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http://news.lp.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/clarke/clrk2rice12501mem.html Formerly classified Clinton-era report, attached to Clark’s memo, on the al Qaeda threat. http://news.lp.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/dec2000aqmem9.html Related Links: The War on Terrorism http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/terrorism/index.html 9/11 Commission Final Report http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/911finalrpt/index.html Terror-Related Cases http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/terrorism/cases/index.html http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0216-01.htm
February 10, 2005 Associated Press http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-650999.php BERLIN German prosecutors said Thursday they won’t open an investigation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials after a group of American lawyers filed a criminal complaint alleging they were responsible for acts of torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The complaint, filed in November by attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, targeted Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez the former commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq. http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-650999.php |
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Negroponte: Nominee for Baghdad Embassy, a Rogue for all Seasons · Negroponte pressed Powell to pressure Chile’s and Mexico’s weak-willed leaders to discharge their U.N. ambassadors over Iraq votes. Negroponte has a sordid human rights record in Honduras. A Cruel Joke: Negroponte, the arch authoritarian, teaching democracy to the Iraqis. Life under Saddam somewhat prepares you for the Negroponte era. Senate Foreign Relations Committee unlikely to closely scrutinize Negroponte nomination. Like the earlier nominations of Otto Reich, John Bolton and Roger Noriega, Secretary of State Colin Powell will have no trouble in describing this villain as an "honorable" man. http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2004/04.20_Negroponte.htm How many times can I write the same piece about John Negroponte? Today George W. Bush named him to the new post of Director of National Intelligence. Previously, Bush had hired Negroponte to be UN ambassador and then US ambassador to the new Iraq. On each of those earlier occasions, I noted that Negroponte's past deserved scrutiny. After all, during the Reagan years, when he was ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte was involved in what was arguably an illegal covert quid pro quo connected to the Iran/contra scandal, and he refused to acknowledge significant human rights abuses committed by the pro-US military in Honduras. But each time Negroponte's appointment came before the Senate, he won easy confirmation. Now that he's been tapped to lead the effort to reorganize and reform an intelligence community that screwed up 9/11 and the WMD-in-Iraq assignment, Negroponte will likely sail through the confirmation process once again. His previous exploits, though, warrant more attention than ever. He has been credibly accused of rigging a human rights report that was politically inconvenient. This is a bad omen. The fundamental mission of the intelligence community is to provide policymakers with unvarnished and valuable information-even if it causes the policymakers headaches. But there's reason to believe that Negroponte did the opposite in tough circumstances. If that is the case, he would not be the right man to oversee an intelligence community that needs solid leaders who are committed to truth-finding. Rather than rewrite my previous work on Negroponte, I am posting below <AHREF="HTTP: www.thenation.com doc.mhtml?i='20040510&s=corn"'the article I did after Bush named him the viceroy of Baghdad. It's more relevant today than when it first appeared. But I doubt Negroponte's dark history will finally trigger a confirmation debate within the Senate. He has skated in the past; he'll likely do so again. Bush's New Iraq Viceroy And read Corn's May 10, 2004 magazine piece for more on Negroponte's http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040510&s=corn http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=2203 HYPERLINK "http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?hr&s=440456&n=thenation"by DAVID CORN May 10, 2004 issue Like dirty money, tainted reputations can be laundered, as the Administration fervently hopes in the case of John Negroponte. Now UN ambassador, Negroponte has been chosen by George W. Bush to be the first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces. This past threatened his confirmation as UN ambassador. But 9/11 rescued Negroponte. At the time of the attack, his nomination was pending, and the Senate moved quickly to approve him. Bush's New Iraq Viceroy by David Corn FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=L" ike dirty money, tainted reputations can be laundered, as the Administration fervently hopes in the case of John Negroponte. Now UN ambassador, Negroponte has been chosen by George W. Bush to be the first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces. This past threatened his confirmation as UN ambassador. But 9/11 rescued Negroponte. At the time of the attack, his nomination was pending, and the Senate moved quickly to approve him. These days Negroponte's tenure in Honduras is old news. The Washington Post's front-page story on his nomination did not mention his stint there. Senate staffers say that his record in Honduras won't be a focus of the confirmation hearings. But his tour of duty there is worth scrutiny, for it raises questions about his credibility and his ability to handle tough situations and inconvenient truths. While he was in Honduras and for years afterward, Negroponte refused to acknowledge the human rights abuses. In a 1982 letter to The Economist he said it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The next year he maintained, "There is no indication that the infrequent human rights violations that do occur are part of deliberate government policy." And during his 2001 confirmation he stated, "I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras." How then does he account for a 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation that concluded, "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and linked to "death squad activities"? ADVERTISEMENT Not only has Negroponte declined to acknowledge the obvious; when he was ambassador, the State Department rigged its Honduras human rights reports to Congress. As a 1995 Baltimore Sun series noted, "A comparison of the annual human rights reports prepared while Negroponte was ambassador with the facts as they were then known shows that Congress was deliberately misled." The Sun reported, "Time and again...Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives." But this didn't make it into State Department reports. Had Honduras been found to be engaging in systematic abuses, it could have lost its US aid--thwarting the Reagan Administration's use of Honduras to support the contras. LINKS FOR THE CLARKE/RICE MEMO TO YOUR RIGHT |
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 ABU GHUREIB Von Severin Weiland Generalbundesanwalt Kay Nehm wird gegen US-Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld keine Ermittlungen wegen der Misshandlung von Gefangenen im Irak aufnehmen. Kommt der US-Verteidigungsminister nun doch zur Sicherheitskonferenz nach MUEnchen? Bislang hat nur sein Vize zugesagt. Karlsruhe - Die US-Gruppe Center for Constitutional Rights hatte Rumsfeld, den frueheren CIA-Chef George Tenet und den ehemaligen US-Oberkommandierenden im Irak, General Ricardo Sanchez, im November bei der Bundesanwaltschaft angezeigt. Die Gruppe wirft ihnen wegen der Folter in Abu Ghureib in der Naehe der irakischen Hauptstadt Bagdad Kriegsverbrechen und Verstoesse gegen das Voellkerrecht vor. Die US-Juristen stuetzten die Strafanzeige auf das deutsche Voelkerstrafgesetzbuch, dessen Einfuehrung am 25. April 2002 einstimmig im Bundestag beschlossen wurde und das am 30. Juni 2002 in Kraft trat. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ 0,1518,341109,00.html
9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings By ERIC LICHTBLAU ASHINGTON, Feb. 9 - In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/10/politics/10terror.html?hp&ex=1108098000&en=5ea3bece066b47f4&ei=5094&partner=homepage Elliot Abrams: defender of death squads to direct US "democracy" crusade By Bill Van Auken On February 2, the same day he delivered his State of the Union speech vowing to "stand with the allies of freedom" in "ending tyranny in our world," George W. Bush named Elliot Abrams as his deputy national security advisor. Nothing could more clearly expose the real aims of the US president’s worldwide crusade for "democracy" than this appointment. FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=Elliott Abrams"
Perhaps more than any other political figure, Abrams personifies the criminal, deceitful and thuggish character of the current US http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nndb.com/people/326/000024254/e-abrams.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nndb.com/people/326/000024254/&h=234&w=174&sz=14&tbnid=w1hB2yz7xesJ:&tbnh= 104&tbnw=77&start=4&prev=/images%3Fq%3Delliott%2Babrams%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG administration. He has been tapped to serve as Bush’s principal advisor on democracy and human rights.
Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by The New YorkerOutsourcing Torture by Jane Mayer Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by The New YorkerOn January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that "you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother." Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man’s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board. Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, "just began beating on me." They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. "Not even animals could withstand it," he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. "You just give up," he said. "You become like an animal."
A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as "extraordinary rendition." This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America including torture. Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. "They are outsourcing torture because they know it’s illegal," he said. "Why, if they have suspicions, don’t they question people within the boundary of the law?" Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, |
