I'm Pretty Sure The CIA Never Tried To Overthrow Any Foreign Governments, But Some People Have Other Ideas

I'm humble to say that my readers and I are unflinchingly patriotic, outrageously smart, and fully aware that the United States would never meddle in the internal affairs of any foreign country, especially a friendly one.

Otherwise, we might be deceived by a new article at Covert Action Magazine which does a superb job of documenting a series of outrageous, deliberate, and mostly successful attempts by the CIA to interfere with the democratically elected governments of two Southern Hemisphere nations which most of the world would consider "friends and allies" of the United States.

The nations to which I refer are Australia and New Zealand, both of which supported Great Britain, the US, and their allies in both World Wars, and suffered horribly in the process.

And the article in question was written by Murray Horton, who provides more than enough links and photographs to make his presentation utterly compelling.

In other words, it is strong enough to convince all but the unflinchingly patriotic, outrageously smart readers who come to this cold blog seeking refuge from the "fake news" which crept in around the edges some time ago, and now has us nearly surrounded.

Murray Horton himself is introduced as "organizer of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA)", "Aotearoa" being the indigenous (Maori) name of the country we would otherwise call "New Zealand". In other words, he's biased!

He's also described as "an advocate of a range of progressive causes for the past four decades", and it's not difficult to imagine that foreign intelligence services meddling in domestic politics may have been one of those causes for most (or even all) of those decades, because the reseach represented here is exhaustive and extremely detailed.

It's just too bad for him that we're all too smart to believe any of it.

Double Cover [1]: Nothing Can Ever Be The Same

The Mumbai terrorist attacks began Wednesday evening and I've been reading about the situation -- and thinking hard -- ever since. The most noteworthy feature so far is the prevalence of unsubstantiated assertions that make no sense at all. I haven't been doing a systematic survey of the world's media -- just grabbing stories from wherever they pop up -- and every item I've stumbled across has been contaminated with spin. Or at least that's the way it strikes me.

Then again, maybe it's become impossible for terrorism -- and news of terrorism -- to strike me any other way. I've seen too much, I've been lied to too many times, to ever take anything at face value -- except the occasional (accidental?) admission of horrors committed by unrepentant (audacious!) perpetrators.

Now that we know the geniuses at the Pentagon have conceived and implemented a worldwide program of fomenting terrorism, nothing can ever be the same.

According to the Department of Defense, it is fighting a war on terror which requires, or allows, it to perpetrate (or con others into perpetrating) acts of "terrorism" which can then be used as pretexts for war against the "terrorist groups" thus "exposed".

This is not a new tactic. It has been used often and very successfully, by Americans both at home and abroad, and by foreign nationals both ancient and modern.

But now, in post-9/11 America, it is official policy.

Darkness Visible

How do we know this? Chris Floyd wrote about it in 2002 for the Moscow Times:

This column stands foursquare with the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, when he warns that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. We know, as does the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, that this statement is an incontrovertible fact, a matter of scientific certainty. And how can we and the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, be so sure that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large?

Because these attacks will be instigated at the order of the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense.

This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story which was itself submerged by mounds of gray newsprint and glossy underwear ads in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times. There – in an article by military analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon – came the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception." According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization – the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" – will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.

In other words – and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan – the United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people – your family, your friends, your lovers, you – in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.

For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice – a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy. (Or should we use the Regime's own preferred terminology and just call it "evil"?) No, it seems the Pee-Twos have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action – by killing their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda? messing with their mamas? or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves? – they can then take measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for "harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way: "Their sovereignty will be at risk."

The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the Regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir 'em with a stick, and presto: instant "justification" for whatever level of intervention/conquest/rapine you might desire. And what if the territory you fancy doesn't actually harbor any convenient marauders to use for fun and profit? Well, surely a God-like "super-Intelligence Support Activity" is capable of creation ex nihilo, yes?

The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the UDF, Eta, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of Bushian morality, decency and freedom). We refer of course to Operation Northwoods, oft mentioned in these pages: the plan that America's top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign – complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – to provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia/Corporate fiefdom which had recently been lost to Castro.

Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander scale, with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him – and with an ignorant, corrupt president who has shown himself all too eager to embrace any means whatsoever that will augment the wealth and power of his own narrow, undemocratic, elitist clique.

There is genuine transgression here, a stepping-over – deliberately, with open eyes, with forethought, planning, and conscious will – of lines that should never be crossed. Acting in deadly symbiosis with their supposed enemies, the terrorist mafias, Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution, blowback, deceit, of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos: the perversion of all that's best in us, of all that we've won from the bestiality of our primal nature, all that we've raised above the mindless ravening urges and impulses still boiling in the mud of our monkey brains.

It's not a fight for freedom; it's a retreat into darkness.

And the day will be a long time coming.

Into The Dark

The darkness has been descending quickly. Chris Floyd wrote this column in early 2005:

More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism: sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action – i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction. The purpose was two-fold: first, to bring the terrorist groups into the open, where they could be counterattacked; and second, to justify U.S. military attacks on the countries where the terrorists were operating – attacks which, in the Pentagon's words, would put those nations' "sovereignty at risk." It was a plan that countenanced – indeed, encouraged – the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that American leaders desired.

This plan is now being activated.

In fact, it's being expanded, as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed last week. Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally with – and ultimately undermine – existing terrorist groups.

Top-level officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases, even the top military commanders in the affected regions will not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never know what's being done in their name.

The covert units – including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and hit squads – will be operating outside all constraints of law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." Indeed, we reported here last summer that Bush has already budgeted $500 million to fund local paramilitaries and guerrilla groups in the most volatile areas of the world, a measure guaranteed to produce needless bloodshed, destruction and suffering for innocent people already ravaged by conflict.

Incredibly, as Hersh notes, the Bushists are now openly citing a sinister role model for their campaign: Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups and killed thousands of innocent civilians in putting down an "insurgency" against their colonial rule. And in fact, Rumsfeld and other Bush officials increasingly talk of combating not just terrorism but a "global insurgency" – as if the whole world is now an American colony, filled with recalcitrant "natives" rising up against their rightful masters.

The activation of the Pentagon terrorist operation is part of Bush's second-term expansion of the "war on terror." Despite some obfuscating rhetoric about "diplomacy," the Bush regime is pressing ahead with a hard-line strategy aimed at opening new military fronts in the "global free-fire zone." Any dissenting voices within the government are being ruthlessly purged. The Pentagon's secret forces are set for operations in at least 10 countries, and Bush insiders "repeatedly" told Hersh that "Iran is the next strategic target."

Iran has long been a focus of the small clique of "global dominationists" – led by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and their acolytes – who engineered the invasion of Iraq. This group is determined to "whack Iran," as one insider put it, and they're not at all discouraged by the debacle in Iraq; indeed, to them it's a rousing success. Their first objective – openly stated years ago, before Bush took office – was the overthrow of Saddam's regime and the planting of a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq. This has now been done. The fact that it has plunged the Iraqi people into a hell of violence, chaos, terror and extremism is of no real concern to the clique. Their lofty rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberation" is meaningless sham, shuck and jive for the rubes. By the admission of the clique's own publications, they seek strategic control over the world's energy resources in order to preserve and expand American geopolitical and economic hegemony in the new century. Everything else – including the security of the American people, put at increasing risk by the clique's reckless policies – is of secondary importance.

U.S. forces are already conducting military reconnaissance inside Iran in preparation for strikes on alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Hersh reports. The Pentagon is feverishly updating war plans for a "maximum ground and air invasion of Iran," incorporating the new staging areas now available in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while employing an Iranian terrorist group, MEK, to launch covert ops and terrorist acts against Tehran. MEK was once given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein, who used the group as a brutal enforcer against Kurd and Shiite insurgents. Now Bush, "riding with the bad boys," has embraced the MEK murderers as his own.

In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran – despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster.

In our original report on the Pentagon's terror scheme, we wrote: "Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us." Now the night has come. Now the United States stands openly – even proudly – for terrorism, torture and the Hitlerian principle of aggressive war. America has fallen into the pit – and the hopes of the world go with it.

And It Makes Me Wonder ...

This deliberate crossing of the line -- or diving into the pit, as you prefer -- has demolished any shred of "plausible deniability" the CIA and its clandestine operations may once have enjoyed.

And now, whenever we see terrorist acts -- especially attacks such as these: spectacular multi-pronged assaults that seem to come from nowhere, which are claimed by groups nobody has ever heard of -- we always have to wonder. And for every detail that doesn't make sense, a dozen suspicions arise.

~~~

the series continues here: Double Cover [2]: What Is A Commando Raid?

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Is Pakistan's "Public Enemy Number One" A CIA Asset? Of Course He Is! Otherwise He'd Have Been Dead A Long Time Ago

Pakistan's most feared terrorist communicates with encryption so strong the Pakistani intelligence services cannot crack it. He gets information on Pakistani troop movements from an unidentified foreign government. He's said to be responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto), but the Americans -- who don't mind bombing "Islamic militants" in Pakistan every now and then -- have refused to attack him despite having solid information as to his whereabouts. And on, and on, and on...

All this and more is highlighted in a excellent piece from "State of Pakistan", which I have reproduced in full below, with just a bit of editing and a few comments.

Baithullah Mehsud could be a CIA ‘intelligence asset’ in this double game

A report published by the News on August 5, 2008 includes the following (apparently based on information given by the ISI officials):

”The top US military commander and the CIA official were also asked why the CIA-run predator[s] and the US military did not swing into action when they were provided the exact location of Baitullah Mehsud [photo], Pakistan’s enemy number one and the mastermind of almost every suicide operation against the Pakistan Army and the ISI since June 2006. One such precise piece of information was made available to the CIA on May 24 when Baitullah Mehsud drove to a remote South Waziristan mountain post in his Toyota Land Cruiser to address the press and returned back to his safe abode. The United States military has the capacity to direct a missile to a precise location at very short notice as it has done close to 20 times in the last few years to hit al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. Pakistani official[s] have long been intrigued by the presence of highly encrypted communications gear with Baitullah Mehsud. This communication gear enables him to collect real-time information on Pakistani troop movement from an unidentified foreign source without being intercepted by Pakistani intelligence.”

Both the CIA and the ISI have been playing a double game. Fighting and nurturing terrorists and warlords at the same time! Why?

If this is a serious question then perhaps I can answer it.

Now please carefully read the following published and circulated by the State of Pakistan on January 31, 2008.

Nicholas Schmidle, who was expelled from Pakistan in January 2008 for writing a detailed report in the NY Times on the tribal areas and the NWFP, later wrote in the Washington Post,

“foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries.”

What does the government want to hide?

I could probably answer that, too.

Most governments make every effort to expose terrorists. Authorities pursue them relentlessly including placing advertisements about purported crimes, requesting people to come forward and give information. When arrested they prosecute the alleged terrorists vigorously and publicize convictions. But no such pattern in Pakistan. The website of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency lists only two, yes only TWO terrorists from the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) as wanted. The star of ‘Jaish-e-Muhammed’ Masood Azhar was allowed to escape. The other star, Omar Saeed Sheikh, is still alive (ostensibly because his case is under appeal) although he was sentenced to death in July 2002. The alleged ‘master mind’ of the plan to blow up trans-atlantic flights, Rashid Rauf, has mysteriously escaped and the government does not even want to hear about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master mind of 9/11, has been kept in Guantanamo since 2004 and has not been tried. Abdullah Mehsud (Baitullah’s relative) was released by the U.S. from Guantanamo and allowed to return? Why? So that they can issue threats to blow up the White House (interview to Al-Jazeera on Jan. 29, 2008) and provide justification for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ which has not seen a single terrorist attack on the U.S. soil since 9/11?

YES! Exactly!

Let’s now talk about Baitullah Mehsud who became a big militant leader soon after Abdullah’s release by the U.S. government from Guantanamo Bay in March 2004. Until the end of 2004, Baitullah Mehsud (former FATA secretary Brig. Mahmood Shah says he is in 40s) lived in the shadow of his daring and charismatic fellow tribesman, Abdullah Mehsud, who, with his long black hair, was considered a terrorist rock star. Abdullah fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance and in 1996 lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine. He was taken captive by warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum who turned him over to American forces. Abdullah Mehsud was sent to Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and held for two years, insisting the whole time that he was just an innocent tribesman. He was released in March 2004 for reasons which remain unclear and returned to Waziristan. Soon after his return, he orchestrated the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers working on a dam in his region, proclaiming that Beijing was guilty of killing Muslims. He also ordered an attack on Pakistan’s Interior Minister in which 31 people perished. The government came under tremendous pressure from the Chinese to hunt Abdullah after the killings of their engineers.

The Afghan Taliban, who were in the process of organizing themselves to fight in Afghanistan and were desperately trying to avoid a head-on confrontation with Pakistani forces in the tribal regions, were not pleased with the killing of the Chinese engineers. Abdullah was made a deputy of Baitullah Mehsud and a shura or tribal council was set up which further undermined his authority. It was said at the time that the Taliban preferred a cool-headed Baitullah over the temperamental Abdullah. Dejected, Abdullah left for Afghanistan to fight in Musa Qilla in the southern Afghan province of Helmand and was killed by security agencies in the Zhob area of the south-western province of Baluchistan while returning home to Pakistan.

Mehsud’s first battlefield experience was in Afghanistan in the late 1980s against Soviet invaders. His mentor at the time was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander in eastern Afghanistan backed by the United States against the Soviets. Now Haqqani is wanted as a terrorist by the U.S. and NATO but the CIA has also been trying to get his support according to the Wall Street Journal. The ISI once considered him a ‘moderate’ Taliban.

For almost three years now, Baitullah Mehsud has been the leading face of militant resistance whose influence, security officials acknowledge, transcends the borders of South Waziristan, according to the sources in the governments of Pakistan and the United States. But there is little independent reporting on the tribal areas. Most of the so-called experts writing for the think tanks have never visited these areas. Mostly they cite each other in their papers or quote US or Pakistani officials.

[The] government [...] acknowledged Baitullah Mehsud as the new chief of militants in the Mehsud part of South Waziristan [...] in February, 2005, when it entered into an agreement with him in Sara Rogha following violent clashes and ambushes. He was reportedly paid [20 million rupees] as part of this deal though it remains unclear who picked [up] the tab, Pakistani or the U.S. government? But read the following report of Jan. 30, 2005 published by the Daily Times, Karachi:

“Baitullah Mehsud gets ready to surrender, Sets aside demand for amnesty to Abdullah Mehsud

By Iqbal Khattak

PESHAWAR: A key local Taliban militant expressed his willingness to surrender to the government after holding talks with tribal elders and clerics at an undisclosed location in South Waziristan Agency, said one of the negotiators on Saturday.

Baitullah Mehsud, a key tribal Taliban commander in the troubled South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, expressed readiness to surrender, Brig (r) Qayyum Sher, a member of the peace committee that met the militant, told Daily Times from Tank.

“He (Baitullah) is ready to settle the matter with the government,” said the tribal negotiator. “We met him today and he said he is ready to resolve the matter.” The tribal negotiator said Baitullah did not press his old demand that his comrade Abdullah Mehsud should also be pardoned if he surrenders. “He (Baitullah) will surrender alone,” said Brig Qayyum.

However, the peace committee will discuss modalities for Baitullah’s surrender with the government. “The modalities will now be sorted out with the government. How, when and where he will surrender will be discussed with the military and the political administration,” said Brig Qayyum.

A military source told Daily Times that Baitullah’s surrender would prove a serious setback to Abdullah Mehsud. “That is what we want. But we have to wait for the moment when he (Baitullah) surrenders,” the source said on condition of anonymity. Lt Gen Safdar Hussain exempted Abdullah Mehsud from amnesty after his alleged involvement in two Chinese engineers’ kidnapping in October last year.

Brig Qayyum said Baitullah, who unlike Abdullah Mehsud and Nek Muhammad was not in the media limelight, set no conditions for his surrender and the Peshawar corps commander had already declared amnesty for him if he laid down arms.

Gen Safdar set a January 26 deadline for the two militants to surrender or “face military onslaught” and hoped sanity would prevail upon Baituallah to live peacefully. However, Gen Safdar had refused to pardon Abdullah Mehsud.

He pledged to cease attacks on security forces and government installations in return for a commitment by the government to withdraw forces from the Mehsud territory and not to take any punitive action against him and his associates. This followed a brief lull in fighting, prompting the then Pakistani army corps commander, Peshawar, Lt-Gen Safdar, to declare Baitullah Mehsud a “soldier of peace” after a meeting with him at Jandola in August, 2005.

The meeting followed accusations by Baitullah Mehsud that the government was not honouring its commitments, was refusing to withdraw its forces and was continuing to attack his mujahideen. Violence erupted again in the restive tribal region and a time came when the government’s writ was restricted to the compounds of the political administration.”

Why was not Baitullah captured when he was ready to surrender? Instead, he was given money and allowed to grow his militia from a few hundred to nearly 20,000? Why? Who made the decision?

Who else?

Baitullah Mehsud addressed his tribe after the Sararogha pact and clearly swore allegiance to Mullah Umar of the Taliban. His power over the two agencies is owed to his wealth and his ability to wage war. He goes around in a bullet-proof car and is followed around by 30 armed guards. Like Nek Muhammad, he too has two wives and has three castle-like houses in North and South Waziristan. Although he is not a tribal leader by lineage or by election, he is more respected as a warlord by the people of the two agencies than any other person. Although he denies that he received [20 million rupees] from the secret funds of the government without signing a receipt, corps commander Peshawar General Safdar Hussain is on record as saying that the money was indeed set aside for him.

Government officials now claim that Baitullah has been running a number of training camps for militants and suicide bombers. And in January 2007, helicopter gunships targeted what the government claimed was a militant compound, killing 20 people. Baitullah responded angrily and threatened revenge which he said “would be such that it would pain their heart”. It was followed by a string of suicide attacks in Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Islamabad. By this time, government officials had begun pointing the accusing finger at Baitullah Mehsud. A UN report released in September 2007 blamed Baitullah for almost eighty percent of suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Now since when has the UN become so well informed as to be able to account for the exact percentage of the perpetrators of suicide bombings as to their source? Who is feeding this information (or disinformation).

In an address to the nation on January 2, 2008, Mr. Pervez Musharraf said that he believed Maulana Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud were prime suspects in the assassination of Bhutto.In its January 18, 2008 edition, The Washington Post reported that the CIA has concluded that Mehsud was behind the Bhutto assassination. “Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, [Michael V.] Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda’s terrorist network.”

The CIA is really well informed! It could not trace Mullah Omar (who reportedly lived in Quetta) or Osama (who escaped helped by the cease fire ordered by Dick Cheney at Musharraf’s request in 2001) in more than six years but it can “conclude’ within three weeks of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto that Mehsud was behind it. Meanwhile Talibans in Afghanistan want to distance themselves from him?

According to a DAWN report (Jan. 28, 2008), the Taliban in Afghanistan have distanced themselves from Pakistani militants led by Baitullah Mehsud, saying they don’t support any militant activity in Pakistan. “We do not support any militant activity and operation in Pakistan,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Dawn on telephone from an undisclosed location on Monday. The spokesman denied media reports that the Taliban had expelled Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. “Baitullah is a Pakistani and we as the Afghan Taliban have nothing to do with his appointment or his expulsion. We did not appoint him and we have not expelled him,” he said.

Now a $10 billion question: What is the end-game of the U.S. if Baitullah Mehsud is indeed an ‘intelligence asset’ of the CIA?

That's simple: Either they continue to protect him and hide the truth (about him, about themselves, about 9/11, and about the entire bogus "War On Terror"), or they all go straight to the guillotines.

Is the aim is to create a theatre of the ‘War on Terror’ in Pakistan to create the justification for the landing of the U.S. troops so that the republican administration can continue to tell American people that it is fighting terrorism while spending billions to enrich the military-industrial complex, win the next elections in Nov. 2008 and tighten its control over Pakistan to pursue its anti-China and anti-Iran foreign policy goals?

For those Pakistanis who may think this is far-fetched, here is a quote from “Devil’s Game” by Robert Dreyfuss (pp. 336-337, published 2005). Citing the infamous policy memo written by leading neocons in 1995, entitled, “A Clean Break” to then Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel to ‘contain, destablize, and roll back’ various states in the region, Dreyfuss concludes:

“Neoconservatives want to control the Middle East, not reform it, even it means tearing countries apart and replacing them with rump mini-states along ethnic and sectrian lines. The Islamic right, in this context, is just one more tool for dismantling existing regimes, if that is what it takes.”

It's not far-fetched at all; it's happening in many countries simultaneously.

And "dismantling existing regimes" is indeed "what it takes".

Furthermore, it will continue until and unless a few "existing regimes" -- in Washington, Islamabad and a few other places -- are "dismantled". That is to say: indefinitely.

Somalia: The Open Secret Horror Show Continues

I haven't been able to devote as much time or effort to Somalia as it has deserved, but fortunately Chris Floyd has been doing exceptional work on the continuing story of American-sponsored murder and mayhem there.

Here's the latest from Chris, with some additional notes and a few extra photos from your chilly host.

Blood Harvest: The Terror War Bears Horrific Fruit in Somalia

The New York Times made one of its periodic jaunts to Somalia this week, painting a hellish picture of the fruits of the Bush Administration's third Terror War "regime change" operation.

To be sure, reporter Jeffrey Gettleman glosses over the larger context and immediate causes of Somalia's deterioration into foreign occupation, brutal civil war and the world's worst humanitarian disaster. The deep and bloody American involvement is only lightly glanced at; there is no mention of the deadly U.S. bombing raids on civilians that accompanied the invasion by Ethiopia (and no mention of the American role in arming, training and funding the armies of the tyrannical regime); no mention of the U.S. death squads sent in to "kill anyone still alive" after bombing strikes; no mention of American security apparatchiks "renditioning" fleeing refugees, including American citizens, to Ethiopia's notorious dungeons; no mention that most of these atrocities took place under the command of the recently-fired and now-saintly Admiral William Fallon, who directed all three of the Terror War's overt wars – in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia – until he was fired by Bush last month, presumably for insufficient enthusiasm about a fourth regime change op -- in Iran.

Still, these lapses aside, the NYT story is an important piece. It goes further than almost any other previous mainstream story in putting across some measure of the horrific reality in Somalia to a wider audience. And to be fair, Gettleman does mention, briefly, some context that is almost always omitted in corporate media reports: such as the fact that the "transitional government" installed by Bush and the Ethopian dictator Meles Zenawi is rife with warlords, some of them on the CIA's payroll.

However, this whisper of truth buried deep in the story is undercut by the large whopper Gettleman purveys near the top: the claim that the transitional government "was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war and suffering." Only in the imperial courts of America's political-media class would the imposition of a gaggle of walords and CIA tools, put in place by the brutal invasion of a despised foreign enemy, be seen as a way to end war and suffering. Then again, this is precisely the same idiocy that imperial courtiers – led by the New York Times – advocated for Iraq.

Gettleman -- once an eager cheerleader for the murderous Somalia caper -- doesn't make that connection, of course, but he does find a "respectable" source to say what most sentient beings looking at Somalia have been saying since the Terror War operation began: that Bush and Zenawi have turned Somalia – which had known its first measure of peace and stability in many years under the alliance of Islamic groups ousted by the invasion – into a replica of the Bush-made hell in Iraq. Of course, the dissenting figure is a Democrat – Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey – so the criticism can be safely portrayed as a "partisan attack," maintaining the sacred "balance" of mainstream journalism. But Payne's observation, whether motivated by partisanship or not, is simply a description of the objective truth: "We’re Baghdad-izing Mogadishu and Somalia. We’re making people feel wrongly treated and pushing them toward more radical positions."

This indeed is the crux of the matter. Just as in Iraq, the invasion, occupation, repression, corruption and brutality unleashed upon Somalia have radicalized many people and empowered the more extreme factions in the Islamic alliance. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Terror War is breeding more terrorists. In fact, this dynamic is so obvious that a cynic could almost believe that this is the actual aim of the Terror War: to generate "ceaseless cycles of war and suffering" – with the war-profiteering loot and enhanced state power that inevitably follow.

The suffering of the Somali people plays no part in these machinations of the great geopolitical game, of course. Why should it? Bush and the American political class have already killed a million Iraqis and driven four million from their homes, with the whole world watching; they are certainly not going to wring their hands over dead and despoiled nobodies in a land the world abandoned long ago.

Excerpts from Somalia’s Government Teeters on Collapse (NYT):

In recent weeks, the Islamists have routed warlords and militiamen who have been absorbed into the government forces but are undermining what little progress transitional leaders have made with their predatory tactics, like stealing food. After 17 years of civil war, Somalia’s violence seems to be driven not so much by clan hatred, ideology or religiosity, but by something much simpler: survival.

“We haven’t been paid in eight months,” said a government soldier named Hassan, who said he could not reveal his last name. “We rob people so we can eat.”

Nur Hassan Hussein, the prime minister, does not deny that government troops rob civilians. “This is the biggest problem we have,” he said in an interview this month.

But, he said, he does not have the money to pay them. Each month, more than half of government’s revenue, mostly from port taxes, disappears — stolen by “our people,” the prime minister said.

That leaves Mr. Nur with about $18 million a year to run a failed state of nine million of some of the world’s neediest, most collectively traumatized people....Aid organizations say that more than half of Mogadishu’s estimated one million people are on the run.

War, drought, displacement, high food prices and the exodus of aid workers, many of the elements that lined up in the early 1990s to create a famine, are lining up again. The United Nations World Food Program said on Thursday, in a warning titled “Somalia Sinking Deeper Into Abyss of Suffering,” that the country was the most dangerous in the world for aid workers.

Most Somalis do not argue with that. They say Mogadishu is more capriciously violent than it has ever been, with roadside bombs, militias shelling one another across neighborhoods, doctors getting shot in the head and 10-year-olds hurling grenades....

In the rat-tat-tat of nightly machine-gun fire, people are beginning to hear the government’s death knell. Many residents have mixed feelings about this. They contend that the government has enabled warlords. They say, almost without exception, that things were better under the Islamists. But they fear what lies ahead...

Government officials say much of the resistance is simply spoilers who are deeply invested in the status quo of chaos, like gun runners, counterfeiters and importers of expired baby formula.

But some of the men believed to be the biggest spoilers are part of the government. To get clan support and — just as crucially — more militiamen, transitional leaders have cut deals with warlords like Mohammed Dheere, now Mogadishu’s mayor, and Abdi Qeybdid, now the police chief. These are the same men whom the C.I.A. paid in 2006 to fight the Islamists, a strategy that backfired because the population turned against them, mostly because of their legacy of terrorizing civilians.

Hassan, the government soldier, said he had been in one of these warlord militias since he was 8. He cannot read or write. He has thin wrists, a delicate face, empty eyes and a wife and two children to feed, which is why he said he routinely robs people. “We are losing,” he said.

He said many of his friends were defecting to the Islamists because that was the only way to survive.

As Chris wrote last spring -- too long ago! ...

I want to reiterate a point that I have made over and over here: This war in Somalia, this carnage, this mass death, this brutality, this vast suffering is the direct result of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." For all you Americans out there, this is our war, just as much as Afghanistan and Iraq are. It's being done in our name, with our money, at the instigation of our leaders. The American Establishment and the American media are almost totally ignoring this on-going horror story -- and downplaying the Bush gang's central role in it whenever it does get a mention -- but be assured: just because American citizens have been left in the usual amnesiac fog by their leaders, the victims of the invasion, and those watching it from outside the American media bubble -- especially in the Muslim world -- know full well whose war it really is. Once again, the brutal policies of loot and domination are preparing a terrible blowback for us; even now, you can see the thunderclouds gathering on the horizon.

The rising thunderclouds play into the hands of the Terror Warriors, who want nothing more than a storm of Islamic extremism to "justify" their "response" to the acts of bogus terror that kicked off the bogus war. It's as dramatic a reality-reversal as you could ever hope not to see. But we're seeing it already, and it will only get worse.

In other words, we started out fighting "terrorists of global reach", or the Taliban, or Afghanistan, or Islam, or Islamists, or the rest of the world, or something, because of the alleged "act of war" that was "declared against the United States" on September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the official story of 9/11 and all its official variants have been packs of lies. The "news" media were never going to expose the fiction -- not after 50 years of being secretly groomed to produce fiction -- and a huge propaganda army could be mobilized against anyone who dared to raise any questions.

So even though the truth about 9/11 couldn't be hidden forever, it could be hidden for quite a while in the United States of Propaganda -- where for generations the citizens had been conditioned to reject any hint of serious wrongdoing by their government.

And in the meantime -- while that truth was sinking in -- the US and her "coalition" of "allies" would have committed countless atrocities against countless innocent people, creating countless new enemies all over the world; these people would themselves be called "terrorists", and eventually the bogus war would have "legitimized" itself.

And then we would be in an actual war against actual terrorists, none of whom had any reason to wish us harm before the beginning of the war that we started, supposedly in order to "root them out"!

Some in the blogosphere have mentioned the media's near-refusal to touch the slaughter in Somalia, and as Chris Floyd points out, the only coverage it receives in the mainstream is highly sanitized. If I'm reading this correctly, the reason for this is because there is no "reason" for the US to attack Somalia.

In other words, we bombed and invaded Afghanistan "because of 9/11" -- a fiction that has flown so well it hasn't yet needed to be revised.

Then we bombed and invaded Iraq "because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction", but that turned out to be fiction too -- and it didn't fly quite so well. So then we changed our story and suddenly we had bombed and invaded Iraq "because Saddam Hussein had connections with Osama bin Laden" and it turned out that this story was fiction too, so now we've decided that we bombed and invaded Iraq "to bring democracy to the Middle East", or whatever the story of the day might be tomorrow.

But when it comes to Somalia, there is no reason, fictional or otherwise. There were no claims that Somalia had weapons of mass destruction, no claims of connections to 9/11, no claims that the Somalis were trying to build a nuclear bomb or wipe Israel off the map -- and no media campaign to catapult the no propaganda. Just nothing.

So the American people are not familiar with even one slightly-plausible reason why our armed forces and their Ethiopian proxies should be slaughtering innocent people in Somalia, other than reasons our "news" providers won't talk about, such as "energy" and "empire" (not to mention "ego" and "evil").

Our "news" media have been trained to produce fiction revolving around the notion that whatever America does overseas is "right"; and in this case there's no possible argument to be made in favor of our intervention in Somalia; therefore they have no choice but to avert their eyes and pretend it isn't happening.

Thus the war in Somalia -- just like many of America's clandestine operations over the years -- is a "secret" to most Americans. But it's not clandestine. It's just a secret.

In former days, when the CIA old-timers were staging a regime-change operation, they took pains to make sure nobody found out. They were afraid of the media. Now their successors don't have to be so careful, because they control the media, and they know nobody's gonna make a peep.

Unless I'm mistaken, we have never seen anything quite like this. Somalia may be the template for open secret warfare -- and if so, it's working out very well, at least in the sense that the bulk of the media are showing they can keep a secret.

What it means, unless I am very wrong, is that we can expect more of the same to start happening elsewhere. And we won't hear anything about it on the "news".

Bush Affirms His Legacy, Vetoes Ban On Torture

President Bush announced on Saturday that he had vetoed an intelligence authorization bill passed by both houses of Congress.

The mainstream press has focused on one particularly gruesome aspect of his decision: the bill the president vetoed would have restricted the range of interrogation techniques that could be used by the CIA; in particular, it would have banned waterboarding -- simulated drowning which has been recognized as torture and banned by all civilized countries for centuries.

In his weekly radio address to the nation, our first openly pro-torture president said:

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.

It wouldn't do that, of course. It wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from detaining people. And it wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from questioning them. It would only limit the techniques that could be used during the questioning.

But it would establish a limit. This is one of the crucial points -- and one which has nothing to do with the core issues. The bill would place limits on the president and his administration, and therefore it must be vetoed. Bush will never willingly sign any legislation which limits what he and his administration can do.

Fortunately for the president, this bill concerns terrorism, so it gives him a chance to use his favorite line:

We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks.

This is false, of course. The president's neglect, or abdication, or repudiation, of his higher responsibility -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as required by his oath of office -- is sufficient grounds not only for impeachment and removal from office, but also for criminal charges of treason, followed by a trial which could only end in a conviction and a public execution. No person of peace and goodwill could deny this; one could only hope that some "enhanced techniques" would be applied along the way.

But unfortunately much of the American public remains unaware of this, and the president is not about to tell them. Instead he continues to catapult the propaganda. Thus, in keeping with his self-appointed "highest responsibility", Bush listed the "plots" that have been "foiled" by "enhanced" interrogations:

The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. [...] Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.

If you've never heard of any of these claims about how interrogations under torture have led to foiled terrorist plots, don't feel badly about it. Nobody else has ever heard them either -- not even the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, who said:

"I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack."

In trying to justify his veto to the nation, the president said:

The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.

This statement is potentially misleading on many fronts simultaneously, but it's tough to tell because so much about the detainees and the means by which they have been interrogated is classified, and because so much of what the government has told us about these things has proven to be false.

Of special interest is the assertion -- made continually by the administration and others (including some supposedly dissident journalists) -- that "specialized interrogation procedures" have been used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists".

To make sense of this assertion, you have to do some mental gymnastics.

By "specialized interrogation procedures" he means the techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual. As the AP reports, the Field Manual prohibits

hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes; stripping prisoners naked; forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts; beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways; subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions; and waterboarding

The president says the "enhanced" techniques are only to be used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists". What does he mean by "small"?

According to Reuters,

CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.

Elsewhere it has been claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques have been used against only 14 of the most hardened al Q'aeda terrorists.

But it is very difficult to take these assertions seriously.

When the furore over destroyed interrogation videotapes erupted, we were told the interrogations were taped because "enhanced techniques" were being used and the tapes were meant to provide insurance against potential claims of excessive force or abusive behavior. But if this is so, then why were the tapes destroyed? If they showed no abuse of detainees, they would have provided powerful support for the government's position that only legal techniques were used.

In the absence of those tapes, one can do little more than speculate about the reasons why an additional 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo were also videotaped. Were "enhanced techniques" used in those interrogations as well? If so, then we've been lied to about the extent of abusive interrogation. And if not, why not? The prisoners at Guantanamo are said to be "the worst of the worst"; the "enhanced techniques" are said to yield crucial information; why wouldn't our interrogators use all the tools available to them? Don't they want us to be safe?

We can only speculate here because the truth is so comprehensively buried. But it's reasonable to assume that torturers don't want us to know much about what they're doing. As Bush explained in his radio address, he vetoed the bill in part because it banned secret techniques.

The bill Congress sent me [...] would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. [...] Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaeda operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures...

Given the torturers' penchant for secrecy, we must assume that we don't know very much about torture and "enhanced" interrogations -- that what we do know is only the "tip of the iceberg".

But what we already know is enormous and horrific; and the government's justification for its practices have all turned out to be false!

Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School has been leading a team of researchers through the documentation pertaining to the detainees at Guantanamo, as provided by the government. The research team has been using the government's own data to evaluate the claims made by the administration and has produced a series of reports whose conclusions are eerily similar: the government's assertions which are supposed to justify the policies have been spectacularly untrue.

One report, "The Meaning of Battlefield", provides the following executive summary:

The Department of Defense has continually relied upon the premise of “battlefield capture” to justify the indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. The “battlefield capture” proposition -- although proven false in almost all cases -- has been an important proposition for the Government, which has used it to frame detainee status as a military question as to which the Department of Defense should be granted considerable deference.

Further, just as the Government has characterized detainee’s initial captures as “on the battlefield,” Government officials have repeatedly claimed that ex-detainees have “returned to the battlefield,” where they have been re-captured or killed.

Implicit in the Government’s claim that detainees have “returned to the battlefield” is the notion that those detainees had been on a battlefield prior to their detention in Guantánamo. Revealed by the Department of Defense data, however, is that:

• only twenty-one (21)—or four percent (4%)—of 516 Combatant Status Review Tribunal unclassified summaries of the evidence alleged that a detainee had ever been on any battlefield;

• only twenty-four (24)—or five percent (5%)—of unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee had been captured by United States forces;

• and exactly one (1) of 516 unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

Just as the Government’s claims that the Guantánamo detainees “were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces,” do not comport with the Department of Defense’s own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have “returned to the fight.”

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of thirty” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed, but to date the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense:

• at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies;

• ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;

• and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, the names of two (2) do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantánamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantánamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.

Thus, the data provided by the Department of Defense indicates that every public statement made by Department of Defense officials regarding the number of detainees who have been released and thereafter killed or re-captured on the battlefield was false.

We knew it was false all along, didn't we? At least we should have suspected it. There's a tendency for this administration to lie about everything.

Unfortunately, most of our so-called "opposition" politicians haven't caught a whiff of this tendency, or else they've chosen to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. So the political reactions to the veto were interesting.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the "Massachusetts liberal" much derided by "conservatives", suggested that Congress should override the veto, which shows how out of touch with reality he is. As if more than a dozen Republican Senators and more than 50 Republican Congressmen would ever vote with the Democrats, against the president, for a bill he had already vetoed! But Kennedy said:

"Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world."

America's "good name" "in the eyes of the world" was gone a long time ago, but Senator Kennedy cannot mention that and remain in national office. Politicians of both parties must maintain the fiction that America is beloved in the eyes of the world, or else they risk being marginalized as "not serious". Forget the truth of the situation; the rhetoric is all that matters.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the key Democratic enablers of the current administration, gets this point, if nothing else; she threw in some sanctimonious manure of her own:

"Failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh torture techniques undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."

Talk about undermining our nation's moral authority!

Let's talk about failing to initiate impeachment proceedings -- oh no, let's not! Impeachment is off the table!

And once again the story-line has been predictable: a pack of lies from a president who was never legitimately elected in the first place, followed by some ass-covering by the people who should have been standing in his way for years, all wrapped up with a bow by the allegedly liberal New York Times, which headlined this particular story "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A.Tactics Affirms His Legacy".

In one sense, it's impossible to argue: Bush's legacy is now securely more despicable than any two American presidents combined, and he's still counting.

But in another sense, it's impossible not to scream!

"Red In Tooth And Claw": Chris Floyd On The History Of The CIA

Here's some essential reading from Chris Floyd: "Red in Tooth and Claw: American Terror, Then and Now", a link destined to adorn my sidebar.

Floyd starts with an article in Lobster magazine, a piece by John Newsinger called "The CIA: A History of Torture."

It is a succinct overview of the notorious record of what Newsinger rightly calls "the most dangerous terrorist organization at work in the world since the Second World War."

In the historical abuses -- never condemned, never punished -- lie the seeds of the current outrageous situation. Floyd outlines out some of the connections and draws out some of the horrific implications, ending this way:

We have seen how the whole nefarious history of the CIA and its fellow black operators in the National Security State has been played out in the killing fields of Iraq: death squads, torture, assassinations, corruption, "etcetera." (For more, see "Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq.") It's also being played out in Afghanistan and Somalia and countless other countries, and in every far-flung "secret site" in the Terror War's global gulag. And it will go on playing out in the same brutal, blood-soaked way -- because no one, not a single person in the ruling circles of the bipartisan political class, has ever been held accountable for these mass murders and terrorist crimes. Not one. Instead, the perpetrators have soared comfortably through long careers strewn with honors, riches, privilege and power. There is literally no penalty whatsoever for any high American official who orders, supports or even directly commits atrocities.

So why should they stop? The system of power protects them. The system creates them. The system needs them. They are the system.

It's another monsterful piece of research, analysis and presentation from a man who specializes in exactly such pieces of work. Read the whole thing right now! And if you have a few nickels in your monthly budget for independent journalism, please consider leaving one of them at Empire Burlesque.

You can thank me later.

Funhouse Mirror: Looking At America With The New York Times

Ages ago -- Monday -- in a bizarre year-end editorial called "Looking At America", the New York Times listed some of the most egregious wrongs of the past seven years.

President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Indeed. And that's not all.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

All this makes perfect sense, does it not?

It condemns the Bush administration -- Bush and Cheney particularly -- for egregious and obvious crimes: crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the people of America, crimes against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, crimes against humanity itself..

So what's bizarre?

First, the "explanation" for all these crimes:

This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

And second, the proposed solution:

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

What kind of a mirror is the New York Times using?

Against all indications, the NYT attributes the actions of the Bush administration to "panic and ideology".

It's clear that neither Bush nor Cheney have panicked -- on 9/11 or ever since. They've been sitting quietly, watching the universe unfold -- right into their laps!

And it's even clearer that their ideology plays a heavy role in what they have done. So why talk about panic?

For that matter, why talk about "this new enemy" without trying to identify it?

The Bush administration took less than a day to decide who was to be held responsible for 9/11, less than a month to start bombing Afghanistan, less than two months to pass the enormous and egregious PATRIOT Act, and more than a year to empower a whitewash disguised as an investigation. What does that tell you?

The administration was (and still is) heavily populated by members of an extremist group which called for a cataclysmic attack on America, in order to enable their radical agenda, just before the 2000 election.

They wanted the catastrophic events of 9/11 to happen, they were ready for them to happen, and they took full advantage of them when they did happen. What does that tell you?

They were in position to make it happen, and they have done everything in their power to deceive us about the how and why of almost everything ever since! ... And we're supposed to believe they're telling us the truth about 9/11!

Alas, the official story of 9/11 is a shaky one, and our nation's leading paper could knock it down with one good investigative series -- but they won't. They'd prefer to enumerate the abuses we suffer at the hands of our own government and hope that we can vote our way out of trouble.

But the Times' prescription for healing America bears absolutely no resemblance to reality!

It's not the voters' fault that Bush got into the White House in the first place, and it's not their fault that he got to stay there for a second term. Both presidential elections were not only stolen by the Republicans but also given away by the Democrats, and the major American media -- led by the purportedly liberal New York Times -- played a huge role in legitimizing the theft, if not the giveaway.

Even now -- even though the illegitimacy of both "elections" is obvious, and even though the ideology of the "winners" has caused us enormous damage, the nation's "leading" newspaper will still not investigate or even acknowledge election fraud, unless it happens in a foreign country.

Even now -- with the official story of 9/11 in tatters -- the NYT will not investigate the events of that day, or even acknowledge that the official story is a crock of manure.

It's only fitting, I suppose, in a fun-house mirror kind of way, for the New York Times to say:

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.

In point of awful fact, the only people who have "the integrity, principle and decency" to use "the awesome powers of the presidency" "honorably" are ignored, if not denigrated, by the nation's corporate press as a whole and by the New York Times in particular.

The hypocrisy required for the New York Times to pontificate about the "wisdom" of the American voters is absolutely beyond measure.

So much for the "liberal media".

If you don't have symptoms resembling stomach flu, you haven't been paying attention.

Zelikow: CIA Withheld Tapes, Impeded 9/11 Investigation: Yeah, Right!!

The pot calls the kettle black, as the New York Times says a study of 9/11 commission documents indicates that the CIA impeded the investigation by failing to share videotapes of certain interrogations...

... and this is crucial because...

... if the commission had seen videotapes of two guys getting waterboarded and one of them implicating two of our key allies in the "global war on terrorism"...

... then the commission would have done a full investigation rather than a whitewash...

... and the criminals who foisted this ugly reality upon us would be hanging from the ceilings of tiny cages right now...

... rather than enjoying the fruits of their deception ...

... unless the relevant sections of the commission's report got redacted!!

Perhaps even more crucial, this revelation gives the whitewashers some much-needed cover: Now they can blame the Agency for impeding the investigation!

And that's why the "9/11 Panel Report" mentioned in the headline was written by Philip Zelikow, who personally orchestrated the whitewash.

Strangely (or not!), the NYT dipsy-doodles around the main story-line, which comes out like this:

A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

And so on. This bit was particularly rich:

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.

Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter.

Yeah, sure! Pressure on the Bush administration!

That's a good one!!

See also: Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything

Torture Tape Updates: White House Lied! CIA Violated Court Order! Mukasey Covered Up! ... [yawn] What Else Is New?

The Los Angeles Times says the CIA's destruction of some of its 9/11 torture videos may have been a violation of a court order.

Over the objections of the Justice Department, a federal judge said Tuesday he would explore whether the U.S. had violated a court order to preserve evidence when the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of two terrorism suspects in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. set a hearing for Friday in Washington in response to a request from Yemeni prisoners who are challenging their detention by the U.S. at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
...

The tapes were destroyed by a CIA official in November 2005, at a time of growing congressional and public concern about U.S. tactics in the war on terrorism, including interrogation techniques.

It was also five months after Kennedy, in the case of the Yemeni prisoners, issued an order requiring that the U.S. preserve and maintain "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now" at Guantanamo Bay. According to court papers, government lawyers said at the time that a formal order was not necessary because they were "well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation."
...

In court papers filed last week, the Justice Department argued that the videos weren't covered by the order because at the time [the prisoners shown on the tapes] were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas. The men were later transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison.

That's a nice loophole they found there, no?

The New York Times says the White House was much more involved in pre-destruction discussions than the public has been told.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.
...

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes.

Sounds like a coverup, doesn't it? But what are they covering up?

A coverup, that's what?

Bob Parry says: "Surprise! Mukasey Covered Up Torture".

Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by rushing a floor vote on Mukasey before rank-and-file Democrats could get organized and push for a filibuster.

To show thanks, Mukasey [photo] now is slapping the Democratic-controlled Congress in the face by demanding it back off any oversight investigations into how and why the CIA in late 2005 destroyed videotapes of the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects.

Mukasey is covering up a lot more than torture, but the courageous Bob Parry won't go there. I have no such qualms. But first, let's recap, shall we?

The CIA may have violated a court order? To this administration, court orders are made to be (a) defied, or (b) used as "justification" for changing the laws they have violated, or (c) used against others. We'll see what they decide to do with this one.

The White House failed to tell the public the truth? That's been their policy forever. Get used to it. And please quit believing what they say, especially their non-denial denials!

Mukasey covered up torture? Of course he did. That was his litmus test for his appointment as Attorney General. And as Bob Parry points out, "leaders" from both parties made sure it happened.

Also: Larisa Alexandrovna says Paul Thompson has created a new section on the destruction of the tapes, at his invaluable site, Cooperative Research.

And finally, please see my previous piece on this matter: "Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything".