of the Bay Area's Muslim community believe that the FBI is close to making additional high-profile arrests of one or more terror suspects who frequent mosques in Silicon Valley and the East Bay. According to a source informed about the investigation, one of the organizations targeted in the Bay Area terror probe is the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative-leaning Muslim organization, founded in India during the 1920s, that boasts world-wide membership and whose primary focus is to persuade Muslims to recommit to their faith.
Last October, a South African Muslim scholar associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, Fazlur Rahman Azmi, was denied entry to the United States and detained at San Francisco International Airport by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Azmi, who had successfully entered the United States to preach in both 1999 and earlier in 2006, was planning on teaching at various American mosques during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Nawaz Khan, a resident of Newark, Calif., and one of Azmi's students, had arranged for Azmi to lecture at the Islamic Society of the East Bay in Fremont, one of the Bay Area's largest and most diverse mosques.
Muslims are concerned that the ongoing terror probe in the East Bay is related to Azmi's planned visit to the Fremont mosque.
A spokesperson said the FBI could neither confirm or deny the existence of such an investigation.
"There is of course not a lot I can say," says FBI public information officer Joseph Schadler. "I did want to make clear that we don't target mosques for investigation. We begin and end an investigation if they pose a threat based on credible information."
Muslims connected to the Fremont mosque are also concerned that the planned arrests may be supported by flimsy evidence. One critic with ties to law enforcement agrees that current terror investigations can be motivated not by strong evidence, but by pressure on America's counter-terrorism agencies to produce results.
"It's something, in my opinion, that is happening," says James Wedick, who retired from the FBI in 2004 after 35 years of service, when asked if the FBI could be pressured to move on weak terror cases. During the Lodi case, Wedick had been skeptical of the evidence marshaled against the terror suspects and worked with defense attorneys on the case; a judge did not permit him to testify in the trial as an expert witness.
"In the last couple of years throughout the Bureau, they know there is a pot of gold out there called terrorism dollars," he says. "[It's] resource allocation—who gets what money, including plain dollars and agent bodies. You are allocated these resources depending upon if you got something going. What I've seen is the Bureau and the department is quick to call something terrorism when it's not—because you got an obvious interest in getting those resources, and they are not going to get them, unless they could say to folks back in Washington that there is a legitimate case. So there is motivation, unfortunately. I've talked to people in the position to know; I've got guys coming to me all day long, telling me they [the FBI] are mischaracterizing things. I don't know if it's going on with respect to this specific case."
"I think that's a completely mistaken assumption," counters the FBI's Schadler. "We work our cases at our end with the Department of Justice, nobody is pressuring us to do anything."
Members of the Bay Area Muslim community, meanwhile, have become somewhat accustomed to FBI activity within their community since 2001.
"It's disheartening," says Mohamad Rajabally, a Fremont dentist who recently completed his term as the president of the Islamic Society of the East Bay. "But, unfortunately, this is the climate Muslims are facing. I always say that we have nothing to hide, and we welcome anybody to our mosques."
During the controversial Lodi case last year, Hayat was convicted based on a confession in which he contradicted himself several times. He was also secretly taped by a government informant posing as a friend; the informant, however, was not able capture a Hayat confession on tape, which weakened the case further. At the time, Muslim leaders in groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) believed that the Hayat case was pursued by the FBI to bolster the arguments for the renewal of the Patriotic Act.
"I mean, if you can imagine, nobody joins the Bureau to work some BS case," says Wedick. "Let's go back to the Hayat case. People stepped into the case, said this is going to be great, only to find out there is no case. There was nothing corroborated to terror except to say in recorded conversation, you had a series of statements ... [but] if you look at them, they made no sense. They [the FBI] made no effort to mitigate them or make sense of them, except to say he said in some fashion [that he attended a camp], and even if he contradicted himself, we'll make an indictment. The older guys are saying, 'What am I doing, this isn't a case—do we follow this guy, does he have something connected with explosives?' Did we follow them? That's what you have to do to prove the case. If you look at all the [nation-wide terror] cases, most of the cases involved the Bureau paying somebody huge amounts of money to go into a network, leaving it up to them, and saying we got a terrorism case."
Rajabally, however, would rather wait and see what unfolds than panic.
"They are arousing suspicion," he says of the rumors that have been swirling through the community. "For what? People will ask you what proof you have. You are raising doubts and panic in the community for no reason."
Researcher Adds to Alger Hiss Debate
By RICHARD PYLE Thursday, April 05, 2007
NEW YORK - A Russian researcher, delving anew into once-secret Soviet files from the Cold War, says she has found no evidence that Alger Hiss spied or that Soviet intelligence had any particular interest in him.
In a speech to be delivered at a New York University symposium Thursday, Svetlana A. Chervonnaya says neither Hiss' name nor his alleged spy moniker, Ales, appears in any of dozens of documents from Soviet archives that she has reviewed since the early 1990s.
A copy of the speech was made available to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Calling her efforts "proving the negative," Chervonnaya says "a thorough combing of all the said archives combined has not produced a shred of evidence that Alger Hiss had ever been a member of the (American) Communist Party and was engaged in any behind-the-scenes interactions with the Soviets."
Hiss, a top State Department official who played a key role in founding the United Nations, was convicted of perjury in 1950 for lying about being a Soviet spy. He served nearly four years of a five-year federal prison sentence and died at age 92 in 1996.
Scholars and experts have debated for decades whether he was guilty or a victim of anti-communist fervor. The case was fraught with Cold War drama, involving a typewriter and a secret film cache in a Maryland pumpkin field.
Chervonnaya was one of several scholars, writers and historians scheduled to speak Thursday at a daylong symposium, "Alger Hiss and History," inaugurating New York University's new Center for the United States and the Cold War.
Others on the program included Hiss' son, Tony Hiss, and stepson, Timothy Hobson, who were expected to recall their family life with the man whose name became a synonym for Cold War espionage. Both have always maintained Hiss was innocent.
Soviet defectors, retired KGB agents and U.S. officials, some claiming to have documentary proof, have come down on both sides of what remains one of the Cold War's most enduring controversies.
In 1995-96, U.S. intelligence agencies released the Venona Files, a series of decoded Soviet diplomatic cables on espionage matters during World War II. They mentioned a U.S. contact called Ales, who already had been identified by a defecting Soviet agent as Hiss.
Tony Hiss, a New York-based writer, said he was encouraged by Chervonnaya's research.
"Her stating of the negative in all this is so strong that it almost becomes a positive," he said. "With her findings, plus new findings from FBI files, we envision reopening the whole field of investigation. After looking for so long like a played-out mine, it's now revealing new veins and whole new galleries of material, but it's far too soon to say this has reached any kind of positive conclusion."
Chervonnaya said her findings thus far echo those of a former Soviet general who in 1992 quoted KGB secret police files as saying Hiss was not a Soviet spy. But she said that was based on one document, whereas her research draws extensively on now publicly accessible files in which intensive cross-checking would be likely to turn up clues if any existed.
"I reasoned that, provided Alger Hiss had been such an important and long-term Soviet asset, we should logically expect his name to slip at some stage into some of the files," she said.
None of the documents implicated Hiss, although names of other people to whom he was linked or who also were accused of being Soviet sympathizers do appear, among them Whittaker Chambers, a one-time Time magazine editor who later became Hiss's chief accuser.
A service of the Associated Press(AP)
NEW YORK - A Russian researcher, delving anew into once-secret Soviet files from the Cold War, says she has found no evidence that Alger Hiss spied or that Soviet intelligence had any particular interest in him.
In a speech to be delivered at a New York University symposium Thursday, Svetlana A. Chervonnaya says neither Hiss' name nor his alleged spy moniker, Ales, appears in any of dozens of documents from Soviet archives that she has reviewed since the early 1990s.
A copy of the speech was made available to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Calling her efforts "proving the negative," Chervonnaya says "a thorough combing of all the said archives combined has not produced a shred of evidence that Alger Hiss had ever been a member of the (American) Communist Party and was engaged in any behind-the-scenes interactions with the Soviets."
Hiss, a top State Department official who played a key role in founding the United Nations, was convicted of perjury in 1950 for lying about being a Soviet spy. He served nearly four years of a five-year federal prison sentence and died at age 92 in 1996.
Scholars and experts have debated for decades whether he was guilty or a victim of anti-communist fervor. The case was fraught with Cold War drama, involving a typewriter and a secret film cache in a Maryland pumpkin field.
Chervonnaya was one of several scholars, writers and historians scheduled to speak Thursday at a daylong symposium, "Alger Hiss and History," inaugurating New York University's new Center for the United States and the Cold War.
Others on the program included Hiss' son, Tony Hiss, and stepson, Timothy Hobson, who were expected to recall their family life with the man whose name became a synonym for Cold War espionage. Both have always maintained Hiss was innocent.
Soviet defectors, retired KGB agents and U.S. officials, some claiming to have documentary proof, have come down on both sides of what remains one of the Cold War's most enduring controversies.
In 1995-96, U.S. intelligence agencies released the Venona Files, a series of decoded Soviet diplomatic cables on espionage matters during World War II. They mentioned a U.S. contact called Ales, who already had been identified by a defecting Soviet agent as Hiss.
Tony Hiss, a New York-based writer, said he was encouraged by Chervonnaya's research.
"Her stating of the negative in all this is so strong that it almost becomes a positive," he said. "With her findings, plus new findings from FBI files, we envision reopening the whole field of investigation. After looking for so long like a played-out mine, it's now revealing new veins and whole new galleries of material, but it's far too soon to say this has reached any kind of positive conclusion."
Chervonnaya said her findings thus far echo those of a former Soviet general who in 1992 quoted KGB secret police files as saying Hiss was not a Soviet spy. But she said that was based on one document, whereas her research draws extensively on now publicly accessible files in which intensive cross-checking would be likely to turn up clues if any existed.
"I reasoned that, provided Alger Hiss had been such an important and long-term Soviet asset, we should logically expect his name to slip at some stage into some of the files," she said.
None of the documents implicated Hiss, although names of other people to whom he was linked or who also were accused of being Soviet sympathizers do appear, among them Whittaker Chambers, a one-time Time magazine editor who later became Hiss's chief accuser.
A service of the Associated Press(AP)
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
US agents visit Ethiopian secret jails
Anthony Mitchell | Nairobi, Kenya
04 April 2007 09:10
CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaeda militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by the Associated Press (AP).
Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.
The detainees include at least one United States citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.
Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighbouring Somalia late last year.
Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.
Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.
US government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.
The prisoners were never in US custody, said an FBI spokesperson, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said US agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI's counterterrorism work.
Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaeda.
But some US allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering US officials, said he sees the US as playing a guiding role in the operation.
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counterterrorism, went further. He said in an email that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in what he labelled a "decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo."
Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.
One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authourised to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 59km east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.
More than 100 of the detainees were originally arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all of them fled Somalia because of the intervention by Ethiopian troops accompanied by US special forces advisers, according to Kenyan police reports and US military officials.
Those people were then deported in clandestine pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were children.
In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian intelligence officers and secretly flown to Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.
A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardise his job. Those prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.
Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.
The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan al-Qaeda suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul Malik, was arrested and flown to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by US officials.
"No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia," said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to comment further.
A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives tell a different story.
"It was a nightmare from start to finish," Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was two-and-a-half months months in detention without charge.
She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a US agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili translator, said she was arrested while on a business trip to Kenya and had never been to Somalia or had any links to that country.
She said she was arrested January 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.
Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male US intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.
In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said the man identified himself as a US official, but not from the FBI. A CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the agency had no contact with Tuweni.
"We cried the whole time because we did not know what would happen. The whole thing was very scary," said Tuweni, who flew back to her family in Dubai a day after her release.
Exhausted
Tuweni's version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.
The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the following day. Benaouda had travelled to Somalia with her fianc é but fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother said.
"She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she's lost about 10kg," her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a website she set up to help secure her daughter's release.
"She was beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet."
The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information she had was being posted on the website. She declined to make her daughter available for an interview.
According to the website, a US specialist visited the location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or allowed access to lawyers.
The teen was also concerned about a seven-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the website said.
The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a 24-year-old US citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.
US diplomats on February 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities about Meshal's transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesperson for the State Department.
He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing on his status.
An FBI memo read to AP by a US official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was "disgusted" by Meshal's deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by US consular staff that the deportation was illegal.
"My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of 'deporting' US citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one," the official quoted the memo as saying.
Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police report of Meshal's arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who were trying to avoid capture.
Meshal's parents insist he is innocent and called on the US government to win his release.
"My son's only crime is that he's a Muslim, an American Muslim," his father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family's two-storey home on a cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife, Fifi.
"Clearly the US government interrogated him, and threatened him with torture according to the accounts that we've seen," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.
Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal's immediate release. "Our government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process," he said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because he is working for their release.
US officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not quoted by name because of the information's sensitivity, said Ethiopia had allowed access to US agencies, including the CIA and FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or deportation.
One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.
Kolko, the FBI spokesperson, also said the detainees were never in FBI or US government custody.
"While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted limited access to interview certain individuals of interest," he told AP.
"We do not support or participate in any system that illegally detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and children."
Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesperson, declined to discuss details of any such interviews. He said, however: "To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to."
One of the US officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to several dozen individuals -- fewer than 100 -- as part of its investigations.
The official said the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents' work. Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were carried out by members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network who were later given safe haven in Somalia.
The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any questioning that involved abuse.
It wasn't clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the agency's officers were working jointly with the FBI.
The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from South-East Asia to Europe.
Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President George Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at Guantánamo Bay.
One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantánamo.
Kenyan government spokesperson Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken and said his government was not aware that anyone would be
transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.
Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violated international law.
"Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating people fleeing a war zone," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch. "Kenya has secretly expelled people, the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and US security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado." – Sapa-AP
04 April 2007 09:10
CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaeda militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by the Associated Press (AP).
Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.
The detainees include at least one United States citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.
Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighbouring Somalia late last year.
Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.
Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.
US government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.
The prisoners were never in US custody, said an FBI spokesperson, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said US agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI's counterterrorism work.
Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaeda.
But some US allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering US officials, said he sees the US as playing a guiding role in the operation.
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counterterrorism, went further. He said in an email that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in what he labelled a "decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo."
Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.
One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authourised to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 59km east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.
More than 100 of the detainees were originally arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all of them fled Somalia because of the intervention by Ethiopian troops accompanied by US special forces advisers, according to Kenyan police reports and US military officials.
Those people were then deported in clandestine pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were children.
In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian intelligence officers and secretly flown to Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.
A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardise his job. Those prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.
Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.
The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan al-Qaeda suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul Malik, was arrested and flown to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by US officials.
"No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia," said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to comment further.
A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives tell a different story.
"It was a nightmare from start to finish," Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was two-and-a-half months months in detention without charge.
She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a US agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili translator, said she was arrested while on a business trip to Kenya and had never been to Somalia or had any links to that country.
She said she was arrested January 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.
Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male US intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.
In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said the man identified himself as a US official, but not from the FBI. A CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the agency had no contact with Tuweni.
"We cried the whole time because we did not know what would happen. The whole thing was very scary," said Tuweni, who flew back to her family in Dubai a day after her release.
Exhausted
Tuweni's version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.
The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the following day. Benaouda had travelled to Somalia with her fianc é but fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother said.
"She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she's lost about 10kg," her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a website she set up to help secure her daughter's release.
"She was beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet."
The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information she had was being posted on the website. She declined to make her daughter available for an interview.
According to the website, a US specialist visited the location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or allowed access to lawyers.
The teen was also concerned about a seven-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the website said.
The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a 24-year-old US citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.
US diplomats on February 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities about Meshal's transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesperson for the State Department.
He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing on his status.
An FBI memo read to AP by a US official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was "disgusted" by Meshal's deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by US consular staff that the deportation was illegal.
"My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of 'deporting' US citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one," the official quoted the memo as saying.
Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police report of Meshal's arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who were trying to avoid capture.
Meshal's parents insist he is innocent and called on the US government to win his release.
"My son's only crime is that he's a Muslim, an American Muslim," his father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family's two-storey home on a cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife, Fifi.
"Clearly the US government interrogated him, and threatened him with torture according to the accounts that we've seen," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.
Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal's immediate release. "Our government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process," he said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because he is working for their release.
US officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not quoted by name because of the information's sensitivity, said Ethiopia had allowed access to US agencies, including the CIA and FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or deportation.
One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.
Kolko, the FBI spokesperson, also said the detainees were never in FBI or US government custody.
"While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted limited access to interview certain individuals of interest," he told AP.
"We do not support or participate in any system that illegally detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and children."
Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesperson, declined to discuss details of any such interviews. He said, however: "To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to."
One of the US officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to several dozen individuals -- fewer than 100 -- as part of its investigations.
The official said the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents' work. Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were carried out by members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network who were later given safe haven in Somalia.
The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any questioning that involved abuse.
It wasn't clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the agency's officers were working jointly with the FBI.
The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from South-East Asia to Europe.
Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President George Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at Guantánamo Bay.
One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantánamo.
Kenyan government spokesperson Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken and said his government was not aware that anyone would be
transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.
Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violated international law.
"Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating people fleeing a war zone," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch. "Kenya has secretly expelled people, the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and US security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado." – Sapa-AP
Police Log Confirms FBI Role In Antiwar Protesors Arrests
Police Log Confirms FBI Role In Arrests
Group Detained, Questioned During D.C. War Protest
Group Detained, Questioned During D.C. War Protest
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007; B01
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.
But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.
The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.
FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.
The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.
Similar intelligence-gathering operations have been reported in New York, where a local police intelligence unit tried to infiltrate groups planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and in Colorado, where records surfaced showing that the FBI collected names and license plates of people protesting timber industry practices at a 2002 industry convention.
Several federal courts have ruled that intelligence agencies can monitor domestic groups only when there is reason to believe the group is engaged in criminal activity. Experts in police conduct say it is hard to imagine how asking questions about a person's political views would be appropriate in a trespassing case.
The Washington case centers on activities that took place April 20, 2002 -- a day of three cacophonic but generally orderly rallies that drew an estimated 75,000 people to the Mall. They included groups demonstrating against the prospect of war in Iraq, numerous supporters of the war, and Palestinians and others rallying for an end to U.S. aid to Israel and for peace in the Middle East.
The police logs for that day show how events developed: Secret Service agents had some concern about a group near the JBG Co. building's garage at 1275 K St. NW just after 5 p.m.
"Intell 53 advises that five members of the anarchist group have entered a parking garage," reads an entry from 5:12 p.m.
Ten minutes later, an entry notes the FBI's role.
"FBI, JOCC advises that an FBI intell team is responding to area of 13th and K/L Streets regarding a report of alleged anarchists in the vicinity," it reads. "There are reportedly 15 anarchists at 13th and K being interviewed. The subjects reportedly had a passkey to a building, but it's unknown how they came to be in possession of it."
The entry notes that D.C. police also were at the site. The protesters were detained at the garage for more than an hour, logs show, until police decided to arrest them for alleged unlawful entry.
D.C. police officials acknowledged in 2003 that the department had a secret intelligence unit that infiltrated and monitored protest groups in the Washington area, even if authorities had no evidence of criminal activity. The practice drew complaints from the D.C. Council, and police promised to develop guidelines.
The Partnership for Civil Justice, a civil liberties group, helped 11 protesters sue D.C. police in 2003 and the FBI last year, alleging that the questioning and detentions violated their civil rights.
In response to the suit, D.C. police at first said that no police intelligence officials were involved in the arrests. Last year, city officials revealed under additional questioning that five members of the police intelligence unit were present.
The plaintiffs argue that the newly released police logs make clear that the FBI, working hand in hand with local police, is engaged in a concerted effort to spy on and intimidate U.S. citizens who are lawfully exercising their free-speech rights. They contend that this is a national effort that abuses the FBI's broad counterterrorism powers and equates political speech with a risk to national security.
"It really is a secret police: This is an effort to suppress political dissent," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice. "If this was happening in another country that the U.S. was targeting, U.S. officials at the highest levels would be decrying this as a violation of human rights,"
FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weierman said the agency stands by its assertion in court filings that it maintains no records of the incident.
A law enforcement official familiar with joint operations during protests said it would be typical for the FBI to hand over records of questioning to the lead agency -- in this case, the D.C. police.
D.C. police said authorities only recently found the logs of police responses to that day's events. That discovery came after three years of police assurances in federal court that no such records or logs existed showing the FBI's role.
The records turned up on the eve of a deposition in which a police records technician was to be questioned about the existence of a routine log that his office is responsible for maintaining during any mass protest in Washington.
Sgt. Joe Gentile, a D.C. police spokesman, referred questions to the D.C. attorney general's office.
Traci Hughes, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, said the city's lawyers never intentionally misrepresent evidence to the court and come forward when discrepancies turn up.
"We have to rely upon information that the client gives us," Hughes said, adding that police turned over the log as soon as they learned it existed.
In November, as the Partnership for Civil Justice continued to try to get police records of the event, the FBI officials argued that the lawsuit against the agency should be dismissed. They said that the bureau had no relevant records and that if the FBI ever had any records, they had been disposed of when protesters' arrest records were expunged, or "they remain unidentifiable for other reasons." Justice Department attorneys noted, however, that questioning people in a criminal investigation was not improper.
In their lawsuit, the partnership and protesters said the FBI's political and religious questioning was "wholly unrelated to any legitimate activities of law enforcement" and violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment. They noted that some of the protesters had parked their van in the garage and were merely retrieving food.
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
FBI chief errs on Patriot Act provision
Scary, isn't it?
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By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 30, 7:22 PM ET
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By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 30, 7:22 PM ET
FBI Director Robert Mueller blames poor training and supervision for the bureau's Patriot Act abuses and promises new training programs. He might want to sign up for the first class himself.
Mueller misstated a key provision of the act in appealing to Congress this week for new authority that was actually granted last year.
"I think he was using old talking points," joked Georgetown law professor Viet Dinh, who drafted the original Patriot Act in 2001 while serving in the Justice Department.
The director's gaffe came during a high-stakes moment for the FBI and for him.
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine found 48 violations of law or rules during 2003-2005 in the bureau's use of documents known as national security letters to acquire telephone, e-mail and financial records about Americans and foreigners without a judge's approval.
Fine estimated there could be 3,000 more such violations among the more than 143,000 requests for information during that period.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Mueller labored to persuade skeptical senators that they didn't need to reduce the bureau's authority under the Patriot Act to fix the problems.
He emphasized that the inspector general found no intentional violations but instead attributed them to "mistakes, carelessness, confusion, sloppiness, lack of training, lack of adequate guidance and lack of adequate oversight."
Mueller assured senators he could curb the violations by providing better training and supervision, among other steps. And he shouldered some blame himself, particularly for not instituting compliance audits to be sure proper procedures were being followed.
Then Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., asked him if it would be useful to adopt some procedures used for issuing administrative subpoenas, which agents can use to demand records in health care fraud or drug diversion cases without prior judicial approval.
"I would give up NSLs for administrative subpoenas," Mueller responded. "I say that because, in the regime of administrative subpoenas, there is generally opportunity for the recipient to contest it in court, on a variety of reasons. But there also is the opportunity for the government to enforce it in court. We do not have an enforcement mechanism for national security letters."
But the reauthorization of the Patriot Act a year ago provided just such an enforcement mechanism. It said that if a company refused to deliver the requested records, the Justice Department could get a federal court order requiring compliance and contempt of court penalties for further resistance.
"He misspoke," said FBI spokesman John Miller. "He was operating on the standard that existed before the renewal where the enforcement mechanism was not clearly defined." Miller added that Mueller knows the law was changed, but "it just slipped his mind for that moment."
James Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group that wants prior judicial approval for the letters, thought the error undercut some of Mueller's case.
"The FBI director doesn't know the law that he's enforcing," Dempsey said. The inspector general and Mueller are arguing that this is a problem of poorly trained lower level agents, "and the guy responsible for implementing the law and the inspector general's recommendations still doesn't understand the law."
Mueller's statement would have been accurate before the Patriot Act renewal.
Although not widely known, before then, if the FBI sent a national security letter demanding records, the recipient was free to ignore the request. Not that that was a big problem.
"Only the librarians ever fought them," said Dempsey. "No bank or telephone company would say `no' when an agent comes in and says this is needed for a national security investigation."
The FBI dropped its request for records of a computer at a Connecticut library after the librarians resisted last year.
National security letters, first authorized in 1986, can be used to acquire e-mail, telephone and travel records and financial information, such as credit and bank transactions.
In 2001, the Patriot Act eliminated any requirement that the records belong to someone under suspicion. Now an innocent person's records can be obtained if FBI field agents consider them relevant to a terrorism or spying investigation.
___
On the Net:
Federal Bureau of Investigation: http://www.fbi.gov
Ex-Partner Of Giuliani May Face Charges
Kerik Counts Said To Include Deception During Cabinet Bid
By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 31, 2007; A01
Federal prosecutors have told Bernard B. Kerik, whose nomination as homeland security secretary in 2004 ended in scandal, that he is likely to be charged with several felonies, including tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wiretapping.
Kerik's indictment could set the stage for a courtroom battle that would draw attention to Kerik's extensive business and political dealings with former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who personally recommended him to President Bush for the Cabinet. Giuliani, the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination according to most polls, later called the recommendation a mistake.
Kerik rose from being a warden and police detective to become Giuliani's campaign security adviser, corrections chief, police commissioner and eventual partner in Giuliani-Kerik, a security arm of Giuliani Partners, which Giuliani established after leaving office in 2001. Kerik resigned his positions in Giuliani's firm after he was nominated to the homeland security job.
The former mayor is not in any legal jeopardy, according to legal sources directly familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is ongoing. He and his consulting firm have cooperated in the FBI's long-running investigation of Kerik.
During a recent meeting, federal prosecutors told Kerik's attorneys that they are preparing to charge Kerik with filing false information to the government when Bush nominated him to the Cabinet, according to the legal sources.
Prosecutors are also prepared to charge Kerik with violating federal tax laws, alleging that he did not declare on his tax returns gifts he received while serving as New York's corrections commissioner, including costly renovations to an apartment he had bought, the sources said. The FBI is investigating loans Kerik received while he was in private business with Giuliani, the sources said, as well as information Kerik had omitted from a mortgage application.
Kerik turned down last month an offer to plead guilty to federal charges that would have required him to serve prison time. His attorney, Kenneth Breen, said in an interview that his client had done nothing wrong.
"He's not going to plead to something that he didn't do," Breen said.
The case against Kerik that federal prosecutors are preparing could generate uncomfortable political attention for Giuliani because it focuses on Kerik's activities while the two men were in government together and were jointly running Giuliani-Kerik, which was paid millions of dollars for advising upstart companies, doing federal work and consulting with clients overseas.
Even as Giuliani prepared to announce his presidential bid, his political team had identified as a political liability the man who had stood stoically by the mayor's side after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, according to a strategy memo that surfaced in January.
Kerik's legal troubles could damage the law-and-order image that is the bedrock of Giuliani's campaign, said Republican political consultant Nelson Warfield, who is not aligned with any 2008 candidate. "Kerik has potential to undermine his image as a competent leader and someone best fit to fight terrorism," Warfield said. "Either he had fundamentally bad information about Kerik, or he was reckless in not knowing enough about a man who was that close to him."
Last night, Giuliani's office declined to comment on Kerik, instead referring a reporter to remarks the former mayor made earlier this week in Teaneck, N.J. "I hope, when people evaluate me, they evaluate the things that I think I did that were wrong and that were mistakes and the things that I did that were right, and I think the public record has been one largely of great success," Giuliani said then.
In addition to charges involving false information and tax law, the U.S. attorney's office in New York City is also threatening to charge Kerik with conspiracy to commit illegal wiretapping in his dealings with the 2006 GOP candidate for New York attorney general, Jeanine F. Pirro, the sources said.
After Kerik left the Giuliani firm, Kerik arranged for two off-duty Giuliani firm employees to conduct surveillance on Pirro's husband. Pirro and Kerik also discussed bugging a boat where Pirro suspected her husband was having an extramarital affair. Kerik was heard on a wiretap telling Pirro that he did not want to do the bugging because it was illegal.
About a year earlier, Pirro, then the Westchester County district attorney, ordered the A&P supermarket chain to hire the Giuliani-Kerik security firm as part of a settlement agreement in a case involving underage alcohol sales. The security firm was ultimately paid $43,000, according to a knowledgeable source who spoke about the terms of the contract on the condition of anonymity.
Kerik's legal team has signaled its plan to fight any federal indictment, initiating an internal appeal to Justice Department officials about the possible tax charges -- a move that could delay any indictment for at least several weeks, the legal sources said.
Giuliani and Kerik first met in 1990 at a dinner for a fallen police officer, while Kerik was a narcotics detective. Three years later, Giuliani asked Kerik to be his driver and his mayoral campaign's advance man. After Giuliani was elected, he tapped Kerik to advise his corrections commissioner. Within a year, Kerik had become the commissioner, and his performance helped him become the city's top police official.
Kerik met Bush in the rubble of the World Trade Center. In 2003, he was dispatched by the Bush administration to Iraq to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was helping train and organize a new Iraqi police force. His work in Iraq won personal accolades from the president.
After Bush was reelected, he nominated Kerik to be the nation's second secretary of homeland security.
But a week after his nomination, Kerik was forced to withdraw his name from consideration. The stated reason was his failure to pay Social Security taxes for a nanny. But other issues had also surfaced, including favors he did for romantic partners -- he once dispatched a homicide detective to find his girlfriend's lost cellphone -- and more serious legal concerns.
Within months, Kerik faced New York state charges -- to which he later pleaded guilty -- that he accepted nearly $200,000 in gifts while a public official -- including more than $165,000 spent on renovations to his apartment. The money came from companies affiliated with a New Jersey outfit that federal authorities and state gambling regulators had linked to organized crime.
In the fall of 2005, Kerik asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions before a New Jersey gaming regulatory body about his relationship to the people involved in the apartment renovations.
The contract with A&P was one of many deals -- some much more lucrative -- that the Giuliani-Kerik firm arranged using the partners' extensive political connections. The work included a Justice Department contract and multimillion-dollar consulting arrangements with business clients in the technology and security sectors worldwide.
In some cases, Giuliani and Kerik simultaneously advised a private company and the federal agency whose actions could affect it. Giuliani's firm, for instance, was hired by Purdue Pharma to help figure out how to keep sales of its popular painkiller OxyContin from being restricted by the government; street dealers were crushing and converting it into a powerful narcotic offering an instant high. Kerik was personally named to oversee security improvements at a New Jersey manufacturing plant.
At the same time, the Justice Department paid Giuliani-Kerik $1.1 million to conduct a management review of the organized-crime drug task force, whose responsibilities included stemming illegal use of OxyContin.
Likewise, Giuliani, Kerik and other firm partners were hired by cellphone carrier Nextel to win Federal Communications Commission approval for a new, emergency-only wireless spectrum for first responders.
The idea was to solve one problem for Nextel -- it had long been subject to complaints that its wireless signal sometimes interfered with the communications channels used by police, fire and rescue officials -- while creating an even stronger business opportunity for the cellular carrier.
At the same time, Giuliani's firm was brought in by the FCC to participate in a panel that was advising the agency in its efforts to address the future needs of a police, fire and rescue communications system in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
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