Update on Goss, Harman and AIPAC

First, Laura Rosen has a convincing, but not definitive account that the wiretap of Harman was part and parcel of a hit job by Porter Goss and his "Gosslings".

Some data points:

• It appears that people are arguing that Gonzalez backed off the investigation of Harman almost a year after the the New York Times had published its story on the wiretaps.
• The leak of this information to Time Magazine in 2006 came 3 days after Harman released a report under the auspices of her being the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) on the Randall "Duke" Cunningham affair, and both Goss and his "Gosslings" frequented Cunningham's booze and prostitute laden soirees:

Indeed, my read of a more recent CQ piece about then DNI John Negroponte also telling Goss not to brief the House leadership about Harman caught on the wiretap is that Negroponte was also trying to shut down what he thought was a rogue effort to pursue investigation of Harman. One now wonders if the reported Negroponte-Goss tensions that ultimately ended in Goss being forced to resign were also fueled by his concerns about Goss's and the Gosslings' actions on the Harman matter, and not just the Foggo matter. As we now know, by the way, the Foggo matter is not at all unrelated to the Cunningham case and the HPSCI report that Harman released. Remember: Foggo got the number 3 job at CIA because Goss's staff recommended him to Goss. Indeed, many members of Goss's staff had played poker with Foggo and the Cunningham case defense contractors for years (remember the Watergate poker parties?). And my understanding is that when Goss was chairman of HPSCI, Foggo had served his staff as a kind of mole against Tenet and other suspected-unloyal-to-Bush types inside the CIA. So Team Goss and the Gosslings had reasons to squirm when Harman released that report. I need to check when the Foggo indictment actually came down, but I don't believe he was indicted yet at the time Harman released that report in October 2006. So that case against Foggo and the wider Cunningham investigation still moving may have unnerved people in Goss-land for multiple reasons when Harman released that report.

....
October 2006 is one month before the midterms when the Democrats would retake the House. And with the Democrats expected to win, who would get the chairmanship of HPSCI would have been a live issue for those who cared about these things, including about what kind of oversight even of past actions at CIA might have occurred. Oversight - and in particular Democratic-led oversight - that might have included looking into actions taken during Goss's tenure as CIA director from 2004-2006. That tenure included, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the CIA's destruction of videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects -- which Harman may have been briefed about. The episode is serious - it's now the subject of investigation by a special prosecutor. Goss's tenure also included the whole Foggo corruption matter which was still playing out in 2006, indeed, which played a big role in Goss being forced to suddenly step down as CIA director in May 2006.

So it's beginning to sound like someone was going after the person most likely to investigate both the torture tape destruction and the connections between Goss staffers and disgraced Congressman Cunningham.

Most of this appears to be moot, because prosecutors are dropping the case against the AIPAC lobbyists, which is a good thing, because the precedent intended by this case was to criminalize the receipt of any classified material by an American citizen without any espionage being involved, and could be very easily extended to journalism.

New CIA Tape Coverup

The Washington Post has a farily good rundown on the CIA tape destruction.

I think that it's increasingly evident that this was intended to avoid congressional and criminal scrutiny.

I think that it's also very likely that some tapes were missed, and they will find their way into investigators hands, where there may be criminal issues.

I understand that the torturers were being "good Germans", but that is no defense.

I further understand that there will be no small number of people who will demagogue this issue for political gain, making any prosecution near-impossible.

This is why I support the US signing onto the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

Our politics, and judiciary, have been so poisoned that we are unable to pursue justice in such cases.

FWIW, prosecuting torture is not about our victims, though doubtless some were innocents tortured by mistake, but about who we are.

Tape Probe Update: One Hacked Off Judge

Judge Richard W. Roberts of the DC court has given the Justice Department 3 weeks to explain how the tape destruction in November 2005 did not violate his July 2005 order not to do so.

CIA Got Legal Approval for Torture Tape Destruction

The interesting part is that they did not get permission from John A. Rizzo, the CIA's chief lawyer, but instead got it from some unnamed lawyers within the operations directorate.

Sounds to me like Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former chief of the clandestine branch, sounded out a lot of lawyers until he found one who would sign off on it.

Members of Congress Push for Special Prosecutor in Tapes Case

I was 11 in 1973, and that hed sounds like Deja vu, but Conyers and Kennedy are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA tape destruction.

Bush and His Evil Minions^™ make miss the openness, honesty, and general humanity of the Nixon administration.

I cannot believe that I just said that.

Intriguing Concept

I'm not a big fan of civil forfeiture.  I think that it is legalized theft, and should be ended. 

That being said, I do think that the proposal to use civil forfeiture against energy companies is an interesting idea demanding further investigation.

Short version of civil forfeiture:  If a cop claims that they think that an asset, (Homes, cars, cash , jewelry, etc.) they can take it, and the onus is on you to prove that this property is not involved with a crime.

In a given year, law enforcement typically takes more assets from people than do burglars.

The procedural barriers are basically non existent.  All the police officer has to do is claim that they think that what they took was involved in a crime, and they can take it, and you have to file a lawsuit to prove that this is untrue.

How easy should it be for cops to steal things from you? Very easy, the Supreme Court ruled in Culley v. Marshall earlier this month. “Civil asset forfeiture,” as it’s called, is a legal tool available in most states and under federal law that allows law enforcement agencies to seize essentially any form of property, including cars, money, and real estate. The state doesn’t need a criminal conviction, criminal charges, or even an arrest. If the police have reasonable grounds to believe that your car is linked to alleged criminal activity, they can seize it. That’s even true if the suspected crime had nothing to do with you, like in Culley, where plaintiff Halima Culley’s car was taken after her son was pulled over for driving with marijuana.

This is clearly an inequitable system. But what if it were directed at worthy targets? What if, instead of targeting assets like Halima Culley’s 2015 Nissan Altima, public safety officials utilized this powerful tool to seize and hold property connected to serious corporate crimes, like dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure whose criminally reckless use by Big Oil companies is endangering countless Americans?

Asset forfeiture was introduced to help law enforcement officials thwart large-scale criminal enterprises—the FBI describes it as a tool that targets “criminal organizations” and “terrorists” in order to “disrupt, dismantle, and deter those who prey on the vulnerable for financial gain.” But these days, a typical case involves the police seizing the property of a low- or moderate-income person of color because of a suspected connection to drugs. Then the person seeking to recover their property is subjected to a labyrinthine process—which the Supreme Court upheld—that makes it nearly impossible for them to recover their assets. In some instances, keeping the assets is the whole point. One amicus brief in Culley describes incidents in which law enforcement officials were caught on tape describing forfeited flat-screen televisions as “very popular with police departments” and referring to forfeited property as “little goodies.” Many departments are permitted to keep the proceeds from selling seized property and, perhaps not surprisingly, those facing budget challenges engage in more seizures. A 2020 study estimated that governments have taken in at least $68.8 billion through these procedures.

Deploying civil forfeiture in these ways is profoundly unjust. But many communities do, in fact, urgently need tools that can disrupt and disable large criminal enterprises that are inflicting serious harms on the public, as civil forfeiture was initially intended to do. Rather than continuing to focus on the property of suspected low-level offenders (or that of their mothers), state and local officials should turn this power against serious offenders causing mass harm, like corporate criminal enterprises. One example is the fossil fuel companies whose actions are responsible for widespread destruction and death in communities across the country. For decades, Big Oil companies and the products they sell have generated the majority of all global greenhouse gas emissions and defrauded the public to block climate action, despite knowing that these actions would lead to lethal and, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate consequences. A growing number of legal experts believe these actions could fall under the category of criminal violations such as reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and racketeering, and homicide. Such charges are routinely lodged against defendants who have not engaged in the same type of willful conduct and are not inflicting the same scale of harm as fossil fuel companies.

Sounds to me like I there is enough here for law enforcement officers to claim that they think that oil company assets are the product of a crime, and so they could seize corporate jets, real estate leased for energy exploration, refineries, tankers, etc.

What's more should they do so so, one can be reasonably assured that Congress and state legislatures would change the law to tighten up procedural standards to prevent this.

The central tenet of conservatism, and corrupt law enforcement, is that, to quote (the composer, not the political theorist) Frank Wilhoit, "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

If the law is applied to bind the rich and powerful, the polity will respond by making the law less arbitrary and capricious.

So, We Have Another Paleocon* Moron Wishing for Another 911

We have Gregory Rodriguez penning a paean to the unity following 911, and suggesting very strongly what we need is to be very frightened about al Qaeda when he asks, "Where is Osama bin Laden when we need him?"

You see, he thinks that we need some of that good old post-911 unity, you know that wonderful stuff that Republicans used to :

• Pass the PATRIOT Act.
• Invade Iraq.
• Illegally wiretap ordinary Americans.
• Become torturer to the world.
• To use the post 911 unity almost exclusively for Republican partisan political advantage.
  

His conclusion:

In the meantime, we all but ignored Bin Laden's most recent tape, and attention to the arrest and indictment of Afghan Denverite Najibullah Zazi on WMD conspiracy charges has been surprisingly low-key. Such blase responses to our true enemies set us up for self-destruction, until we once again find out the hard way that we're all Americans.

The reason that this is low key is because it should be low key, because Bush and His Evil Minions^™ are no longer juicing every half baked tyro with half a terrorism plan and multicolored terror alerts.

The reason that this is low key is because it is Barack Obama, for all the complaints about him, is not Karl Rove, and does not see terrorizing the American public into supporting him as a legitimate goal of anti-terror policy.

It's no wonder that quotes Samuel P. Huntington glowingly when suggesting that there is a need for an external enemy in order to create unity in society.

This is the same Samuel Huntington, whose entire career, and perhaps his entire life, to finding people to hate, whether it was the Arab Muslim (Clash of Civilizations), the brown mestizo Mexican (Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity), a suggesting that civilian (small d) democratic government is undesirable when maintaining a standing military (The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations), that democratic change is generally a bad thing(Political Order in Changing Societies), and advocated the near-genocidal "hamletization" policy in Vietnam.

Seriously, can this man is a moral pygmy.

^*I read some of his other articles, and it appears that his guiding principles are stupidity, not Neoconservatism.

US Claims DPRK-Syria Nuclear Ties

Sounds familiar *Cough* Iraq *Cough*? Don't worry, we have video taped evidence, so there can be no question that...what????

Oh, we don't have a video tape. We have a video presentation of a PowerPoint presentation, so what we have is something that is very close to Colin Powell's infamous UN presentation (full disclosure, I know people who were involved int he technical end of the production):

A US official, requesting anonymity, told AFP: "There are still photographs of the facility as part of the video, but it's a video presentation, like a Powerpoint presentation. It's not a video of the facility."

Just to remind everyone, we have no credibility on this:

Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha yesterday angrily denounced the U.S. and Israeli assertions. 'If they show a video, remember that the U.S. went to the U.N. Security Council and displayed evidence and images about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I hope the American people will not be as gullible this time around,' he said.

From your mouth to God's ear.

So Not a Surprise. The CIA F%$#ed Up, and then Covered it Up

In Newsweek, of all places, we have Jeff Stein explaining part of why the CIA is trying to suppress and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Rather unsurprising, torturer and tape destroyer Jose Rodriguez figures prominently in all of this:

The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he'd narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

"I guess I would've done it," he said, implying you either took orders or quit. But everybody in the counterterrorism program knew what was going on in those places, he said, and he was glad the agency found something else for him to do at the last minute. "Look what's happened."

Four years after Feinstein launched her probe of that interrogation program, her committee and the CIA are locked in a death-struggle over what can be released from the panel's 6,300-page, still-classified report. The impasse is bringing renewed attention to statements by former CIA and FBI agents that buttress the committee's all-but-official conclusion that the agency exaggerated the interrogation program's successes and minimized its abuses.

In early 2008, for example, the committee heard from Ali Soufan, one of the FBI's top former counterterrorism agents, who has since gone public with his criticism of the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, that CIA contractors had used on top Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah. "The staffers present were shocked," he wrote in his memoir, The Black Banners. "What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, 'Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.' "

A Lebanese-American who was decorated by both the FBI and Defense Department for his counterterrorism work, Soufan laid out a case for the committee that CIA officials, chiefly Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA counterterrorism boss who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, lied about the value of torturing detainees-to the point of altering the dates on documents to show a cause-and-effect that didn't exist.

"In this area, it's not a question of memory but of factual record," he later told the New Yorker's Amy Davidson. "There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the EITs claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claim.

This is why the CIA is terrified.

They are not afraid that their immorality will be revealed, they are afraid that their incompetence and mendacity will be revealed.

They are afraid that meaningful oversight will reveal that there are no adults in the room, which will lead to ……… meaningful oversight.

I Think that Hamas is in the Process of Completely Losing their Sh%$

It's not been a good few days for Hamas.

Over the past few days, the Israelis have manage to kill 3 Hamas military leaders, and they almost took out Mohammed Deif, the head out of their military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.

In response, Hamas has start executing people accused as collaborators on an industrial scale:

One day after three top Hamas commanders were killed in an Israeli airstrike, at least 18 Palestinians were executed Friday by firing squads in Gaza City, sentenced to death by a “resistance court” for collaborating with Israel during a time of war.

………

A group calling itself the Palestinian Resistance announced on Hamas-affiliated Web sites that 11 alleged collaborators — nine men and two women — were executed by firing squad Friday morning in the courtyard of an abandoned police headquarters.

Witnesses said seven more men were placed against walls with bags over their heads and shot by men in black Hamas uniforms in front of the Al-Umari mosque, according to local news media reports.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Resistance named the alleged collaborators or offered details of the charges against them. They said they were withholding the names to spare their families shame.

The Palestinian Maan news agency reported that some of the bodies were later dumped at al-Azhar University and the Shifa hospital.

Palestinian militants said the informers were found guilty by local courts, supported by religious clerics, of providing information to Israel that led to the destruction of “resistance houses,” as well as revealing the location of tunnels and rocket launchers.

The executions came a day after Israeli aircraft targeted and killed three senior Hamas commanders who had gathered in a building in Rafah in south Gaza.

The targeted killings were celebrated as a major success in Israel and taken as a punishing blow in Gaza, where the Hamas commanders were well known.

Two days earlier, Israel targeted a house where it believed Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Hamas military wing, was staying. The Israeli bombardment killed Deif’s wife and two of his children. It is still unclear whether Deif survived the strike.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigade is now claiming that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teens. Note that he did this from the relative safety of Turkey, where is in exile, and I would take this with a grain of salt:

A veteran Hamas official has said that the Islamist group was behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank – an incident that was a major trigger for the current brutal war in Gaza.

Saleh al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas's military wing, made his comments at a conference in Istanbul, where he lives in exile. A tape of his comments was posted online by conference organisers.

"There was much speculation about this operation; some said it was a conspiracy," al-Arouri said at a meeting of the International Union of Islamic Scholars on Wednesday.

"The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by [Hamas's armed wing] the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron."

His claim has not been supported by any other member of Hamas.

………

Hugh Lovatt, Israel and Palestine coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while al-Arouri was a significant Hamas figure – serving as the group's most prominent representative in Turkey – the former militant could have an ulterior motive for making his claim.

"Given the timing I would be very suspicious about his claim. I still don't believe Hamas as an organisation and its upper echelons sanctioned the kidnappings – something that Israeli intelligence also believes," he said.

I think that both of these actions are tied together by the recent reverses suffered by Hamas leadership.

Under such situations, there is an organizational imperative to show agency, and both the executions, and the claim or responsibility, are an attempt to demonstrate that Hamas is in control of the situation.

Both of the acts are counterproductive to Hamas's goals, hence my comment on their losing their sh%$.

In the long run, I do not think that this make a difference though.

The Middle East:  SSDD.

I Did Nazi That Coming

So,1 19 year old, Sai Varshith Kandula, just crashed a U-Haul truck into barriers in front of the White House in an attempt to take over the United States.

There was nothing in the truck but him, his backpack, and a Nazi flag.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

A Missouri teen who allegedly crashed into a security barrier near the White House on Monday night reportedly told cops he was trying to kill President Joe Biden and seize power of the government.

That man, identified by U.S. Park Police as 19-year-old Sai Varshith Kandula, now faces charges that include threatening to kill, kidnap, or inflict harm on a president, vice president, or family member.

Unnamed law enforcement sources told ABC News that Kandula said he wanted to seize power from the president, flying to Washington, D.C. from St. Louis to carry out the failed attack. Many details about the incident are unclear, but Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed Tuesday that the crash appeared to be intentional.

Authorities say Kandula rammed into security bollards at Lafayette Park—across the street from the White House—using a rented U-Haul box truck. A law enforcement source told CNN that no explosives were found in the but a witness told Reuters that cops dug out a Nazi flag from his truck. (A Reuters photographer captured the flag laid out on the ground next to the truck before it was taken away as evidence.) Fox 5 reported that cops also recovered a backpack, duct tape, and “a notebook with pages full of writing” from the truck.

………

Kandula now faces a slew of federal charges, including assault with a dangerous weapon, destruction of federal property, trespassing, and reckless operation of a motor vehicle.

This sh%$ is seriously getting out of hand. 

Also, I did some Googling, and it appears, and it appears that South Asian Hitler fanboi are way more common than I knew.

Live and learn.