///Taking the Illusions Out of History-I would like to be able to love my country and justice///

Saturday, July 26, 2003

B.C.C.I.: Bank of Crooks and Criminals International
U.S GOVERNMENT ONE OF ITS BIGGEST CUSTOMERS

by Brian Downing Quig

Early last month regulators in 62 countries shut down the BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL. The July 29, 1991 issue of TIME MAGAZINE boldly proclaimed on its cover "THE WORLD'S SLEAZIEST BANK: How B.C.C.I. and its "black network" became a financial supermarket for crooks and spies --- and how the U.S. is trying to cover up its role." Read this issue.

I never thought I would be recommending a TIME MAGAZINE cover story on a drug money laundering bank with CIA ties. I can't find anything wrong with this most detailed account. If I had written this article few would have believed it. If it can be accepted that this material, presented by a magazine whose largest stock-holder is the Rockefeller controlled CHASE MANHATTAN BANK (a 5.5% controlling interest the last time I checked) is approximate to the truth, then a more profound lesson can be erected on this foundation.

Here are some excerpts from this TIME article and then some conclusions that will never be found in TIME. All quotes here will be from this article.

"B.C.C.I. is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein and the Columbian drugs lords."

A significant part of this story involves B.C.C.I.'s "stealth-like invasion of the U.S. banking industry by secretly buying FIRST AMERICAN BANKSHARES --- whose chairman is Clark Clifford". It is known from Col. L. Fletcher Prouty that Clark Clifford was the attorney who drafted the original charter for the CIA at the direction of John Foster and Allen Dulles and the original "Secret Team".

B.C.C.I. maintained what its insiders called a "black network" which was engaged in international bribery, blackmail, and assassination of government officials at the highest levels. The CIA used B.C.C.I. to facilitate funding of the Contras, illegal arms sales to Iran and Iraq as well as the arms supply to the Afghan resistance. The Justice Department up to four days ago was obstructing the investigation. One bank employee said when B.C.C.I. wanted to make a point, they might send an uncooperative person the severed hand of his brother with the rings still on the fingers. These are powerful charges.

B.C.C.I. maintained accounts for Contra leader Adolfo Calero and Sandanista leader, Daniel Ortega, as well as such disparate figures as Noriega, Saddam, Marcos, Adnan Khashoggi, the PLO, the Mossad and the governments of China, Argentina, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Peru. There is a very important lesson to be drawn from the fact that here was this international bank which was facilitating both right-terrorists and left-terrorists. THE RIGHT-TERRORISTS AND THE LEFT TERRORISTS ARE FINANCED AND DIRECTED BY THE SAME INTERESTS!!

Think about it. Isn't this the best means of stimulating the lucrative arms industry? Doesn't control of both the violent right and the violent left confer total world domination? And doesn't this insight explain many anomalies such as the fact that the U.S. government has been observed building up enemy states in the years preceding its military interventions.

The U.S. sold $50 billion dollars worth of weapons to Iraq before the gulf war. The simple fact is that the U.S. is so powerful that it is necessary to build up these enemy states in order to have any pretext for maintaining a cranked up arms industry. From the business standpoint, war is the ultimate consumer. Perhaps more important is the fact that wars are necessary to maintain internal control for the ruling class. But, in the age of the Hydrogen bomb there can be no such thing as an all out go-for-broke war. It is therefore necessary to promote phoney wars which collectively have been called the Cold War. These low intensity conflicts consume more dollars than conventional war.

We saw Ed Wilson supplying Kadafy with hundreds of Green Beret trainers and 42,000 lbs of C-4 plastic explosives prior to U.S. altercations with Libya. Carter gave the Sandanistas $300 million in aid, more than Samosa got in 10 years, prior to trouble there. The U.S financed the Kama River truck plant which produced the trucks for the Afghanistan invasion and built the highways used by the Russian tanks. The day General McArthur signed the peace treaty with Japan half the weapons stored on Okinawa were shipped to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap who met these shipments at the docks of Hai Phong harbor with Lucien Conein, the CIA case officer for Diem. This was enough to equip an army of 450,000 men. This may seem crazy until one stops to consider whose interests this serves.

This is not the first time the CIA has been linked to a drug money laundering bank. Jonathan Kwitny's book, THE CRIMES OF PATRIOTS, A TRUE TALE OF DOPE, DIRTY MONEY AND THE CIA, SIMON AND SCHUSTER 1987, is a hard hitting expose of the hidden role of the American intelligence community in international narcotics trafficking.

Kwitny documents the participation of what was essentially the entire U.S. clandestine operations cadre in the founding and operation of the notorious NUGAN-HAND BANK --- an Australian money laundering operation set up to facilitate Golden Triangle heroin trafficking. Major officers of the bank included Admiral Buddy Yates (President), General Erle Cocke, General Edwin Black, General LeRoy Manor, and ex-CIA Director, William Colby with other CIA affiliated persons too numerous to mention.

The phrase "Bank of Crooks and Criminals" was coined by Robert Gates, George Bush's designated CIA Director. Three years ago he prepared a report on B.C.C.I. for CIA. Apparently, his moral indignation was not sufficiently aroused to recommend a Justice Department investigation then.

Very, very little of this story reached the American people. The few who did become informed were not prepared to believe such heinous activity on the part of the U.S. government. Now here is a replay --- only B.C.C.I. is 100 times bigger! It is very difficult for me to believe that nothing will come of this. My guess is that the CIA has already used its "get out of jail card" on the NUGAN-HAND BANK.

According to Sherman Skolnick, two Federal judges in Chicago are blocking the release of documents from the B.C.C.I. branch there which implicate George Bush in enormous secret business deals with five world dictators including Saddam and Noriega. Skolnick was recently added to LIBERTY LOBBY'S PAC committee joining Fletcher Prouty and Victor Marchetti. For Sherman's recorded message on B.C.C.I. and related matters call HOTLINE NEWS 312-731-1100.

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(C) 1996 Intelligence Connection
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:15 PM

EPORT ON CALVI AUTOPSY RETURNS SPOTLIGHT TO VATICAN BANK SCANDAL

Roberto Calvi, the man once dubbed "God's Banker," was murdered according to new autopsy results. Will the finding put the spotlight back on a decades-old financial scandal involving the Vatican bank, or end up as the most "under-reported" story for 2002?

Web Posted: October 29, 2002

An investigation into a man linked to a decades-old Vatican bank scandal reveals that he was murdered, and did not commit suicide as earlier claimed.

Roberto Calvi, a leading Italian financier, was found suspended from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982. He was chairman of the powerful Banco Ambrosiano, and had close ties with top-ranking Vatican officials as well as organized crime. His death came amidst revelations that the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), the Holy See's financial arm, was involved in money laundering and other suspect activities. Principals in the story were linked to fascist groups including a renegade Masonic lodge that was working to overthrow the Italian government, Mafia operatives and foreign intelligence services.

An initial investigation concluded that Calvi had somehow managed to commit suicide. His body was disinterred in 1998 and a new probe revealed that he had been strangled, and his body then suspended from beneath the London bridge and weighed-down with bricks. One theory investigators have operated on is that Calvi, who was intimately involved with money laundering and other suspect financial activities with the Vatican, may have been murdered for not repaying loans to organized crime, or was silenced for complicity and what he knew about the unravelling Ambrosiano-Vatican scandal.

There was no official explanation of why it took four years to perform the new autopsy and release the results.

The latest report notes that Calvi's neck bones did not show the kind of damage that would have been caused by suicide through hanging, and that his hands and fingernails were clean. "If he had stuffed bits of brick in his own pockets and climbed a rusty scaffolding to hang himself, there would have been traces," noted a Reuters news report.

Three men are awaiting trial in Rome accused of conspiring to murder the prominent financier. The accused -- Francesco DiCarlo, Flavio Carboni and Pippo Calo -- all have ties to organized crime groups. Prosecutors are expected to examine the results of the new evidence in Calvi's autopsy and possibly use it in forthcoming trials.

But the background of Calvi's mysterious death is part of a larger tapestry of events which includes the collapse of banks in Europe and the United States, the role played by the Vatican in laundering money and stealing assets of Jews and other refugees from the World War II period, and even efforts to stage political coups and shelter former Nazis and fascists from being brought to justice. Calvi's links to the Vatican bank/IOR have resulted in books, and even a recent movie -- "God's Banker" -- which has played throughout Italy, much to the consternation of the Holy See. The Church has even tried to have posters and other advertisements for the film censored.

"The Vatican is reported to be furious over the film," noted a BBC story last March, "and the Holy See's press office said it had 'absolutely no comment' when asked for their reaction."

FROM BANCO AMBROSIANO TO P-2
AND THE VATICAN RAT LINES

The Calvi story touches on persons and developments going back to the time when the Vatican Bank was first chartered by the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Throughout the 19th century, the holdings of what was originally considered "the Papal State" were confiscated thanks to the unification of Italy. With an ear to the interests of the Vatican, Mussolini proposed in 1929 a Concordant which formally recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See as a geopolitical institution. The equivalent of approximately 85$ million was granted to "actualize" a banking institution under the control of the papacy, known benignly as the Institute for Religious Works.

monthly special The IOR was more than a simple internal banking system for the relatively small "government" of the Catholic Church. It benefited from shrewd investments, and eventually would become a haven for "offshore" funds secreted by corporations, organized crime, intelligence services and other groups. During World War II, over $100 million flowed into the IOR coffers thanks to the imposition of the notorious "kirchensteur" or "church tax" imposed by the Nazis in Germany and occupied countries. Other assets, believed confiscated from Jews, Serbs and other nationalities were also safely smuggled into the Vatican treasure chest where they found safe haven and legal immunity.

In 1969, the Vatican brought into its inner financial circle Michael Sindona, a man with ties to the Mafia dating to the 1940s. Using various "letters of introduction" from key Catholic officials, Sindona had risen rapidly in the world of Italian banking, and was described as "Uomini Di Fiducia," a Man of Confidence in the eyes of the Holy See. Sindona established his own investment empire, and worked closely with Vatican officials to invest in other banks and financial holdings.

In the United States, Sindona was prominent inside the hierarchy of the Illinois Republican Party. He was also working with the Inzerillo crime family (cousins of the New York Gambino family), and used their funds to invest in private banks and holding companies such as the Liechtenstein-based Fasco AG to the Banca Privata Finanziaria, which had been founded in 1930 by a fascist ideologue.

Among Sindona's contacts and close associates were Roberto Calvi (Banco Ambrosiano) and an American Bishop, Paul Marcinkus, who would later rise to the position of Archbishop and head of the Institute for Religious Works.

¶ Another curious thread of the tapestry involving the Vatican Bank was Liccio Gelli.

Gelli was welcome in the homes of Italy's leading bankers, industrialists and church officials. He had been a member of the Black Shirts Battalion in Italy, and served with the fascists during the Spanish civil war. With the advent of WW II, he became oberleutnant in the Nazi SS assigned as liaison with the elite Herman Goring Division, and developed close ties to the OVRA, or Italian Secret Service.

Gelli was also involved with a Croatian priest, Krujoslav Dragonovic, a man instrumental in operating a smuggling service known as the "Vatican ratline." Hundreds of ex-Nazis and clerical fascists were successfully smuggled out of Europe using Vatican passports and other transit instruments. Funds from the IOR often helped in the re-settlement of the war criminals, and spoils from the Third Reich looting spree were sequestered in the untouchable vaults of the Vatican bank.

Gelli went on to establish an impressive list of international contacts. He was instrumental in bringing Juan Person to power in Argentina, and years later brokered an agreement between French arms manufacturers and the Argentine military for the acquisition of Exocet missiles used during the Falklands war. His penchant for supporting authoritarian, neo-fascist clerical regimes was best articulated by his frequently-mentioned homily, "The doors of all bank vaults open to the right..."

With his background in fascist movements and ties to intelligence services, Gelli also presided over a secret "lodge" known as Propaganda Due, or P-2. It was structured along the lines of traditional Masonic groups (although the fraternity did not officially recognize P-2 or Gelli), with Gelli as the Grand Master. Its ranks included leading industrialists and financiers, the heads of various intelligence and police services, gangsters and individuals with close ties to the Vatican. In Italy, Sindona and Calvi were both linked to P-2, as was Klaus Barbi, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon."

Branches of P-2 were established in Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal and Nicaragua. The Latin American lodges included junta and death squad leaders, such as Jose Lopez Rega, head of an Argentina-based murder-for-hire intelligence apparatus which also ran a cocaine smuggling operation on the side.

In Italy, a likely member of P-2 was Cardinal Paolo Bertoli, an official with the church's diplomatic corps. It was Bertoli who introduced Liccio Gelli to the head of the Vatican Bank, Paul Marcinkus. Another entree for both Gelli and Calvi into the Vatican was Italian lawyer and businessman Umberto Ortolani, who in WWII served in the intelligence corps. Ortolani, another P-2 member, was also a enrolled in the Catholic Knights of Malta -- a group which included leading American and European business and intelligence community leaders -- and was elevated by Pope Paul VI to the official status of "Gentleman of His Holiness" within the Holy See.

RISE AND FALL

A number of developments occurred which brought down Calvi, Gelli, and others tied to the Vatican Bank. Throughout the 1970s, the IOR had served as a shelter for "hot money" and stolen assets, and under the directorship of Marcinkus and others, had guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans connected to Banco Ambrosiano.

¶ Sindona fell first, when in April, 1974 his Franklin National Bank collapsed. Banca Privata disintegrated six months later, with the Vatican's loss pegged at about $27 million. The following month news about Sindona's speculative and illegal offshore capital flight ventures leaked, and Liccio Gelli tipped off the wanted banker to a police arrest warrant. By the time Sindona surfaced in Switzerland, Franklin Bank had collapsed, and Vatican exposure on the debacle reached $240 million.

¶ Calvi was also overextended, and some Ambrosiano-Vatican ventures were in serious trouble. Marcinkus, in September, 1981, steps in with "letters of patronage" with the IOR seal to seek more financing. The IOR later admits that its partnership with Banco Ambrosiano in the control of eleven ghost companies based in Panama adds up to a debt of about $1 billion.

¶ Word breaks in the news media that Liccio Gelli and his P-2 lodge had created a virtual "state within a state" with the intent of overthrowing the Italian government and establishing a clerical-fascist regime. The membership rolls of P-2 are made public. Also exposed is Flavio Carboni, a "fixer" with ties to the Holy See, various political groups, Propaganda Due and the Vatican -- and a recipient of cash from Banco Ambrosiano for construction projects in Sardinia. Calvi boasts, "Behind those loans is the Vatican, the Pope."

¶ In England and elsewhere, investigations into Sindona have widened to include Roberto Calvi and the Vatican Bank. One group being mentioned is Opus Dei, the semi-secret Catholic "prelature" founded by Jose Escriva de Balaguer (recently elevated to sainthood by Pope John Paul II). A powerful financial backer of Opus Dei, Spanish industrialist Jose Mateos, was also treasurer of Propaganda Due and a close associate of Roberto Calvi. Prior to his disappearance, Calvi revealed to associates that in exchange for 16% of Banco Ambrosiano, Opus Dei would help close the institutions $1.3 billion debt. Marcinkus opposed the plan, though, fearing that it would require him to be replaced with a representative of Opus Dei.

THE DEATH OF ROBERTO CALVI

On June 18, 1982, Calvi's body was discovered dangling from Blackfriars Bridge in London. Sindona had gone down, P-2 was exposed -- with Gelli fleeing to Switzerland and later literally "disappearing" from a Swiss prison -- and more questions were being asked about the Vatican's complicity in the Ambrosiano affair, as well as the failed Propaganda Due coup.

Sworn depositions from members of the Calvi family reflect that he blamed "the priests," men like Marcinkus and Ortolani, and possibly Opus Dei. By this theory, the Vatican reaped huge sums of money through participation in illegal offshore banking schemes, "peekaboo finance," and other questionable financial devices. It is also intriguing to consider the political clout the Vatican purchased, especially with Banco Ambrosiano making huge loans to Italy's major political parties, from the Christian Democrats and Socialists to even the Communist Party.

The Vatican emerged relatively untouched by the Calvi affair despite the many links between it and principals like Gelli, Carboni, and others. In 1984, the Italian Government guaranteed the return of about $600 million to those who had loaned money to the Ambrosiano-IOR group. Nearly $400 million still remains missing, unaccounted for in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

Flavio Carboni, one of the men possibly implicated in the murder of Calvi, has also been under investigation for his involvement in a scheme to sell contents of Calvi's missing briefcase to Czechoslovakian Bishop Paolo Hillica. Hillica had been wiretapped by Italian authorities while in conversation with Carboni negotiating for the briefcase, believed to contain documents embarrassing to the Vatican. Hillica, in turn, is linked to another bizarre story, the "miracles on demand" industry centered around alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugore.

Calvi's body was exhumed on Wednesday, December 16, 1998. News stories suggested that the autopsy results would be release the following year. Now, nearly four years later, comes word that Roberto Calvi did not load his clothing up with bricks and broken mortar and climb to the underside of Blackfriars Bridge to commit suicide, but was killed elsewhere to become a prop in a staged suicide.

Carlo Calvi, his son told the Toronto Star in December, 1998, "My father had many enemies within the Vatican... The Vatican was at the time effectively selling its extra-territoriality for profit."

For the Holy See, the outcome was different. There was the mysterious death of one pope, and the rise of a new pontiff who, despite his avuncular public style, has done little to bring transparency to the Vatican Bank. The United States extended official diplomatic recognition to the Holy See, making Catholicism the only world religion which enjoys such a unique governmental status. It was no secret by Reagan-era strategists that one reason for the diplomatic gesture was to tap into the extensive intelligence and organizational resources the Church possessed, particularly in Eastern Europe. With the "fall of the wall," the Church moved aggressively to try and replace the hegemony of fragmented Communist parties throughout the region with its own vision of stern clerical control using the facade of a limited democracy. Soon, as the Stalinist regimes disintegrated, the Holy See was denouncing new secular governments and the prospect of "too much freedom" and the rejection of spiritual values.


Calvi's death, and the revelation that it was the result of murder, may turn public attention toward a financial scandal that vanished from the media radar screen without being fully resolved. Despite its ramifications, it is a story which so far is under-reported, and may still have significant consequences. For a church besieged by revelations of priestly pedophile abuse and complicity in the looting of personal property from victims of the Holocaust, it is a story best left ignored.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:11 PM

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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=dcorn
The 9/11 Investigation

by DAVID CORN

[from the August 4, 2003 issue]

The attacks of September 11 might have been prevented had the US intelligence community been more competent. And the Bush Administration is refusing to tell the public what intelligence the President saw before 9/11 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

These are two findings contained in the long-awaited, 800-page final report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted the Senate and House intelligence committees, which was released on July 24. As is traditional in Washington, the contents of the report were selectively leaked before it was officially unveiled. And several news outfits noted that the report contained "no smoking guns" and concluded, as the Associated Press put it, that "no evidence surfaced in the probe...to show that the government could have prevented the attacks." Those reports were wrong--and probably based on information parceled out by sources looking to protect the government and the intelligence community.

In the report's first finding, the committees note that the intelligence community did not have information on the "time, place and specific nature" of the 9/11 attacks, but that it had "amassed a great deal of valuable intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden and his terrorist activities," and that this information could have been used to thwart the assault. "Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that was available prior to September 11," the report says, "there were various threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are both relevant and significant. The degree to which the [intelligence] community was or was not able to build on that information to discern the bigger picture successfully is a critical part of the context for the September 11 attacks." One Congressional source familiar with the report observes, "We couldn't say, 'Yes, the intelligence community had all the specifics ahead of time.' But that is not the same as saying this attack could not have been prevented."

The final report is an indictment of the intelligence agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II) that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information.... As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001."

The committees' report covers many missed--and botched--opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it aggressively."

An example: The FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had numerous contacts on 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego informant told the committees that had he had access to the intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their 9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11 plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance, unfortunately, never materialized." (The FBI's informant--who is not named in the report--has denied any advance knowledge of 9/11, according to the report, but the committees raise questions about his credibility on this point, and the Bush Administration objected to the joint inquiry's efforts to interview the informant.)

The CIA was not the only agency to screw up. So did the FBI. In August 2001, the bureau did become aware that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in the United States and tried to locate them. But the San Diego field office never learned of the search. The FBI agent who was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a few days." And the chiefs of the financial crime units at the FBI and the Treasury Department told the committees that if their outfits had been asked to search for these two terrorists they would have been able to find them through credit card and bank records. But no one made such a request.

The final report notes that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were never able to develop precise intelligence that would have allowed a US attack on bin Laden before 9/11. And it reveals that there were even more warnings than previously indicated that Al Qaeda was aiming to strike at the United States directly. In an interim report released last year, the committees provided a long list of intelligence reports noting that Al Qaeda was eager to hit the United States and that terrorists were interested in using airliners as weapons. The new material in the report includes the following:

§ A summer 1998 intelligence report that suggested bin Laden was planning attacks in New York and Washington.

§ In September 1998 Tenet briefed members of Congress and told them the FBI was following three or four bin Laden operatives in the United States.

§ In the fall of 1998 intelligence reports noted that bin Laden was considering a new attack, using biological toxins in food, water or ventilation systems for US embassies.

§ In December 1998 an intelligence source reported that an Al Qaeda member was planning operations against US targets: "Plans to hijack US aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals...had successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a NY airport."

§ In December 1999 the CIA's Counterterrorism Center concluded that bin Laden wanted to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive panic and score a psychological victory. To do so, it said, he might seek to attack between five and fifteen targets on the millennium, including several in the United States.

§ In April 2001 an intelligence report said that Al Qaeda was in the throes of advanced preparation for a major attack, probably against an American or Israeli target.

§ In August 2001 the Counterterrorism Center concluded that for every bin Laden operative stopped by US intelligence, an estimated fifty operatives slip through, and that bin Laden was building up a worldwide infrastructure that would allow him to launch multiple and simultaneous attacks with little or no warning.

Despite these warnings, the intelligence bureaucracy did not act as if bin Laden was a serious and pressing threat. A CIA briefing in September 1999 noted that its unit focusing on bin Laden could not get the funding it needed. In 2000 Richard Clarke, the national coordinator for counterterrorism, visited several FBI field offices and asked what they were doing about Al Qaeda. He told the committees, "I got sort of blank looks of 'what is al Qaeda?" Lieut. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said that in 2001 he knew that the NSA had to improve its coverage of Al Qaeda but that he was unable to obtain intelligence-community support and resources for that effort.

According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counterterrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior to 9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counterterrorism program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not state what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning criticism, the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."

One crucial matter is missing from the report: how the White House responded to the intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat. That is because the Administration will not allow the committees to say what information reached Bush. The Administration argued, according to a Congressional source, that to declassify "any description of the president's knowledge" of intelligence reports--even when the content of those reports have been declassified--would be a risk to national security. It is difficult to see the danger to the nation that would come from the White House acknowledging whether Bush received any of the information listed above or the other intelligence previously described by the committees. (The latter would include a July 2001 report that said bin Laden was looking to pull off a "spectacular" attack against the United States or US interests designed to inflict "mass casualties." It added, "Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for a vulnerability.")

It is unusual--if not absurd--for an administration to claim that the state of presidential knowledge is top-secret when the material in question has been made public. But that's what Bush officials have done. Consequently, the public does not know whether these warnings made it to Bush and whether he responded.

The White House also refused to release to the committees the contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that contained information on bin Laden. In May 2002 National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed this PDB only included information about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective and contained no specific warnings. But the joint inquiry appears to have managed to find a source in the intelligence community who informed it that "a closely held intelligence report" for "senior government officials" in August 2001 (read: the PDB prepared for Bush) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here and that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives. This is quite different from Rice's characterization of the PDB. Did she mislead the public about it? And presuming that this "closely held intelligence report" was indeed the PDB, the obvious question is, how did Bush react? But through its use--or abuse--of the classification process, the Administration has prevented such questions from inconveniencing the White House.

The committees tried to gain access to National Security Council documents that, the report says, "would have been helpful in determining why certain options and program were or were not pursued." But, it notes, "access to most information that involved NSC-level discussions were blocked...by the White House." Bush has said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." Just not those details about him and his National Security Council.

One big chunk of the report that the Administration refused to declassify concerns foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers. Of these twenty-seven pages, all but one and a half have been redacted. The prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the committees--and it is well-founded--is that most of the missing material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither CIA nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address definitively the extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the United States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature. Only recently, and at least in part due to the joint inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their efforts to address these issues.... [T]his gap in US intelligence coverage is unacceptable." At one point in the final report, the committees reveal that a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's concerns that persons associated with a foreign government may have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. "Those indications addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report obviously raise issues with serious national implications," the report notes. But these "indications" are not addressed elsewhere in the report. The Administration would not declassify the material.

The report does include a list of quotes from unnamed US officials each of whom says that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to cooperate with the United States on matters related to bin Laden. "In May 2001," according to the report, "the US government became aware that an individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior al Qaeda operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming operation." The following sentences--which likely cover how the United States responded to this intelligence and what the Saudis did or did not do--is deleted from the report, thanks to the Bush Administration.

It's a pity that the committees were, on a few matters, rolled by the White House, and that Bush has gotten away with concealing from the public what he knew and when, and what he did (or did not do) about a serious threat to the nation. But for seven months, the joint inquiry has been engaged in trench warfare with the Administration over the declassification of this report. It is a credit to the joint inquiry and its staff director, Eleanor Hill, that the committees squeezed as much out of the Administration as they did. The joint inquiry has done far better in this regard than the average Congressional intelligence committee investigation.

The report is a good start in establishing the historical record. It reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers were within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually, the report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms of date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting them was within the realm of possibility.

The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:15 PM

Servicemembers speaking out:
A look at the policies, consequences


By Steve Liewer, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Tuesday, July 22, 2003

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following correction from July 26, 2003 applies to this story:

A July 22 Stars and Stripes gave incorrect information about who may be punished under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for speaking contemptuously of certain members of the military chain of command. Article 88 governs the conduct of commissioned officers only. However, under Article 134 of the UCMJ, soldiers or officers of any rank may be prosecuted for making “disloyal statements” against the U.S. government.

As frustration over their lengthening deployment grows among troops in Iraq, soldiers are smacking head-on into limits on their public speech.

Last week, several 3rd Infantry Division soldiers offered pointed criticisms of decisions by their chain of command. One called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Afterward, 3rd ID public affairs officers based at Baghdad International Airport barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from interviewing soldiers on the subject. They said there already has been too much negative publicity on the issue.

The U.S. Central Command’s top officer, Gen. John Abizaid, said July 16 at a Pentagon news briefing that some of the soldiers could be punished for their remarks.

“None of us that wear this uniform are free to say anything disparaging about the secretary of defense or the president of the United States,” Abizaid said. “Whatever action may be taken, whether it’s a verbal reprimand or something more stringent, is up to the commanders on the scene.”

Lt. Col. Nick Balice, a CENTCOM spokesman, said the military’s media policy hasn’t changed.

“[The policy] has always been for servicemembers to be able to speak openly and freely to the media, as long as they speak about issues that fall under their cognizance or level of expertise,” Balice said from CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

“When speaking on issues that are purely personal opinion, as was the case on the [ABC] media program, that was their personal opinion and what is done with that individual is up to the unit commander.”

Free speech has always been a sensitive issue in the military, where divulging secrets may put lives at risk or excessive complaining might undermine discipline in a unit. There are few regulations restricting the First Amendment rights of servicemembers. Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other directives do forbid officers and enlisted soldiers from speaking contemptuously of a specific group of officials, though the last time a military court prosecuted someone for violating it was in 1965.

Still, action has been taken against some after they have made public comments. Last year, Lt. Col. Steve Butler, a 24-year veteran Air Force officer, was suspended from his senior position at the Defense Language Institute for writing a letter to the Monterey, Calif., newspaper that was critical of President Bush.

Reluctance to speak

The perceived threat of even informal sanctions from their command makes many servicemembers reluctant to speak to the media.

About three dozen people at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, on Saturday were asked whether they thought those in uniform ought to be able to freely express opinions.

Only three were willing to answer, give their names and allow their photograph to be taken. One soldier who wished to remain anonymous answered, “Of course they should be able to speak their minds, but it’s simply not going to happen.”

Another said: “We’ve been briefed several times before we even got here, to refer all questions from the media to the public affairs office.”

When asked the question, a servicemember in his early 20s, wearing civilian clothes, paused for a long moment and said, “I’m not comfortable telling you what I really think, and I’m not going to lie to you, so it’s better if I just don’t say anything.”

Added another soldier: “C’mon man. People are getting into trouble for talking to the media, and now you want me to answer questions? Yeah, right. …”

But some soldiers in Iraq agree that free speech in the military needs limits.

Loyalty and risk

“We owe a sense of loyalty to senior officials and must trust them to make the right decision based on the information at their disposal,” Master Sgt. Shaun Trescott, 37, of 101st Corps Support Group said via e-mail from Mosul, Iraq.

“No doubt, a soldier will encounter times when he or she feels shortchanged by their leadership, but discipline will compel them to quietly trudge on and focus on the goal ahead.”

For many, the old saying “Loose lips sink ships” has real meaning, especially when they are in a war zone. Knowing lives could be at stake, they say they can tolerate certain restrictions that will help keep secrets or keep discipline in the ranks.

“Everybody knows it is for our protection, and our families,” said Spc. Angel Febus, 22, who is at Balad Air Base, Iraq, with the Germany-based 6th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment. “You never know who’s around listening [to] the way we make plans and decisions. That’s the best way for the enemy to surprise us with an ambush.”

But other deployed soldiers say restricting their speech betrays the principles they are fighting for in Iraq and elsewhere.

“I find it absurd that these same people we put our lives on the line for can punish us for having our own opinions — which, in effect, is punishing our open-mindedness,” said Spc. Brandon Gullen, 21, of the 864th Engineer Battalion, in an e-mail from Balad. “There should be no restrictions on what we say.”

“As far as freedom of speech, I am 100 percent all for it,” wrote Sgt. William Hudgins, 22, of the Germany-based 3rd Battalion, 58th Aviation Regiment. “I mean, it’s a constitutional right last time I checked.”

One deployed Apache pilot, who gave only his rank and last name, said military and civilian leaders are more than happy to hear praise from the lower echelons. But sometimes, he added, they need to hear unpleasant opinions.

“It’s a fine line, but criticism in and of itself does not undermine discipline,” the pilot wrote in an e-mail from Iraq. “If no one complains, these people will think that we’re all happy down here even though we’ve been yanked around since day one.”

Reporters up close

The Pentagon’s decision to “embed” unescorted journalists with military units during the invasion of Iraq put reporters closer to troops than at any time since the Vietnam War. The public got its most immediate, intimate view of war ever. But soldiers also felt freer than before about talking with reporters.

Many soldiers in the Middle East said they received at least some guidance about handling reporters’ questions.

“We have been encouraged to be forthright and honest with the media but, on the other hand, to abstain from disclosing our personal opinions regarding ongoing operations or political issues and decisions,” Trescott said.

Hudgins said his unit practiced mock interviews with a television reporter.

“We were given about a 15-minute class on what to say if the media asks certain questions,” he said. “But we also had a major in the background giving the slashing-throat motion when we shouldn’t comment.”

Changing plans

Many soldiers in the 3rd ID have said they believe the military’s civilian leadership has broken a string of promises about their homecoming from the war.

The 3rd ID deployed its four brigades — including about 16,500 soldiers — from Fort Stewart, Ga., in late 2002 and early 2003, before almost everyone else, then led the successful assault on Baghdad. They thought they would be going home shortly afterward.

Members of the 3rd ID’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week they have been given, in a matter of just a few weeks, at least three different times they would be going home, only to have their departure delayed.

The most recent promise, they told the paper, came July 7, when the acting chief of staff of the Army, Gen. John Keane, went to Fallujah to congratulate the troops and hand out awards.

Soldiers said Keane told them they would be returning home in a few weeks.

“When a general at that level gives his word, it’s like the word of God,” 1st Sgt. Jose Mercado, 40, a 22-year Army veteran, told ABC.

Last week, the Pentagon added to the confusion when Rumsfeld’s office and 3rd ID commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount issued differing schedules for the division’s homecoming. Abizaid said at his press briefing the 3rd ID would be “home by September, certainly out of Iraq by September, and they’ll be moving toward home in September.”

He qualified that, though, by saying that replacements would need to be in place before the division could return to Georgia.

The delays in getting their spouses home clearly has upset some Army family members.

“This saying one thing and backing out of it, all it does is breed distrust,” Michelle Brock, wife of a 3rd ID soldier, told ABC News. “It’s going to be really hard to trust anything that the military tells us again.”

The griping of spouses drew a public rebuke from Anita Blount, wife of 3rd ID commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, in the Fort Stewart base newspaper, CNN reported.

“We have the right to be disappointed, and it is understandable if we are angry,” Blount wrote in an open letter to the community. “I know that many of you believe you should embark on a campaign to raise awareness of the need for [the 3rd Infantry] to return. We need to be aware of a possible outcome of our outcries that could backfire on us directly.

“When the Iraqis see media coverage of disgruntled Americans publicly campaigning for the return of our soldiers from Iraq, they are encouraged and believe their strategy is working,” she said.

Appropriate answers

Third ID soldiers in Fallujah said they have received no orders preventing them from speaking to the press, or even guidance concerning what should and should not be said. Several soldiers, in fact, seemed puzzled by the question.

In Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Mark Ingham, a spokesman for Combined Task Force 7, the U.S. forces in Iraq, said that deployed soldiers have not been instructed to decline media interviews as a result of the 3rd ID flap.

Soldiers also have not been issued recent guidance on appropriate comments to the media, he said.

“Nothing has been put out officially,” Ingham said.

With the Baghdad summer getting hotter, the patience of soldiers and their families with the troops’ unexpectedly long and dangerous peacekeeping mission is stretching thinner.

“Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing Pentagon officials, generals, politicians, and people at the Defense Department continue to say that the morale of the troops is still high, when every single person knows full well that it isn’t,” Erica Herrera of Illesheim, Germany, whose husband is an Apache Longbow pilot with the 6/6 Cavalry at Balad, said in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes.

“Now we are looking at possibly almost a year away without our husbands, friends and fathers. The country is in a sad state of affairs when you could go work at McDonald’s and get treated better than someone who is out defending the liberties and freedoms of our country.”

“It’s time,” said Gullen, of the 864th Engineer Battalion, “someone hears what the soldiers have to say about all this mess.”

Contributing to this report: Kent Harris in Baghdad, Iraq; Lisa Burgess in Fallujah, Iraq; Sandra Jontz in Washington, D.C.; Ray Conway at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany and The Associated Press.

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:12 PM

Reveal terrorism's backers

The nation's first investigation into the 9/11 attacks had a single goal: to find out how 19 hijackers were able to launch a surprise attack that killed 3,000 people on U.S. soil. On Thursday, a congressional committee conducting the probe released its declassified findings. Instead of a complete account, the public got a report with a glaring hole -- 27 heavily censored pages.

Domestic intelligence agencies were rebuked for serious lapses. Kept under wraps, though, were details of how a foreign government financed the terrorists and helped them travel and hide in the USA to plan their murderous attacks, according to former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla. The foreign government is widely acknowledged to be Saudi Arabia.

The Bush administration said the censorship was imperative to protect national security. Yet the real beneficiaries are the Saudis, whose links to terrorism remain hidden, and the Saudi ruling family's feelings.

Even Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the panel's former vice chairman, says censored parts ''might be embarrassing'' but don't threaten security and should be released.

He's right. The public deserves the full story, not a version gussied up to protect a sometimes ally.

Certainly, the administration has important economic and strategic reasons to treat Saudi relations gingerly. A stable flow of Saudi oil is crucial to the industrial world. And earlier this year, the Pentagon persuaded the royal family to allow its use of a base in Saudi Arabia to help run the war against Iraq.

But 9/11 is where President Bush has drawn the line on friends vs. enemies. Countries that condoned or cooperated with terrorists are foes. That line shouldn't be redrawn now to shield a nation that aided terrorists, no matter how strategically vital.

Saudi Arabia already has been revealed as a primary source of terrorist financing -- money that flows from prominent families and charities serving as fronts for anti-Western activities.

Yet, since 9/11, the Saudis have ignored U.S. calls to impose stiff anti-money-laundering and disclosure regulations on its banks. Given the Saudis' aversion to bad publicity, a candid report could pressure them to take stronger anti-terror steps.

Just as critical is the future ability of the U.S. to fight terror. The government can't hope to correct the mistakes of 9/11 until it owns up to all of them. Every blacked-out word and missing chapter in what's supposed to be the full story is a weapon that wounds the nation's determination to prevent a next time.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:08 PM

Billionaire challenges case for war

08:29, Jul 26 2003



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billionaire philanthropist George Soros is running full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers challenging the honesty of the Bush administration's case for waging war in Iraq.

The ads in The New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Houston Chronicle, are titled, "When the nation goes to war, the people deserve the truth."

A dozen statements made by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld making the case for war are reprinted and described as either exaggerated or false.

The statements centre on claims about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and large quantities of poison gasses.

The Hungarian-born Soros, 72, emigrated to the United States from Britain in 1956 and built a fortune as a financier. He is founder of a network of philanthropic organisations active in more than 50 countries that focus on education, public health, human rights and economic reform.

The ads, estimated to cost about $185,000 (114,000 pounds), were co-sponsored by U.S. philanthropists Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman.

"Both George Soros and Lewis Cullman have been deeply concerned about the deception used to justify the war in Iraq," said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros.

"They believe their fellow citizens should also be concerned and took out these ads to move them to action."

Bush has defended the case for war, saying he is confident that weapons of mass destruction will eventually be found in Iraq and that criticism of intelligence about Iraq's military capabilities amounts to quibbling.

Public opinion on the issue is closely divided, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released this week. It showed U.S. voters believed the administration did not intentionally exaggerate evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons by 50 to 44 percent with a 3 percent margin of error
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:07 PM

Go to Original

Editor's Note: The full September 11 Report can be read here.

White House, CIA Kept Key Portions of Report Classified
By Dana Priest
Washington Post

Friday 25 July 2003

President Bush was warned in a more specific way than previously known about intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists were seeking to attack the United States, a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks indicated yesterday. Separately, the report cited one CIA memo that concluded there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi individuals provided financial assistance to al Qaeda operatives in the United States.

These revelations are not the subject of the congressional report's narratives or findings, but are among the nuggets embedded in a story focused largely on the mid-level workings of the CIA, FBI and U.S. military.

Two intriguing -- and politically volatile -- questions surrounding the Sept. 11 plot have been how personally engaged Bush and his predecessor were in counterterrorism before the attacks, and what role some Saudi officials may have played in sustaining the 19 terrorists who commandeered four airplanes and flew three of them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

To varying degrees, the answers remain a mystery, despite an unprecedented seven-month effort by a joint House and Senate panel to fully understand how a group of Arab terrorists could have pulled off such a scheme. The CIA refused to permit publication of information potentially implicating Saudi officials on national security grounds, arguing that disclosure could upset relations with a key U.S. ally. Lawmakers complained it was merely to avoid embarrassment.

The White House, meanwhile, resisted efforts to pin down Bush's knowledge of al Qaeda threats and to catalogue the executive's pre-Sept. 11 strategy to fight terrorists. It was justified largely on legal grounds, but Democrats said the secrecy was meant to protect Bush from criticism.

And while the report contains extensive details about counterterrorism policy and operations under President Bill Clinton, it also leaves out substantial material deemed classified. The panel took testimony from former senior advisers to Clinton and Bush but did not interview either president.

Still, the report offers bits of new information about both presidents and the Saudis, and lays out a possible road map for the independent commission charged by Congress to pick up the investigation of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It also offers pointed criticism of both Bush and Clinton, concluding that neither "put the government or the intelligence community on a war footing before September 11" -- despite ample evidence of al Qaeda's dangerous designs.

With respect to Bush, the congressional panel indicated that it tried to determine "to what extent the President received threat-specific warnings during this period" -- but obtained only limited information.

Among the only clues cited in the report about Bush's knowledge of al Qaeda's intentions against the United States is an Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing (PDB) -- described in the report only as a "closely-held intelligence report" -- that included information "acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of [Osama] Bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."

The PDB also said "that Bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that the group apparently maintained a support base here." It cited "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to the report.

In a May 16, 2002, briefing for reporters, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the PDB was a historical look at bin Laden's methods dating to 1997. She characterized the briefing as an "analytic report" that summed up bin Laden's methods of operation. "It was not a warning," she said. "There was no specific time or place mentioned."

The CIA declined to declassify the PDB, and the White House, which had the authority to release it, declined to do so, citing "executive privilege." Executive privilege allows the president to withhold from public disclosure all advice and communications he receives from advisers so that they feel free to offer frank advice without fearing that it will become public.

The Aug. 6 PDB came amid a barrage of intelligence reporting indicating that al Qaeda was planning attacks, somewhere, against U.S. interests. The intelligence community has said its focus was on possible attacks overseas.

Deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley, who refused to testify before the panel but submitted written responses to questions, told the panel that the National Security Council held four deputy committee meetings between May and the end of July 2001 in an effort to adopt a more aggressive strategy vis-a-vis al Qaeda. The review was finalized Sept. 4, 2001. Bush had not reviewed the proposal before Sept. 11, Hadley wrote the panel.

The committee also unsuccessfully sought budget information from the Office of Management and Budget to determine where in the Bush administration the decision was made not to provide more funding for counterterrorism activities.

CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a closed-door session on June 18, 2002, that he had told other members of the administration that his counterterrorism budget would be as much as $1 billion short each year for the next five years. "We told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base," Tenet told the panel.

On the issue of Saudi Arabia, the report cited a CIA memorandum that said connections between some hijackers and some Saudis living in the United States amounted to "incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists" from Saudi officials.

This section of the report refers only to "foreign support." Officials from various branches of the U.S. government said those two words refer to Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the report said, further investigation of these allegations "could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations for these associations."

The report makes no accusation that it was ever the policy of the Saudi government to support terrorism. Rather, the questionable activity involved Saudi citizens, some of whom worked for the Saudi government.

The panel also took the FBI to task for not aggressively pursuing allegations against Saudi individuals, including a network of businessmen and religious figures in San Diego who, together, provided two key hijackers with seemingly unlimited money, an interpreter and other support.

The report said that because Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally, "the United States had not established heightened screening for illegal immigration or terrorism by visitors from Saudi Arabia."

One U.S. official told the panel "he believed the U.S. government's hope of eventually obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S. government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests."

Yesterday, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, issued a statement refuting the criticism of his country. "It is unfortunate that false accusations against Saudi Arabia continue to be made by some for political purposes despite the fact that the kingdom has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism," he said.

Members of the panel offered differing assessments of the impact of the administration's efforts to keep secret certain politically sensitive subjects.

"We were never able to get much of the material we requested from the National Security Council," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), former ranking member of the House intelligence committee. "The nation was not well-served by the administration's failure to provide this critical information."

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he doubted Bush was complacent about warnings he received. "The intelligence community was providing him information. He wasn't AWOL," Goss said. "In hindsight, it might take on a little more significance . . . but it's a huge stretch to say the president had information he should have acted on."

Go to Original

Findings on Saudis Blacked Out
From correspondents in Washington
Agence France-Presse

Friday 25 July 2003

THE US Congress probe into the September 11 attacks may have prompted more questions than it answered when 28 pages on a possible role by Saudi Arabia were blacked out by the Bush administration.

The revelation has sparked the indignation of the victims' families.

For reasons of national security, the White House blacked out the entire section of the report entitled "Finding, discussion and narrative regarding certain sensitive national security matters."

"In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people," Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan said in a statement.

"Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages."

AFP was able to confirm through various sources close to the investigation that the top-secret pages are for the most part about the Saudi policy of supporting fundamentalism in the absence of repressing al-Qaeda's terror network despite US alerts to Riyadh since 1996.

The report confirms press revelations suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, an associate of two of the hijackers, could have been a Saudi government agent. The report details his ties with September 11 suicide attackers Khaled al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

In January 2000, al-Bayoumi entered the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and upon leaving, he headed directly to a restaurant where he met with the two future attackers, a meeting one FBI agent said "may not have been accidental."

The two men had just arrived from Malaysia, where they had participated in a meeting with al-Qaeda officials under surveillance of Malaysian officials at the behest of the CIA.

Al-Bayoumi then helped the men rent an apartment in San Diego, paying the first month's rent and the security deposit.

The news weekly US News and World Report reported in November that the owner of the apartment was an FBI informant, a leader of the Muslim community in San Diego, Abdussatar Shaikh, 68. The FBI refused to allow the commission to question him, according to the report.

The congressional report said: "(Since September 11) the FBI has learned that al-Bayoumi has connections to terrorist elements."

"Despite the fact that he was a student, al-Bayoumi had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia. "For example, an FBI source identified al-Bayoumi as the person who delivered 400,000 dollars from Saudi Arabia for the Kurdish mosque in San Diego.

"One of the FBI's best sources in San Diego informed the FBI that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power."

"The report shows the significant role played by Saudi government agents in the preparations (for the attacks) which benefited from the royal financial generosity," said Jean-Charles Brisard, attorney for the victim's families.

"It would be inconceivable for the US government to refuse the victims' families the right to the whole and complete truth," he said.

Many in Congress feel sure that in the end, the blacked-out part of the report will be made public.

© Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:06 AM

Trapped in a quagmire, again

July 25, 2003

BY ANDREW GREELEY
Advertisement


The trouble with war is the unintended consequences. Consider August 1914. No one wanted a long war in which 15 million to 20 million people would die. The wars in Europe after the end of Napoleon's empire were all quickie conflicts. Two armies came together and fought a single battle. The winner of the battle was the winner of the war. Some territories were exchanged and everyone went home. The classic example was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Emperor Napoleon III took on the Prussians at Sedan, was soundly defeated and surrendered. The Prussians went home with Alsace and Lorraine, the emperor abdicated, and that was that, except for the sanguinary uprising of the Paris commune.

In 1914, the Austrians wanted to teach the Serbs a lesson. The Russians wanted to protect their fellow Slavs. The Germans assumed they would roll through France just as they had in 1870. The Russians assumed they would overwhelm the Germans by sheer weight of numbers.

They were all wrong. The Serbs kept fighting for four more years. The Germans virtually destroyed the Russian army at the battle of the Masurian Lakes, a prelude to the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. The Germans almost made it to Paris.

Or consider our War Between the States. The hotheads in Charleston figured they'd teach the Yankees a lesson by taking Fort Sumter. President Lincoln figured he could defeat the South in three months with his 75,000 volunteers. After the first battle of Bull Run (or Manassas Junction, if you wish), the two sides locked themselves into an orgy of destruction that would last another four years. Obviously the Confederacy won. The South is running the country now, isn't it?

Human nature seems doomed to underestimate the consequences of war, to take for granted that it will be easy and short when in fact it often is not.

It is now reasonably clear that the American government had inadequate intelligence not only about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but about what would happen after the war was won. Although there were warnings about the number of troops necessary for occupation, the costs of the occupation and the reactions of the Iraqi people, these warnings were dismissed. The brilliant ''neocons'' in the Defense Department did not foresee the looting, the sabotage, the hostility to Americans. They did not anticipate the power of Shiite clerics. They did not expect that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime would be able to mount a guerrilla war. They did not expect the Iraqis to cheer when American soldiers were killed. Apparently, they had never heard about the guerrilla war that ancestors of the Iraqis had fought against the British in the 1920s. In those days the Arabs were glad to be rid of the Turks, whom the British had driven out, but they didn't feel enough gratitude to enter quietly the British Empire. Yet men like Paul Wolfowitz thought the Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims would let the hated Americans set up a democratic--and pro-Israel--state.

This intelligence mistake cannot be blamed on the CIA or on 10 Downing Street.

So now the United States has trapped itself in a quagmire in Iraq, and the end game is not clear. When Arabs in Lebanon blew up a Marine barracks, President Ronald Reagan withdrew our forces. But Texans don't run away, so that option is not available. We might finally decide to turn the whole game over to the United Nations, but that would involve national humiliation.

So we will be trapped in the quagmire indefinitely as the president's approval rating plummets. What will the administration do? My guess is that it will turn mean--though that will only make matters worse. The soldiers from the 3rd Division who complained to ABC News are under threat of punishment. The ABC reporter is dismissed as a homosexual Canadian. These punitive actions are likely to be only the beginning. The ultimate unintended consequences could be a police state.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:59 AM

Watching BushCo Crumble
Ratings slipping, economy tanking, lies spiraling, credibility shot. Try not to cheer
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 25, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/07/25/notes072503.DTL

This is what happens when it's all a house of cards.

This is what happens when you build your entire presidency on an intricate network of aww-shucks glibness and bad hair and cronyism and corporate fellatio and warmongering and sham enemies and economy-gutting policies and endless blank-eyed smirks that tell the world, every single day, whelp, sure 'nuff, the U.S. is full of it.

Shrub's ratings have dropped below 50 percent for the first (and probably not the last) time since they surged hugely right after 9/11 and he was hoisted in front of a wary America and puffed out his chest and pretended like he could find Afghanistan on a map and promised he would bomb every damn country on the planet that didn't have a McDonald's or an Exxon or a secret U.S. chemical-weapons deal.

Shrub's numbers are down. The nation is catching on. The armor of money and power is cracking. The smirk is waning. Dick's defibrillator is running on fumes.

And Karl Rove, Shrub's master strategist, is scrambling, rushing down hallways, sweating hard, mapping out lib-killer tactics and frantically redirecting blame (CIA! FBI! The NSA!) as nine Demo candidates have a field day knocking all of Shrub's shortcomings out of the ideological park.

Maybe it's the regular slew of lies. You know the ones: "proof" of uranium purchases, "proof" of Iraqi nuke facilities, "proof" of WMDs, poison gas, plus two quick and "painless" wars, a robust economy, women's rights, gay rights, America proud and strong and respected the world over, a nice shiny oil-sucking SUV for every flag-waving misguided Fox News-drugged American. Ha.

Funny how the BS can wear you down. Funny how it can make you feel like someone's been piling huge rocks on our collective chest for the past three years and stomping on them with ugly polished right-wing loafers until we can hardly breathe.

And all you have to do is ask any schoolteacher or grandparent or health-care worker or conscious sensual attuned soulful organism anywhere, and the answer is unavoidable: The nation is gasping for air.

Cities are desperate, basic services are being slashed, schools are broke, the environment's molested, the GOP has promised a ridiculous array of cuts and dedicated billions they can't possibly deliver in light of inane tax cuts and the biggest deficit in U.S. history. Hey, how's your portfolio doing?

Maybe the slip, the change in national timbre, is due to all the recently uncovered and aforementioned misfirings of the GOP machine, that frighteningly rich and seemingly omnipotent team of multibillionaire CEO Bushites who bought the presidency in the first place and who have steered the conservative agenda so brilliantly, so ruthlessly to this point.

Until recently, they've managed to stay viciously on message, trashed every liberal cause, demonized every social program, overhyped every fear, desiccated the poor and the elderly and gays and women and called it all Christian largesse, compassionate conservatism, which of course we all now know means, whoops sorry about all the unemployment and the raped environment and the dead Iraqi children.

Or maybe it's all those U.S. soldiers, more dying every single day, outright brutal guerrilla warfare with no end in sight, tens of thousands of American soldiers stuck in miserable and war-torn Iraq for years to come, proving that BushCo's policy of perpetual unilateral war in the name of a sovereignty we no longer have is just plain dangerous, if not downright immoral. Iran? North Korea? Liberia? Saudi Arabia? Wanna make your own list?

Maybe it's that feeling that we've reached saturation, that the nation can't really absorb any more misinformation and misdirection and snide switcheroos, Osama to Saddam, nukes to uranium, WMD to WMD intent, serious threat to "liberation," brutish recession to "temporary downturn."

Maybe we've just had enough. Enough of the macho all-American gun-totin' faux-cowboy ethos that says, if we just beat [insert nation/minority/progressive viewpoint here] up enough, they'll get the message and get in line and start complying with U.S. demands and we can expand our empire and crush all comers and their wimpy objections, too.

It is not yet time for delicious plates of schadenfreude. It is not yet time to relish Junior's slide into abject failure and scathing ratings and one-term histrionics -- you know, just like those suffered by his dear old dad. We are still too fragile, the feelings too raw, the wounds too recent from the current administration's mugging of the country.

But we are healing fast. We are coming back to life. We are opening our blackened eyes, realizing we have been massively and systematically and enthusiastically and intentionally duped by some very rich, very impotent white males three years running and it's damn near time for a domestic regime change and let's just float a Dean/Kerry (Kerry/Dean?) presidential ticket out there to the cosmic Void, see how it plays, shall we?

Because after all, that whimpering house of cards, it can't survive much longer
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:54 AM

ONE AFTERNOON HE was headed out on the highway to the Baghdad airport in a heavily protected convoy. He’d already been warned that, on that road, “people get shot, there are fire fights.” Then the general with him suddenly ordered a machine gunner on top of a Humvee to get down. The reason: Iraqi killers are good at blindsiding American troops. “From time to time,” Lugar was told, “there are enemy, whoever they are, who sort of loop wires down from the bridges that might pluck somebody off at the neck as they go down the road.”
By the time Lugar’s trip to Iraq was over, the Indiana Republican worried the American people were being blindsided, too, by the true costs in blood and treasure of a war that has yet to end. “This idea that we will be in [Iraq] ‘just as long as we need to and not a day more’,” he said, paraphrasing the administration line, “is rubbish! We’re going to be there a long time.” Lugar said he kept demanding answers about the cost to American taxpayers and was not quite getting them. “Where does the money come from?” he asked. “How is it to be disbursed, and by whom?”
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:48 AM

washingtonpost.com

GOP's Power Play
Goal of Reforms in House Gives Way To Tough Tactics Party Once Criticized

By Jim VandeHei and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A01

Nearly 10 years after winning control of the House by vowing a fairer and more open Congress, Republicans have tossed aside many of the institutional reforms they promised, increasingly employing hard-nosed tactics they decried a decade ago, according to numerous lawmakers and scholars.

Among the reforms championed by an earlier generation of House Republicans, and subsequently dropped or weakened: term limits for rank-and-file members as well as committee chairmen; stricter ethics laws; and greater power for individual members and the minority party.

Republicans have instead consolidated power in the hands of a few leaders, most notably Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.). In the process, the authority of committee chairmen and the influence of rank-and-file members have waned.

Republican leaders have cracked down on GOP lawmakers who oppose them, creating a culture in which Republicans often fear bucking the party line.

And, increasingly, they have systematically prevented Democrats from offering ideas and amendments in committee or on the House floor -- a tactic DeLay, when he was in the minority, called the "arrogance of power."

After a recent dustup between the two parties, Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) lamented, "It's the way [Democrats] treated us when we were in the minority. We're in the majority party. We need to be bigger than our egos. We need to be adults."

Hastert dismissed such talk, saying Democrats were far more punitive when they were in power.

"People would have their keys to their offices or their parking spots taken away," he said in an interview yesterday. "We don't do that, and we can't do that." Referring to Democrats, he said, "If you don't have policy, you complain about process."

Democrats are staging protests over what they call unfair treatment, hoping to build a political campaign around it -- much as Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Hastert and DeLay did when they spearheaded their party's 1994 takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

Republicans have "shut out the minority, shut 'em down and shut 'em up," Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said. "It could end up hurting them" as it hurt Democrats a decade ago, he said. "We will develop a theme around that."

At a private meeting of GOP committee chairmen this week, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) had a warning for colleagues. The 2004 elections "will be a referendum on us," Davis said he told them. "You always have the ability to overplay your hand. We have to be careful of that."

While many of these issues are esoteric internal matters holding little interest for average Americans, the Republicans' management of the House spilled into public view when Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) last week called the Capitol Police to evict Democratic members -- who were protesting a procedural ruling -- from a committee room.

Democrats assailed the decision, and Hastert, sensing a public relations disaster, pressed Thomas to apologize. The chairman did so, tearfully, on the House floor Wednesday.

Former majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said in an interview this week that he could see Democrats using the actions of Thomas and others to paint "a systematic pattern of Republicans using heavy-handed tactics. . . . We said 40 years of one-party rule is enough. Now they're saying 10 years is enough."

Perhaps most vexing to House Democrats is the GOP's refusal to let them offer ideas -- such as an expansion of the child tax credit for low-income families -- for votes on the House floor. Republicans won control of the House, in part, by promising to allow elected representatives a chance to voice their proposals and have them voted up or down. On the November 1994 night that voters delivered the House into GOP hands, the incoming speaker, Gingrich, declared: "We're going to be dramatically more fair than the Democrats have been in my lifetime."

Nonetheless, Republicans routinely write complicated legislation and provide Democrats little time to review it. They frequently prevent the minority party from offering an alternative.

Norman Ornstein, a nonpartisan congressional scholar, this week wrote in the newspaper Roll Call that the Democratic "high-handedness" Gingrich lamented was "nothing compared to what House Republicans are doing now."

Republicans concede that it was easier -- or more convenient -- to make promises in 1993 as the minority party, than to keep them in 2003 as the majority party.

Self-imposed term limits were never popular with members seeking to keep their jobs, and voters rarely if ever punished those who broke their term-limit vows. House Republicans tightened ethics laws when they took power, outlawing gifts from lobbyists. But they later permitted members and staff to accept meals and gifts worth as much as $50, and allowed outside interests to deliver meals to them on Capitol Hill. The reason: Republicans said the original restriction was too draconian.

With Republicans holding a 229 to 205 majority in the House (there is one Independent), some leaders make no apology for regularly denying Democrats a chance to offer compromise legislation that might attract enough GOP moderates to derail a leadership-backed measure.

"The philosophy is that if we create bills that get largely Republican support . . . we're able to drive the country in a specific direction," House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said.

In many ways, Thomas represents the complicated legacy the GOP has forged in trying to reform the House while also aggressively pursuing its agenda. He has been a force for change, helping dismantle the patronage system that dominated House operations under the Democrats and contributed to scandals involving the House bank and post office.

On their first day as the majority party, Republicans adopted the Congressional Accountability Act, which applied federal workplace standards to Capitol Hill. For the first time, police officers could form unions and receive overtime pay, and blue-collar workers enjoyed the same rights to safe working environments that their counterparts in the federal government held.

As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Thomas recruited outside managers to run the chamber's day-to-day operations. He commissioned an independent audit, in which accountants had to sift through handwritten ledgers to decipher how Democrats had spent federal funds. He got rid of the daily ice deliveries to members' offices, suggesting staffers could use nearby ice machines.

His committee disbanded the "folding room," an internal mail operation that employed a disproportionate number of the constituents of then-Rep. Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.). "We professionalized the House," Thomas said.

At the same time, Thomas developed a dominating leadership style reminiscent of the Democratic old bulls', often ignoring the minority and pursuing legislative wins at all costs. On Thomas's Ways and Means Committee, "the norm now is to treat the minority as if it doesn't exist, not just by steamrolling over it, but by finding ways to humiliate it in the process," Ornstein wrote.

Thomas was also part of the leadership team that diluted or ignored some of the bigger reforms. After promising to impose term limits on members, committee chairmen and party leaders, Republicans retreated.

They first dropped their push for term limits on all House members and started allowing some chairmen exemptions from their six-year limit. At the beginning of this Congress, they jettisoned the eight-year term limit on Hastert's position as speaker, and gave him an even bigger say in the selection of future Appropriations "cardinals" -- the subcommittee chairmen who largely shape federal spending.

The consolidation of power extends beyond longer holds on leadership posts. From the start, Gingrich and his top three deputies determined the shape of legislation and how it would move, rather than deferring to committee chairmen. At times Gingrich would personally rewrite legislation, such as the telecommunications act in the mid-'90s.

Today, some members say Hastert commands even more power than Gingrich did. Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), the Appropriations Committee's ranking Democrat, recalled times in the 1990s when his GOP counterpart, Robert Livingston (La.), would thunder into the phone that he would not acquiesce to Gingrich's demands. Nowadays, Obey said, Appropriations Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) does not put up such fights.

The leadership's decision to siphon some of the appropriators' power, Obey said, denies committee members a chance to apply their policy expertise to legislation. "You can get your marching orders from your leadership," he said, "but that has to be tempered by your own substantive knowledge. That's where this system has largely broken down."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:46 AM

The New York Times
July 26, 2003
G.O.P. Effort in Texas Fails in Bid to Redraw Districts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS





AUSTIN, July 25 (AP) — A Republican effort to redraw Congressional districts in Texas in a special legislative session has failed, the state's lieutenant governor said today.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a Republican, said the redistricting proposal would not be voted on by the full Senate before the term ended on Tuesday, but he vowed that "sooner or later" a new plan would be approved.

"In essence, redistricting in this session is dead," Mr. Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate, said. "We will continue to do everything we can to bring everyone together."

Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader in Washington, has been pushing the effort to redraw Congressional lines.

A bloc of 11 Democrats and one Republican has prevented the bill from coming up for debate in the Texas Senate. Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, will call a second special legislative session on the issue probably "sooner than later," Mr. Dewhurst said.

A committee in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, approved a redistricting map this week that probably would have given Republicans an additional seven seats in the state's Congressional delegation, which now has 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans.

The bill stalled when a Republican senator, Bill Ratliff of Mount Pleasant, joined Democrats in opposing the measure, saying it would hurt rural areas. Republicans hold 19 Senate seats and Democrats hold 12. Ten Democrats had said they would vote to block a debate, so Mr. Ratcliff's vote gave them the 11 they needed, according to Senate rules, to stymie the measure.

The lieutenant governor has said that in a second special session he will remove the rule that requires two-thirds of the 31 members to agree to bring a bill up for debate, so that support from only a majority of senators will be needed to debate the bill.

The House, which is also controlled by Republicans, has approved a redistricting map that could have given Republicans as many as six more seats in Congress.

Lawmakers failed to draw district lines during the 2001 legislative session, after the 2000 census, so the plan currently in use was drawn by federal judges.

Democrats prevented a quorum on a Republican redistricting plan in the House during the regular legislative session by leaving the state. They are now weighing what to do if another session is called.

"Each individual senator has to make their decision based on what happens if the governor calls a second special session," Senator Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio, chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said.

One option is boycotting the Senate to break a quorum so a redistricting bill cannot be debated. Two-thirds of the Senate, or 21 members, must be present for the lawmakers to take up business in the chamber.

Some Democrats say they are ready to break the quorum.

"If they go, I go," Senator Mario Gallegos Jr. of Galena Park said. "If the majority of my colleagues say they need to go, then we go."

Texas Department of Public Safety troopers were ordered to search for the House Democrats when they broke the quorum, but almost all of them had gone to Ardmore, Okla.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:44 AM

Friday, July 25, 2003

Bush War: Military Necessity or War Crimes?
By Jennifer Van Bergen & Charles B. Gittings 1
t r u t h o u t | Tuesday, 15 July 2003

[Editor’s Note] This is Part One of a three-part series that raises the question whether the “Bush War” – namely, the domestic agenda in the so-called “war on terrorism,” the Military Tribunal Order of November 13, 2001, the illegitimate detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere without due process -- are justified, as the Bush Administration claims, by the doctrine of “military necessity,” or whether they, in fact, constitute violations of the Geneva Conventions, which would thus be “war crimes” under United States law, subject to capital punishment. Part One introduces the question. Part Two discusses the Geneva and Hague Conventions, which the authors claim Bush is violating. Part Three discusses the doctrine of military necessity and concludes military necessity does not justify the Bush War.

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

Military Necessity

As we wrote yesterday, the Bush Administration is violating Geneva, and in doing so, it is violating the United States Constitution, international law, and federal domestic law. The President and his officials get away with this by claiming "military necessity." The determination of military necessity shifts the balance on most prohibitions. The Third Geneva Convention forbids:
Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. 2

The Hague Convention prohibits destruction or seizure of "the enemy's property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war." 3

"Military necessity" is a term that has been thrown around quite a bit by this Administration. What is it? According to one scholar:
Military necessity was first stated as a legal principle in General Orders No. 100, a codification of the law of war drafted by Francis Lieber and issued by President Lincoln in 1863. Controversial from the beginning, the principle was nevertheless intended as a new restraint on military discretion, as Lincoln's application of it during the Civil War demonstrates. Military necessity remains an important restraint on military operations in new situations for which specific rules have yet to be established. 4

Lieber wrote that "Military necessity, as understood by modern civilized nations, consists in the necessity of those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war." 5

Lieber's language is reflected in the Commentary to the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions, which states that military necessity "means the necessity for measures which are essential to attain the goals of war, and which are lawful in accordance with the laws and customs of war." 6

The concept of military necessity comes from the idea of "just war," which is based on the idea of a human society with norms and morals that transcend national boundaries and apply to all humanity. According to the 16th century Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, war is just if
(1) the danger faced by the nation is immediate,
(2) the force used is necessary to adequately defend the nation's interests, and
(3) the use of force is proportionate to the threatened danger. 7

According to one commentator, there are three constraints on the free exercise of military necessity:
First, any attack must be intended and tend toward the military defeat of the enemy; attacks not so intended cannot be justified by military necessity because they would have no military purpose. Second, even an attack aimed at the military weakening of the enemy must not cause harm to civilians or civilian objects that is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Third, military necessity cannot justify violation of the other rules of IHL [International Humanitarian law]. 8

"[T]he principle of necessity specifies that a military operation is forbidden if there is some alternative operation that causes less destruction but has the same probability of producing a successful military result." 9

The Truth About Bush's Wars
The question must be asked, then: is the Bush Administration following Geneva, except to the extent that "military necessity" requires otherwise?

Clearly not. Military necessity cannot justify violation of rules of international humanitarian law, which include those provisions in the Geneva and Hague Conventions relating to status determination of captives, right to a fair hearing, legal representation, and full due process. Military necessity does not justify indefinite detention of suspects without charge. It does not justify violation of the United States Constitution. Nor can military necessity sanction the violation of federal criminal law.

And, where is the necessity in committing an act that is explicitly prohibited by law? (Remember 18 U.S.C. 2441 explicitly prohibits violation of Geneva and Hague and requires the United States to prosecute violators. This means that not only is every official who violates 2441 guilty of a war crime, but every federal prosecutor in this country who does not prosecute them is failing his or her duty.)

What about protecting our freedoms could possibly justify preventing our laws from being enforced? And since when does "necessity" entail doing anything that someone happens to think is a good idea without the least regard for any civilized standard of conduct?

A real necessity is obvious. When we launched the D-Day invasion we knew that there were French civilians living in the beachhead area who would very likely be injured or killed, but we also knew that warning them of the invasion would seriously jeopardize the chance of it's success. That is an example of a real military necessity: a specific instance where the specific circumstances require a specific method.

It is not necessity to simply do whatever you think might possibly give you some tactical advantage or leverage. If we were to capture some of Osama Bin Laden's children, we might be able to exert some pressure on him by roasting them one by one over an open fire, but there wouldn't be anything necessary about it -- it would simply be another atrocity committed by an administration that has not the least understanding of necessity because they are lost in hysteria, greed, and the self-serving conviction of their own infallibility.
1 Jennifer Van Bergen is a frequent contributor to Truthout. She holds a J.D. from Cardozo School of Law and will be teaching a course on "The Anti-Terrorism Laws, the Constitution and Civil Rights" at the New School Online University, NY, this Fall.
Charles B. Gittings is a computer programmer and founder of the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions (PEGC),
2 Third Geneva Convention Article 130. The spelling is so in the original.
3 Hague IV Annex (HR) Article 23.
4 Burrus M. Carnahan, "Lincoln, Lieber and the Laws of War: The Origins and Limits of the Principle of Military Necessity," 92 American Journal of Int'l Law, Vol. 92 (No. 2), p. 213 (April 1998).
5 www.commonlaw.com/Lieber.html.
6 ICRC, Geneva Commentary, pp. 681-82.
7 See Rebecca Grant, "In Search of Lawful Targets," Air Force Magazine (February 2003).
8 Francoise Hampson, "Military Necessity," (From Crimes of War Project - The Book).
9 Douglas P. Lackey, The Ethics of War and Peace (1989) p. 59, quoted in, Colonel J.G. Fleury, "Jus In Bello and Military Necessity," Department of National Defence (Canada), Advanced Military Studies Course ("This paper was written by a student attending the Canadian Forces College in fulfillment of one of the communication skills requirements of the Course of Studies. The paper is a scholastic document, and thus contains facts and opinions which the author alone considered appropriate and correct for the subject. It does not necessarily reflect the policy or the opinion of any agency, including the Government of Canada and the Canadian Department of National Defence.").

© Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:45 PM