Paging Andy Card ...Or: From the "What if paranoids are right" department

By J. Thomas Duffy

Funny, in doing a Google search this morning, on the Obama Campaign for President, I couldn't find "A covert CIA Manipulation Program you can believe in", anywhere



Earlier this week, Adrian Chen, over on Gawker, brought to our attention the organization Wikileaks, and how the U.S. Government wants to put a serious ass-whipping on them.

Is the U.S. Government Spying on a Tiny Secret-Sharing Website?

Wikileaks.org is a website legendary in certain circles for posting documents people want hidden from the world. The Pentagon is not a fan. Now, Wikileaks is accusing the U.S. of spying on its editors.

[snip]

Wikileaks, which is run by a 9-person advisory board, has built a reputation based on its impressive record of posting secret documents like the ones that threaten the U.S. Army. These include emails hacked from Sarah Palin's private account, 570,000 pager messages from 9/11 and the infamous climate change scientist emails. They have also posted sensitive U.S. military documents—most prominently the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Holy Spooky Shadows Batman!



But wait, there's more!

Glenn Greenwald, today, has some startling info, in his "The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters";

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

[snip]

It's both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious -- though, of course, completely unsurprising -- that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

[snip]

If that doesn't sound familiar to Americans, it should. At exactly the time when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions ostensibly responsible for investigation, oversight and exposure have failed. The American media are largely co-opted, and their few remaining vestiges of real investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints. The U.S. Congress is almost entirely impotent at providing meaningful oversight and is, in any event, controlled by the factions that maintain virtually complete secrecy. As I've documented before, some alternative means of investigative journalism have arisen -- such as the ACLU's tenacious FOIA litigations to pry documents showing "War on Terror" abuses and the reams of bloggers who sort through, analyze and publicize them -- but that's no match for the vast secrecy powers of the government and private corporations.

Holy Foreign-Policy-Mess-Waiting-To-Happen Batman!

It's almost as if The Bush Grindhouse still has an office putting alongside the new Obama Administration.

Or has the Obama team launched, based on their predecessors model, a new "White House Afghanistan Group"?

Maybe they'll have to dust off Rummy's Propaganda Agency plans to sail past this one

Paging Andy Card!


Bonus CIA Riffs

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Top Ten Cloves: Things About The New CIA Personality Test

Paid News Scandal Widens; CIA Said To Run Network Of "Blue Hole" Newspapers ...Detainees Forced To Work As Copy Editors Or Write Stories In Isolation; Old Typewriters With No Wite-Out Used

Breaking News! ...Leak of CIA Covert Prison System May Affect IPO, Franchising Rights ...Early Heavy Investment Cools In Wake of Story; North Korea May Trade Nuke Program For Multiple Prisons




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

Tortured Thinking, Part I - the Players

By Carol Gee

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary/Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, held an important hearing on "Detainee Interrogation Rules" May 6. (The above opening link is to the committee's news release with good highlights of the hearing's testimony). The committee also authorized a subpoena for Bush administration lawyer David Addington, who actually may be willing to testify, though he might not say very much.

Judiciary Committee Chairman, John Conyers D-MI, laid the groundwork for finding out more about the role of senior government lawyers in the development of the legal opinions authorizing interrogation methods via a series of so-called torture memos:

1. 8-1-02, the Bybee memo to Alberto Gonzales containing a narrow definition of torture -- allowed interrogation methods. Withdrawn in 2004.
2. 12-2-o2, DOD Secy. Rumsfeld approved the harsher interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay, which may have echoed the earlier memo.
3. 3-14-03, DOJ John Yoo memo, also involved Jim Haynes, the DOD's attorney for Rumsfeld. It was similar to 8-1-02 but more extreme. This is the memo withdrawn by DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith.
   

Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, swore in a panel of witnesses who gave a more in-depth picture than we have previously known of our nation's recent history of "severe interrogation," what some call torture. Witnesses included British law Professor Phillipe Sands and Georgetown Professor David Luban. Other witnesses were former administration Counsel's Office lawyer David B. Rivkin and Professor Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild. Hat tip to "SmileySam" at Daily Kos for his interesting article on the hearing, including some very good links. Also, this Kos blogger borrows from Dan Froomkin's well-linked blog at the WaPo: "Torture Showdown Coming."

Republicans on the Committee who asked questions included Ranking Member, Rep.Trent Franks of Arizona, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, Rep. Mike Pense of Indiana, and Rep. Steve King of Iowa. Rep. Issa was true to form, picking a fight early with Chairman Nadler over limiting members' opening statements. When denied he demanded a roll call vote on the chair's ruling, resulting in 4 "yes," 2 "no," 1 (Issa) "Hell, no" votes.

Later the Republicans were relatively thoughtful in their questioning. Rep. Franks made a point about the Yoo memo "trying to get specific," asking Professor Luban about the term "severe pain." Luban replied that to him it refers to ideas such as a dentist's drill with no anesthetic or a broken bone. He described water-boarding as "suffering." Rep. Pence discussed his idea that our methods need to be kept secret so that "terrorists could not train themselves to resist specific methods." And he wanted to find out, after 9/11 with addition American lives perhaps on the line, how you gain information from detainees who will not respond to relationship-building techniques, what he termed "the Oprah Winfrey methods." Rep. Issa supports a ban on torture. His question to David Rivkin produced the witness' opinion that, "investigations can "degenerate into a witch hunt." Rep Steve King believes that focusing on the "narrow exceptions" of U.S. torture, rather than our "long history" of justice does a disservice to the country. In asking Professor Sands to give an instance of "when our enemies were more moral that we were," King fell into a delicious trap that provoked wry smiles as he back-peddled from Sands' answer. Sands (a British citizen) said, to paraphrase, "The United States has long been the historical moral leader of the world. And, as I spent the past year working on my investigation of what happened after 9/11, I met many military leaders of whom I had a very favorable impressions. Things went wrong under the political appointees."

To be continued with "Tortured Thinking, Part II - the Witnesses." In the meantime boys and girls, your homework is to read Phillipe Sands' "Green Light." For extra credit you can watch the hearing on C-SPAN television or watch the video posted at the House Judiciary website. (links below)

References:

• The hearing is available in full at C-SPAN: House Hearing on Guantanamo Bay and Interrogation Rules: Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) presides over a a House Judiciary Constitution, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Subcmte. hearing on detainee treatment and interrogation techniques at facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They voted to authorize a subpoena for Vice President Cheney?s chief of staff and former legal counsel, David S. Addington to appear at a later hearing. 5/6/2008: WASHINGTON, DC: 2 hr. 22 min.


• The Senate Committee on the Judiciary -- Committee website


• " The Green Light." Professor Phillipe Sands wonderful new article this month (should be required reading) in Vanity Fair Magazine, Intro:
  

  As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee wouldn’t talk, the Bush administration’s highest-ranking lawyers argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army’s own Field Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the pressure—then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes charges.



• Representative Nadler writes at the Huffington Post (11/15/07), "No More Clever Word-play on Torture," on the torture-banning legislation subsequently vetoed by our current president: The Orderly and Responsible Iraq Redeployment Appropriations Act.


• Nov. 8, 2007 -- Hearings by the same committee on water-boarding torture at Guantanamo Bay.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

An enigma, wrapped inside of a riddle: The Tesseract Archipelago

By J. Thomas Duffy

A concentration camp with a concentration camp that we pay a Communist nation to host.

I have to wonder, with all that we know so far, do they have a secret handshake as well? Have they issued super secret decoder rings? Lapel buttons, so they can know who is one of them, nod silently and knowingly, as they pass each other?

Well, after the Crony General the other day, the "Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil, Speak-No-Justice" Crony General, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that it has been uncovered that we have secret prisons inside secret prisons.

Only in the Bush Grindhouse...

We really should have titled this post "An Evil Enigma, Wrapped Inside A Riddle of Lies".

Larisa Alexandrovna of At-Largely didn't pull any punches, in a great post this past Thursday, "The Tesseract Archipelago..."
Here are a few nuggets:

"For the commie fearing right-wingers, their collective silence about US funding of communist Cuba through a business arrangement in which they give us land to house our concentration camps on is astounding. It is, however, no surprise that nationalists see human rights abuses as a necessary fall-out of war. After all, Christian extremists, like their Muslim counterparts see war as a tool of God, and they see God in a single man giving them orders, not in anything divine:

Aside from the security propaganda and its flag-waving boot-marchers, however, I want a legitimate explanation as to why we need this many camps, this many secret camps within camps, and just who the hell is being held there in secret and why in secret. I demand this as a US citizen. Because if we have people secretly boxed within secret boxes, which house even more secret boxes filled with even more secret people, then we cannot continue calling ourselves a democracy."

Maybe this is the reason that The Commander Guy thinks Vice President Darth Vader is "The Best Vice President In History".

How nicely it fits ... The secret, Shadow Government running secret prisons inside secret prisons.

Read Larisa's "The Tesseract Archipelago..."

Add it to the ever-growing Clean-Up/To-Do List, once we get these criminals out of office.

**********

Bonus Secret Prisons Riffs

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Top Ten Cloves: Problems Created With President Bush Admitting To CIA Black Site Prisons

Paid News Scandal Widens; CIA Said To Run Network Of "Blue Hole" Newspapers; Detainees Forced To Work As Copy Editors Or Write Stories In Isolation; Old Typewriters With No Wite-Out Used

Breaking News! Leak of CIA Covert Prison System May Affect IPO, Franchising Rights; Early Heavy Investment Cools In Wake of Story; North Korea May Trade Nuke Program For Multiple Prisons























(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)