George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice knew that once he has consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn’t like to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic, reason, and facts have little or no role.

Bush’s Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty. A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it was catastrophic.

At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway, regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just with opponents but with reality.

What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even after 7 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the tragedy and crime of our times.

Walter Reed outpatient treatment, poor living conditions, undelivered mail, lack of caseworkers to oversee and facilitate patient care for amputees, brain injured, and psychologically disabled veterans; Walter Reed is not the only military hospital about which questions have been raised; also out there the underfunding of the VA.

The problems at Walter Reed came to the public’s attention through a series of articles by Dana Priest beginning February 18, 2007. Following them, Gen. George Weightman who ran Walter Reed for 6 months resigned March 1, followed by the forced resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey the next day. Weightman’s boss Army Surgeon General Gen. Kevin "I don’t do barracks inspections at Walter Reed" Kiley who lived across from the notorious Building 18 and who had run the hospital from 2002-2004 lasted one day as the new head of Walter Reed before he was removed. He resigned from the Army on March 12.

One source of the difficulties at Walter Reed was the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) decision on August 25, 2005 to close Walter Reed. Planned renovations were canceled. Another was the privatizing of support services at the hospital. The workforce dropped from 350 experienced professionals to 50 who were not and the contract was given to IAP. IAP began work at Walter Reed in 2003. In 2004, IAP lobbied successfully against an Army recommendation not to privatize the workforce. The OMB reversed the Army finding and the services contract was given to IAP in January 2006 although its implementation was delayed a year. IAP is run by two former KBR executives and had a well connected board of directors as well as being owned by a powerful holding company the Cerberus hedge fund.

However, the generally low priority given to ongoing patient care for wounded soldiers was probably the single greatest reason for the woes at Walter Reed. It bears remembering that there were problems noted as early as 2004 and certainly by 2005 and that Walter Reed is located in the nation’s capital minutes from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of major media outlets. Washington didn’t know about Walter Reed because it didn’t want to know.

The mindset which gives a higher priority to PR than care of the nation’s wounded continues. An August 2008 USAToday story reported that barracks in Fort Sill, Oklahoma meant to relieve conditions experienced by veterans at Walter Reed had mold problems in their ventilation system. The situation had been known for months, but soldiers were ordered not to talk to the press about it. Chuck Roeder, the social services coordinator, who blew the whistle on conditions at the base was rewarded for his diligence by being forced out of his job.

Firing of US attorneys. Most of the country’s 93 US attorneys are usually replaced within the first 2 years of a new administration and this is what happened when Bush came into office in 2001. US attorneys are political appointees and are chosen to reflect the policy priorities of a President. Still their primary job is to uphold the law, and the law is not supposed to be partisan. Karl Rove, of course, had other ideas. He believes that government should be politicized and populated with compliant partisan hacks loyal to him and his.

The plan was to create a list of political hires and fires of US attorneys under the direction of the White House (i.e. Rove and Harriet Miers) which Gonzales (and Bush) would then dutifully sign off on. There were two components. First, on February 7, 2006, regulations were published giving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the power to hire and fire all non-civil service employees of the Justice Department (DOJ). On March 1, 2006, Gonzales signed an order delegating this power (subject to his nominal final approval) to two fairly junior and inexperienced staffers: Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling his senior counselor and liaison with the White House and his Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson. Second, sometime late in 2005 (shortly before the conference report for the Patriot Act Extension was filed on December 8, 2005), language originating at the DOJ was surreptitiously inserted into the act by Brett Tolman (see 97) which allowed Gonzales to make indefinite interim US attorney appointments without Senate approval. The conference report was passed and became law on March 9, 2006. So again, the two parts were first to set up a system where Rove could control the hiring and firing of US attorneys and second to bypass the Senate confirmation process which might interfere with the first part.

On December 7, 2006, eight US attorneys were notified that they would be fired. Most came from swing states. Most were considered not to have aggressively enough prosecuted Democrats or voter fraud cases in the run up to November 2006 elections, the idea being that such prosecutions would have helped Republicans in close elections. Worse some were investigating and had even prosecuted prominent Republicans. And then there were those partisan hacks waiting in the wings to replace them.

1. Carol Lam, Southern California, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and indicted the former No. 3 at the CIA Dusty Foggo.
2. H. E. Cummins III, Eastern Arkansas, had been asked to investigate the Republican Governor in the neighboring state of Missouri. He announced the investigation finished in October 2006 a month before the election but was fired anyway to make way for Timothy Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove who had been the principal opposition researcher in the Bush 2004 campaign.
3. David Iglesias, New Mexico, angered Republican Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson when he refused to push for indictments of Democratic officials before the election after they inappropriately contacted him.
4. Daniel Bogden, Nevada, similarly was replaced by Brett Tolman who was crucial to bypassing Senate scrutiny of these appointments.
5. Paul K. Charlton, Arizona, was investigating Republican Representative Rick Renzi for corruption.
6. John McKay, Western Washington, angered state Republicans for not creating voter fraud cases in the 2004 Governor’s race which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.
7. Margaret Chiara, Western Michigan. It is not clear why she was fired. She was on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) of US attorneys. It may have been to make way for Russell Stoddard who had been languishing out in Guam as First Assistant Attorney after Frederick Black got demoted for investigating Abramoff’s activities in the North Marianas. In July 2008, it came out that Monica "It’s against my religion" Goodling may have sought to remove Chiara because of unsubstantiated rumors that she was in a lesbian relationship with an Assistant US Attorney Leslie Hagen (see item 336).
8. Kevin V. Ryan, Northern California, is the only one of the 8 who deserved to be on the list because he did run his office poorly. DOJ actually wanted to keep him on but a federal judge forced the issue and his name was added to the list.

A 9th US Attorney Todd Graves (Western District of Missouri) was asked to resign before the others on January 24, 2006. This resignation took place under pressure from Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) as payback for frictions his office was having with Sam Graves, a Republican Representative also from Missouri and Todd Graves’ brother.

As they say, it is not the crime but the coverup. Gonzales has given so many different and contradictory stories about the firings that it is hard to keep up and then there is his memory. In his Senate testimony of April 19, 2007, he answered he couldn’t remember by some counts 71 times. He didn’t know who had called for such a list. He couldn’t remember having been very involved in the process. He even forgot to mention the March 1, 2006 order in his testimony. In fact, he knew very little about what were major decisions at the department he supposedly ran but, despite this, he did know there was nothing improper in any of it. Testifying in the House on May 10, 2007, his memory and his believability were little improved. Kyle Sampson too had memory problems but did contradict Gonzales’ claim that he had not been involved. For his part, Sampson described himself as just the guy that others dropped their files off to and his contribution to the process was to keep them in his desk drawer. Initially, Monica Goodling took an indefinite leave of absence, then resigned, then said she would take the 5th in any Congressional testimony. On May 23, 2007, after a grant of immunity she testified that Paul McNulty the Deputy Attorney General was more aware of events surrounding the firings (although this is far from clear), that she had crossed the line (i.e. broken the law) in asking career DOJ hires about their political affiliations, that Gonzales’ statements were inaccurate (i.e. he lied), and that Gonzales had sought to harmonize their stories (i.e. obstruct justice). Goodling, like Sampson, tried to portray herself as a bit player despite Gonzales’ extraordinary grant of authority to them both. On June 21, 2007, Paul McNulty testified before the Congress and basically stonewalled, saying that he was out of the loop, that he didn’t know who created the firing list, that there was no problem at the DOJ, and that there was no contradiction between his testimony and that of anyone else, including Monica Goodling. On July 11, 2007, Sara Taylor who left her post of White House political director in May randomly invoked Executive privilege and otherwise and like so many others had a bad memory. She did state that she had had no dealings with Bush concerning the firings. Along with her selective use of Executive privilege, this contention further undermined the claim that an Executive privilege was involved and left the possibility of a contempt citation. An unintentionally revealing insight into the mindset of those who work for this Administration came in Taylor’s testimony when she stated, “I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously.” Her oath was, of course, not to the President but to defend the Constitution. On July 12, 2007, former White House counsel Harriet Miers refused to appear pursuant to a House Judiciary Committee subpoena, leaving her open to contempt proceedings as well.

From this use of Executive privilege, it is clear that the White House, and more specifically Karl Rove, was involved in the firings and was, in fact, calling the shots in this affair, and that those at Justice, including the Attorney General, were just the eager, if dim, facilitators of it.

In addition to the Sampson and Goodling resignations, Michael Battle Director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA) who informed the US attorneys of their firing left the DOJ on March 16, 2007. Paul McNulty the No. 2 at the DOJ and Deputy Attorney General announced his resignation on May 14, 2007 to become effective later in the summer. Although left out of the loop on the details of the firings and giving false Congressional testimony as a result for which he apologized, McNulty did approve the firings and through his Chief of Staff Michael Elston warned several of those fired to stay quiet about them. Elston announced his resignation on June 15, 2007. On June 22, 2007, Bill Mercer who was Acting Associate Attorney General (the No. 3 spot at the DOJ) withdrew his nomination for the permanent position. On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney General effective September 17, 2007.

The DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) informed the Senate in June 2007 that it was investigating Goodling’s claim that Gonzales had tried to tamper with her testimony.

Congress intervened and changed the relevant provision of the Patriot Act to re-instate the Senate’s role in confirming US attorneys (May 22, 2007). This was signed into law June 14, 2007. Provocatively, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continued to make interim appointments right up to the Presidential signing.

In September 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility issued a joint report on the US Attorney firings. Their investigation was hampered by an unprecedented lack of cooperation from within the Executive Branch itself. Not only did major players like Harriet Miers and Karl Rove decline to be interviewed but the White House refused to provide relevant materials or redacted them to the point of rendering them useless. Even more extraordinary Justice’s own Office of Legal Counsel (which now acts as more of an adjunct of the White House in the Justice Department) also refused to share materials. Monica Goodling, of course, declined to cooperate as did Senators Kit Bond (R-MO) and Pete Domenici (R-NM).

As happens in most IG reports, this one pulled its punches. It sought to ascertain if there was a credible rationale for each of the firings, an approach fundamentally at odds with the political nature of the firing process itself. Chiara might have been fired for performance reasons and not sexual orientation. With Lam, it might have been about guns and immigration. McKay, a disagreement about a file sharing system. Charlton, a death penalty case. But all these miss the point. Credible rationales were not the object of the exercise.

As the report concludes:

. . . the process the Department used to select the U.S. Attorneys for removal was fundamentally flawed, and the oversight and implementation of the removal process by the Department’s most senior leaders was seriously lacking. In particular, we found that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty failed to adequately supervise the U.S. Attorney selection and removal process, and they were remarkably unengaged in the process. Instead, Chief of Staff to the Attorney General Kyle Sampson, with very little input from other Department officials, designed, selected, and implemented the removal process, with little supervision or oversight.

This is certainly damning, but it still invites us to accept an incredible scenario, that the senior management of the Justice Department, faced with significant high level personnel changes in which they either had a direct say or substantial interest, simply took a walk, asked no questions, and left it all in the hands of a virtual nobody. While this DOJ OIG-OPR report fills in details, the real story behind the US Attorney firings remains to be told.

Plamegate. Scooter Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President was convicted on March 6, 2007 on two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. Placing political payback (against an individual and an agency) above national security, the Vice President’s office orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, her cover company Brewster Jennings, other agents which had used this same cover, and her contacts. All this was done in retaliation for an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003 written by her husband ambassador Joe Wilson. In it, he publicly debunked the "16 words" in Bush’s January 28, 2003 State of the Union which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain uranium from Africa (Niger). This undercut the argument that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and showed that the Bush Administration had known this was so in advance of the war. Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate this charge in February 2002 at the request of the CIA and had reported nearly a year before its use in the SOTU that it was false. After several attempts by among others Karl Rove to pitch Plame’s identity to the media, on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame was outed in a column by Robert Novak In his closing argument at the Libby trial, Patrick Fitzgerald detailed Cheney’s guiding hand in the conspiracy behind the outing and spoke of a "cloud" over the Vice President. That cloud remains.

On June 5, 2007, Scooter Libby received a preliminary sentence of 30 months in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a requirement of 400 hours of community service. This was confirmed June 14 and bail during appeal was denied. Scooter’s defense solicited letters on his behalf from Washington’s conservative elite. These praised his legal expertise and national security credentials and were likely counterproductive since they made clear he was well aware of the legal ramifications of lying to a grand jury and the security implications of outing a CIA agent. A group of conservative attorneys led by Robert Bork also filed an unsuccessful, last minute amicus brief questioning the legitimacy of Patrick Fitzgerald’s appointment as prosecutor. It called the appointment a "close" question although its rationale depended upon a lone Supreme Court dissent in a case that was not closely decided and its effect would be to prevent independent investigations of high US officials. On July 2, 2007, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit unanimously denied Libby’s appeal. Hours later George Bush commuted Libby’s sentence eliminating any jail time. This is an Administration that believes it is outside the law and acts accordingly. It is not so much that they have contempt for the law. Rather they have contempt for us. The cloud that was over Cheney now covers Bush as well.

A civil suit filed by Valerie Plame was dismissed on July 19, 2007 by judge John D. Bates who ruled that, while Plame’s complaint had merit, the court did not have jurisdiction.  It was dismissed again on appeal on August 12, 2008 on procedural grounds.

On December 10, 2007, Libby’s lawyers announced that they were dropping his appeal. This is all part of a legal strategy to stonewall and run out the clock. Since Libby had his sentence commuted rather than receiving a pardon, he could continue to assert a 5th Amendment privilege if he were summoned to give testimony before Congress. Beginning an appeal gave a patina of credence to such a contention. However, to go forward with the appeal once this point had been made would have been expensive and unnecessary. The last thing Scooter wanted was a successful appeal since this could have resulted in a retrial and another conviction, very likely after Bush had left office. At that point Scooter would have no one to commute his sentence or pardon him and he could have faced real jail time. This was not the object of the exercise.

Iraq: axis of evil, lack of preparation for occupation, looting, including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi army, banning the Baathists, the CPA, cronyism, Paul Bremer, losing tons of money literally, lack of international inclusion in reconstruction and security, weak Constitution, formation of sectarian parties, weak government, denial of actual conditions in Iraq, for example, its civil war, ignoring 4 years of failed policies and the basic proposal of the Iraq Study Group to withdraw, escalating instead, continuing lack of any discernible mission. A brief analysis of casualty figures can be found here:

Afghanistan, transferring resources to Iraq before the job was finished, the results: a resurgent Taliban, continuing warlordism, and exploding opium production. On January 30, 2008, three independent non-partisan reports on Afghanistan by the Center for the Study of the Presidency (Jones-Pickering), the Atlantic Council, and the National Defense University concluded that Afghanistan has been neglected and is in danger of becoming a failed state and that a new comprehensive policy for it is needed. You would think that after 6 years we would have one by now but this is the Bush Administration we are talking about.

Iran and saber rattling, axis of evil, lack of engagement, refusal to talk to, addressing the nuclear issue through threats, clumsy attempts to blame Iran for the debacle in Iraq and a failure to recognize their very real interests there.

North Korea, axis of evil, ditching the 1994 agreement and freezing of bank accounts because of dubious uranium program, the plutonium program which led to a fizzled first nuclear test, and something like a return to the 1994 agreement. On June 26, 2008, Bush declared that he would ask Congress to rescind its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. While this move was primarily to establish some sort of a positive legacy for him, it underlines how off track his North Korea policy was during most of his Presidency and how although tenuous this one foreign policy success was due to that most abhorred of all concepts in the Bush Administration: diplomacy.

Osama bin Laden, where are you? The blown opportunity at Tora Bora. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the roles of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in terrorism. Pakistan’s intelligence service the ISI created the Taliban. Despite $11 billion in US aid from 2001 through 2007, the government of Pervez Musharraf continues to give it safe haven in Pakistan. As for al Qaeda, those efforts which do occur are limited and often timed to the visits of American dignitaries. In addition, Bush’s oft stated policy of spreading democracy was dealt a blow when Musharraf fearing a Supreme Court decision preventing him from holding the Presidency and remaining Chief of Staff of the armed forces declared a state of emergency and instituted martial law on November 3, 2007.

The Saudis for their part fund radical madrassas throughout the Moslem world and have a domestic educational system run by the most extreme of their homegrown extremists. Saudi and Gulf oil dollars find their way to many terrorist groups as well as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

Civilian contractors; also no bid contracts; in Iraq Halliburton tainted food and water, overpriced gas; Blackwater use of private security contractors, what used to be called mercenaries, with little or no accountability

The Military Commissions Act: torture, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts. One of the last acts of the Congress before the November 2006 elections, it passed the Senate on September 28 and the House the next day and was signed into law by Bush on October 17. The short story on this is that, pre-election, the Republicans pushed it and the Democrats caved on it. As bad as the military commissions envisioned in the act are, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) which designate who is to be tried are even worse. They were complete shams. Decisions were made on the flimsiest and most general information without challenge or taking into account the methods (torture) used to obtain it. Detainees lacked effective legal representation, and the CSRTs did not come close to meeting minimal standards of judicial process, even a preliminary one. To top it off, as later military judges have found, the CSRTs designated detainees "enemy combatants" which does not meet the Military Commissions Act standard of "unlawful enemy combatants" vitiating their findings to date. Even when they make up the rules they can’t get it right.

The case of Murat Kurnaz shows how flawed the CSRTs are. He was a Turkish citizen who had lived his entire life in Germany. On October 3, 2001, at the point of getting his German citizenship, he traveled to Pakistan to visit religious sites. In December 2001, he was removed from the group he was traveling with, arrested by Pakistani police, and flown to Guantanamo 4 weeks later. In September 2002, he was interrogated by American and German intelligence officers who concluded that he had no links to terrorism and should be freed. This view was repeated in a memo dated May 19, 2003 from the commanding general of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, the Pentagon unit responsible for interrogating detainees. Against this was a memo dated June 25, 2004 by Brigadier General David Lacquement, then head of the US Southern Command’s intelligence unit, who said Kurnaz was a danger because he had among other things prayed during the national anthem, asked how high the basketball rim was in the prison yard (which in Lacquement-speak indicated a desire to escape), and enquired about guard schedules and detainee transfers. There was also the accusation that Kurnaz knew someone who knew a suicide bomber (except this was later shown to be untrue) and had stayed at a hostel in Pakistan run by a religious group linked to terrorism (the group’s link was also untrue). Kurnaz’s CSRT was held on October 4, 2004 where he was determined to be an enemy combatant. His lawyers challenged this in a DC District Court. (This was before the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.) In a January 2005 opinion, Judge Joyce Green found that the CSRT process had been biased and was contrary to US and international law. This opinion became public on March 25, 2005 when it was inadvertently released by court officials. Nevertheless, Kurnaz continued to be held. In January 2006, a yearly Review Board hearing reconfirmed.that Kurnaz was an enemy combatant. Meanwhile Kurnaz’s detention and German participation in his interrogation was giving the story legs in Germany. Also in January 2006, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up the case with Bush. On May 31, 2006, the FBI weighed in indicating that it had no interest in Kurnaz. In July 2006, a special Review Board met and determined that he was no longer an enemy combatant. The reasons for this change of status remain classified. Kurnaz was flown back to Germany goggled and shackled where he was released on August 24, 2006. Despite repeated findings by the intelligence community that Kurnaz was innocent of any links to terrorism, flimsy, false, and easily refutable evidence allowed by the CSRTs resulted in his detention without any formal charge for more than 4 1/2 years, a detention that would have continued if it had not been for the accidental leak of details of his case by a DC court and the personal intervention of the head of the German government.

On July 20, 2007, a three judge panel of the DC Circuit in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. US rejected parts of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of 2005 asserting that it will expect to examine all information bearing on a detainee’s case and not just what the government used in deciding to hold a detainee. SCOTUS on June 29, 2007 changed its mind and decided to take a look at these cases in the fall, especially in light of what the Circuit Court might decide. On June 10, 2008, SCOTUS in a 5-4 decision with Kennedy writing the majority opinion and Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas dissenting ruled that that review procedures in the the DTA did not provide an adequate substitute for the writ of habeas corpus, that the CSRTs were deficient, that the Constitutional requirements for its suspension (rebellion or invasion) had not been met, that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) could not strip habeas out, that practical not formal considerations applied to its extension to non-citizens overseas, and that because the US exercised effective if not de jure sovereignty over Guantanamo, accordingly the writ of habeas corpus ran there. This is another indication that the “judicial” structure that the Administration sought to construct at Guantanamo continues to collapse under its own un-Constitutional weight. It also underlines the divide in the Court among those justices who subscribe to the Bush doctrine of the unilateral Executive and those who believe in the traditional doctrine of judicial review embodied in Marbury v. Madison early in the country’s history.

On September 24, 2007 in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found that on hearing more evidence a military judge had the power to determine that an alien enemy combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this could clear the way for trials under the MCA. On November 8, 2007, the government informed Khadr’s defense that it had an exculpatory eyewitness which it had known about from the beginning but only chose to tell the defense about several years into Khadr’s detention. On May 29, 2008, the Pentagon announced that the judge in Khadr’s case Army Colonel Peter Brownback had been removed. No reason was given but there was a push on to start trials before the November 2008 elections and Brownback had threatened to suspend proceedings because the prosecution had been stalling about sharing records with the defense concerning Khadr’s detention. On June 8, 2008, it came out that Khadr’s attorney Lieutenant Commander Bill Kuebler had come across a military directive which ordered interrogators to destroy their handwritten notes of interrogations, i.e. destroy evidence, obstruct justice. The notes are important because they give a blow by blow account of interrogations and are far more complete than the sanitized summaries put together later based on them. They could, as the defense contends, show that Khadr’s various confessions were the product of torture. And their destruction effectively poisons the well in any prosecution of Khadr. On June 9, 2008, Kuebler was to submit an affidavit on this to SCOTUS in the Boumediene case. (see also item 85)

On October 5, 2007, the chief Guantanamo prosecutor career Air Force Colonel Morris Davis resigned in a dispute with reserve Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann (until recently a corporate lawyer now legal adviser to the convening authority for the Military Commissions Susan Crawford). The function of the convening authority is to approve or reduce charges against the accused or make plea agreements with them. It is supposed to be an arbiter, but in a clear conflict of interest, Crawford and Hartmann pressed the prosecutor’s office to file the most serious charges possible in an attempt to drum up publicity and support for the military commissions process. Davis has since said another reason for his departure was the placement of his office under that of the Department of Defense’s General Counsel. The DOD GC is William Haynes (See item 194) who signed off on the torture memos prepared by John Yoo for the Department of Defense. No matter how rank and foul this travesty of American justice is, it seems to have a never-ending capacity to get worse.

In Congressional testimony on December 11, 2007, Hartmann refused to say whether waterboarding was torture or whether waterboarding of an American soldier by a foreign government would be considered torture. He did suggest that he had no problem with evidence gained by torture being admitted into court proceedings.

On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed the Intelligence Authorization bill because it outlawed waterboarding and required intelligence agencies to adhere to interrogation methods authorized by the Army Field Manual. Bush reiterated his standard lies on the subject:

While details of the current CIA program are classified, the Attorney General has reviewed it and determined that it is lawful under existing domestic and international law, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. I remain committed to an intelligence-gathering program that complies with our legal obligations and our basic values as a people. The United States opposes torture, and I remain committed to following international and domestic law regarding the humane treatment of people in its custody, including the “Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 [On this last, he appended a signing statement saying that he would follow the DTA only if and when he felt like it].

On March 11, 2008, the House failed to override 225-188.

On May 9, 2008, the judge Captain Keith Allred presiding over the first Guantanamo trial, that of Salim Hamdan, ordered Hartmann to have no further contact with the proceedings because he was too closely associated with the prosecution.

On August 6, 2008, Hamdan was convicted of giving material aid to terrorists but acquitted of the more serious charge of conspiracy in the African embassy bombings and to kill Americans in Afghanistan. The prosecution argued that Hamdan was more than Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur but also a bodyguard. It could not explain, however, why Abdallah Tabarak in that case who was bin Laden’s chief of security was released from Guantanamo in 2004 after 3 years detention there. It also pointed to the precedents of Nuremberg but again could not explain why Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver, was never charged with anything. The defense pointed to testimony of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed that described Hamdan who has only a 4th grade education as a primitive Bedouin fit only to wash cars and change tires. When Hamdan was detained, two shoulder fired missiles were found in his car, and this appears to be the basis for his conviction on the one count. In this sense, the commission acted correctly and in adherence with its rules, but this trial in no way validates those rules.

Hamdan was determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by the thoroughly discredited, sham process of the CSRTs. He was held for years without trial and subjected to coercive interrogations and denied the benefit of legal counsel during these. He was sent before a military commission where his lawyers were severely limited in the defense they could present. They had little access to evidence or ability to challenge it or present exculpatory evidence of their own. Evidence derived from coercive interrogations was allowed. The surprise is that under these conditions and before a handpicked military jury who did not even need unanimity to convict the prosecution still could not make the main part of its case. Yet even if Hamdan had been acquitted on all charges, his indefinite detention would not have ended.

Nuremberg was about holding leaders responsible but Hamdan is the very opposite of a leader. He is very much a pawn, perhaps not quite an innocent, certainly not a fighter. He is a small man caught up and by larger events. And this is what the Bush Administration’s War on Terror has produced after 7 years and the commitment of untold resources: the conviction of Osama bin Laden’s driver on a lesser count. Could anything be more ridiculous and pathetic?

The following day on August 7, 2008, Hamdan was sentenced to 66 months. The judge indicated he would credit current time served which amounts to 61 months making the effective sentence 5 months. The prosecution was asking for 30 years. What happens when Hamdan’s sentence is up remains unclear, but it will occur shortly before the inauguration of the next President.

On November 25, 2008, Hamdan was sent to Yemen where he will be held until December 27 and then released.

On August 14, 2008, Hartmann who is supposed to act as a neutral supervisor was barred from further involvement in a second trial that of Mohammed Jawad due to bias in favor of the prosecution by trial judge Colonel Stephen Henley. Also on August 14, 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Zierhoffer, a military psychologist supervising Jawad’s interrogation, invoked her article 31 rights. Article 31 is the military version of the 5th Amendment prohibition against self-incrimination. Despite Jawad being a juvenile, known not to have any intelligence value, and rapidly deteriorating mentally, Zierhoffer recommended that techniques, such as prolonged periods of extreme isolation and sleep deprivation, be continued with him, resulting in Jawad attempting suicide. This isn’t us, or at least it shouldn’t be.

On September 24, 2008, citing a lack of due process and the suspression of exculpatory evidence in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld quit. Jawad, a juvenile at the time of his capture, was accused of throwing a grenade at Americans. In a sealed affidavit, Vandeveld stated that prosecutors knew that Jawad may have been drugged prior to the attack and that two other men had, in fact, confessed to it. It says a lot about how rotten the military commissions process is that even military prosecutors can’t stomach it.

A November 1, 2008 story in the Miami Herald reports that Thomas Hartmann has decided to retire from the military effective February 17, 2009. With vacation time, he would be gone before the inauguration. This may be a classic case of getting out of Dodge. He is currently facing two different investigations by the DOD for his Guantanamo activities.

On November 18, 2008, the chief military judge at Guantanamo Marine Colonel Ralph Kohlmann announced his immediate retirement. He was previously scheduled to retire in April 2009. His departure confuses further an already thoroughly dysfunctional and discredited process.

On November 20, 2008, a conservative federal district court judge in Washington, DC Richard Leon in the first habeas review of Guantanamo detainees ordered the release of 5 Algerians. These were Lakhdar Boumediene, Saber Lahmar, Mohamed Nechle, Mustafa Ait Idir and Hadj Boudella. Leon ruled that a sixth Algerian Bensayah Belkacem who was considered the leading al Qaeda operative in Bosnia had been lawfully detained. The six had been seized by US forces in Bosnia citing a plan to blow up the US embassy there. They were taken to Guantanamo in 2002 and have been held there ever since this despite a Bosnian court having decided that there was insufficient evidence against them. In October 2008, the government had withdrawn the bombing plot charge but claimed the men had been on their way to fight in Afghanistan. Leon noted that the government’s case rested on a classified document from a single unnamed source and termed it a “thin reed”. On December 16, 2008, the government returned 3 of the 5 (excluding Boumediene and Lahmar) to Bosnia.

Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, FEMA and "Heck of a job, Brownie," lack of preparation, lack of emergency aid, slowness of reconstruction, Bush ignores for days then gives address from Jackson Square in New Orleans promising aid which never comes or much of which goes to politically connected outstate no bid contractors, disparity between response to Louisiana and Republican Trent Lott’s Mississippi; Bush refuses to waive 10% state match for federal funds (waived in many previous disasters) increasing the bureaucratic paperwork, reducing aid to affected areas, and further slowing and complicating rebuilding.

Bush authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001. However, Joseph Nacchio former CEO of Qwest convicted April 19, 2007 of insider trading reported that the NSA in a meeting on February 27, 2001 (1 month after Bush became President and 6 1/2 months before 9/11) tried to sign Qwest up to a warrantless surveillance program and that when Nacchio refused the NSA pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts from the company.

Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) a warrant would be needed from the FISA court (federal judges entrusted with these decisions in addition to their regular jobs) for domestic to international telephone or internet communication. The bar for such a warrant is extraordinarily low, has almost never been denied, and can be granted up to 3 days after the surveillance as begun (in order to give maximum flexibility in emergency situations). This is in contrast to international to international communications which have always been considered legitimate targets for US intelligence organizations and require no warrant.

The post-9/11 Bush program acquired its legal basis from a John Yoo memo originating in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It went much further than cutting FISA out of the loop and probably included surveillance of both international and domestic communications of targets generated from datamining NSA databases as well as their contacts and the contacts of those contacts in ever expanding and less relevant circles. While incredibly intrusive and in violation of Fourth Amendment protections, this operation was to all intents and purposes worthless. FBI agents sent to check out the information they received from this program were invariably sent on wild goose chases. They wasted a lot of time and resources on them, all of which could have been better spent elsewhere. Because this was often where their information led them, they took to calling these Pizza Hut leads. It has been suggested that what the NSA was using in its surveillance was a program called Main Core, a searchable database of databases. It is rumored to contain data on 8 million Americans deemed suspicious (yes, I don’t know what that means either) who in case of national emergency would be subject to anything from arrest to heightened surveillance. It may have been this massive warrantless surveillance, real or potential, of huge numbers of Americans that troubled some, like James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, at the DOJ. It screamed lack of probable cause and smacked too closely of being an enemies list, only a lot bigger.

In addition to this, the Administration appeared intent on exploiting the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to expand the scope of its surveillance. This act requires telecoms to configure their equipment to facilitate governmental wiretapping. While the act was not envisioned as a means of large scale warrantless wiretapping, it could with the help of service providers like the telecoms be turned into one. Supporting this view is that on March 10, 2004, the DOJ, FBI, and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) petitioned the FCC to extend CALEA to the internet (see item 252). This action coming as it did on the same day as the Ashcroft hospital visit (described below) may have been an effort to expand or acquire additional cover for a data mining program like Main Core that was already in operation.

In any case in March 2004, the OLC under its new head Jack Goldsmith a defense oriented conservative rejected Yoo’s reasoning and reversed its position on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey both conservatives and Bush appointees accepted this finding. Then Ashcroft came down with acute gallstone pancreatitis and transferred his powers to his deputy Comey who became Acting Attorney General. In a scheme apparently orchestrated by Vice President Cheney, Bush called Mrs. Ashcroft and Cheney "on the President’s behalf" ordered then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to go to the hospital and get the ailing and doped up Ashcroft to sign off on the surveillance program. Mrs. Ashcroft informed her husband’s Chief of Staff David Ayers about the impending visit and he contacted Comey. Comey in turn contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to order the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft to remain in his room (as witnesses) and raced to the hospital and Ashcroft’s room in the ICU. This set the scene for the now famous March 10, 2004 hospital room confrontation where Gonzales and Card ignoring Comey tried to get Ashcroft’s signature. Ashcroft was, however, lucid enough to refuse to sign and to point out the obvious: that he did not have the power to do so since Comey was the Acting Attorney General. Despite the refusal by the DOJ to vouch for the program’s legality, Bush re-authorized it anyway. A threat by Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller to resign did, however, result in changes to the program. The OLC came up with a narrower justification under the AUMF for a more limited program which became the TSP (Terrorist Surveillance Program). It should be noted that this program in all of its manifestations and despite its various justifications has been illegal on its face since its inception.

The program became public when the New York Times reported on it in December 2005. In 2006 various unsuccessful attempts were made to accommodate the program. This included the infamous attempted "compromise" by Arlen Specter to legalize its worst excesses and retroactively amnesty any illegalities. Under mounting pressure and with a new Democratic Congress, Alberto Gonzales announced on January 18, 2007, a "deal" with the FISA court which would put the program under its supervision. Gonzales maintained, however, that Bush still had Article II power to go outside the court if he wanted to.

On July 24, 2007, Gonzales testified under oath before Senate Judiciary Committee that before going to the hospital to see Ashcroft he had met with a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders overseeing intelligence matters (the Gang of 8) to discuss Comey’s objections and that they had approved the predecessor to the TSP. Several of the Democratic members of the Gang of 8 denied that such approval was ever given. Additionally, Gonzales asserted that the program discussed was not the TSP but another program. Both General Hayden then head of the NSA and John Negroponte then DNI have indicated that this was precisely the program discussed albeit in its unmodified form. Finally, Gonzales maintained in his testimony that there had been no serious disagreement about the program despite the objections from the DOJ. Along with his constantly changing testimony concerning the US Attorney firings, this discrepancy led four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 26, 2007 to ask Solicitor General Paul Clement (in his role of Acting Attorney General for matters in which Gonzales has recused himself) to name a special prosecutor to determine whether Gonzales has obstructed justice, perjured himself, and made false statements.

Despite previous abuses, April 10, 2007 intelligence czar DNI John "Mike" McConnell (not to be confused with Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell) proposes allowing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of foreign nationals completely outside of FISA, extend from 3 days to one week surveillance without seeking FISA permission "in emergency situations," immunize telecoms, and extend FISA warrants from 120 days to one year. McConnell has a large conflict of interest in the immunization of telecoms issue. Like too many others, McConnell has benefited from the revolving door between government and private enterprise. He has been director of defense programs at Booz Allen Hamilton a large defense and intelligence firm with CIA and NSA consulting contracts and chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association for NSA and CIA contractors. In short, he has intimate connections to precisely those corporate players most closely involved in promoting the use of telecoms in intelligence gathering and with the greatest vested interest in keeping this arrangement going .

On August 5, 2007, Bush signed into law a 6 month revision of FISA which would allow warrantless wiretapping of non-American individuals "reasonably" thought to be outside the US and incidentally of US citizens as long as these are not the primary targets of surveillance. The Attorney General (at the time of the bill’s signing this was still the eminently untrustworthy Alberto Gonzales) and the DNI (the as we will soon see truth challenged Mike McConnell) alone and without any outside judicial review would see the program was properly carried out. In effect, this was a backdoor way to surveil Americans without a warrant. It also granted telecommunication companies prospective immunity for aiding the government in these activities during this 6 month period but not retroactively for their past actions.

The need for such a bill was raised at the last minute as lawmakers were on their way out of town for the August recess. Although it only became public later, the ostensible reason for modifying FISA at this particular juncture was an unspecified terrorist threat to the Capitol (which DNI McConnell knew at the time was based on an unreliable source). Mike McConnell then negotiated with Democratic Congressional leaders on a Democratic bill to address perceived shortcomings in the FISA law. The White House, however, wanted FISA gutted, and McConnell reneged on his deal with the Democrats. With the Congressional vacation coming on and members eager to leave, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid caved. Through their parliamentary machinations, the Democratic bill was defeated and the Republican version endorsed by the White House passed. The end result was, abetted by a dishonest DNI, another power grab by the Bush Administration and the failure of the Democrats to stand up to it.

On September 10, 2007, DNI McConnell testified before a Senate committee that the newly gutted FISA law the Protect America Act resulted in the arrest of 3 Germans planning to attack Americans in Germany. When German authorities pointed out that the Germans in question had come to their attention through US surveillance initiated under the old FISA statute, McConnell retracted his statement without apologizing for it.

On September 20, 2007, McConnell testified falsely again that surveillance of Iraqi insurgents holding American troops had been held up for 12 hours due to FISA court restrictions. The delay, however, occurred because of the initial weakness of the request submitted by the NSA to the DOJ (which given the low threshold for FISA warrants is telling) and subsequent foul ups in finding a senior official to sign off on it. Since the old FISA law allowed surveillance to begin up to 72 hours before the granting of a warrant, it is unclear why this was even an issue.

Because the Protect America Act (PAA) was set to expire after 180 days, in December 2007, an attempt was made in the Senate to pass a permanent extension. There were two principal versions of this bill, the Intel version from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) chaired by the conservative Democrat Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and another a revision of the Intel version that came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The Intel version was Republican friendly and was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as the base or favored version. It granted the retroactive immunity the telecoms had been lobbying for (not in the SJC bill), allowed basket warrants for the surveillance, not of individuals, but of classes of persons, had weak minimization (i.e. disposal of information on Americans incidentally obtained) requirements and oversight, and gave only vague assurances that the program would not be used for reverse targeting (using a foreign national as an excuse to surveil an American). An objection by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) threw this well orchestrated process into disarray, and Reid pulled consideration of the bill on December 17, 2007.

In January 2008, with the PAA due to expire on February 1, Reid made a second attempt to pass the Intel version. This time he was blindsided by Bush and the Republicans. Senate Republicans played politics. They refused to allow any face-saving amendments (all of which were likely to be defeated anyway) to be brought up and were willing to see the PAA expire instead. Bush for his part announced he would veto even a short extension of the PAA to give the Senate time to act. So on the one hand Bush and the Republicans argued that the PAA was absolutely necessary and if it was not passed the terrorists would win and we would all die. On the other, they were perfectly ready to see it expire just so they could stick it to Senate Democrats.

On January 28, 2008, with the SOTU scheduled for later that evening, that is what happened. In a near party line vote, Democrats defeated the Republican move (48-45 with 60 votes needed) for cloture on the Intel version of the PAA with no amendments. The Republicans then defeated a similar motion for a 30 day extension of the PAA on a straight party line vote.

So to recap briefly, Senate Democrats were ready to pass a bad bill, but the Republicans who supported the bad bill wanted to rub the Democrats’ faces in it first. As a result, everything fell apart, and the upshot was everyone could and did blame everyone else. High school was not this bad.

On January 29, 2008, a 15 day extension (to February 15, 2008) was agreed to by voice vote in the House and by Unanimous Consent in the Senate. An agreement was made to consider amendments to the PAA in return for a cloture vote. All of the amendments were rejected by Republicans voting as a bloc and conservative Democrats voting as weasels.

• SA 3915: (Feingold): stoppage of surveillance of an American upon finding of FISA court and minimization of information so acquired. Rejected: 40-56
• SA 3913 (Feingold): No reverse targeting of Americans. Rejected: 38-57
• SA 3910 (Feinstein): Exclusivity (surveillance must be conducted under FISA). Rejected: 57-41 (Needed 60)
• SA 3979 (Feingold): Segregation and audit of communications involving Americans. Rejected: 35-63
• SA 3907 (Dodd): No retroactive immunity for telecoms. Rejected: 31-67
• SA 3912 (Feingold): No bulk surveillance. Rejected: 37-60
• SA 3927 (Specter): Substitution of US for telecoms in civil suits. Rejected: 37-60
• SA 3919 (Feinstein): Transferal of civil suits to FISA court (with an eye to dismiss). Rejected: 41-57 (Needed 60)

The first two were defeated on February 7. The others on February 12, 2008. Cloture was invoked, and the bill passed in the Senate 68-29. Senate Republicans timed their votes close to the February 15 expiration date in an effort to force the House to drop consideration of its own bill and accept the Senate version without revision. Instead the Democratic House leadership played for time and sought a further 21 day extension to the PAA. On February 13, 2008, this action was defeated by House Republicans along with a small group of liberal Democrats 191-229. In effect, the liberal Democrats called the Republicans and Bush Administration’s bluff. The deadline passed, the country did not collapse, as right wing commentators ominously predicted. A few Democrats showed some backbone although the vast majority of them continued to punt or enable. Somewhat lost in all the kabuki was the real object of the exercise: to grant immunity for the telecoms. DNI Mike McConnell touched on this in a February 15, 2008 NPR interview:

The issue is liability protection for the private sector. We can’t do this mission without their help.

But even this admission is heavily spun. The telecoms have substantial protection from liability under existing law and their exposure to large payouts is minimal. The government and telecoms are intimately intertwined, and this relationship will not be changed by a failure to grant immunity to them. Further the telecoms can not duck future cooperation with the government (even if they were so inclined) if that cooperation is accompanied by a court order. No, immunity is not about protecting the telecoms (they don’t need it) but rather squelching civil lawsuits which if allowed to proceed could expose the extent of this government’s spying on its own citizens. This isn’t about national security. It is about CYA.

On June 20, 2008, the House passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (HR 6304) by a vote of 293-129 with 105 Democrats, including the whole of the Democratic leadership, voting for. The bill spearheaded by the Democratic Majority leader Steny Hoyer was another cave on the part of Democrats to a deeply unpopular President at the end of his term. The text of the 114 page bill was made available to lawmakers less than 24 hours before the vote, meaning that almost no Representative actually read the bill before voting on it. No amendments were allowed, and only one hour was given for debate.

The bill granted effective retroactive immunity to telecoms in a particularly cowardly way, not by Congressional action but by shifting responsibility to the federal district court level. All that was required was that the telecoms show they had received an OK from the President. There was no requirement that they demonstrate that they thought that the President’s request was lawful or that they (with their large legal departments) made any effort to assess its legality. This would end current lawsuits against telecoms which seek to learn what kind of spying the government was doing on its own citizens.

On minimization (removal of information on untargeted Americans), the bill allowed for review by the FISA court only as to whether the government followed in general terms its own procedures, but gave the court no scope to judge the legality of the procedures themselves.

If the government disagreed with the FISA court, it could continue wiretapping throughout the appeals process and keep all information so gathered regardless of the outcome of the appeal.

The bill also contained a superfluous “exclusivity” clause making FISA the only bill through which this kind of surveillance could be carried out. I say “superfluous” because FISA already was the exclusive “legal” vehicle for such surveillance.

In short, this is a dreadful piece of legislation and shows that the rot in our body politic is not confined to the Republican Party. House Democrats could have proposed responsible, uncontroversial changes to the FISA law, but they chose instead to endorse the lawless actions of the President and the telecoms and see that the extent of that lawlessness never saw the light of day.

On July 9, 2008, the Senate easily voted down amendments to the House bill and passed it unchanged 69-28. Both Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader (in how the bill was brought up) and the 2008 presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama (in not only not leading any opposition to the legislation but in fact supporting it) were instrumental in the passage of a bill codifying the power of the government to spy on its citizens without a warrant, sanctioning the illegal activities of telecoms, and hiding from public view the extent of the Bush Administration’s lawlessness in this area.

No Republican voted against the bill. 21 Democrats and Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) voted for it.

More on the FISA modification legislative history can be found here.

On October 9, 2008, ABCNews came out with a story (first reported on by Amy Goodman on May 13, 2008) in which whistleblowing military communications operators admitted that they had listened routinely in on phone calls of ordinary Americans overseas, that they had recorded and transcribed them, and in some cases passed them around to colleagues to gossip about and make fun of. This directly contradicted statements by George Bush and former NSA head and current CIA Director Michael Hayden that warrantless wiretapping was only directed against foreign terrorists.

SWIFT surveillance of international financial transactions. After 9/11, the US Treasury Department began the Terrorist FinanceTracking Program which served the international secure messaging system known as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) based in Belgium with broad subpoenas which resulted in the network turning over large parts of its database involving millions of records to US authorities.

Essentially, the US government was allowed to peek in on most of the international wire transfers between banks in the world. As long as all parties are foreign, US law does not have much to say about this, but many transactions involved Americans. This brings up 4th Amendment considerations which expressly forbid “unreasonable searches and seizures” and demand a warrant that is both specific and based on “probable cause”. Hoovering up for data mining purposes millions of bank records of ordinary Americans sending money abroad violates all aspects of this Constitutional protection. The program came to light on June 23, 2006 in articles in major US papers. Subsequently, there were announcements that the program had been modified but it was not clear how. The real question is how many of these post-9/11 “emergency” programs of dubious legality are still out there running years later.

Black prisons and extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by torture.

Khalid El-Masri a German citizen was detained by Macedonian police in late 2003. His name was similar to the alleged mentor of the al Qaeda Hamburg cell (of which two of the 911 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as well as Ramzi Binalshibh were members). He was held for 3 weeks and then released. Although the CIA knew that this El-Masri was not the one they were looking for, they kidnapped him and took him to Afghanistan where he was interrogated and beaten for months. Eventually, on May 28, 2004, after two orders from then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and being made to promise never to talk about what happened, El-Masri was dumped at night on a road in Albania. On December 6, 2005, the ACLU filed suit on his behalf in federal court. On May 12, 2006, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed the case accepting the government’s contention that a suit into Masri’s illegal detention would compromise national security. The dismissal was upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 2, 2007. On January 31, 2007, a German prosecutor issued warrants for 13 people suspected of participation in the kidnapping. For his part, since his release, El-Masri has had a troubled history. On May 17, 2007, after an argument with clerks about a defective iPod, he set fire to the store and burned it down. On October 9, 2007, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to a suit by El-Masri and let stand a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion accepting the government’s state secrets argument and dismissing the case.

Meanwhile on February 17, 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric Abu Omar in Milan and rendered him to Egypt where he was held and tortured. In December 2005, an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 (now up to 26) CIA agents. Abu Omar was released early in 2007.

Several European countries are looking into the rendition programs. These efforts are complicated by US stonewalling and the complicity of their own intelligence services.

Something similar happened to Maher Arar. A Canadian resident with dual Canadian/Syrian citizenship was detained at JFK in New York on September 26, 2002 because he knew someone who knew someone who knew Osama bin Laden. He was held in US custody for 2 weeks without access to a lawyer. Then because the Canadian government falsely declared he was no longer a resident and with the knowledge of their intelligence services, he was rendered to Syria where he was held for a year and tortured. He was released October 5, 2003 and returned to Canada. The Canadian government eventually exonerated Arar and paid a $10.5 million settlement. A suit entered by Arar in US federal court was dismissed on February 16, 2006 on national security grounds. The US government has never admitted any wrongdoing and Arar continues to be on the US No-Fly list. On June 5, 2008, DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner in Congressional testimony said that his office had opened an investigation into whether immigration officials had broken the law in sending Arar to a country that tortures. He also revealed the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) had begun a similar investigation in March 2007 into the activities of DOJ lawyers in the affair.

As for black prisons, these were created to hold high value ghost detainees up to one hundred in number beyond the oversight of the judiciary and Congress, essentially so that they could be tortured. 14 of these, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were eventually transferred to Guantanamo. In Europe, Poland and Romania were rumored to be sites of the prisons. US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan held others. The remainder were scattered throughout the world in complicit countries and on other US bases. Although there had been previous revelations, the story broke officially in a Dana Priest Washington Post report of November 2, 2005. President Bush acknowledged their existence nearly a year later on September 6, 2006.

The purpose of both rendition and black prisons was to gain actionable intelligence, an obsession in the Bush Administration. In its pursuit, they stooped to torture and bartered our image as a champion of human rights for a stack of unreliable information. It is an exchange that is impossible to justify.

On August 12, 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided on its own (sua sponte) to take another look at the Arar case en banc (with all the appellate judges of the Circuit involved). Oral arguments were scheduled for December 9, 2008.

Homeland Security: white elephant (organization), black hole (money), Tom Ridge and threat levels, Michael Chertoff and general incompetence.

As of May 1, 2007 in a House report on the DHS, under Chertoff’s direction, there were 138 vacancies and another 92 currently being recruited among the department’s top 575 positions. Most of these were in the department’s policy, legal and intelligence sections, immigration agencies, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. Luckily, nothing important.

K Street Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, North Marianas, removal of investigating US attorney Frederick Black (Guam), Gale Norton and Steven Griles at Interior, go betweens Italia Federici for Norton and Susan Ralston for Rove, tribal casinos; conviction of Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney (R-OH) for conspiracy and false statements re Abramoff’s Indian casinos scam.

Kyle “Dusty” Foggo was Executive Director under Porter Goss at the CIA from November 4, 2004 to May 12, 2006. In this, the No. 3 post at the agency Foggo ran daily operations. On February 13, 2007, Foggo was indicted along with Brent Wilkes by fired US attorney for Southern California Carol Lam (two days before she left her office) for wire fraud, deprival of honest services, money laundering, and conspiracy for steering business to Brent Wilkes, a figure in the Duke Cunningham scandal. This indictment concentrated mainly on a water contract for CIA personnel overseas and expensive vacations to Hawaii and Scotland paid for by Wilkes. On May 10, 2007, an expanded, superseding indictment was filed. This indictment added Wilkes-Foggo deals involving cover for CIA air operations, selling armored cars to the CIA, and rental of office space, $1.35 million transferred out of government contract accounts to Wilkes’ businesses, and details more of the expensive dinners Foggo was treated to. On February 19, 2008, Foggo’s case was transferred from the Southern District of California to the Eastern District of Virginia, nearer to Langley and CIA headquarters. On May 20, 2008, Foggo was indicted in Virginia. Added on to previous charges were receiving “sexual companionship”, i.e. hookers in exchange for favors and seeking the “enrichment of a mistress” by helping her get a job in the office of the CIA’s general counsel. On September 29, 2008, in a plea bargain Foggo pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in exchange for no more than 3 years in prison.

Duke Cunningham convicted of receiving $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion, the MZM connection. Mitchell Wade the founder of the defense contracting firm MZM purchased Cunningham’s Del Mar home for $1,675,000 then put it back on the market a month later for $975,000. Cunningham lived in Washington on a yacht owned by Wade. In exchange for these kinds of bribes and favors, Cunningham steered contracts to MZM. One of the first in July 2002 was for $140,000 for computers and office furniture for Vice President Cheney which turned out in actuality to be for anthrax screening (for which MZM had zero expertise). Another in September 2002 was for a data storage system for CIFA (see item 158 on CIFA’s domestic spying). $5.4 million of the $6.3 million contract was profit. As it turned out the system was incompatible with CIFA’s and was never installed. As often happens in these kinds of arrangements, Lt. Gen. James C. King who helped set up CIFA went to work at MZM and became its President in June 2005 replacing Wade. By the time that Cunningham pled guilty on November 28, 2005, he had managed to steer $150 million in contracts to MZM, a firm which before Cunningham and Wade hooked up received no important government contracts.

Another player in the Cunningham scandals was Brent Wilkes who founded ADCS a data conversion firm. He too won contracts through Cunningham and according to Wade set up a prostitution ring for the benefit of Cunningham and other legislators at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels. On November 5, 2007, Wilkes was convicted in federal court on all 13 felony counts he was charged with. These included conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and wire fraud. In addition to paying for flings in Hawaii and Las Vegas for Cunningham, Wilkes was accused of giving Cunningham $100,000. Wilkes said it was to buy Cunningham’s boat although the deal never went through and Wilkes never asked for the money back. Wilkes also passed along $525,000 to help cover a mortgage for a house in Santa Fe for Cunningham. In exchange for these bribes, Wilkes’ company received about $80 million dollars in contracts. The government lost $30-60 million and Wilkes made about $46 million as a result of his deals with Cunningham. On February 19, 2008, US District Court judge Larry Burns went against probation and prosecutorial recommendations and sentenced Wilkes to 12 years in prison. He could have gotten 60.

On December 15, 2008, Mitchell Wade who was a smart enough operator to cooperate early and often with the government was sentenced to 30 months and a $250,000 fine, pretty much of a wrist slap for his participation. In addition to his help with Cunningham, Wade also apparently gave information in the investigations of Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Rep. Allan Mollahan (D-WV.), Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), outgoing Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA), and former Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL).

Tom Delay, creator of the K Street Project, squeezing lobbyists to finance Republicans only, indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws (money laundering) in Texas, also connections to the Abramoff scandal. Major figure in Washington culture of corruption.

Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigned over the House page scandal: sending sexually explicit messages to pages.

Cheney’s Energy Policy, Big Oil’s writing of it, and refusal to divulge that participation

Tax cuts for the wealthiest, corporations and on capital gains; retention of the AMT.

• HR 1836 the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law June 7, 2001. It was projected to reduce total surpluses by approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. Its principal feature was a reduction spaced over the 2001 to 2006 period in the 4 highest tax brackets.
• HR 2 the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law May 28, 2003. It increased the exemption amount for the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT), decreased the tax rates for income from dividends and capital gains, modified tax law relating to bonus depreciation and expensing, and allowed certain 2003 corporate estimated tax payments to be shifted into 2004. Its principal effects would occur in its first 5 years from 2003-2008 and would cost $342.9 billion in this period.
• HR 1308 the curiously named Working Families Tax Relief Act was signed into law October 4, 2004. Its main feature involved extensions and changes in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Its principal costs occurred over the 2005-2009 period and were estimated to be $122 billion.

In 2005, there was an attempt at another tax cut bill which failed. In 2006, the Republicans broke their tax cuts up into a couple of bills .

• HR 4297 was signed into law May 17, 2006. It was to cost about $70 billion, split roughly between cuts on dividends and capital gains on the one hand and cuts in the Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) on the other.
• HR 6111 was signed into law December 20, 2006. It was a minor catchall bill extending and modifying some expiring tax provisions and was projected to cost $40 billion over the period from 2007 to 2016.

Looking over the various bills, it is likely they became increasing hard to sell over time. They certainly became smaller. Still a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. It’s just that after Bush got a trillion dollars for the rich in his first bill, everything else seemed small by comparison.

Global warming: denial of manmade origin, followed by minimization of the effects of the manmade contribution, continued reliance on fossil and carbon based fuels, little movement on CAFE standards and conservation, and political interference in scientific reports.

• March 13, 2001, Bush rejects Kyoto Protocols (finished December 1997 but never ratified by the US Senate) and casts doubt on the causes of climate change.
• June 11, 2001, in reference to a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Bush questions both the extent of global warming, its impact, and the manmade contribution to it.
• February 14, 2002, Bush announces his Clear Skies Initiatives which lacks any limits on CO2.
• April 2002, at the urging of ExxonMobil Bush blocks reelection of Robert Watson, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.
• June 3, 2002, an EPA report to the UN admits global warming largely due to human activities.
• June 4, 2002, Bush dismisses the report as "put out by the bureaucracy" and reiterates his opposition to Kyoto.
• August 19, 2002, White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) chief of staff Philip Cooney a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a non scientist questions why climate change is mentioned at all. In September 2002, for the first time in six years, the annual EPA report on air pollution "Latest Findings on National Air Quality: 2001 Status and Trends" omits the section on global warming.
• November 2002, Our Changing Planet, an annual report to Congress on the Climate Change Science Program for oversight and budget purposes is heavily edited by Philip Cooney.
• April-May 2003, CEQ Chairman Jim Connaughton edits the draft of what will be the August 2003 "Fabricant" opinion.
• June 23, 2003, the EPA issues "Draft Report on the Environment 2003" in which the section on global warming was pulled after Philip Cooney sought to replace data showing sharp increases in global temperatures with references to a study funded by the API questioning the evidence for global warming.
• July 2003, the Administration releases its Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program. Philip Cooney along with other CEQ officials made at least 181 edits emphasizing the uncertainty of global warming and 113 de-emphasizing the human contribution to it. The CEQ also inserted language about the possible benefits of global warming and removed recommendations to do something about it.
• August 28, 2003, in response to a petition by environmental groups to regulate greenhouse gas
• June 1, 2005, Rick Peltz a scientist at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (USCCSP) resigns and accuses Phillip Cooney, the then chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of editing scientific papers so that they would agree with Administration policies on climate change.
• June 10, 2005, Cooney resigns
• June 13, 2005, Cooney is hired by ExxonMobil
• September 21, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Max Mayfield, the Director of the National Hurricane Center in testimony before the Commerce Committee denied a connection between Katrina and global warming, ascribing an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes to natural fluctuations. Mayfield was a popular and respected media figure whose thinking on this was out of the mainstream. His testimony, however, was carefully worked out between committee staff and the Office of Legislative Affairs at NOAA to in the words of one staffer Tom Jones smack "the shit out of this issue."
• December 2005, NASA climatologist James Hansen reported his work was being monitored and his access to the press limited by a 24 year old Bush political appointee in NASA’s PR department George C. Deutsch. Deutsch also tried to qualify references to the Big Bang as this conflicted with his fundamentalist beliefs.
• February 7, 2006, Deutsch resigns after it becomes known that he lied on his resume about having a college degree.
• April-November 2006, the Smithsonian (almost all of whose $1.1 billion budget comes from the government) self censors an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic which it had delayed six months while trying to tone it down.
• July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center at NOAA had his Congressional testimony on global warming modified and weakened by political appointees at the White House Council of Environmental Quality, the OMB, the Commerce Department, and NOAA.
• January 30, 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists releases a report indicating that 150 climate scientists from 8 federal agencies had personally experienced at least one instance of interference in their work in the previous 5 years (for a total of 435 incidents).
• April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA rejects the Fabricant opinion and requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The commonwealth of Massachusetts argued successfully that it and its citizens had suffered and would suffer ecological damage, including loss of coastal lands, due to global warming.
• May 2007, Bush continues to use the mantra of short term, unsustainable "economic growth" to oppose meaningful international (G-8) approaches, such as carbon trading and emission caps.
• May 31, 2007, in an NPR interview, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admits that global warming exists but doubts that it is a problem "to be wrestled with".
• September 28, 2007, Bush at a meeting held in competition with a UN conference on global warming called on those countries which emit the most greenhouse gases to set voluntary caps but did not say what those should be, even for the US.
• October 23, 2007, the White House cut written testimony of Julie Geberding director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 14 pages to 6 removing references to specific diseases, health problems, and global warming as “a serious public health concern.” As Jason Burnett who resigned June 9, 2008 as associate deputy administrator of the EPA related, this was done at the direction of Vice President Cheney’s office by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to avoid a finding that climate change was a public threat which in turn would have forced action under the Clean Air Act.
• December 3-15, 2007, at the UN’s Bali conference on moving beyond the Kyoto Accords, the Bush Administration continued to refuse binding commitments for reduction in carbon emissions. Instead there will be two more years of negotiations effectively punting any real decisions to the next Administration. Unfortunately, the effects of global warming are unlikely to wait on this further bout of procrastination.