The Public Record | Intrepid New Journalism

Give Us Your Huddled Masses – But Battered Women Need Not Apply!

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:12:16 +0000

By William Fisher

Here’s a note for the “to do” list of the Obama Administration’s newly appointed Domestic Violence Czar – or Czarina in this case:

Battered wives and significant others pose a serious law enforcement and public health problem affecting as many as one in four women in this country. But they are not just an American problem. Women are being whacked all over the world. And some of them are trying to find safety in America – and are being turned away.

Why? Because of the inept and bureaucratic foot-dragging of our Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Thanks to their sorry non-performance over more than a decade, domestic violence is still not a legal basis for seeking asylum in the U.S.

Consider the plight of Rodi Alvarado from Guatemala. At 16, she married a man who, for the next decade, terrorized her. He raped and sodomized her almost daily, beating her before and during the violations. Because he was unfaithful, he infected her with sexually transmitted diseases. He dislocated her jaw when he learned that her period was late, and violently kicked her when she refused to abort her baby, causing her to bleed for eight days.

She tried to run away, even to the other side of the country, but her husband – a former soldier – always found her. One night, he woke her to whip her with an electrical cord, pulled out a machete and threatened to cut off her arms and legs if she ever tried to leave him again. He broke windows and mirrors with her head. He pistol-whipped and threw a machete at her, punched her and dragged her by her hair.

Mrs. Alvarado repeatedly sought help from the police in Guatemala, but to no avail. She pled her case to a judge, but the judge said the same thing: They don’t involve themselves in domestic matters.
Finally, in 1995, she did the most difficult and desperate thing she could do to save her life. After 10 years of cruelty, at age 28, she fled Guatemala and sought asylum in the United States.
There was only one problem. The U.S. has no asylum provisions that cover victims of domestic violence. Mrs. Alvarado was ordered deported. Under U.S. law, asylum applicants have to show they can't go home because they face persecution because of religion, race, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. But not domestic abuse.

Enter a sympathetic immigration judge, who granted Mrs. Alvarado a temporary stay of deportation. That was in 1996 – thirteen years ago. And for thirteen years, Mrs. Alvarado has remained in this legal limbo. She hasn’t been deported – she works as a housekeeper in a California convent. But she can’t achieve any legal status and can’t be reunited with her son and daughter, who remain in Guatemala. She hasn’t seen them in thirteen years.

The reason: For more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have been playing musical chairs with a new asylum regulation that would cover victims of domestic violence. Without such a regulation, Mrs. Alvarado’s case cannot come before a Board of Immigration Appeals, which is supposed to re-decide her fate.

The musical chairs have bounced Mrs. Alvarado’s case from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, and now to the Obama Administration.

Opponents said new asylum rules would lead to a surge in claims, an assertion disputed by a large and bipartisan group of immigration, legal and religious advocates.

Those proposed regulations saved --and stalled --Alvarado's case. In 1996, an immigration judge granted Alvarado temporary asylum, finding that the abuse she suffered and the government's inability to protect her constituted persecution. But newly-installed Bush immigration service opposed the decision, and Alvarado's case went before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Justice Department panel that reviews immigration cases.

The board ruled that Alvarado was not eligible for asylum and ordered that she be deported. But on her last day in office, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno voided that ruling and instructed the board to reconsider the Alvarado case after the immigration service finalized the proposed regulations. A month later, George W. Bush took office.

The next stop in this cruel bureaucratic game was the desk of John Ashcroft, then Bush’s Attorney General. Ashcroft certified the case to himself, making him effectively the judge. He said he would decide Mrs. Alvarado’s fate. But he didn’t. Instead, he kicked the can down the road, deciding neither to grant nor deny asylum to Alvarado. A decision, he said, should await new regulations from the Department of Homeland Security.

Wonder of wonders, the DHS actually drafted a regulation to make domestic abuse a valid legal basis for asylum-seekers. But the Department of Justice disagreed with the draft. In the years since then, the DOJ and the DHS have failed to agree on the domestic abuse asylum regulations.

Ashcroft’s inaction simply complicated the problem. Just before he stepped down, he passed the responsibility for the Alvarado case to his successor, Alberto Gonzales, who faithfully followed in the quicksand footsteps of his predecessors: He did nothing. And his successor, Michael Mukasey, did exactly the same thing: Nothing.

The DHS says it will not press for Mrs. Alvarado’s deportation regardless of how much longer it may take the agency to finalize the new regulations. But that’s cold comfort to Mrs. Alvarado. At the current pace, she could be a very old lady by the time the DHS and the DOJ decide to actually do something.

That’s where Obama’s new Domestic Violence Czar could be a huge help. Lynn Rosenthal is an experienced advocate for abused women. She was executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She has focused on domestic violence issues like housing, state and local coordinated community response, federal policy, and survivor-centered advocacy.

Reporting to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, she will have the ears of the two guys at the top of the tree. And it may be helpful that Biden has had a long-standing interest in the domestic violence issue, dating from his days in the Senate and his key role in enacting the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

Immigration experts say they are more encouraged than ever that cases like Mrs. Alvarado’s will be resolved by the Obama Administration. No doubt Ms. Rosenthal’s cup will runneth over with issues of purely homegrown domestic violence – which the stresses of the recession have apparently caused to spiral out of control. Perhaps the relatively tiny number of battered women seeking asylum in America will be assigned a low priority.

But further delay would simply exacerbate a gross denial of justice. So even at a time when immigration in general remains one of the third rails of American politics, Lynn Rosenthal needs to find the time to flex a little White House muscle with the DOJ and the DHS. She needs to ensure that the process of writing one new regulation doesn’t again fall victim to another decade of bureaucratic bungling and inter-agency turf wars.

So Rodi Alvarado can see her kids again.

William Fisher is a regular contributor to The Public Record. Mr. Fisher's background in foreign affairs includes managing economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He also served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration. Mr. Fisher now reports on a wide-range of issues, from human rights to foreign affairs, for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

A Plan to End the Wars

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:35:06 +0000

By David Swanson

There are a million and one things that people can do to try to end the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and to prevent new ones in Iran and elsewhere, as well as to close U.S. military bases in dozens of other nations around the world.

Certain people are skilled at or interested in particular approaches, and nobody should be discouraged from contributing to the effort in their preferred ways. Far too often proposals to work for peace are needlessly framed as attacks on all strategies except one. But where new energy can be created or existing resources redirected, it is important that they go where most likely to succeed.

In my analysis, we should be focusing on three things, which for purposes of brevity and alliteration I will call: Communications, Congress, and Counter recruitment/resistance. Communications encompasses all public discussion of the wars and impacts all other approaches, including targets I consider far less likely to be influenced by us than Congress, such as the president, generals, the heads of weapons companies, the heads of media companies, the people of Afghanistan, your racist neighbor, etc.

If our communications strategy can change the behavior of any of these targets, terrific! We should be prepared to take advantage of such opportunities should they arise. But the first place we are likely to be able to leverage successful communications will be the House of Representatives. Counter-recruitment/resistance is another area that overlaps with communications but involves much else as well, and it is a strategy that we continue to underestimate.

Communications

Our task is to communicate that:
The wars are ongoing and will not end without our efforts
The wars must be ended
The peace movement has had many successes already and should by no means give in to frustration
The wars can be ended if a small fraction of the majority that wants them ended makes an effort
We have to choose between warfare and healthcare/other social goods
Minimizing U.S. casualties will not satisfy the demands of the U.S. public
Neither maximizing nor minimizing foreign casualties will satisfy the demands of the U.S. public
There is a personal cost to those who support wars and war crimes
Congress members will face opposition through negative communications, disruption of their lives, and electoral challenges if they fund wars

We don't have to communicate all of that in one interview on cable television, or violate any other laws of physics, but we DO have to communicate ALL of that. And getting our spokespeople on TV has to be part of how it is done. But primarily we need to create our own media and work with decent independent media outlets. Online media has developed to the point where it can influence broadcast and print media. And yet we are still quite capable of creating powerful online media. We cannot overlook the need to work with communities that lack internet access, or the need to use the internet to generate offline activities. But it is very hard to overestimate the importance to our efforts of the internet, and working to get more people access to it might be one of the most helpful efforts we can make.

We stopped Bush-Cheney from invading Iran. They intended to do so, and we prevented it -- largely by exposing the grounds for invading Iraq to be lies. There was no press conference at the White House to announce this failure of theirs and success of ours, but that should have no impact on our claiming a victory and making it known to those who require encouragement and optimism. On the other hand, we have allowed the wars to be spread to Pakistan with barely a peep of recognition, and by proxy to Gaza with only a weak and muddled response. And the push to attack Iran directly or by proxy remains.

We dominated the news and the elections in the United States and shifted power in the House, Senate, and White House to a different political party. And we ended up with a House, Senate, and White House that all favor continuing or expanding wars. But we compelled President Bush to agree to withdrawal from Iraqi localities by the end of last month, complete withdrawal from the nation by the end of 2011, and a treaty that the Iraqi people have the right to reject by the end of this month in a vote that would move the complete withdrawal date to one year from now.

I still question the wisdom of our having silently accepted a treaty making three years of war without the consent of the U.S. Senate, but a better way to reject the treaty is now upon us. Our focus for the next month should be on insisting that the Iraqi people are permitted to vote the treaty up or down in a verifiable election (which, of course, means that they will vote it down if those voting bear any similarity to those who have been polled). Everyone who has expressed concern for the voting rights of Iranians should be required to do the same for Iraqis.

The other advantage of our having shifted the partisan balance in our government, even without fundamentally altering our government's approach to war, is that we no longer have to do so. We can now move on to replacing pro-war Democrats with pro-peace Democrats (or Independents, Greens, Republicans, Libertarians, etc.) The claim that we should keep quiet about peace in order to elect Democrats who will then (contradictorily) give us peace can no longer be made and can no longer get in the way. And the advantage of having elected a president of a different party, without having fundamentally changed anything, is that the claim that a new president will give us peace can now be replaced by consideration of whether we should look to presidents at all, or Congress instead, to do such things.

We kept the occupation of Iraq smaller than it would have been and prevented other invasions through the success of counter-recruitment efforts and resistance within the U.S. military. Bush-Cheney having pushed the military to the breaking point is not a story of their incompetence or love for war and empire. It is a story of our efforts pushing back against theirs. The United States will always push the military to the breaking point until we succeed in countering the current militaristic agenda, but our job (one of them) is to make what is available to be pushed smaller.

We need to discuss our successes because nobody else will, and because 70 percent of Americans basically agree with us and do nothing about it, largely because many people do not believe they have the power to change anything. We have been building organizations and websites and Email lists for these past several years, and we have been achieving some successes and coming very close to more. Yet, a common response to "Will you gather signatures on this petition for peace?" is "We've tried that before and it didn't end the war." But it did expose the war lies.

It did force Alberto Gonzales out. It did come within 7 votes just last month of -- at least temporarily -- stopping the war funding. And while doing all of these things, the same old tired tools can also build larger organizations, and have been doing so. I'm sure people told abolitionists not to print another newspaper because they'd printed one before and slavery was still around. Yet abolitionism was advancing despite not a single slave yet being freed. And we are advancing, but it is crucial to know where.

We must absolutely put our signatures and our time and our money into those organizations that oppose war regardless of political party, and NOT into those organizations that claim to oppose war only when it allows criticism of a particular political party. (Here's a list of heroes, which cannot possibly be complete, of course, and I apologize for whomever I have omitted, but the major organizations are all here, listed as either heroes or frauds).

Just as we should continue to push the corporate media while focusing on building our own, we should continue to push the pseudo-peace organizations to do better, but we should focus on building those organizations that have consistently taken a principled stand and pushed with skill and intelligence (even if not with success) for peace.

"Healthcare Not Warfare" should be our cry (following the example of Progressive Democrats of America), along with "Housing Not Warfare," "Jobs Not Warfare," "Schools Not Warfare," etc. We have to force recognition of the financial choice before us. In that choice we find a solution to the healthcare debate that is almost too easy to be believed, but deadly real. And we find a solution to the misconception that war does not impact the "Homeland."

This is a discussion that should discuss the current wars as part of an expansion of military bases around the world, bases that make us less safe but cost us over $100 billion every year. The discussion should include the non-war military budget and the trade-offs involved. We should work harder to build alliances with people and groups focused on advocating for all the things we cannot pay for because we pay for weapons and wars.

But our communications strategy should be dominated by our true central reason for opposing wars, not any secondary reason that we imagine will move someone else. If wars are made cheaper and more efficient we will still oppose them, and that is a real possibility. If American casualties are reduced, we will still oppose wars, and that is the case at the moment. If smart decisions in military terms replace comical blunders, we will oppose wars all the more, and that may be happening.

Fundamentally, we oppose wars because they kill people and they are part of hostile occupations that make people around the world hate and resent our nation. When a group like Brave New Films documents the impact of our war on the people of Afghanistan, we should promote those films as far as we are able. When an election leads to the corporate media humanizing the people of Iran, we should highlight that and ask why, if we do not want them killed by riot police, we should want them killed by bombs.

There is enormous potential, but uncertain, value in seeking to end and discourage wars by holding war criminals accountable for their crimes. Those working to end torture are right to emphasize that we tortured in order to generate false justifications for war, even after the war had begun.

Those working to end war should emphasize that we tortured people in order to support the lies that at least one of the wars, and arguably all of them, is based on. Every war crime for which we are able to hold anyone accountable by exposing their crimes, unelecting them, impeaching them, finding them liable in civil suits, and prosecuting them at home or abroad, should be discussed as part of the ongoing wars. Congress members should understand that we consider their funding of wars to constitute a war crime. And they should understand that we require them to place peace before party.

One useful tool for mass communications is mass rallies. As argued below, our targets should be Congress members. National mass actions should be focused on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Local actions should target local Congress members. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach.

A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested. This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7, strikes me as the most obvious way to send a powerful message of opposition to wars. Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. And backed by lots of money and staff time.

Where do we get lots of money and staff time? That's where we'll need to be very good communicators. But there are wealthy people tired of funding politicians and ready to fund citizens, not to mention people with money who have watched Republicans prosecute and imprison top Democratic donors like Paul Minor and then watched the Democrats not lift a finger in their defense. There are no limits on contributions to peace and justice groups, and almost no limits on what we could accomplish if funded. More importantly, there are ways to influence Congress that do not require putting anyone on a bus and can be done largely by volunteers -- yes, in their pajamas in the basement eating Cheetos. Read on.

Congress

While we have relatively little in the way of carrots or sticks with which to influence a president or a weapons maker (and influencing the military is discussed below), we have the ability to influence Congress members, at least those who represent districts rather than large states. And we have the ability to end the wars by succeeding only in the House of Representatives. We do not need to persuade a single senator or the president or any cabinet secretaries or any news producers. If we can do so, great. But we can end the wars by winning in the House of Representatives alone. This is because it takes two houses and the president to make a bill a law, but it only takes one house to prevent a bill from becoming law.

The House of Representatives is supposed to represent us and yet, on matters of war as on most other things, does not. Why not? Well, many flaws weaken our elections system, but on any given vote three major corrupting factors can usually be pointed to: party, media, and dollars. On an issue like healthcare, as on many issues, these factors should be listed in the opposite order. It is the dollars of corporate interests that do the greatest share of the corrupting. But on matters of war, party is the greatest corruptor.

Of course, political parties are the largest funders of campaigns, so money is still right at the top. Members of Congress in both political parties have voted to fund these wars, over the wishes of their constituents, because their party leadership has told them to do so. Parties can promise money, committee memberships, chairmanships, votes on bills and amendments and earmarks, and press events in a member's district with cabinet members and presidents.

Parties can threaten to withhold money, back a challenger, block measures from reaching the floor, and withhold chairmanships. It is very difficult and very rare for Congress members to oppose their parties' strong demands. But it is also rare for citizens to press them to do so, in part because many citizens and the groups through which they approach activism also take their orders from political parties.

The experience of opposing the most recent war supplemental bill, which was combined with funding for the International Monetary Fund, is instructive, especially as Congressman John Murtha has already indicated that there will be another war supplemental bill this year. Because all the Republicans in the House opposed the bill due to the IMF measure (five of them switching their votes to yes only after it had passed), 39 Democrats could have stopped the bill.

This would have forced separate votes on the war and the IMF, and both might have passed. Certainly the war would have. But it would have created a serious block of peace votes in the House willing to vote for peace even when it mattered and the Democratic Party commanded otherwise. In the end, we persuaded 32 Democrats to vote No (two of them only in opposition to the IMF, 30 of them in opposition to at least the war). So we actually did establish a block of peace voters.

It just contained 30 people instead of 39. And of those 30 people, three, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, and Lynn Woolsey actually urged their colleagues to vote No. This gives us 30 votes we can count on if we work like hell to hold them, and three leaders we can work with to whip together a larger caucus. And while we lost this vote, we exacted a price. We compelled the White House and the Democratic Party leadership to spend a week working on little other than bribing and blackmailing Congress members. And it will take many weeks to fulfill all the promises made.

My own Congressman, who opposed the IMF but voted for it, has thus far held press events promoting himself in his district with the House Majority Leader, with the two top environmental officials in the White House, and has an event scheduled here this month with two members of the cabinet.

Over the past years, we have -- more often than not -- lacked the coordination and ability to push back hard against such intense lobbying from the other side. This time we surprised Congress and ourselves. Key to this effort was public whipping. We didn't have eight different peace groups keeping their own whip lists of who had promised them what. We had 8,000 citizen lobbyists feeding their reports to one website where the whip count was kept public, and where we promised to thank or spank people as appropriate once they had voted for peace or war. Critical to this effort were all the usual off-line activities of people in each Congress member's district. But the public whipping was central. It organized and encouraged the activism. It inspired the blogging. It infiltrated the corporate media.

Here's a history of this campaign. Here's the whip list.

Sadly, we've barely followed through on our promises to thank and spank, activities for which the Backbone Campaign offers tools and assistance. We should be celebrating and denouncing those who came through and those who let us down with at least as much energy as we threatened to do so. Otherwise we lose our credibility, and next time will be harder rather than easier. Disturbingly, even some who seemed willing to threaten repercussions to Democrats for voting yes appeared to decide afterwards that it would be inappropriate to follow through, especially since some other Democrats, not to mention most of the Republicans, were worse and never even pretended to be with us. But we're not handing out prizes in the afterlife here. We're trying to move those who might be moved.

Now, there is another reason why the next time is almost guaranteed to be harder. Unless the Democrats choose to include something else as strongly opposed by Republicans as the IMF, most of the Republicans can be expected to vote Yes. There may be nine who oppose the war funding. Combining them with the 30 Democrats gives us our block of 39 after all. (These would be the nine who voted No on the war supplemental before the IMF was added to it.

But that was an easy vote. By that measure we had 51 Democrats, so these nine are not solid.) This means that, in a worst case scenario, we need to find -- in addition to these nine -- not 39 No votes, but 209 No votes, and most of them from Democrats. We're starting at 39 if we can hold them and need 179 more. This should not be considered impossible, not if we are succeeding at the communications strategy above and the counter-recruitment / resistance below.

If most of the Congress members we have on our side found five more who would vote with them, we'd have a comfortable majority. We need to develop a system to whip Congress members to whip other Congress members. We also have the advantage of being able to tell them this time that when they told us last time that they were voting for the last war supplemental it was a lie.

This strategy of cutting off the funding for war, which can and should be used against standard military/war budget bills as well as supplementals, has always struck some people as a harder hill to climb than passing bills and amendments and resolutions that we approve of, steps that move us somehow in the direction of peace even while funding war. But this thinking ignores the existence of the United States Senate. While we can block a bill in the House, we have to pass a bill in both the House and Senate, and the chances of a good bill passing the Senate are smaller than Dick Cheney passing through the eye of a needle. There may be measures we want to advance in the House for communications purposes. And there may be measures we can persuade the House to slip into other bills the Senate wants to pass. But none of this should be our focus.

Bills that we might want to move in the House for communications purposes might include Rep. McGovern's bill requiring an exit strategy for Afghanistan, or legislation that turned the slogan of "Healthcare Not Welfare" into policy. A bill requiring that for every dollar spent on wars and military at least 25 cents must go into a fund for single-payer healthcare would be rhetorically useful. You can imagine the multitude of possibilities, as well as the impact if such a discussion were to penetrate the healthcare debate.

Bills that we might slip something very useful into and conceivably still get passed include House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's "paygo" bill, which has 159 cosponsors and the support of the Democratic leadership and the White House. This bill requires that any expense be paid for by a tax increase or a cutback elsewhere. But the bill makes an exception for "emergency" legislation, which is of course what war supplementals are claimed to be. An amendment to the paygo bill stipulating that no war already in progress for over five years is an "emergency" would, I think, effectively impose a paygo requirement on war supplementals. And suddenly you'd be unable to pass a war supplemental without explaining where the money was going to come from. In such a situation, it's conceivable that Blue Dogs and Republicans would join us faster than Progressives.

Congress can do other useful things as well, things that it is easier to get them to do. The House can pass a resolution supporting the right of the Iraqi people to a verifiable election this month on whether to agree to the treaty mislabeled a Status of Forces Agreement. The House can hold hearings on the subject. Advancing that issue, through Congress and elsewhere, should be our immediate priority. And in the back of our heads should be plans to demand a public vote for the people of Afghanistan.

We should also be working to sign incumbent and challenger candidates in the 2010 congressional elections onto a platform committing them to voting no funds to continue wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. It's not that we can trust them to keep their word. Only intense immediate pressure can control them. The point is to begin shaping the election in terms of how they will vote on war money between now and the election.

Counter Recruitment

I've gone on at too much length to burden you with a detailed discussion of counter-recruitment and resistance when others can provide more expertise than I. The National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth provides excellent resources on the crucial work of keeping recruiters out of schools. NNOMY is holding a national conference July 17-19 in Chicago, and you are invited.

Courage to Resist provides up-to-date information on efforts within the US military to refuse illegal orders.

Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's new book "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" is good background, as is "Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World," by Aimee Allison and David Solnit.

As Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. We must deny them the army they want. If we succeed beyond our wildest dreams for the next decade, at some point it might make sense to take into consideration the actual defense needs of the United States. At this point, the best thing our military could do to defend us would be to stop endangering us by doing everything it is doing.

Come Together Right Now

There's a national conference at which strategies to end the wars will be deliberated happening in Pittsburgh on July 10-12, and you should try to be there. The event is organized by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupation.

I've submitted the following action proposal to the assembly and I hope to see you there.

Action Proposal

Organize a mass protest march and civil resistance against war funding at House side of Capitol Hill on the 8th anniversary of invading Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th. The House of Representatives is where we have the greatest chance of ending these wars. If we cut off the funding there, nothing else is needed. We can influence House members with activities in districts, online, in the media, and on Capitol Hill. But not on a weekend when they aren't there.

We need to be present on a weekday and lobby them before and after we march. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach. A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested.

This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th, could send a powerful message of opposition to wars.

Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. While such an action would be open to those willing to risk arrest and those not willing to do so, it would indeed fail to include those unable to participate on a Wednesday (except by making phone calls and holding in-district events). However, it WOULD include the people we intend to influence but which the corporate media cannot be counted on to inform of our doings over a weekend. Some members of Congress would even JOIN us.

David Swanson is the founder of AfterDowningStreet.org. He is the author of the forthcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." to be published in the fall by Seven Stories Press. Mr. Swanson’s book can be pre-ordered directly from his website.

DOJ Reveals Details About Cheney's Interview With CIA Leak Prosecutor

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:13:20 +0000

By Jason Leopold

In early fall 2003, as the scandal over leaking a covert CIA officer’s identity was exploding, President George W. Bush claimed not to know anything about the leak and called on anyone in his administration who had knowledge to come “forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

How disingenuous the President’s appeal was has been underscored again by a new Justice Department court filing sketching out the contents of the 2004 interview between special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Though the Obama administration continues to balk at releasing the full contents of the Cheney interview, it did reveal that Bush and Cheney were in contact about the scandal, including what is described as “a confidential conversation” and “an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.”

The filing in a federal court case also makes clear that Cheney was at the center of White House machinations rebutting criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who charged in summer 2003 that the Bush administration had “twisted” intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003. While seeking to discredit Wilson, administration officials disclosed to reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

Bush and his subordinates then sought to deny a White House hand in the leak. White House press secretary Scott McClellan later apologized for his role in the deception in his 2008 book, What Happened, saying that Bush and four other high-ranking officials caused him to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the Plame leak.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote. “And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff [Andrew Card], and the president himself.”

Eventually, the cover-up led to the prosecution of Libby, who was found guilty in 2007 of four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, but Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence.

When Fitzgerald’s investigation came to a close with only that one prosecution, questions were raised about his reasoning for not bringing legal action against Bush, Cheney or other senior officials implicated in the leak and cover-up. Those questions led to congressional requests for the Bush-Cheney interviews and to the current Freedom of Information court case.

In its new court filing, the Obama administration opposed release of the Cheney interview, but described the topics discussed. Besides the contacts with Bush, the filing referenced Cheney’s questions to the CIA about its decision to send Wilson to Africa in 2002 to investigate – and ultimately refute – suspicions that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger.

Cheney also was asked about his role in arranging a statement by then-CIA Director George Tenet taking responsibility for including a misleading claim about the African uranium in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, and Cheney’s discussions with Libby and other White House officials about how to respond to inquiries regarding the leak of Plame’s identity, the court filing said.

Fitzgerald also questioned Cheney about his participation in the decision to declassify parts of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD. It ultimately fell to Bush to clear selected parts of the NIE so they could be leaked as part of the White House campaign to disparage Wilson.

Obama’s Resistance

A public interest group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is seeking access to Fitzgerald’s interview with Cheney under the Freedom of Information Act and now has confronted refusals from both the Bush administration and the Obama administration.

Though President Obama declared a new era of openness when he entered the White House in January, he has recently had his administration’s lawyers resist releasing information about the secret dealings of the Bush administration.

In the CIA leak case, Justice Department lawyers claimed that disclosing Cheney’s interview might discourage future government officials from cooperating with criminal inquiries.

“In any such investigation, it will be important that White House officials be able to provide law enforcement officials with a full account of relevant events,” said Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general for the criminal division.

“Baseless, partisan allegations that, easily could be investigated and dismissed through voluntary interviews now may have to be investigated through the specter of the grand jury process. In addition, if law enforcement interviews are routinely subject to public disclosure, there could be a significant risk of politicization of law enforcement files and investigations, which could undermine the integrity and effectiveness of, and public confidence in, those investigations.”

Last month, during a court hearing on the case, Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith told the judge that release of the transcript might open Cheney to ridicule from late-night comics and thus could discourage other White House officials from cooperating with government prosecutors.

"If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren't going to cooperate," Smith said during a court hearing. "I don't want a future Vice President to say, 'I'm not going to cooperate with you because I don't want to be fodder for The Daily Show.' "

When asked by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan whether the Obama administration was standing behind the refusal of Bush’s Justice Department to release the transcript, Smith answered, “This has been vetted by the leadership offices. … This is a department position.”

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said, “It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?”

Fitzgerald told a congressional committee last year that the interviews he conducted with Cheney and Bush in 2004 were not protected by grand jury secrecy rules, nor were there any pre-arranged agreements to keep the interview transcripts secret.

The insistence on keeping the interviews secret arose late in the Bush administration when Congress sought the transcripts. Bush’s Justice Department cited executive privilege and national security in refusing to turn them over, as well as the speculation about the effect on future White House cooperation with investigations.

The Obama administration has now taken up that banner while also adding concerns about possible comic use of the transcripts.

More CIA Delays

The CIA leak case was only one of two examples this week of the Obama administration going back on its word about government transparency.

On Thursday, the Justice Department said it would not release until the end of the summer a CIA inspector general’s report that was believed to have been sharply critical of the Bush administration’s torture program. Even then, the Justice Department said there is no guarantee that any part of the report would be declassified.

The announcement was made following several previous delays in the long-running court case between the CIA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to gain access to the report and other documents related to the treatment of prisoners.

The Justice Department, acting on behalf of the CIA, previously told U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein that the agency would reevaluate whether the report's contents could be at least partially released by June 19. The CIA then requested two extensions – to June 26 and then July 1.

"The Report poses unique processing issues,” the Justice Department said in a letter Thursday. “It is over 200 pages long and contains a comprehensive summary and review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

"The Report touches upon the information contained in virtually all of the remaining 318 documents remanded for further review. Although the Government has endeavored in good faith to complete the review of the Special Review Report first, as we have gone through the process, we have determined that prioritizing the Report is simply untenable. …

“We have determined that the only practicable approach is to first complete the review of the remaining 318 documents, and then apply the withholding determinations made with respect to the information in those documents to the Special Review Report. ... One month into that process, we have concluded that we must review all of the documents together, and that the review will take until August 31, 2009.”

ACLU Objections

The ACLU, in a letter to Hellerstein, said it “strenuously” opposes the two-month delay, which would amount to “a fourth extension” of the original deadline.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said the CIA "has already had more than five months to review the inspector general's report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long."

"We're increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA's interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal," Jaffer said. "President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA's secret prisons and on whose authority."

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney who has been working on the case, said it's "apparent that the CIA report is not being delayed for legitimate reasons, but to cover up evidence of the agency's illegal and ineffective interrogation practices. …

"It is time for the President to hold true to his promise of transparency and once and for all quash the forces of secrecy within the agency. The American public has a right to know the full truth about the torture that was committed in its name."

Defense Department Releases Previously Secret Torture Documents

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:07:11 +0000

By Jason Leopold

The Department of Defense released redacted documents Thursday related to abuse and torture of detainees held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas prisons.

The 12 documents were released as part of the American Civil Liberties Union's long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the government.

The Obama administration agreed to reprocess the documents, but it continues to withhold many key details related to the Defense Department's use of torture methods. In some documents, the Obama administration has withheld details that were previously disclosed by the Bush administration.

"These documents provide still more evidence of the widespread and systemic abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas locations," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. "They further underscore the need for a congressional select committee to examine the roots of the torture program as well as an independent prosecutor to investigate issues of criminal responsibility.

"Key details relating to the Defense Department's use of illegal and abusive interrogation methods have, however, been redacted from these documents. In some documents, the Obama administration has even withheld details previously disclosed by the Bush administration. The withholding of this information makes a mockery of President Obama's promise of transparency."

One of the documents, was a witness statement taken from the former head of interrogations at Guantanamo who suggested that President George W. Bush verbally signed off on the abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Details of that document have been previously reported by The Public Record.

On Feb. 14, 2002, just one week after Bush signed the action memo, Maj. Gen. Mike Dunlavey was contacted by Rumsfeld who asked him to attend a Defense Department meeting with him, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and others.

At the meeting, which took place on either Feb. 21 or 22, 2002, Rumsfeld told Dunlavey he wanted him to oversee interrogations at the Guantanamo Bay naval facility in Cuba. Prisoners captured by U.S. military personnel had first arrived at Guantanamo a month earlier. Dunlavey was a Family Court Judge in Erie County Pennsylvania when he got the call from Rumsfeld and was placed in charge of interrogations at Guantanamo.

Rumsfeld told Dunlavey, according to a March 17, 2005 witness statement Dunlavey gave to U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who was investigating FBI complaints about abuse at Guantanamo, that Rumsfeld said the Department of Defense had rounded up "a number of bad guys" and the Secretary of Defense "wanted a product and wanted intelligence now."

Rumsfeld "wanted to set up interrogation operations and to identify the senior Taliban and senior operatives and to obtain information on what they were going to do regarding their operations and structure," Dunlavey said, according to a copy of his witness statement. "Initially, I was told that I would answer to SECDEF (Secretary of Defense) and [U.S. Southern Command]. The directions changed and I got my marching orders from the President of the United States. I was told by the SECDEF that he wanted me back in Washington, DC every week to brief him....The mission was to get intelligence to prevent another 9/11."

Dunlavey did not explain what he meant by "I got my marching orders from the president." But his comments suggest that Bush may have played a much larger role in the interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo than he has let on.

Obama Continues to Move Further Away From Promise of Transparency

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:07:39 +0000

By Jason Leopold

The Obama administration continues to back away from its grand promises of transparency and open government by using legal arguments virtually identical to those made by Justice Department lawyers working under George W. Bush to block the release of critical documents.

In two separate cases this week, Obama’s Justice Department provided additional reasons for refusing to turning over documents to civil liberties and government watchdog groups.

In the first case, Obama’s Justice Department expanded upon its legal rationale Wednesday as to why it won't turn over a copy of a May 2004 transcript of Dick Cheney’s interview with Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to probe the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. [For the definitive account on this issue please read Marcy Wheeler's excellent analysis.]

And on Thursday, after several delays, the Justice Department said it would not release until the end of the summer a CIA inspector general’s report that was believed to have been sharply critical of the Bush administration’s torture program. Even then, the Justice Department said, there is no guarantee that any part of the report would be declassified.

In the case involving Cheney’s interview with Fitzgerald, Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, said in a declaration (which begins on page 11 of the court filing) that releasing the transcript would deter future White House officials from cooperating with investigations, even those conducted by independent counsels.

“The Department of Justice believes that there is a reasonable probability of future law enforcement investigations by the Department of Justice that will require and benefit from obtaining information from White House officials, possibly at the highest level of government,” Breuer’s declaration states. “In any such investigation, it will be important that White House officials be able to provide law enforcement officials with a full account of relevant events...

“Baseless, partisan allegations that, easily could be investigated and dismissed through voluntary interviews now may have to be investigated through the specter of the grand jury process. In addition, if law enforcement interviews are routinely subject to public disclosure, there could be a significant risk of politicization of law enforcement files and investigations, which could undermine the integrity and effectiveness of, and public confidence in, those investigations.”

Late last month, during a court hearing in the case, Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith made a similar argument. He told a federal judge that release of the transcript might open Cheney to ridicule from late-night comics and thus could discourage other White House officials from cooperating with government prosecutors.

"If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren't going to cooperate," Smith said during a Thursday court hearing. "I don't want a future Vice President to say, 'I'm not going to cooperate with you because I don't want to be fodder for The Daily Show.' "

When asked by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan whether the Obama administration was standing behind the refusal of George W. Bush’s Justice Department to release the transcript, Smith answered, “This has been vetted by the leadership offices. … This is a department position.”

The Justice Department's latest court filing includes a separate declaration by David J. Barron, the Acting Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, explaining the topics Fitzgerald discussed with Cheney.

Additionally, it had long been understood that Fitzgerald interviewed Cheney was in June 2004. But according to another declaration in the Justice Department filing, the interview is believed to have taken place on May 8, 2004, more than a month before Bush was interviewed by Fitzgerald, according to a description of the subjects discussed during Cheney’s interview.

According to the Justice Department’s filing [P.20], the topics discussed included:

The Vice President’s discussion of the substance of a conversation he had with the Director of the CIA [George Tenet] concerning the decision to send Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Niger in 2002.
The Vice President’s discussion of his requests for information from the CIA relating to reported efforts by Iraqi officials to purchase uranium from Niger.
The Vice President’s recollection of the substance of his discussions with the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice] while she was on a trip to Africa.
Vice President's description of government deliberations, including discussions between the Vice President and the Deputy National Security Advisor [Stephen Hadley], in preparation of a statement by the Director of CIA regarding the accuracy of a statement in the President's 2003 State of the Union Address.
Vice President's recollection of discussions with Lewis Libby, the White House Communications Director [Dan Bartlett], and the White House Chief of Staff [Andrew Card] regarding the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA employee.
Vice President's description of his role in resolving disputes about whether to declassify certain information.
Vice President's description of government deliberations involving senior officials regarding whether to declassify portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.
Description of a confidential conversation between the Vice President and the President, and description of an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.
Names of non-governmental third-parties and details of their extraneous interactions with the Vice President.
Name of a CIA briefer.
Names of FBI agents.
Names of foreign government and liaison services.
The name of a covert CIA employee.
The methods CIA uses to assess and evaluate intelligence and inform policy makers.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a copy of the report, said Breuer’s reasons for withholding the document does not make sense.

“It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?” Sloan said.

Additionally, Breuer fails to take into account that that Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Plame leak, told the chairman of a congressional committee last year that the interviews he conducted with Bush and Cheney in 2004 were not protected by grand jury secrecy rules.

Moreover, Fitzgerald said that in his capacity as special counsel he did not enter into a pre-arranged agreement with the White House to keep secret Bush and Cheney's interview transcripts.

"I can advise you that as to any interviews of either the President or Vice President not protected by the rules of grand jury secrecy, there were no "agreements, conditions and understandings between the Office of Special Counsel or the Federal Bureau of Investigation" and either the President or Vice President "regarding the conduct and use of the interview or interviews," said Fitzgerald's July 3 letter addressed to Henry Waxman, then-Democratic chairman of the he House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Last year, the Justice Department told CREW in a letter that it was not turning over Cheney’s interview transcript because it contained information that was classified under the National Security Act. Obama's Justice Department makes that same argument and includes a declaration from Ralph S, DiMaio, the CIA’s Information Review Officer, Clandestine Service, who said releasing Cheney’s transcript, at least certain portions of it, could damage national security because it contains information about intelligence gathering methods and sources that is classified. [P. 25]

In the months after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Wilson emerged as the first Washington insider to claim that the Bush administration had “twisted” intelligence – specifically claims that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa – to justify the U.S.-led preemptive war.

Though Wilson was right about the bogus uranium story, the White House organized a public relations campaign to damage Wilson’s reputation by contending that a fact-finding trip that he made to Africa in 2002 to investigate the uranium issue for the CIA was a junket arranged by his CIA wife.

In pushing that argument, senior administration officials exposed Plame’s clandestine work as a counter-proliferation expert operating under highly sensitive “non-official cover.” Plame’s identity was first revealed in an article by right-wing columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003.

With Plame’s cover blown and her espionage career destroyed, the CIA complained that the leak may have been a violation of a federal law protecting the identities of undercover CIA officers. That prompted a parade of senior White House officials who claimed not to know about the leak.

Leading the way was Bush, who announced his determination to get to the bottom of the matter.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had been part of the get-Wilson operation by authorizing the declassification of some secrets about the uranium issue and by ordering Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role.

That prompted similar denials from White House political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby. However, it later became clear that Rove and Libby had a hand in the Plame leak and that Bush and Cheney had helped organize the campaign to disparage Wilson.

Fitzgerald indicted Libby in October 2005 and secured his conviction in March 2007 on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.

In closing arguments, Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells, told jurors that Fitzgerald had been trying to build a case of conspiracy against the Vice President and Libby and that the prosecution believed Libby may have lied to federal investigators and to a grand jury to protect Cheney.

"Now, I think the government, through its questions, really tried to put a cloud over Vice President Cheney," Wells said.

Rebutting Wells, Fitzgerald told jurors: "You know what? [Wells] said something here that we're trying to put a cloud on the Vice President. We'll talk straight. There is a cloud over the Vice President. He sent Libby off to [meet with New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting - the two-hour meeting - the defendant talked about the wife [Plame]. We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant obstructed justice and lied about what happened."

Libby received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence but it was commuted by Bush. Fitzgerald chose not to pursue prosecutions of other figures in the case, never explaining why.

When Congress sought the transcripts of the Bush and Cheney interviews, Bush’s Justice Department refused to provide them on executive privilege grounds and because of a speculative concern that future White House officials might balk at cooperating with criminal inquiries.

"I am greatly concerned about the chilling effect that compliance with the [House Oversight] Committee's subpoena would have on future White House deliberations and White House cooperation with future Justice Department investigations," Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in 2008.

In continuing the battle to keep the Cheney transcript secret, the Obama administration has again chosen to oppose releasing evidence of Bush-era misconduct.

In a separate case, Obama’s Justice Department told a federal court judge on Thursday that it will not be able to determine whether any part of a 200-page report prepared by the agency's inspector general that called into question the legality of the Bush administration's torture program can be publicly released until the end of the summer, the time when the agency expects to complete it's review.

The announcement was made following several delays in the long-running court case between the CIA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to gain access to the report and other documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Justice Department, acting on behalf of the CIA, previously told U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein that the agency would turn over a reprocessed version of the report on June 19. The CIA then requested two extensions – to June 26 and then July 1.

"The Report poses unique processing issues,” the Justice Department said in a letter Thursday. “It is over 200 pages long and contains a comprehensive summary and review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

"The Report touches upon the information contained in virtually all of the remaining 318 documents remanded for further review. Although the Government has endeavored in good faith to complete the review of the Special Review Report first, as we have gone through the process, we have determined that prioritizing the Report is simply untenable."

“In this instance, we have determined that the only practicable approach is to first complete the review of the remaining 318 documents, and then apply the withholding determinations made with respect to the information in those documents to the Special Review Report... One month into that process, we have concluded that we must review all of the documents together, and that the review will take until August 31, 2009.”

CIA Now Delays IG's Torture Report Until the End of the Summer

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:48:28 +0000

By Jason Leopold

The CIA told a federal court judge Thursday that it will not be able to determine whether any part of a report prepared by the agency's inspector general that called into question the legality of the Bush administration's torture program can be publicly released until the end of the summer, the time in which the agency said it expects to complete it's "labor-intensive" review.

The announcement was made following several delays over the past few weeks in the long-running court case between the CIA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to gain access to the report and other documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In court filings, the Justice Department told U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein recently that the CIA would turn over a reprocessed version of the report on June 19. The CIA then requested two extensions – to June 26 and then July 1.

"As we explained to the Court and Plaintiffs when Plaintiffs first raised the prospect of expediting the Special Review Report, the report poses unique processing issues,” the Justice Department said in a letter Thursday. “It is over 200 pages long and contains a comprehensive summary and review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

"The report touches upon the information contained in virtually all of the remaining 318 documents remanded for further review. Although the Government has endeavored in good faith to complete the review of the Special Review Report first, as we have gone through the process, we have determined that prioritizing the report is simply untenable."

“In this instance, we have determined that the only practicable approach is to first complete the review of [318 other documents from the CIA related to the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody the ACLU is seeking], and then apply the withholding determinations made with respect to the information in those documents to the Special Review Report... One month into that process, we have concluded that we must review all of the documents together, and that the review will take until August 31, 2009.”

But last month, the Justice Department told Hellerstein "reprocessing of the [report] is largely complete" and the CIA needed more time to "make a final determination as to what additional information, if any, may be disclosed from the report."

Heavily redacted portions of the report were released to the ACLU in May 2008 in response to a FOIA request, but the group appealed the Bush administration’s extensive deletions and the Obama administration agreed to respond to that appeal by releasing additional material.

The ACLU, in a letter to Hellerstein, said it "strenuously" opposes the two-month delay.

"Plaintiffs strenuously object to what amounts to the government's request for a fourth extension of its deadline to reprocess the CIA's Office of the Inspector General's Special Review Report," the ACLU's letter said.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project said the CIA "has already had more than five months to review the inspector general's report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long."

"We're increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA's interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal," Jaffer said. "President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA's secret prisons and on whose authority."

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney who has been working on the case, said it's "apparent that the CIA report is not being delayed for legitimate reasons, but to cover up evidence of the agency's illegal and ineffective interrogation practices."

"It is time for the president to hold true to his promise of transparency and once and for all quash the forces of secrecy within the agency," Singh said. "The American public has a right to know the full truth about the torture that was committed in its name."

In another letter sent to Hellerstein last month, the Justice Department said the CIA expected to complete it’s review of the report prepared by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson by July 1--after the agency had already sought a previous extension--and at that time CIA officials would alert the court whether the full report or some of the findings can be turned over to the ACLU.

But the agency abruptly announced Wednesday that it would not meet that deadline.

As with other recent battles over openness, the CIA is opposing any significant release of new information arguing that it would jeopardize sources and methods. President Barack Obama will have to decide whether to overrule CIA objections as he did in April when he released four Justice Department memos justifying torture.

However, more recently – in May and June – Obama has sided with U.S. officials wanting to keep evidence of detainee abuse away from the public. In May, Obama refused to release photos of U.S. military mistreatment of prisoners, and in June, he allowed the CIA to resist releasing documents relating to its destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes.

The highly classified report has been sought by members of Congress and civil liberties organizations for some time. Justice Department torture memos released in April contain several footnotes to the inspector general's report noting the watchdog's concerns about the fact that interrogators strayed from the legal limits set forth in the memos on how specific interrogation methods could be used.

For example, a footnote in a May 2005 Justice Department legal opinion says Helgerson found that, "in some cases," the "waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated...and also that it was used in a different manner."

The May 2004 report about the agency’s use of torture includes details of how at least three detainees were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Helgerson's still secret findings led to eight criminal referrals to the Justice Department for homicide and other misconduct, but those cases languished as Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly intervened to constrain Helgerson’s inquiries.

As with other recent battles over openness, the CIA is opposing any significant release of new information arguing that it would jeopardize sources and methods. President Barack Obama will have to decide whether to overrule CIA objections as he did in April when he released four Justice Department memos justifying torture.

However, more recently – in May and June – Obama has sided with U.S. officials wanting to keep evidence of detainee abuse away from the public. In May, Obama refused to release photos of U.S. military mistreatment of prisoners, and in June, he allowed the CIA to resist releasing documents relating to its destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes.

The ACLU’s appeal of the redactions from Helgerson’s report will test whether Obama’s retreat on openness includes concealing evidence of homicides.

Watchdog Group Obtains More Documents In 'Missing' Bush-Era E-Mails Case

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:58:05 +0000

By Jason Leopold

The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released additional documents Thursday related to the organization's long-running lawsuit over the "disappearance" of as many as 15 million Bush administration e-mails.

Thursday's batch of documents turned over to CREW by the Obama administration "appear to be copies of documents the Bush White House gave to the House Oversight Committee several years ago" when the panel was chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman. The California Democrat launched a wide-ranging probe into the matter after CREW revealed the Bush administration appeared to have purged it's e-mails in violation of federal law.

"A significant portion of the documents are emails and spreadsheets prepared by the Office of Administration in 2005 and early 2006 as it discovered the missing emails and analyzed the scope of the problem," CREW said in a statement Thursday. "As in the last production, virtually all names have been blacked out with no explanations for the redactions. The spreadsheets and other computer listings detail the days and components for which emails are missing and appear to be the output of computer processes used to identify the contents of the PST files in which White House emails were stored.

"During this same time frame, the White House was responding to subpoenas for documents related to the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity, and the documents include discussions of problems in locating responsive Office of the Vice President (OVP) emails as well as spreadsheets of OVP emails from October 13, 2003, sorted by name, size and number of items."

CREW further added:

Significantly, the documents include an analysis dated November 2007 – when CREW’s lawsuit was first filed – of the Office of Administration’s report of its findings. OAP00004640. These documents conclusively demonstrate that at the same time the Bush administration was publicly proclaiming there was no missing email problem, administration officials had in hand an internal analysis detailing just such a problem. More simply, the documents prove the administration lied.
Other documents are related to the Office of Administration’s attempt in 2007-08 to analyze how many and which emails were missing, and to restore a limited number of them from backup tapes. This process is ongoing despite the fact the Obama administration moved to dismiss the lawsuit in January claiming it had done all that is legally required.
In testimony before Congress in February 2008, then Office of Administration Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton suggested emails might not actually have been missing. These documents reveal the White House was well aware of the problem.

Last month, documents in the e-mail case turned over to CREW revealed that some Bush administration officials were aware of the e-mail archving problem as early as February 2004, when the White House was attempting to respond to an unidentified grand jury subpoena from the Justice Department believed to be related to the Plame investigation.

Those documents confirmed that in October 2005, the White House discovered millions of emails had disappeared. The documents also showed that emails Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had subpoenaed in connection with the Plame investigation were missing from Vice President Cheney’s office.

The documents turned over to CREW and George Washington University's National Security Archive (which brought a separate lawsuit that was consolidated with CREW’s), the Obama administration marked some of the documents “sensitive,” said it was not subject to public disclosure, and redacted the identities and contact information of virtually all individuals named in the documents.

The Public Record has reported extensively on the "missing" Bush administration e-mails, many of which covered the time frame leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings, and the Plame leak.

The email controversy first surfaced in January 2006 when Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the leak of Plame's undercover CIA status, said in a court filing following the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Scooter Libby that he "learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

In October of 2005, the Office of Administration discovered that White House e-mails had not been archived in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. The Office of Administration had briefed former White House Counsel Harriet Miers about the lost e-mails.

Miers is said to have immediately informed Fitzgerald about the issue. Fitzgerald had been investigating White House officials' role in the Plame leak and subpoenaed White House e-mails sent in 2003. Fitzgerald stated in a 2006 court filing that some e-mails in the Office of the President and Vice President had not been turned over to federal investigators working on the leak probe.

An internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney covering the Sept. 30, 2003, through Oct. 6, 2003 time frame were lost and unrecoverable.

That was the week when the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Plame leak and set a deadline for Bush administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails containing any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Additionally, Office of Administration staffers said there were at least 400 other days between March 2003 and October 2005 when e-mails could not be located in either Cheney's office or the Executive Office of the President.

Last year, in a sworn affidavit, Payton, the former head of the White House Office of Information, revealed that every three years the Bush administration destroyed its hard drives "in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance."

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired... under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines," Payton wrote in her sworn affidavit.

Eager to Tap Iraq's Vast Oil Reserves, Industry Execs Suggested Invasion

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:40:38 +0000

By Jason Leopold

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain "a prisoner of its energy dilemma" as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

That April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world's second largest oil reserves.

"Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," the report said.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the U.S. should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.

"Like it or not, Iraqi reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade."

The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco.

James Baker, the namesake for the public policy institute, was a prominent oil industry lawyer who also served as Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush and was counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign during the Florida recount in 2000.

Ken Lay, then chairman of the energy-trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.

At the time of the report, Cheney was leading an energy task force made up of powerful industry executives who assisted him in drafting a comprehensive "National Energy Policy" for President George W. Bush.

A Focus on Oil

It was believed then that Cheney's secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, later described a White House interest in invading Iraq and controlling its vast oil reserves, dating back to the first days of the Bush presidency.

In Ron Suskind's 2004 book, The Price of Loyalty, O'Neill said an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda at the first National Security Council. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq's oil fields would be carved up.

O'Neill said even at that early date, the message from Bush was "find a way to do this," according to O'Neill, a critic of the Iraq invasion who was forced out of his job in December 2002.

The New Yorker 's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated Feb. 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." [The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch.

A Commerce Department spokesman issued a brief statement when those documents were released stating that Cheney's energy task force "evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply."

There has long been speculation that a key reason why Cheney fought so hard to keep his task force documents secret was that they may have included information about the administration's plans toward Iraq.

'Conspiracy Theory'

However, both before and after the invasion, much of the U.S. political press treated the notion that oil was a motive for invading Iraq in March 2003 as a laughable conspiracy theory.

Generally, business news outlets were much more frank about the real-politick importance of Iraq's oil fields.

For instance, Ray Rodon, a former executive at Halliburton, the oil-service giant that Cheney once headed, said he was dispatched to Iraq in October 2002 to assess the country's oil infrastructure and map out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry, according to an April 14, 2003 story in Fortune magazine.

"From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield," Fortune's story said. "A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry."

"Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists."

At about the same time as Rodon's trip to Iraq - October 2002 - Oil and Gas International, an industry publication, reported that the State Department and the Pentagon had put together pre-war planning groups that focused heavily on protecting Iraq's oil infrastructure.

The next month, November 2002, the Department of Defense recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Kellogg, Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires.

The contract also called for "assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations."

In January 2003, as President Bush was presenting the looming war with Iraq as necessary to protect Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported that oil industry executives met with Cheney's staff to plan the post-war revival of Iraq's oil industry.

"Facing a possible war with Iraq, U.S. oil companies are starting to prepare for the day when they may get a chance to work in one of the world's most oil-rich countries," the Journal reported on Jan. 16, 2003.

"Executives of U.S. oil companies are conferring with officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war, industry officials say.

"The Bush administration is eager to secure Iraq's oil fields and rehabilitate them, industry officials say. They say Mr. Cheney's staff hosted an informational meeting with industry executives in October [2002], with Exxon Mobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton among the companies represented.

"Both the Bush administration and the companies say such a meeting never took place. Since then, industry officials say, the Bush administration has sought input, formally and informally, from executives and industry experts on how best to overhaul Iraq's oil sector."

Guarding the Oil Ministry

Despite the Bush administration's denials about oil as a motivation for war, the Bush administration's focus on Iraqi oil was firmly set.

On April 5, 2003, Reuters reported that the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project headed by Thomas Warrick, special adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, held its fourth meeting of the oil and energy-working group.

Documents obtained by Reuters showed that "a clear consensus among expert opinion favoring production-sharing agreements to attract the major oil companies."

"That is likely to thrill oil companies harboring hopes of lucrative contracts to develop Iraqi oil reserves," the news agency reported. "Short-term rehabilitation of southern Iraqi oil fields already is under way, with oil well fires being extinguished by U.S. contractor Kellogg Brown and Root ...

"Long-term contracts are expected to see U.S. companies ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips compete with Anglo-Dutch Shell, Britain's BP, TotalFinaElf of France, Russia's LUKOIL and Chinese state companies."

After U.S. troops captured Baghdad in April 2003, they were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry even as looters ransacked priceless antiquities from Iraq's national museums and stole explosives from unguarded military arsenals.

Unacceptable Options

In April 2001, the report laid out a series of unacceptable options, including helping Iraq under Saddam Hussein extract more oil by easing embargoes that were meant to hem Hussein in.

"The U.S. could consider reducing restrictions on oil investment inside Iraq," the report said. But if Hussein's "access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to U.S. allies in the region if weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, weapons regimes and the coalition against him are not strengthened."

Iraq is a "key swing producer turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest," the report said, adding that there even was a ''possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time'' in order to drive up prices.

"Under this scenario, the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages," the report said. "These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention."

The report recommended Cheney move swiftly to integrate energy and national security policy as a means to stop ''manipulations of markets by any state" and suggested that his task force include "representation from the Department of Defense."

"Unless the United States assumes a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game,'' the report said, ''U.S. firms, U.S. consumers and the U.S. government [will be left] in a weaker position."

Two years after the Baker report, the United States - along with Great Britain and other allies - invaded Iraq. Now, more than six years after that, the U.S. oil industry finally appears to be in a strong position relative to Iraq's oil riches.

However, the price that has been paid by American troops, Iraqi civilians and the U.S. taxpayers has been enormous.

Saddam Hussein's FBI Interviews Revealed

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:06:02 +0000

FBI special agents carried out 20 formal interviews and at least five "casual conversations" with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003, according to secret FBI reports released as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive and posted today on the Web at www.nsarchive.org.

Saddam denied any connections to the "zealot" Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the "fanatic" Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport.

The former Iraqi leader, when asked about his accomplishments, listed social progress for the people of Iraq, a temporary truce with the Kurds in the early 1970s, the nationalization of Iraq’s oil in 1972, support for the Arab side during the 1973 Middle East war with Israel, and after that, for the remaining 30 years of his rule, simple survival – through a devastating eight year war with Iran that he had launched, and a 12-year sanctions regime imposed on his people after another war that he began. During the interviews he repeatedly contests FBI evidence and the neutrality of his interlocutors – which one of them finds ironic, given the record of peremptory Iraqi justice under Saddam’s governance. He selectively outlines recent Iraqi history and acknowledges some mistakes, including the destruction without U.N. supervision or verification of some of Iraq’s WMD arsenal left over from the 1980s.

During the interviews Saddam refutes some examples of what he views as myths, like his purported use of body doubles. Instead he says that to evade his enemies he never used the telephone and traveled constantly from one dwelling to another (he describes the farm where he was captured in a “spider hole” as the same place where he took refuge after a failed 1959 coup attempt.)

He takes personal responsibility for ordering the launching of SCUD missiles against Israeli targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, because he blamed Israel and its influence in the U.S. for “all the problems of the Arabs”, but denies that his purpose was to draw that country into the conflict and to divide Washington from its Arab allies. He provides details on the lead-up to the war, reporting that during a January 1991 meeting former Secretary of State James Baker told Saddam’s foreign minister that if Iraq did not comply with U.S. conditions “we’ll take you back to the pre-industrial stage.”

Saddam’s historical recollections include his ascendancy within the Ba’athist party in 1968 and 1969; his disappointment after the Iran-Iraq war with Arab governments for their lack of gratitude for Iraq’s “saving all of the Arab world” from occupation by Iran; details about the 1991 Persian Gulf war; and the post-war Shi’a uprising in Iraq’s south, which he characterizes as “treachery” instigated by Iran.

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public.

The interviews and conversations were led by George L. Piro, one of an exceedingly small number of FBI agents who spoke Arabic. The agency expected that Saddam would feel rapport with Piro and develop a sense of dependency. During the interviews Piro hears Saddam out but is often openly skeptical of the former leader’s recollections. The agent does, however, assert with confidence that the U.S. side had information that Iraq was maintaining or developing a WMD capability and cites “evidence” of continuing contact between Iran and al-Qaeda, seemingly implying an operational relationship.

Read the Documents
Note: The following documents are in PDF format.

ACLU: Obama Admin. Relying On Tortured Confession In Habeas Case

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:46:42 +0000

By Jason Leopold

The American Civil Liberties Union accused the Obama administration in court papers Wednesday of relying on statements obtained through torture to support the indefinite detention of a prisoner being held at Guantanamo Bay who the civil rights organization is defending.

In a 37-page legal brief, portions of which are redacted, the ACLU asked a U.S. District Court Judge overseeing the case to suppress all statements obtained against their client through torture.

The habeas corpus case involves Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who was believed to be 12-years-old when he was captured in December 2002, was “subjected to repeated torture and other mistreatment and to a systematic and sustained program of highly coercive interrogation” on more than 50 occasions. The Department of Defense claims Jawad was as old as 17 when he was arrested.

“U.S. personnel at Bagram [Air base in Afghanistan, where Jawad was detained after his arrest] subjected Mr. Jawad to beatings, forced him into painful 'stress positions,' deprived him of sleep, forcibly hooded him, placed him in physical and linguistic isolation, pushed him down stairs, chained him to a wall for prolonged periods, and subjected him to threats, including threats to kill him, [his family], and other intimidation,” the ACLU’s legal brief states.

“While in an isolation cell, Mr. Jawad remained hooded and restrained with handcuffs. Guards made him stand up and, if Mr. Jawad sat down, he was beaten. Guards also kicked Mr. Jawad and made him fall over, as he was wearing leg shackles and was unable to take large steps. Sometimes guards fastened Mr. Jawad’s handcuffs to the door of his isolation cell so that he was unable to sit down. At one point Mr. Jawad became so sick from his treatment in the isolation cell at Bagram that he was taken to the hospital and was treated for pain in his chest and problems with urination."

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd would not comment on the specifics of the case but said the government intends “to prove our case in court rather than attempt to do so through the media."

Immediately after his arrest for allegedly throwing a grenade at an unmarked jeep that wounded two U.S. soldiers, Jawad was taken to an Afghan police station where he was coerced into signing a confession written in Farsi, a language Jawad could not speak, much less read or write. In fact, Jawad was functionally illiterate even in his native language of Pashto.

Once transferred to U.S. custody, Jawad was illegally rendered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated at least 11 times.

“Typically, beatings by guards preceded interrogation sessions,” the ACLU’s legal brief says. “Interrogators often placed Mr. Jawad in a position along the wall where he was sitting without a chair and with his arms outstretched.”

The U.S. later transported Jawad to Guantanamo, where he was subjected to the notorious "frequent flyer" sleep deprivation program as well as the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) interrogation methods recently exposed in a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report. Eventually, Jawad tried to commit suicide in his cell by slamming his head repeatedly against the wall. The Afghan government recently sent a letter to the U.S. government demanding Jawad's return and suggesting he was as young as 12 when he was captured nearly seven years ago.

Last October, the judge in Jawad's military commission proceedings suppressed statements made by Jawad to Afghan and U.S. officials following his arrest for allegedly throwing the grenade at U.S. soldiers, concluding that they were the product of torture and were made after Afghan authorities threatened to kill his family. However, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, continues to rely on those same statements in arguing that Jawad should be held indefinitely.

"Since his arrest in 2002, Mr. Jawad has been subjected to repeated torture and other mistreatment and to a systematic program of harsh and highly coercive interrogations designed to break him physically and mentally," said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The statements wrung from Mr. Jawad in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo during more than 50 interrogations do not remotely meet the standard for admissibility in a court of law."

Hafetz sharply criticized the Obama administration for continuing to defend the Bush administration’s position in the case.

"That Mr. Jawad was a juvenile – perhaps as young as 12 – when his abuse began makes the coercive nature of his interrogations all the more barbaric and the government's continued reliance on his statements all the more egregious," Hafetz said.

Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the former lead prosecutor in Jawad's military commission case, left the military commissions because he did not believe he could ethically proceed with the case and signed a declaration in support of the ACLU's position.

In an interview with the Washington Post earlier this year, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions at Guantanamo, said that she would not allow Mohammed al-Qahtani’s prosecution to move forward because his interrogation met the legal definition of torture and as such the evidence against him was tainted.

A hearing in Jawad's habeas case is scheduled for August 5-6.