Bush/Cheney Still Lie with Abandon

consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry
April 6, 2007

What makes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney such extraordinary threats to the future of American democracy is their readiness to tell half-truths and outright lies consistently without any apparent fear of accountability.

While other politicians might spin some facts in a policy debate or tell a fib about a personal indiscretion, President Bush and Vice President Cheney act as if they have the power and the right to manufacture reality itself, often on matters of grave significance that bear on war and peace or the future of the nation.

Even in the face of growing public skepticism, Bush and Cheney continue to invent new lies and retell old ones, seemingly with the goal of at least keeping their gullible right-wing “base” behind the faux reality depicted on Fox News, the Rush Limbaugh radio show and other right-wing media outlets.

So, on April 5, Cheney showed no hesitancy in telling Limbaugh’s listeners both an old canard about how Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in league with al-Qaeda terrorists and a new one about how a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.”

Cheney surely knows that U.S. intelligence analysts have reached the opposite conclusions on both points – that there was no operational relationship between Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda; that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was based in a section of northern Iraq outside Hussein’s control; and that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been a boon to al-Qaeda that the terrorist group wants to extend, not end.

As one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants, known as “Atiyah,” wrote two years ago, “prolonging the war is in our interest.” The letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, and obtained by U.S. intelligence after Zarqawi’s death in June 2006, urged that Zarqawi’s jihadists in Iraq show patience and restraint in deepening their ties to Iraqi Sunni insurgents.

[To read the “prolonging the war” passage from the Atiyah letter at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, click here and then scroll down to the bottom of page 16 and the top of page 17.]

Other intelligence information has revealed that in 2004-05, al-Qaeda’s situation both in Iraq and along the Pakistani-Afghan border was precarious, with their hopes tied to a continuation of Bush’s blunderbuss strategies in order to deepen alienation between the Muslim world and the West. Al-Qaeda leaders feared that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would cause many young recruits to put down their guns and go home. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]

In late October 2004, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that bin Laden released a pre-election video with the intent of helping Bush gain a second term so his policies would continue. Bin Laden devoted most of his harangue to denouncing Bush in what looked like a Brer Rabbit ploy of “Don’t throw me in the briar patch” – when that was exactly where he wanted to go.

After bin Laden’s video dominated the news on the Friday before Election 2004, a meeting of senior CIA analysts began with deputy CIA director John McLaughlin observing that “bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President,” according to Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine, which relies heavily on CIA insiders.

“Certainly,” CIA deputy associate director for intelligence Jami Miscik said, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years,” according to Suskind’s account of the meeting.

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. “An ocean of hard truths before them – such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected – remained untouched,” Suskind wrote.

If helping Bush was bin Laden’s intent, the strategy appeared to work. According to two last-minute polls, Bush moved from a virtual dead heat with Sen. John Kerry to about a five percentage point lead and hung on to win by an official margin of less than three points. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush Agrees Bin Laden Helped in ‘04”]

Intelligence Consensus

In April 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, formalized some of the analysis about the benefit of the Iraq War to Islamic terrorism. The Iraq War had become a “cause celebre” that was “cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement,” the NIE said.

So, Cheney seems to have the intelligence upside down. The ones playing into al-Qaeda’s hands are those who favor an open-ended conflict in Iraq, not those who want to bring the war to a prompt conclusion.

Similarly, Cheney continues to spread the false claim that Zarqawi’s pre-war presence in Iraq indicated an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein’s regime. “This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq” before the invasion, Cheney told Limbaugh’s listeners.

But the facts on Zarqawi have long since been established. Before the invasion, the Jordanian terrorist – who had not yet allied himself with al-Qaeda – was operating in Iraq’s northern territory where he was protected by the U.S.-British “no-fly zone” that prevented Hussein from launching military offensives.

Though the Bush administration has made much of Zarqawi slipping into Baghdad in 2002 to receive some medical treatment, U.S. intelligence has concluded that Hussein’s government did not know where Zarqawi was and indeed launched a manhunt aimed at arresting him.

“The [Hussein] regime did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” concluded a CIA report dated Oct. 25, 2005.

A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee said Zarqawi used an alias while getting medical treatment and evaded capture by the Iraq Intelligence Service, which created a “special committee” to track him down.

Further, the Senate panel concluded that “no postwar information indicates that Iraq intended to use al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group to strike the United States homeland before or during” the U.S. invasion.

The Senate report found, too, that Hussein’s regime had not developed any operational links to al-Qaeda. As explained by captured Iraqi officials after the invasion, the several contacts between Baghdad and al-Qaeda appeared to have been initiated by al-Qaeda and didn’t lead to any cooperation from Iraq.

Hussein was determined to keep the radical fundamentalist bin Laden at arm’s length, according to these accounts. Senior Iraq Intelligence Service official Faruq Hijazi told American debriefers that he was picked by Hussein to meet with bin Laden in 1995 because Hijazi was secular and unsympathetic to bin Laden’s fundamentalist message.

Hussein also instructed Hijazi “only to listen” and promise nothing. Bin Laden requested permission to open an office in Iraq, to receive Chinese sea mines, and to obtain military training – all of which Hussein rejected, Hijazi said, according to the Senate report.

Other al-Qaeda overtures met similar rebuffs from Hussein who disliked bin Laden, in part, because the Saudi exile had called Hussein an “unbeliever,” according to a senior Iraqi official interviewed after the invasion. Hussein also ordered another al-Qaeda operative, who snuck into Iraq, to be apprehended and expelled.

Even before the U.S.-led invasion – when the Bush administration was hyping Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda – then-CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “there are several reported suggestions by al-Qa’ida to Iraq about joint terrorist ventures, but in no case can we establish that Iraq accepted or followed up on these suggestions.”

Despite this evidence and a broad consensus within the U.S. intelligence community, Cheney keeps alive his discredited claims about a pre-war al-Qaeda role under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Possibly, the Vice President believes that the right-wing media echo chamber is so influential that the sheer repetition of these falsehoods can solidify support for the administration’s position regardless of the facts.

Bush’s Lies

Bush has operated with similar audacity in depicting a “history” of the Iraq War that is mythical, not factual. For instance, just four months after the invasion, Bush altered the pre-war reality in stating that he had no choice but to invade because Saddam Hussein had barred United Nations weapons inspectors.

“We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in,” Bush said at the end of a brief press conference at the White House on July 14, 2003. “After a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Yet, as everyone who watched the run-up to war knew, Hussein did let U.N. inspectors in to scour the countryside. Indeed, in early March 2003, U.N. inspectors were requesting more time for their work and noting that the Iraqis finally were filling in details about how they had destroyed earlier stockpiles of weapons. But Bush cut the inspections short and launched his invasion.

Then, months later, when U.S. forces also were unable to locate the suspected weapons of mass destruction, Bush simply altered the historical facts with his assertion that Hussein “chose war” by rejecting U.N. inspections.

In those heady days of Bush’s stratospheric poll numbers, no one in the major U.S. news media dared to challenge Bush’s falsehoods.

Although Bush’s poll numbers have fallen precipitously since then, U.S. journalists remain hesitant to question Bush’s honesty now when he continues to revise recent history to fit his political needs.

Bush’s latest revisionist history relates to his claim that his “surge” of higher troop levels in Iraq represented the will of the military commanders and that politicians shouldn’t override battlefield judgments.

The American people “don’t want politicians in Washington telling our generals how to fight a war,” Bush said at a press briefing on April 3, scolding congressional Democrats for seeking a gradual withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq.

But it was Bush in December and January who rebuffed the judgment of the Pentagon brass and U.S. field commanders when they opposed his plan for expanding the size of the U.S. military contingent in Iraq.

During a classified briefing at the Pentagon in December, Bush reportedly made clear to the brass that he had no interest in finding a way out of Iraq. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, described Bush’s message as “What I want to hear for you is how we’re going to win, not how we’re going to leave.”

Bush began warming to a “surge” strategy that was pushed by neoconservative scholar Frederick Kagan and Bush’s hard-line White House strategists. That was countered by a Pentagon leak revealing that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed an escalation because they doubted it could achieve any lasting strategic objective.

Bush, who has always insisted that he listens to his generals on military matters such as troop levels, reacted to their resistance to the “surge” with a purge. He pushed out Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, the two top field commanders, and promoted other officers who would bend to White House political demands.

In other words, Bush claiming he was abiding by his commanders’ advice on the “surge” would be like Richard Nixon saying he was only following the will of the Justice Department in firing Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”

To get Cox fired, Nixon first had to accept the resignations of the Attorney General and the deputy attorney general, before reaching the third-ranking official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who removed Cox.

But not even Nixon would have dared invert factual reality so brazenly. Nixon had to confront a far more aggressive press corps than Bush does. Plus, Nixon couldn’t turn as readily to an ideologically compliant right-wing news media, which has been lavishly constructed in the past three decades partly in response to Nixon’s Watergate debacle. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Bush and Cheney apparently believe that today’s friendlier media environment still lets them do or say almost anything they want. But a democratic Republic cannot long endure when leaders substitute lies for truth.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

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Accountability and the Renegade Executive

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Scott Horton

Normally, I begin my remarks by saying "Ladies and Gentlemen." But here I'm not sure that's quite the right salutation. On my way down from New York to Charlotte to Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi today, passing over the freshly verdant Appalachians and then down the valley of the Tennessee River to the Mississippi Delta, I read the first chapters of William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary - it takes placed in a bucolic college down named Jefferson - a town which is remarkably like this one. And there towards the end of Chapter III, I ran across this scrap:

"The Virginia gentleman… told us at supper that night about how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman. Put a beetle in alcohol, and you have a scarab; put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you have a gentleman -"

So, as it's still too early in the evening to speak of "gentlemen" here in Mississippi, I'll just say "friends."

America today is in the grips of a scandal surrounding the machinery of justice, but it is a scandal being played out on more fronts than the mass media seems to realize. Indeed, in the end it turns on the concept of justice, not just about the bureaucracy that supposedly administers it.

Eight US attorneys were dismissed by Alberto Gonzales on prodding from Karl Rove. We now know the fateful decision was taken on December 7 (an ironic day, as FDR said, "a day that will live in infamy"). As Gonzales and his deputies Paul J. McNulty and William Moschella trotted out various and contradictory after-the-fact rationalizations for this decision, it has become increasingly clear that the dismissals were politically inspired. Indeed, in the testimony that he has submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee within the last two hours, Gonzales' chief of staff acknowledges as much.

The prosecutors selected for discharge come from "battleground states" which will be key to the 2008 presidential election: New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Washington and Arkansas. This is no coincidence. Shortly after the 2006 Congressional election, Karl Rove, licking his wounds over a serious defeat, indicated in a speech to Republican lawyers that the public perception of scandal surrounding GOP law-makers was key to that loss. Rove promised he would do something about it. Within a few days, a move to cashier these prosecutors was underway. It is tied to a plan to use their offices to go after Democrats, whether a basis existed or not, and to pursue a voter suppression program focused on prospective Democrats. In other words, it's pure politics. Not high politics in the sense that Aristotle uses the term. But the crude gutter politics of the partisan hack. This sort of politics is not the exclusive province of one party. But over the last years, one party has exercised a monopoly on political power, and this appears to have led to a particularly virulent strain of political hackery.

Standing alone, this incident would be cause for grave concern. But it's just one aspect of a far broader crisis in which our country is enmeshed. The crisis has its start in the decision to introduce torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment - in contravention of 230 years of US military tradition, stretching back to George Washington's order after the battle of Trenton. Gonzales had a key role in this process as well, backed up by Cheney's chief-of-staff, David Addington and the now ever-present John Yoo. They tell us that they did this to insure that the president, as commander-in-chief, would have all the tools at his disposal that he might need to fight a war against terror. But if we strip the varnish off that, there are unmistakably unsavory elements underneath: one is a recognition that torture is a crime, and the second is a desire to enlist it into the president's arsenal notwithstanding what the law says.

A former president of the Argentine bar, with whom I spoke two years ago, told me that his experience with torture in Argentina's "Dirty War" under a military dictatorship had been very clear. The dictator wanted torture as a talisman. It would show that the military rulers were above the law - subject to none of the restraints that marked the rule-of-law state. No one was under the illusion that torture techniques would actually get any useful intelligence. On the other hand, it would instill fear, and that was useful. He spoke to me with some conviction: the legal profession must oppose the introduction of torture, he said. In the end you will learn this is not about interrogation practices, it is about dictatorship, about tyranny. The experience of Argentina and Chile backs him up. Is the experience of America different? America is not governed by a military junta, of course. Nor can the brutality of technique and number of victims of the "Dirty War" yet be compared with the dark underside of the war on terror. But it is striking that most of the abusive techniques used by the Argentine junta were adopted and introduced in what President Bush has called the "program." This includes waterboarding, which the Argentinians called el submarino, the cold cell (or hypothermia), long-time standing and sleep deprivation in excess of two days. Nevertheless, this is a question we all should ponder.

The Argentine lawyer's remarks reminded me immediately of what Gonzales wrote in a memorandum on January 25, 2002 - he speculated that the newly fashioned plans for the war on terror might lead future prosecutors to consider war crimes charges. Gonzales suggested that if Bush declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, it would be more difficult for a prosecutor to go after the authors of these new policies.

It's chilling to consider that this was written by a man destined to serve as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. But it explains, perhaps, why Bush gave Gonzales the nick name "Fredo" - the name of the younger, loyal, but mentally less adept son of the Godfather crime family, the Corleones.

It started with torture but it moved swiftly beyond this. For instance, to a decision to introduce a system of torture-by-proxy through extraordinary rendition. Gonzales also gave this program, which has its origins back in an anti-drug kingpin program launched by Clinton, the green light. And now more than thirty American public servants - CIA officers and military for the most part - stand under indictment in Italy and Germany with counts of assault, kidnapping and other felonies; these are all dedicated public servants performing an official program. The blame for what happened doesn't rest with them, or at least not entirely. It rests with the people who formed the policies that they implemented. Our reputation around the world is a tatters. And nations who want to cooperate with us in a war against terror, and whose support the United States badly needs, repeatedly find they can't do so. If they do, they will be collaborating with a nation that tortures, and they aren't prepared to sacrifice their values the way the Bush administration has sacrificed ours.

Recently a friend of mine who works with the Afghan Government shared with me some intelligence the Afghans had gathered from a young man apprehended in connection with an attack using an improvised explosive device. The man had fled as a refugee to Pakistan. There he was seized by the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (a close collaborator of the CIA) and told that unless he participated in a planned bombing attack on NATO forces in the Afghan south, the Pakistanis would turn him over to the Americans, he would be taken to Guantánamo and tortured there for years on end. He agreed to participate. Interestingly he was not the only young Afghan to be captured with an account like this. Is the account true? The Afghans are convinced it is, and US intelligence apparently has credited it as well. So there you have it: come full circle. The image of Gitmo used to recruit people to perform acts of terror against us.

Gonzales also gave the go-ahead for surveillance that violated FISA, a federal criminal statute. Indeed, Newsweek gave us a fascinating insider's account of how all this went down at Justice. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft was out in the hospital for a gallbladder operation. James Comey, his deputy, said "no," he couldn't possibly authorize this. Neither, apparently, would Jack Goldsmith, the man responsible for the Attorney General's legal opinions. Gonzales had to find alternative means to get this through. And in short order Ashcroft, Comey and Goldsmith were gone from Justice and Gonzales arrived with a new team of enablers. Gonzales gave evasive or false testimony about much of this during the confirmation process, which earned him a distinction that is, as far as I know, unprecedented for a US attorney general. He enjoys such a reputation for "truthiness" (as Stephen Colbert calls it, namely something which has the outward appearance of truth, but is, in fact, a lie) that he is not permitted to speak before the Judiciary Committee without being formally sworn in. And this last weekend, three senior Judiciary Committee Republicans - Specter, Graham and Hagel, were openly discussing Gonzales' truthiness problems on talk shows.

Where once our nation had the debate of Jeffersons, Madisons, Websters and Clays, now we have the Beltway punditry - the Fred Hiatts, Chris Matthews and Norah O'Donnells - a vacuous chattering class which is the Muzak of our political discourse. They tell us that all of these scandals - the cashiering of US attorneys, the surveillance, the introduction of torture and torture-by-proxy - this is all just politics. Don't get yourself worked up. In fact, pay no attention. Time to move on.

Don't believe them. This is about the country we live in and the country we will pass to posterity. It's about fidelity to the values on which this country was founded. It is about the rule of law and accountability. Our Founding Fathers had faith in mankind, but also a very real sense of man's corruptibility. "If men were angels," James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, then we should have no need of government. But men are no angels, and politicians may in fact be closer to what Kant called a race of devils. The genius of the tripartite system of checks and balances that Madison and the other Founding Fathers created was its use of the quest for power latent in so many of us (and especially in politicians) as a brake against itself.

But in the last six years this brake has been dismantled and removed. There has been a fundamental shift in the power structure - a sweeping reallocation of power from the Congress and Courts to the Executive. Much of this has occurred secretly, behind closed doors, as a sort of constitutional coup d'état.

It's telling that the current scandal began with a secret change in the Patriot Act. Unbeknownst to those who should have run the process, including Senator Specter, then the chair of the Judiciary Committee, a provision was slipped in at the last minute giving the Attorney General a direct power of appointment of US Attorneys, skirting the advice and consent of the Senate. This provision was smuggled into the bill by a young legislative assistant who was promptly appointed, at 34 years of age, as the US Attorney in Utah. He was a friend of Kyle P. Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff and the man who stage-managed the removal of the eight US attorneys. Sampson, who is going to become a household name in the next few days, has a nickname, "Little Rove," both for his similarity to and friendship with Karl Rove. But the point here is that the Senate should have exercised a brake by looking into the entire process, and through legislative legerdemain that was stopped.

Bismarck famously said that with legislation, like with sausage, it was perhaps best not to know what went into it. But that reflects the Bismarckian democracy, which in the end, wasn't much democracy at all. As for our process, we have Madison's admonitions not to legislate in secret, a charge that Congress has rarely lived up to, but has miserably breached these last few years.

This week at colleges and law schools around the country, there is a special focus on what is underway at Guantánamo, or Gitmo as my Navy friends call it. Newspapers today are reporting on the first hearings held in the military commissions process. Last weekend, the New York Times informed us that in his first weeks in office Bob Gates, the man who replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in December, put together a comprehensive plan to shut down the Gitmo detention centers and move the entire operation to the United States. This initiative was immediately supported by Condoleezza Rice. Gates and Rice argued that the name "Guantánamo" was now held in such disrepute around the world that no one would ever associate what transpired there with any notion of justice. Gates, it seems, thought that when Bush said he wanted to shut down Gitmo, he really meant it. But he quickly learned that it's dangerous to assume Bush means what he says, especially when he's talking about Gitmo and the war on terror. Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney stepped in very quickly to quash the Gates plan. Gonzales said that bringing the detainees to the US could have unpleasant legal consequences for the administration.

Indeed it would. It would greatly up the chances that the detainees would be able to challenge their treatment in a federal court, before real judges, who would apply real law - starting with the US Constitution and continuing on to the Geneva Conventions. And it would open the prospect that the American people would learn, perhaps in some detail, exactly what was done to those detainees. Rumsfeld called them the "worst of the worst" but we know thanks to a Seton Hall study that roughly 80% of them were picked up by Afghan and Pakistani bounty hunters, and, in the assessment of both FBI and CIA teams that initially screened them, had no business being there. Gates and Rice were correct when they offered that no one would associate these proceedings with justice. That's because they bear no resemblance to justice, as it has traditionally been dispensed in US courts. Nor do they bear much resemblance to the high and honorable standards that have been established under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual on Courts-Martial. These proceedings are loaded from the outset. Defendants are not permitted counsel of their choosing, and defense counsel have been subjected to a torrent of abuse and mistreatment. Evidentiary rules are weighted in favor of the admission of coerced testimony, including torture-induced testimony, secret evidence, and evidence which cannot be confronted or properly crossexamined. A fair-minded judge might still get to a just result, but the rules the Pentagon dictated, and the shameful provisions the Congress wrote, will make it perilously difficult to get there.

Dwight David Eisenhower, the last of our nation's great warrior presidents, said "Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace." He reflected the received wisdom of the nation that won World War II and then turned with swift justice to the work of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. Through this process, America demonstrated it had a powerful thirst for justice. It vindicated America's cause in the war. It exorcised the demon of fascism which had laid hold of the heart of Europe. And it produced a new world in which the vanquished foes, Germany, Italy and Japan, emerged as America's allies for the coming generations. Eisenhower's faith in the power of justice, pursued swiftly and with a firm sense of fairness, was borne out. Wielded effectively, justice is indeed among the most potent tools in our arsenal.

And this provides reason for us to ask: Why is this administration afraid of justice the way our fathers and their fathers understood it? Why do we wait five and a half years after 9/11 to witness the first sessions of the military commissions? And why do we then witness a confused tumult which embarrasses us in the eyes of the entire world, just as Gates suggested it would?

In the end the turn against traditions and values has been about the aggrandizement of power in the executive. It has been about arrogant avoidance of accountability. And it has been about that principle that lies most at the heart of the development of the Anglo-American legal tradition, namely that no man is above the law, not even the king or the man who would be king. As with so many things of recent times, it resonates of England in the seventeenth century, and reminds us of the famous words uttered by Thomas Fuller: "Be ye ever so high, still the law is above thee." But the mantra of the current administration is to frustrate all efforts to hold it to account, to grant itself immunity for its crimes, to strip courts of jurisdiction, including even the great writ. On each of these points, the conduct of the Bush presidency mirrors that of Charles I, the monarch whose conduct provoked Fuller's statement.

Americans have inherited a great legacy, one that embraces the worth and dignity of all human beings, the promise of equal justice for all before the law, a principle of limited, carefully divided and counter-posed governmental powers, with full accountability to a people in whom sovereignty rests. The answer to our current problems lies in our past, and in fidelity to the best that America has brought forth. But it requires citizens to be alert and to see what passes before them. And it requires us to take our heritage seriously.


Remarks delivered at the University of Mississippi School of Law, Oxford, MS, Mar. 28, 2007
Posted 1:22 AM by Scott Horton [link]

There's no watchdog for secret budgets

A deal between SOCom and eTreppid raises questions, but is hard to track.

By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
Published March 9, 2007
Breaking News Video

TAMPA - It all began with an anonymous letter to the St. Petersburg Times in late 2005.

The four-page missive said the leader of U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base gave preferential treatment to a defense contractor.

This and other allegations from people claiming to work at SOCom were later dismissed by investigators. But that did not end talk about the contractor, eTreppid Technologies of Reno, Nev.

How eTreppid won a no-bid, $30-million contract in 2004 for secret software provides a glimpse into the foggy world of the Pentagon's "black budget," highly classified defense spending that gets little public scrutiny.

To many budget watchers, the story also raised questions about congressional earmarks - items inserted into the federal budget, often to reward lawmakers' supporters.

"It's an atrocious process," said Winslow Wheeler at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan think tank on defense issues.

ETreppid was in the news in November when the Wall Street Journal revealed that former Rep. Jim Gibbons, a Nevada Republican who is now the state's governor, accepted gifts from eTreppid's founder, Warren Trepp, and helped the company get government work.

Gibbons denied any "quid pro quo," but questions have persisted about the SOCom contract and others awarded to eTreppid, including deals with the Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency.

"The sad thing with the 'black budget' is that you don't know how the military's budgeting process works," said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a public interest group in Washington, D.C. "We're operating under total secrecy with some of these things."

Anonymous letter

The news that eTreppid had won the SOCom contract in 2004 was revealed only in vague terms.

The contract, according to the Department of Defense, was for "compression and automatic target recognition software." Additional detail is classified.

The story is further obscured by the reluctance of so many of the players to comment. Gibbons' staff, Trepp and one of Trepp's defense lobbyists, former Largo resident Letitia H. White, did not return calls.

The Times got the anonymous letter in October 2005. It was later received by two Florida congressmen - Rep. C.W. Bill Young and Sen. Bill Nelson - and Pentagon investigators.

The letter said SOCom's commander, Army Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, gave eTreppid favored treatment out of line with established procedure. SOCom, which oversees the nation's elite commandos, denied the allegation.

ETreppid, the letter said, had spent $12-million but had not delivered a usable product.

"This is an example of waste and fraud," the letter said. Though the contract was for up to $30-million, SOCom says eTreppid was paid only $9.6-million.

At the time, Nelson said he was suspicious of "rambling anonymous letters." And nearly a year later, Pentagon investigators cleared Brown.

That might have ended the scrutiny over eTreppid but for the front-page article in the Journal.

'Wined and dined'

Trepp "wined and dined" friends and business partners during a weeklong Caribbean cruise in 2005, the Journal reported in November.

Among his guests: longtime friend Jim Gibbons.

Gibbons and his wife flew home from the cruise on a chartered aircraft paid for by Trepp. These gifts were not initially reported by Gibbons, which may have violated federal ethics rules.

Gibbons, a former combat pilot who served on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said he thought gifts from friends were exempt.

He also said he helped pay for the trip, though the Journal reported it was not enough to cover its cost.

In an e-mail exchange just before the cruise, the Journal reported, Trepp's wife told her husband, "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn," referring to Gibbons and his wife.

The Journal said Trepp quickly responded, "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!"

Trepp questions the authenticity of the e-mails.

Companies and partnerships tied to Trepp had given nearly $90,000 to Gibbons' gubernatorial campaign, the Journal reported. And court papers filed by a former business partner now locked in a lawsuit with Trepp accused Gibbons of accepting $100,000 in cash and casino chips, which Gibbons denies.

Gibbons acknowledged that he helped open doors for eTreppid.

"My connection was to get people to evaluate the technology," he told the Journal.

Trepp, the Journal reported, said: "If a member of Congress becomes aware of a technology they believe will be beneficial to the country, don't they have a duty to bring it to the attention of the appropriate governmental agencies?"

In a statement to the St. Petersburg Times, SOCom denied that anyone used influence to win the contract and said eTreppid, like many vendors, simply contacted the command about its products. The company no longer does work for SOCom.

SOCom officials said the contract was no-bid because no other company offered a similar product.

ETreppid provided several products as part of its deal (exactly how many is classified). "Only one product worked as advertised," said Lt. Cmdr. Marc Boyd, a SOCom spokesman.

Now the FBI is investigating Gibbons and the eTreppid gifts, the Journal reported.

Oversight questions

The Pentagon's black budget has grown exponentially, doubling since 1995 in inflation-adjusted dollars to more than $30-billion in the current fiscal year.

"It's not debated and discussed like other policy issues," said Steve Kosiak, a researcher with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The oversight can't be as rigorous as other open programs."

Wheeler, at the Center for Defense Information, said the military rarely rejects the "free money."

"I have no clue whether eTreppid does important stuff well," he said. "And, frankly, neither does Gov. Gibbons because one thing that is studiously avoided (with earmarks) is an objective evaluation from an entity that has no vested interest."

William R. Levesque can be reached at levesque@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3436.

[Last modified March 9, 2007, 05:52:55]

Arabic edition of War Crimes Report published: English edition also here

Download Arabic edition here. - PDF

Download English edition here.-PDF

Please download, print and distribute these reports and forward these links.

A message from Sunny Miller, Traprock’s Executive Director:

“Some may be concerned that translating these realities into Arabic will increase hostilities. In fact people in Iraq know these things and our admitting to them and objecting to them with transparency can increase understanding. Most importantly, addressing these wrongs through legal and nonviolent action increases hope that one day soon the corporate plunder and military mayhem will end! Soldiers can return to their sworn duty to uphold the constitution, rather submit to illegal orders. In the wake of Martin Luther King’s birthday I have to speak truth to power. I urge you to print the War Crimes Report and take it with you. It’s our duty to all the children of this Earth. When we recognize reality, we can begin to change it. Veterans, parents, students, teachers, doctors, nurses, … all of us are needed to right these wrongs!”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JANUARY 17, 2006

CONTACTS: Nick Mottern, Director of Consumers for Peace
914.806.6179; nickmottern@earthlink.net
Karen Parker, President of Association of Humanitarian Lawyers
415.533.1066; ied@igc.org

“U.S. War Crimes in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability” - published on October 11, 2006 by ten organizations concurrently, has now been translated into Arabic. The report is now fully accessible by Iraqis and other Arabic speakers in the Middle East.

“We are making ‘U.S. War Crimes in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability’ available in Arabic because we want to increase its accessibilty to the people of Iraq so that they may have knowledge of the scope and illegality of certain U.S. conduct there,” said Nick Mottern, Director of ConsumersforPeace.org. “We hope that this will assist the Iraqi people in preventing further war crimes and in getting reparations for what has been done.”

We thank Dahr Jamail for coordinating the translation, which includes all references in his extensively researched report.

Adobe Reader for pdf files is installed on most computers, or available for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

The English language edition had been prepared by Consumers for Peace -
http://www.consumersforpeace.org - with the advice of Karen Parker, noted lawyer in human rights and humanitarian law. Ms. Parker is President of the San-Francisco-based Association of Humanitarian Lawyers and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the Los Angeles-based International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), an accredited non-governmental organization on the U.N. Secretary-General’s list.

Endorsements from the forward:
Howard Zinn, a historian, playwright, and social activist, is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he feels are outside of the political and economic establishment. He writes:

This report on the war crimes of the current administration is an invaluable resource, with a meticulous presentation of the evidence and an astute examination of international law.

Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence and three-time Noble Peace Prize nominee, has visited Iraq 28 times in the last 15 years. She writes:

“After spending four days in the fortified and secure Green Zone, in Iraq, during September ’06, former Secretary of State James Baker III assured that the investigative panel he led had not spent any time “wringing our hands over what mistakes might or might not have been created in the past.” (NYT, September 20, 2006). The “Consumers for Peace” report on war crimes committed in Iraq helps us understand our responsibility not to wring our hands but rather to demand accountability from elected representatives by delivering this report to them and to local media. How many people killed? How many families torn apart? How many homes destroyed? How many livelihoods gone? How many lives ruined? How many cities sacrificed? We bear responsibility to end the war in Iraq, insist on just reparations for suffering caused, and promote careful, legal scrutiny of the crimes committed. This report beckons all who read it to stop collaborating with illegal, immoral warmongers who recklessly afflict Iraq.”

Dahr Jamail, noted independent journalist who spent more than eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, writes the following about the report:

“I cannot endorse strongly enough this report prepared by Karen Parker regarding U.S. war crimes in Iraq. Having witnessed much of what is so well documented in this report, it is a clear and encompassing indictment of the Bush Administration for the war crimes they are directly responsible for in Iraq. Until evidence such as this begins to see the light of day in a court of law and the perpetrators brought to justice, the world remains unsafe and unstable from an administration determined to rule the world. After witnessing what they are capable of in Iraq, I have no doubt these people will not stop in their quest for world domination. Instead, they must be stopped. And the only way to do that is bring the guilty to justice. This document will help achieve that goal.”

Neil MacKay, multi-award winning Home Affairs and Investigations Editor of the Sunday Herald (Scotland), writes:

“What has happened in Iraq is a great sin and a great crime. The invasion and occupation have stained the concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty; and disgraced the good name of the people of both the United States of America and Great Britain. As a journalist who has investigated the roots of this war, and the on-going horror of what is happening in Iraq, I fully commend this report to readers. It is an important reminder of the blood which is on the hands of our leaders, and the shame that the governments of the UK and the USA have brought to the British and American people by perpetrating a criminal war in our name.”

Ann Wright, 29 year US Army veteran who retired as a Colonel and US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war in Iraq commented on the War Crimes Report:

“While in the US Army at Ft Bragg, NC, I taught to US military officers and non-commissioned officers the responsibilities of military forces under the Geneva Convention and the Law of Land Warfare, as well as the obligations of an Occupying Power.

The War Crimes Report is an extraordinarily comprehensive and important presentation of international law that governs the conduct of nations and their military forces. The Report documents the blatant violations of international and domestic law by the Bush administration and US military forces including the use of illegal military tactics and illegal weapons.

Because of a huge media failure in the United States, many Americans do not realize how many times the Bush administration has violated international law. But, the rest of the world knows very well the extent of these crimes.

As a retired military officer, I know that accountability is one of the foundation elements of the US military. The Bush administration has undercut the professionalism of our military forces by encouraging and condoning the violation of international and domestic war in treatment of detainees, torture and use of illegal tactics and weapons. For the sake of our own military we must demand accountability from civilian leaders, as well as our military forces. This report provides specific mechanisms for much-needed accountability of criminal behaviour by Bush administration policy makers and by US military forces.”

Charles Jenks, human rights attorney (1981), Past President of Traprock Peace Center (1998-2005) and Chair of its Advisory Board, and consultant to Consumers for Peace writes:
This war crimes report accurately and succinctly states the case that US officials in the Executive Branch and military have committed grievous war crimes in Iraq. Of course, this is not to say that US culpability stops at the Executive Branch and military. It was the US Congress that authorized the Bush Administration to go to war against Iraq and that has funded the war through every request made by the Executive Branch.

In addition to the fact that this was an illegal war to begin with, the war has been conducted in myriad ways that violate international humanitarian law, including the use of uranium munitions, chemical weapons (white phosphorus), cluster bombs, torture, the indiscriminate killing of civilians and laying waste to cities and the land.

No treatment of crimes, criminals or atrocities could completely describe the wrongs of this tragic conflict. This war crimes report strikes a balance. It manages to be concise at 37 pages, yet has sufficient scope, factual detail and exposition on the law to be useful in both considering the war crimes committed, and the grounds and theories of prosecution for those crimes. Further, it is a treasure trove of resources, with 120 notes and references.

Consumers for Peace
http://www.consumersforpeace.org

Feds' Creative Accounting

Posted on Fri, Dec. 15, 2006
Report: Federal deficit would be higher MARTIN CRUTSINGER Associated Press WASHINGTON - The federal deficit for 2006 would have been 81 percent higher than the $247.7 billion that was reported two months ago if the government had to use the same accounting methods as private companies. That was the finding Friday when the administratio n released a 166-page "Financial Report of the United States Government" for the 2006 budget year that ended on Sept. 30. The report, released by the Treasury Department and the president's Office of Management and Budget, found that under the accrual method of accounting, the deficit for 2006 would have totaled $449.5 billion, not the widely reported $247.7 billion incurred under the cash system of accounting. Under the accrual method, expenses are recorded when they are incurred rather than when they are paid. That tends to raise costs for liabilities such as pensions and health insurance. Ten years ago, Congress ordered the government to start issuing annual reports using the accrual method of accounting in an effort to show the finances in a way that was comparable with the private sector. In this year's report, as in every one that has been issued, Congress' auditing arm, the Government Accountability Office, said that it could not sign off on the books because of problems in the reporting. Comptroller General David M. Walker, the head of GAO, said in a letter included in the report that 53 percent of the government's total assets were included in agencies that could not be audited properly. These problems included what Walker described as "serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense," repeating criticism previous reports have made about the Pentagon's bookkeeping. The report, citing information from the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs, said that the shortfall in funding those two programs would total $44 trillion over the next 75 years. "This report shows we are making progress getting our fiscal house in order in the near term," White House Budget Director Rob Portman said in a statement. "But it also puts in stark terms the necessity of addressing the rapid increase in entitlement spending over time." ON THE NET Financial report: http://www.fms.treas.gov

It’s Not Just Bush: We’re Accountable Too

HEATHER WOKUSCH

Blaming everything on a handful of people at the top, no matter how destructive and abusive they've been, misses a critical point. Systems tend to self-perpetuate. Remove one player and the next comes in to ensure business as usual.

Remove Rumsfeld, a man who helped prop up Hussein in the 80's and skewed intelligence towards war, and who do you get? Robert Gates, a man who helped prop up Hussein in the 80's and skewed intelligence towards war.

Replacing those in power won't help if the power structure itself doesn't change. And that means addressing how our own actions maintain this dysfunctional system.

Decades ago, Rumsfeld and Cheney hoodwinked the American people with fearmongering lies about Soviet military capability, and set the country on a path of paranoia and weapons build-up. 911 let them pull the exact same trick again, with a public more focused on macho vigilantism than on facts and diplomacy.

But the dirty little secret remains: a combative foreign policy requires perpetual conflict. After all, tough-talking cowboys and weapons manufacturers have little value in times of peace, so it's in their interest to foment never-ending strife. Maybe that's why top Pentagon strategist Air Force Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler recently warned Americans to prepare for a 50-100 year "generational war."

The Democrats also seem to be hunkering down for a long-term battle against evildoers; their "Six for '06" goals call for doubling the size of "Special Forces to destroy Osama bin Laden and terrorist networks like al Qaeda." An October 2006 report from the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive Policy Institute additionally noted: "America needs a bigger and better military ... Democrats should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops, replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil reconstruction.

The wild card in this march towards military domination remains Iran. Bush has already promised Israel protection if it bombs Iran's alleged nuclear facilities, and just this week, Congress voted to double the US stockpiles of military equipment in Israel (turns out that Israel had used much of the US equipment during its war with Lebanon this summer). Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's recent admission that Israel possesses nuclear weapons is not expected to impact the billions in aid the country receives each year either, even though the US officially bans funding to those producing weapons of mass destruction.

While US involvement in an attack on Iran would invite Armageddon, Bush is backed into a corner domestically and may feel he doesn't have a whole lot to lose. Leading Democrats (including Clinton and Obama) have also called for the "military option" to be available for Iran, and would most likely push for troops/weapons to protect Israel from retaliation.

Some consider war with Iran as inevitable, but it isn't. The results would be catastrophic and the diplomatic options have not been adequately explored. More to the point, one must consider how the very legitimizing of perpetual conflict is devastating our national security. The Pentagon's budget currently runs over $430 billion per year, not including the roughly $140 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Democrats are expected to increase the military budget next year. Meanwhile, domestic social programs are being slashed to compensate for war spending and our military has become severely weakened.

The upshot? We the people need to retire the tough-talking cowboys in both political parties and dump the idea that perpetual conflict is a given. We have to hound members of the 110th Congress to pursue every possible option for peace in the Middle East and we must confront the fear of faceless enemies legitimizing rollbacks in our own civil liberties. Above all, we must hold ourselves accountable not to be fooled into war again.

Action Ideas:

1. To learn more about the lies leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

• Iraq on the Record (http://democrats.reform.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord)

• DowningStreetMemo.com (www.downingstreetmemo.com)
• AfterDowningStreet.org (www.afterdowningstreet.org)

2. To explore peaceful approaches to foreign policy:

• Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org)

• Global Issues (www.globalissues.org)
• One World (www.oneworld.net)
• Just Foreign Policy (www.justforeignpolicy.org)

3. To identify the cost of the Iraq War to U.S. taxpayers:

• Cost of War (www.costofwar.com)

Note: Originally published: December 15, 2006

Bush Colluded With Big Oil Cheats

December 3, 2006
Blowing the Whistle on Big Oil
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Honolulu

DURING a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Department’s best auditors in the nation’s oil patch, snaring promotions that eventually had him supervising a staff of 120 people.

He and his team scrutinized the books of major oil producers that collectively pumped billions of dollars worth of oil and gas every year from land and coastal waters owned by the public. Along the way, the auditors recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from companies that shortchanged the government on royalties.

“Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions,” wrote Gale A. Norton, then the secretary of the interior, in a 2003 citation. Ms. Norton praised Mr. Maxwell’s “perseverance and leadership” while cataloguing his “many outstanding achievements.”

Less than two years later, the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a “reorganization.” That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments.

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