by H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye
Originally published at Truthout

On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally released a "seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed's torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were criticized by the British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed's torture places the implementation of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA's secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed "black sites" by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950's with the CIA's Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency's own files. This is the so-called "Lyle O. Kelly case." The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents.

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Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).

This is part one of an interview in which Scott talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war and is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington, but rather is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in society, and about the need for a new kind of American foreign policy.

SCOTT: I think I have talked about the deep state. I prefer now just to talk about deep politics, that there are things which we just don't face in our society, things we're not willing to talk about. With respect to Afghanistan, one of the things that we don't want to face and talk about is the presence of drug trafficking in the plans of the CIA for controlling remote areas of this world. And when you have a number of facts which are not being talked about, our politics becomes more and more like an iceberg, in which the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all. And that's the part that I call deep politics. The phrase "deep state" is a bit dangerous, 'cause it might make people think that there's a secret Pentagon and a secret White House, it's nothing like that. It's more this matter of the mindset that I'm talking about.

JAY: When you described the war machine, you use the words "drug-corrupted war machine," and everyone knows that Afghanistan is now the manufacturer of the majority of the world's heroin, but it doesn't ever get talked about as a policy issue or as an underlying driving force in this struggle for all sides. So talk about this.

SCOTT: Well, I would say, actually, it has become talked about in the last year, with the beginning of Obama's campaign. You know, when Bush first went in in 2001, they had a list of the main refineries, and they were never touched, because America's coalition for developing local support in Afghanistan was made up very largely of warlords who were involved in the drug traffic. Our principal ally was going to be [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, and there was a big debate in Washington, before we went into Afghanistan, whether to make him an ally or not, because they knew he was involved in the drug traffic. Well, he was in fact assassinated, just a day or two before 9/11. But the Northern Alliance, which was the only faction in Afghanistan in that year that was growing poppy, they were our allies. And if you look at almost any newspaper story about drugs in Afghanistan, it's going to be talking about the Taliban. But the Taliban are getting at most about a tenth of the revenues that are being raised by opium and heroin in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of it is going to the big warlords who essentially make up, to this day, the coalition that are supporting [Hamid] Karzai in Kabul.


Real News Network - January 31, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy?
Peter Dale Scott: The President does not choose the mindset, it chooses the people who become President

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Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s on-going letter writing campaign for torture accountability under the law. For those who have not seen this series before, the way it works is as follows; every Monday the Dog writes a letter to the decision makers urging them to follow through on accountability for the apparent Bush Administration torture program. You get involved by either using the letter as the starting place for one of your own, or cutting and pasting it over your signature and sending it off.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

Most weeks the letter heads to the Attorney General, but the quest for accountability does not begin and end at the DOJ. Congress has a constitutional role of oversight which is also required if we are to make sure the United States does not drift to and fro on the issue of state sponsored torture. To this end, we will be writing Sen. Dianne Feinstein Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this week. There will copies to the President, the AG, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, Judiciary Chairs Conyers and Leahy and Rep. Jerry Nadler a senior member of the House Judiciary

Dear Senator Feinstein;

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Image from AirForceTimes.com: [expand image]

Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.

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By David Swanson

The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called "a nation of laws, not men" to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.

In 2003, the CIA and the United States military kidnapped a man, a political refugee, in Italy. His name was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Our CIA agents spied on him from their luxury hotels and gourmet-meal lives in Milano (all paid for by U.S. tax payers). They were told to kidnap Nasr and send him to Egypt to be tortured, and they did so. According to recent statements by two of them, they knew perfectly well they were violating the law. But they were not worried enough at the time to refrain from discussing the matter on their cell phones as they enjoyed the dolce vita and racked up credit card bills wasting the same currency our government claims it has a moral duty not to waste on healthcare.

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A month before Valerie Plame Wilson's covert status as a CIA operative was revealed, Vice President Dick Cheney told his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and his press secretary, Cathie Martin, that Plame Wilson worked at the CIA.

But according to a 28-page summary of Cheney’s May 8, 2004 interview with the special prosecutor probing the leak, Cheney did not recall having that conversation.

"Cheney has no recollection of Cathie Martin entering his office at some point while Scooter Libby was present and advising both of them that [Plame Wilson] was employed by the CIA," states the interview summary, released late Friday by the FBI after a lengthy court battle between the Bush and Obama administrations and the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The "Plame-gate" affair dates back to 2003, when Valerie Plame Wilson’s husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly disclosed that he had undertaken a fact-finding trip to Niger which had disproved President Bush’s claim that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium from the African nation.

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Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

Think of us as just having passed through the failed era of "must" in Washington. For almost eight years, George W. Bush made speeches and appearances in which he hectored this or that country, or enemy, or people about what they "must" do. Never, I suspect, has an American president lectured more people out there on their responsibilities to us. Looking back, what's surprising is how few paid much attention. The Iraqis didn't listen, nor did the Afghans, nor the Iranians, nor, it seems, the Pakistanis, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese... and so on. It's been a remarkably ignominious lesson in bluster and bust -- and a reasonable measure of the actual power of a country that, not so many years ago, Washington pundits were happily (and favorably) comparing to the Roman and British empires in its reach and ambition.

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Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency(C.I.A.) drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to reliable reports. The drone is a remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft.

“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”

Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports.

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A federal court judge ordered the Justice Department Thursday to release portions of an interview transcript between former Vice President Dick Cheney and the special prosecutor assigned to investigate the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and the role Bush administration officials played in her outing six years ago.

US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected arguments by Obama Justice Department appointees that releasing the transcript would discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become "fodder for The Daily Show."

At a federal court hearing in July, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney's 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as ten more years to protect Cheney from any political embarrassment that would result from the transcript being released.

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Back in 2001, the Defense Department was briefed about a massive data mining system that officials said was aimed at identifying alleged terrorists who lived and communicated with people in the United States.

The new intelligence program granted traditional law enforcement agencies as well as the FBI and the CIA the authority to conduct what was then referred to as "suspicionless surveillance" of American citizens.

"Suspicionless Surveillance" was developed by the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness department, led by Adm. John Poindexter, the former national security adviser, who secretly sold weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra affair and was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress and destroying evidence. The convictions were later overturned on appeal.

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