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Today's Stories
June 26 / 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
June 25, 2004
Stephen
Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"
Saul Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege: Bush
Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction
Amir
Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace
Jack McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal? Did
Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?
Greg
Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader
June 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
John
Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing
Death Threats
Harry Browne
On
the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe
Bill Kaufman
Another
Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush,
Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did
They Tell?
Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?
John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy
Diane Johnstone
Kerry
and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"
June 23, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Bush
and Castro Face Off
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"
Kurt Nimmo
From
Saddam, With Love
Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars
Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"
Patrick Cockburn
The
Pretense of an Independent Iraq
Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib
June 22, 2004
Dave Lindorff
The
Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption
Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?
Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings
Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq
John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales
Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity
Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés
Bruce Jackson
Saying
No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify
Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill
June 21,
2004
Gary Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos
Upon Chaos
Cockburn
/ Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty
Uri
Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage
June 19
/ 20, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid
and Isolated
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation on
Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh
Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature
Col. Dan
Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a Year Later
Prudence
Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!
Poets'
Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert
Kathy
Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids
June 18,
2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player &
Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| Weekend
Edition
June 26 / 27, 2004
The Failure
of the 9/11 Commission
Decision
Not to Explore Quashed FBI Investigations Prior to 9/11 Tarnishes Hearings
By
BRYAN SACKS
At
the twelfth and final public session of the 9/11 commission hearings
this week in the NTSB building in Washington, DC, the disappointment
was palpable among family members of the 9/11 deceased. A less-than
distinguished panel of FBI and CIA agents took turns praising the ingenuity
and resourcefulness of Al-Qaeda, and offered little hope that future
efforts would be successful in stopping terrorism. But give the CIA
and FBI this: they can still recognize a marketing opportunity when
they see it.
Apparently
unfamiliar with the concept of shame, representatives from two of the
agencies whose failures bear clear responsibility for the events of
9/11 saw the morning session as an opportunity to shill for 'patience'
and, tacitly, more money. One after another, in front of the surviving
family members, many of whom clutched pictures of their dead sons, daughters,
husbands and wives, the agents fawned over the incredible resourcefulness,
commitment and dedication of Al Qaeda operatives (in one notable exchange,
Al Qaeda was glowingly described as “innovative,” “creative”
and “entrepreneurial”—why not just say you were outsmarted?)
The CIA agents referred familiarly to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama
Bin Laden as ‘KSM’ and ‘UBL’. The uninitiated
might have gotten the impression they were speaking of protégés,
and not hated enemies. Earlier, in a jaunty tone completely incongruous
with the substance of his statement, the CIA’s Dr. Kay told the
commission that “(Al-Qaeda) may strike next week, next month or
next year, but it will strike.” The agencies took no responsibility
for the attacks, and they were not challenged to.
But the nadir of the morning session came when commissioner James Thompson
asked all of the panelists how best to combat the new type of stateless
enemy Al-Qaeda represents. FBI special agent Mary Deborah Doran answered
last. She had already warned the Commission in her introductory remarks
that, as a “street agent”, she was removed from the “policy
and administrative decision-making processes” that determined
the scope of the FBI’s investigation of Al Qaeda, and thus could
not speak to them (no one did that day, including Executive Assistant
FBI Director John Pistole, seated to her right). Her answer to Thompson’s
question was: "I think what we need to do . . at the FBI street-agent
level, is to continue what we’ve always done, and that is to pursue
all the information that we do get. . . to its logical end. . ."
Here, in classic doublespeak fashion, Doran gives an answer that is
a non-answer. She had to be aware that several FBI “street-level”
investigations into the activities of the 9/11 terrorists were stymied
by higher-ups in the weeks prior to 9/11, each under strange circumstances,
and well before the street-level agents felt like they had reached their
“logical end”. Consider the following cases, all drawn from
mainstream news sources, summarized in David Ray Griffin's well-researched
expose, "The New Pearl Harbor":
1) Ken Williams of the Phoenix FBI office sent a now-famous July 10,
2001 memo to the counterterrorism division of the FBI suggesting that
the organization institute a national program to keep tabs on suspicious
flight-school students. This came just a few weeks after the CIA learned
that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 plot and a well-known
terrorist at that time who the CIA was monitoring, was recruiting jihadists
to come to the US to take part in attacks here. Williams, who had previously
been transferred to an unrelated arson case despite tracking the hijackers
for more than a year, had been back on the case for about a month when
he wrote the memo, which also warned of a possible “effort by
Osama bin Laden to send students to the US to attend civil aviation
universities and colleges” (Fortune, May 22, 2002). His suggestion
for a national program was ignored before 9/11;
2) FBI agent Robert Wright of the Chicago field office, who had been
investigating a suspected terrorist cell for three years, was informed
in January 2001 that the case was being closed. This despite Wright's
contention that his case was growing stronger. His investigation included
individuals from the notorious Ptech, a software company which provided
product for the White House, Congress, FBI, CIA, IRS, Army, Navy, and
FAA and which was raided by federal agents in December 2002.
Three months before September 11, Wright wrote a stinging internal memo
charging that the FBI was not interested in thwarting a terrorist attack,
but rather "was merely gathering intelligence so they would know
who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred." (UPI, May 30,
2002, cited in Griffin, p. 83);
3) Legal officer Colleen Rowley worked in the FBI's Minneapolis field
office when agents arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August of 2001. The
commission made repeated mention of the fact that Moussaoui, by that
time, was considered a very dangerous person capable of crashing a plane
into the World Trade Center. The Minneapolis felt so strongly about
the need to detain him that a request was sent to FBI headquarters to
search Moussaoui's laptop computer under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance
Act.
Approximately 10,000 requests under FISA over the past 20 years had
been made without a single request being turned down, but the Minneapolis
agency's request never got out of the FBI. The request had been excised
of the critical intelligence that made the case for Moussaoui's connection
to Al Qaeda in Chechnya on its path to FBI headquarters. Excised of
that justification, the request was never forwarded for FISA consideration,
spurring Rowley to charge that the FBI was "sabotaging" the
case, and another agent to charge that headquarters was "setting
this up for failure." (Senate Intelligence Committee, October 17,
2002; Time, July 21 and July 27, 2002 and Sydney Morning Herald July
28, 2002, each cited in Griffin, p. 81);
4) On Aug 28, 2001 the New York FBI office requested opening a criminal
investigation in soon-to-be hijacker Khalid Almihdhar based on evidence
he had been involved in the USS Cole bombing. The request was turned
down, on the basis that, as Griffin puts it, "Almihdhar could not
be tied to the Cole investigation without the inclusion of sensitive
intelligence information." This led one frustrated FBI agent to
write in an email that "someday someone will die--and. . . the
public will not understand why we were not more effective." (Congressional
Intelligence Committee, cited in Griffin, p. 83). Perhaps Doran, a New
York FBI agent herself, knew something about this? She was not asked
directly.
What these examples make clear is that FBI “street agents”
and translators don’t have the power to follow their investigations
to their logical ends when they are obstructed by their superiors. In
light of these facts, Doran's breezy recommendation that the FBI street
agents “keep doing what we’ve always done” is entirely
inadequate, and inspires no confidence. Neither Thompson nor any other
commissioner pressed for a better answer. And while the FBI’s
“unprecedented transformation” after 9/11 testified to by
FBI Executive Assistant Director For Counterterrorism John Pistole on
April 14 may sound impressive to some, it does not explain nor address
the past obstruction of promising investigations. Factor in the erosion
of civil liberties required for its execution, and the “unprecedented
transformation” appears to be of dubious value.
There are several other aspects about the FBI’s behavior pre-
and post-9/11 that scream out for further investigation. One of the
most bizarre cases still unfolding involves the targeting of former
FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who was fired by the agency shortly after
reporting a number of complaints to her superiors. According to a June
7, 2004 story in The New Republic, those complaints included the charge
that a fellow FBI translator, Can Dickerson, tried to recruit Edmonds
into a foreign organization whose documents Dickerson had been translating
and which had been under investigation by the FBI. Edmonds then filed
a wrongful termination suit and took her grievance to Senators Charles
Grassley and Patrick Leahy, as well as the television program “60
Minutes,” which aired an interview with her in 2002.
But the FBI has since gone to extraordinary lengths to silence Edmonds.
In May, the Bureau re-classified all of the information it presented
to Sens. Grassley and Leahy, nearly two years after it had become public.
It even violated its own rules for reclassification in doing so. The
reclassification has had the effect of silencing Grassley and Leahy
on the matter, too, who had been pressing the Bureau for a fuller account
of the matter. Now they were limited to writing classified letters to
the FBI.
Edmonds, meanwhile, has seen her wrongful termination suit delayed for
two years and most recently was informed by Judge Reggie Walton on June
14 that her hearing was delayed once again (for the fourth time), with
no date set for a rescheduling. The delays result from an effort from
Attorney General John Ashcroft to invoke the State Secrets Privilege,
which can quash lawsuits on the basis that their continuation would
damage national security. Judge Walton is still waiting for the government
to make its case for the invoking of the States Secrets Privilege. In
the meantime, as the New Republic notes, while Edmonds herself is not
gagged, she is not permitted to reference any of the now-classified
information that could substantiate her claims.
At her June 14 press conference outside the E. Barrett Prettyman United
States Courthouse in Washington, DC, Edmonds summarized her charges
clearly, stating that for more than two years, “John Ashcroft
has been relentlessly engaged in actions geared toward covering up my
report and investigations into my allegations. His actions. . . .include
gagging the United States Congress, blocking court proceedings on my
(wrongful termination suit) by invoking the State Secrets Privilege,
quashing the subpoena for my deposition on information regarding 9/11,
withholding documents requested under the Freedom Of Information Act
and preventing the release of the Inspector General’s report of
its investigations into my report and allegations.”
She threw down a gauntlet to all citizens, members of Congress and federal
officials that so far have not spoken out, saying, “To become
an American citizen, I took the citizenship oath. In taking this oath,
I pledged I would support and defend the Constitution and laws of the
United States and America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Therefore, not only do I have the right to challenge John Ashcroft’s
anti-constitution(al) and un-American actions, but as an American citizen
I am required to do so. So are you.”
Edmonds did testify with the 9/11 commission behind closed doors, but
a host of disturbing questions still remain before the commission:
•
Why weren't any of the agents mentioned above called to testify in
the commission's public hearings? What legitimate claim to a thorough
investigation can be made without their public testimony?
• Were the FBI agents who saw their investigations stymied at
least deposed in private sessions?
• Why was Robert Wright's investigation derailed, and why did
the government move to block significant portions of his book in 2002,
such that it remains unpublished to this day?
• Why was the information connecting Moussaoui’s connection
with rebels in Chechnya excised before it reached the FBI Deputy General?
• And why have lower-level agents been demoted and/or punished
for doing their jobs while their superiors, who spiked, obstructed
or otherwise compromised their promising investigations been rewarded?
In
sum, the day’s hearings played as a commercial for supporting
the efforts of the country’s intelligence agencies without additional
public scrutiny of them. We’ve seen that show before, and we know
how it ends. If the commission’s report fails to adequately address
Sibel Edmonds’ charges, and fails to address the obstructed FBI
investigations prior to 9/11, the unanswered questions which haunt the
9/11 Inquiry will grow louder and more insistent, and neither the 9/11
families nor the concerned citizens of this country will have the closure
they deserve.
Bryan Sacks is an adjunct instructor of philosophy
for Immaculata University. He can be reached at bksacks@yahoo.com
Works Referred to:
1.David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about
the Bush Administration and 9/11. Northampton: Olive Branch Press, copyright
2004.
Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede
Team CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
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