Tag Archives: Bush administration

What is your HOP level?

An interesting article in NY Magazine discusses conspiracy theories and the secret history of 9/11.

As well as mentioning a few of the suspicious facts about what happened that day, it cites a score to categorize just how far along the conspiracy theory path you are: the HOP level.

Me, I’m about a Level 3.5. Everyone has to have a theory, and here’s mine:

Consider the October surprise conspiracy. Whether that conspiracy is true or not, the Iran-Contra scandal is at the level of documented fact, and it’s hard to deny that the sudden freeing of the hostages immediately after Reagan took office was a vital popularity boost for an otherwise unpopular president.

Wind the clock forward to 2000, and we have an unelected President, so unpopular that he had to skip the usual inaugural parade to avoid being pelted with projectiles. He’s making a routine PR visit to a school, reading The Pet Goat to the kids, when someone tells him that some planes have been hijacked.

I think it was news to him. To me, he looks like he’s worrying about it as he continues to sit there. But I think he’s been told that it’s under control.

I think that one or more people high up in the chain of command decided it would be best to let the hijackings go ahead, then send in the Marines to kick ass, and get a cheap PR victory for the new administration.

That’s why US air defenses weren’t scrambled; that’s why the plane was allowed to get so close to the Pentagon. The expectation was that it would be like every other hijacking and hostage taking, and that the only people in danger were a few hundred civilians. The planes would land somewhere, there would be negotiations, troops would be sent in, Bush’s approval rating from handling the difficult challenge would rocket no matter what happened or how long it took.

I think that those people high up who made the decision to let the hijackers get away with whatever they wanted, were as horrified as the rest of us when they saw what happened next. They had been prepared to risk a few lives, but nothing on the scale of 9/11. If their decision ever became public knowledge, they would be lynched.

Hence, the general level of secrecy and coverup, and the eventual whitewash of the 9/11 Commission Report.

I think my conspiracy theory is better than the Reichstag Fire kind, because it’s a conspiracy of dunces. Remember Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Is it really plausible that there was a conspiracy over the course of several years, spanning several countries, started long before the election, and that the people now in the Bush administration managed to keep it totally quiet?

I think not. Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends didn’t manage to keep arms sales to Iran and Iraq quiet, so there’s not a hope they could pull off 9/11 as a deliberate act. Look at their performance at running the economy and dealing with Iraq—they’re not evil geniuses, they’re naïve idiots who value blind faith over reality.

And even if I believed they had the skills, ultimately I just don’t believe Republicans are that evil. They might want to run Social Security into the ground and rip up the Bill of Rights, but I don’t think they’d kill thousands of Americans just to boost Bush’s popularity and get a few spying laws passed. That’s just unrealistic.

Business ethics, Part 1

Thank you, Bush administration. I’ve just been required to spend the most mind-numbing couple of hours carefully reading page after page of ethical guidelines. Rules that should be blatantly obvious to anyone with any ethical sense whatsoever. It’s all about ensuring that I don’t do things like take Dick Cheney out to the Country Club in order to get juicy government contracts on a no-bid basis, or organize a price-fixing system to defraud California.

Apparently some government agencies no longer allow their employees to accept any free food or drink from contractors. There’s a written notice I have to make sure is displayed before I offer any government employee coffee or a doughnut. If I’d known public officials were that cheap…

Much as I appreciate the problem, I can’t help despairing of a world where there’s a need to tell people “You are prohibited from engaging in fraud”. The course material even then goes on to define the term, enumerating examples. Perhaps at some point someone said “What, false invoices are fraud? Fraud isn’t allowed? Nobody told me!”

LCWRD QMKTF CWMQJ BMDRU QVCGJ JNLAC

You may know that the NSA are not supposed to carry out surveillance against American citizens, as per US Signals Intelligence Directive 18, unless given special permission by the Attorney General.

You may also know that the Supreme Court has ruled that the NSA cannot spy against US citizens. They used to get around this by working with GCHQ in the UK—GCHQ would spy on Americans, the NSA would spy on the English, and they’d exchange data.

Well, the New York Times reports that the Bush administration let the NSA off its leash in 2002. It can now spy on anyone, with no judicial oversight whatsoever.

Americans may wish to read up on the ECHELON network and its capabilities. In the interests of balance, I will point out that ECHELON caught at least one 9/11 terrorist. Whether that’s sufficient to justify the fact that your telephone calls and e-mails are almost certainly all being scanned, is for you to decide.

And cordial greetings to my readers in Fort Meade.

Faint praise

When I first heard that Bush and Rumsfeld had signed off on pro-torture policy documents written by our new Attorney General, one of my first thoughts was: How will they react when American soldiers are tortured by foreign powers?

The answer, amazingly enough, is that they are being consistent. The Bush administration is now fighting Gulf War veterans in court, trying to prevent them from claiming compensation for being tortured by Saddam Hussein. The rationale given is…well, several rationales are given, ranging from the legalistic to the economic, but conspicuously avoiding any discussion of morality. So much for “values”.

I guess Bush and his cronies think torture is no big deal in general—not just when carried out on Arabs. I feel like I ought to at least be glad that everyone tortured at Abu Ghraib is being treated equally badly, whether American or not, but instead I just feel even more horrified. It’s easy to believe that Bush doesn’t give a shit about Iraqis; it’s somewhat harder to accept that he doesn’t give a shit about US veterans either.

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The story so far:

Armstrong Williams $240,000
Maggie Gallagher $41,500
Michael McManus $10,000

Looks like being a shill for the Bush administration can be pretty lucrative. I particularly love the irony of McManus calling his column “Ethics and Religion”.

What I want to know is: where’s my back-hander? I would have thought that an occasional pro-Bush posting from someone who’s not a right-wing religious freak would be far more likely to sway the Bush-hating masses than the steady drip of propaganda from people like McManus. I figure that I therefore deserve at least a few thousand in spite of my smaller audience.

Adios Ashcroft

With Ashcroft’s departure, George W. Bush has a chance to make a symbolic gesture towards uniting the nation. Instead, he has chosen Alberto Gonzales as the new Attorney General.

That’s the Alberto Gonzales who wrote the memo urging that the president declare the US exempt from the Geneva Convention, because otherwise US behavior could lead to war crimes prosecutions. If you had any doubt that a vote for the Bush administration would be rewarding those who supported torture, that doubt should now be dispelled.

It was also Gonzales who ignored a subpoena to turn over documents relating to Enron. Not exactly surprising, since he was one of Enron’s corporate lawyers when he worked for Vinson & Elkins.

Gonzales was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court by Bush in 1999, where he took cash from Halliburton while overhearing a case against them. Surprise, surprise, the case was denied. He also defended the Texas practice of not bothering to alert consulates when foreign nationals were arrested in Texas, stating that international law did not apply to Texas.

Finally, Alberto Gonzales was the guy Bush relied on to summarize the death penalty cases in Texas for him, so he could decide whether to grant clemency or just have ‘em executed. We all know how that turned out.

So, let the healing commence!

Dirty Money for PBS

If you watch New Hampshire Public Television (WENH) for a while, chances are you’ll see an advertisement stating that the programming is sponsored by BAE Systems of New Hampshire. The TV ad shows happy smiling families playing baseball to raise money for the American Cancer Research Fund, and ends with the slogan “BAE Systems: A Global Company With A Local Heart”.

Heartwarming stuff. Unless, of course, you know who BAE Systems actually are.

They used to be known as British Aerospace, until they merged with Marconi in the late 1990s. They’re the UK’s number one defense contractor, and one of the largest arms manufacturers worldwide. They make warplanes, ships, submarines, radar systems—everything from gyroscopic compasses to weapons of mass destruction.

One of their more well-known products is the Hawk fighter-bomber. During the 1980s and 90s, BAE Systems sold 40 Hawk aircraft to the Indonesian government, who used them to help with the attempted genocide in East Timor. The UK Labour government shipped them another 16 after the genocide started, saying that they were powerless to revoke an arms contract signed by the previous government. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they extended the contract to avoid it expiring during the EU arms embargo on Indonesia…

You might also know BAE Systems via their subsidiary Heckler & Koch. The H&K MP5 was standard issue for Indonesian troops in East Timor during the genocide. To get around inconvenient trade embargoes, BAE Systems licensed the design to MKEK, a Turkish company who were happy to sell the weapons to Indonesia. (You may also remember seeing one of them pointed at Elian Gonzales.)

BAES are on very good terms with the US government too, to the tune of $5 billion a year. (That’s a very nice tune, it goes cha-ching.) BAE gets special treatment from the Pentagon, being allowed to trade as if it was a domestic arms company. That means lots of juicy contracts fighting “The War Against Terrorism”.

They’re also close friends with the regime in Saudi Arabia, allegedly thanks to their purchasing houses, yachts and hookers for Saudi officials via a corporate slush fund. In 1995, investigative reporters caught BAE staff on film offering electroshock batons for sale as torture equipment, and admitting that they had sold 8,000 to the Saudis and thousands more to the Chinese, who are particularly fond of using them against Tibetans. The great thing about BAES electroshock batons is you can torture someone for hours and not leave a mark. For some reason, they fail to mention all this on their home page, merely stating that they are “innovating for a safer world”.

When the UK government tried to start an anti-corruption initiative, BAE Systems actually refused to take part. In fact, they are so sleazy that the Bush administration accused them of being corrupt. All of which makes the WENH ad rather surreal, but not as surreal as the fact that BAES have the titanium composite cojones necessary to publish a corporate social responsibility page.

So, next time you see the happy smiling faces of the BAE Systems children on WENH, perhaps like me you’ll wonder what happens when one of them asks “What do you do at work, Daddy?”

Yes, I know, all the bad things happen in other parts of BAE Systems. The New Hampshire people make teddy bears for orphans. No, actually they’re the Information and Electronic Warfare Systems unit, who make the guidance systems for the happy fighter jets that fly over Aceh.

Was that a buck I saw whizz past?

Seymour Hersh is the journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre, a Pulitzer prize winner. He’s got a new book out. Expect to see it rubbished extensively on TV.

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today.

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would “fuck with [detainees] as much as we could” by inflicting pain on them.

[...]

Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects—considered by many to be in defiance of international law—an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

[...]

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh.

[...]

A senior intelligence official told Hersh: “I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia.”

The secret “special access programme” facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners—widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention—was established after a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: “I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”

—Guardian

But in case there’s anyone out there thinking “Well, Americans raping Iraqi children is OK if it makes America safer”, consider the following insightful comments from a CIA analyst about Guantánamo Bay:

Two former administration officials who read the analyst’s highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst’s disturbing conclusion was that “if we captured some people who weren’t terrorists when we got them, they are now”.

—Guardian

So, who’s going to vote for torture this November?

Foxes guarding the henhouse?

The 9/11 Commission recommended setting up an organization to help safeguard civil liberties. Sure enough the Bush administration has gone ahead and created a President’s Board on Safeguarding Americans’ Civil Liberties.

Ignoring for the moment the issue that civil liberties should, constitutionally, be protected for everyone and not just US citizens, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the people who are being put in charge of safeguarding your freedoms.

  • The Deputy Attorney General, James B. Comey.

    Quote from Comey: A court of the United States has no jurisdiction…to enjoin the president in the performance of his official duties.

    He also explained at length why he thought it was right that Jose Padilla was thrown in a military jail indefinitely and not allowed to talk to a lawyer, even though he is a US citizen and was not officially charged with any crime. Comey’s position was overruled by the Supreme Court, thank goodness.

  • The Assistant Attorney General (Civil Rights Division), R. Alexander Acosta.

    Acosta seems to be one of the Good Guys, having (amongst other things) defended a Muslim student’s right to wear her head scarf at school.

  • The Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Policy), Daniel J. Bryant.

    Bryant is a strong supporter of a Constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Need I say more?

  • The Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security, Asa Hutchinson.

    Hutchinson was formerly head of the DEA, that bastion of concern for the civil liberties of the individual. He pushed the “drugs support terrorism” angle, and favored intensifying the War On (Selected) Drugs. He also supports Constitutional Amendments to ban flag burning and allow official school prayer, and supports banning abortion and gay adoption.

  • The Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, General Patrick Hughes. He was a member of the 9/11 Commission, and wrote a series of articles on the theme of global threats to the USA and its interests abroad, for various audiences. His major focus in recent years has been building a massive information sharing network to ensure that law enforcement, homeland security and private contractors at federal, state and local level share information freely, so I’m sure he’ll have something to say about preserving your privacy.

  • The Assistant Secretary (Policy), Directorate of Border and Transportation Security, part of the Department of Homeland Security; that would be a Mr C. Stewart Verdery, I believe.

    Quote from his nomination speech: We all remember well the bipartisan effort which spawned a host of responses to the terrorist attacks, including the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Those days exemplified the kind of public service which is truly gratifying.

    His department is responsible for visa policy, and is pushing biometric passports—including forcing foreign countries to use biometric passports if they wish to take part in US visa waiver programs.

  • The Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, Daniel W. Sutherland. He’s another of the good guys, having written in favor of immigration reform and against mandatory biometric national IDs.

  • The Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Nuala O’Connor Kelly. She was the Chief Privacy Officer for…wait for it…DoubleClick. Joking aside, though, she seems to be on the side of light.

  • The Counsel for Intelligence Policy, Department of Justice, James A. Baker III. You might recognize that name if you’ve seen Farenheit 9/11. He’s the Senior Counsel for the Carlyle Group, the 10th largest defense contractor in the US, heavily tied to ENRON and the Bin Laden family. He even has a bio page on the George Bush Foundation web site.

  • The Under Secretary for Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Stuart Levey. Coincidentally, he’s was a partner in James Baker’s law firm.

  • The Assistant Secretary (Terrorist Financing), Department of the Treasury, Juan Zarate. His job focus has been on stopping the flow of cash to terrorists—while assuring Muslim charities that Bush administration policies were not intended to hurt them.

  • The General Counsel, Office of Management and Budget. I think that’s Raymond J. McKenna. His office is part of the General Services Administration, responsible for helping to improve government efficiency by providing office space, office supplies, technology, and services.

    I must confess to being unclear why he’s on this particular committee.

  • The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, Larry C. Kindsvater. He’s strongly in favor of reorganizing the US intelligence system, which is probably why he was picked.

  • The Chair of the Privacy Council at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I can’t find any record of a Privacy Council at the FBI; a search of their web site produces 0 hits.

  • The General Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency. These are the people who advise the CIA on the legality of their assassinations, foreign government coup attempts, and drug running.

    The CIA OGC web site doesn’t provide any information naming anyone who works there. They do mention that you can’t work for the CIA OGC in any capacity without a Top Secret clearance, polygraph test, and 6 month background screening. I believe the current General Counsel is still Scott W. Muller. Interestingly, Muller had no intelligence background before getting the job; his background was investigating white collar crime.

    Muller apparently thinks the PATRIOT Act didn’t go far enough. As he said at his nomination hearing:

    Well, let me start, Senator, by saying that I think the changes that were made in the U.S.A. Patriot Act were clearly necessary in light of the events of September 11 and I think have gone a long way toward creating at the operational level the kind of sharing and collaboration that this Committee and the Intelligence Community and the Bureau and law enforcement think need to occur. There’s a lot of work left to be done.

  • The General Counsel for the National Security Agency. I believe this is still Vito T. Potenza, though obviously it’s very hard to find any information on who the NSA’s General Counsel is, or even who Mr Potenza is.

  • The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone. The Center for American Progress describe his qualifications as a fierce loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld and an unshakeable right wing ideology and note that he was responsible for sending Major General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq with orders to find more effective ways to interrogate prisoners.

  • The General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William J. Haynes II

    Mr Haynes is the man who wrote the infamous memo listing “interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) authorized for use at Guantanamo Bay, and was also involved in numerous other dubious legal arguments.

  • The Legal Adviser at the Department of State, James H. Thessin. I can’t find much of anything about him.

  • The Director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, John O. Brennan, a 23 year CIA veteran. His is the department which is supposed to glue together all the other departments and make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It’s also the department that was blamed for embarrassing inaccuracies in the 2003 “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report. It was initially released to a fanfare of congratulation, as it showed that deaths from terrorist activity had fallen thanks to the Bush “War on Terror”. Then, the spurious figures were quietly revised to show that things had actually gotten worse. Brennan explained the errors by saying that their computers were too old and they were understaffed.

So, there we have it. Not a totally one sided panel, but definitely stacked carefully in a particular direction.

Medical ethics and US torture

This month’s edition of The Lancet features an extensively footnoted article by Dr Stephen Miles which describes some of the issues of medical ethics in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

A few lowlights:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found that the medical system failed to maintain internment cards with medical information necessary to protect the detainees’ health as required by the Geneva Convention; this reportedly was due to a policy of not officially processing (ie, recording their presence in the prison) new detainees.

[...]

Two detainees’ depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner’s lacertation from being beaten.

[...]

In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.

[...]

In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of “natural causes…during his sleep.” After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a “homicide” caused by “blunt force injuries and asphyxia.”

Homicide from blunt force injuries, peaceful death of natural causes during sleep… it’s a fine line, isn’t it?

In November, 2003, Iraqi Major General Mowhoush’s head was pushed into a sleeping bag while interrogators sat on his chest. He died; medics could not resuscitate him, and a surgeon stated that he died of natural causes.42 6 months later, the Pentagon released a death certificate calling the death a homicide by asphyxia.

So let’s be clear about this: we’re talking about US forces deliberately torturing prisoners of war, and accidentally murdering a few. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s the conclusions of the Pentagon.

Furthermore, it was official White House policy that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Bush himself signed the memo. Rumsfeld himself approved signed a memo approving use of degrading and torturous techniques including “stress positions”, 20 hour long interrogations, 30 day spells in complete isolation in solitary confinement, removal of all clothing and personal items, and use of “detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress”. The latter, of course, is straight out of 1984, the infamous Room 101.

So let me be blunt: if you vote for the Bush administration, you are voting for torture, and I wish you many sleepless nights.