January 16, 2012

Source: Ria Novosti

Iran has arrested several people in the killing of a nuclear scientist last week that Tehran blames on Israel and the United States, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani told state Al-Alam TV, Tehran Times daily said on Monday.

“We have discovered some clues and some arrests have been made,” Larijani told the Arabic-language broadcaster.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a deputy director of Iran’s largest uranium enrichment plant, died in a car bomb explosion in Tehran last week. Local police sources said a passing motorcyclist attached a magnetic mine to the car Roshan was riding in.

Larijani did not give any further details on the arrests but vowed his country would avenge the death using “non-terrorist” tactics.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has accused the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services of killing of the scientist.

Read More….

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January 15, 2012

Source: Big News Network

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December 1, 2011

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top national security lawyers in the Obama administration say U.S. citizens are legitimate military targetswhen they take up arms with al-Qaida.

The lawyers were asked at a national security conference Thursday about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Alwaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.

The government lawyers — CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson — did not directly address the al-Alwaki case. But they said U.S. citizens don’t have immunity when they’re at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, are equipped to make decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

Read More…

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November 30, 2011

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November 28th, 2011

Via: CNN:

Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on “formidable evidence” asserting his innocence and “horrendous violations” of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.

In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan’s lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan’s revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.

Attorneys William F. Pepper and Laurie D. Dusek also allege that fraud was committed in Sirhan’s 1969 trial when the court allowed a substitute bullet to be admitted as evidence for a real bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck.

The attorneys further assert that Sirhan was hypno-programmed to be a diversion for the real assassin and allege that Sirhan would be easily blamed for the assassination because he is an Arab. Sirhan, 67, is a Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem whose parents brought him and his siblings to America in the 1950s.

Sirhan “was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed,” court papers said.

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In public Sunday, President Obama was at a summit unsuccessfully leaning on Russia and China to back diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuke program.

In private Sunday, there was more evidence of an efficient and brutal covert operation that continues to degrade Iran’s military capabilities.

Iranian officials revealed that one of the 17 men killed in a huge explosion at a munitions depot was a key Revolutionary Guard commander who headed Iran’s missile program. And the IRNA state news agency reported that scientists had discovered a new computer virus in their systems, a more sophisticated version of the Stuxnet worm deployed last year to foul up Iran’s centrifuges.

Iran said the army base explosion was an accident and the new Duqu virus was contained. But Israeli newspapers and some U.S. experts said it appeared to be more from an ongoing secret operation by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat.

The covert campaign encompasses a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and a similar explosion at another Iranian missile base two years ago both widely attributed to the Mossad.

“May there be more like it,” was all Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said when Army Radio asked about the new blast.

There was a third mysterious event: The son of a top Iranian hard-liner was found dead — a seeming suicide — in a Dubai hotel on Sunday. His father called it “suspicious” and linked to the base explosion, without elaborating.

Israel was accused of deploying the 11 agents who killed a top Hamas terrorist in a Dubai hotel last year.

Tension has risen in recent weeks between Iran and the United States as a key United Nations report said Iran was close to being able to build a nuclear weapon.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Hawaii, Obama tried to get Russia and China to back a bid to tighten sanctions on Iran, meeting individually with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Afterward, Hu didn’t even mention Iran, and Medvedev said only that he had spoken with Obama about Iran.

Obama came under withering fire from the GOP presidential candidates at a debate Saturday, when the front-runners agreed he had been too weak on Iran and vowed to go to war to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions if needed.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) slammed Obama for not being “smart” on Iran.

Gingrich said he would launch “maximum covert operations” against Iran, “including taking out their scientists. . . . All of it covertly, all of it deniable.”

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters that pressure on Iran had put its leadership in disarray, and “the Iranian economy has ground to a halt.”

hkennedy@nydailynews.com

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October 30th, 2011

Via: Time:

A wave of CIA drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda figures in Yemen is stoking widespread anger there that U.S. policy is cruel and misguided, prioritizing counterterrorism over a genuine solution to the country’s raging political crisis.

Politics has never been a concern to Sam al-Homiganyi and his fellow teenagers. This month, though, they were shocked by the sudden death of a friend and are struggling to understand why.

Fighting back tears, his gaze fixed downward, al-Homiganyi, a lean-looking 15-year-old from the outskirts of Sana’a, told TIME, “He was my best friend, we played football together everyday.” Another of his friends spoke up, gesturing to the gloomy group of jeans-clad boys around him: “He was the same as us. He liked swimming, playing computer games, watching movies … you know, normal stuff.” (See photos of Yemen on the brink.)

The dead friend was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, the third American killed in as many weeks by suspected CIA drone strikes in Yemen. His father, the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, was killed earlier this month, along with alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, who was from New York. When Abdulrahman’s death was first reported in the Western press, his age was given as 21 by local Yemeni officials. Afterward, however, the Awlaki family put out a copy of Abdulrahman’s birth certificate.

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Billionaire French Hotelier Shot Dead in Professional Hit

October 28th, 2011

Via: Telegraph:

A billionaire French hotelier has been shot dead in a wealthy Paris suburb in what police believe was a professional hit.

The lifeless body of Claude Dray, 76, was found with three bullet holes in the neck in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Paris suburb where President Nicolas Sarkozy built his career and still owns property.

A butler found Dray’s corpse at 9am on Tuesday following a death that had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.

Dray, one of the most prominent Jews in France, had been the subject of threats in the past. His palatial villa – which was called Madrid – was considered one of the most secure in the French capital.

It was regularly surrounded by police and private security guards, and is equipped with anti-intruder measures including cameras and infra-red alarms.

“Somebody got in and fired three bullets into the victim’s neck,” said one detective at the scene who asked not to be named, adding that a silencer had likely been used as domestic staff heard nothing.

Dray’s wife, Simone, was in the US, where four years ago he bought the famous art deco National Hotel in South Beach, Miami.

Dray also owned the Hotel de Paris in St Tropez, one of the most popular celebrity institutions on the French Riviera.

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The killing of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son

By Glenn Greenwald *

October 20, 2011 (updated below) Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.” The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives. There are two points worth making about this: (1) It is unknown whether the U.S. targeted the teenager or whether he was merely “collateral damage.” The reason that’s unknown is because the Obama administration refuses to tell us. Said the Post: “The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was.” So here we have yet again one of the most consequential acts a government can take — killing one of its own citizens, in this case a teenage boy — and the government refuses even to talk about what it did, why it did it, what its justification is, what evidence it possesses, or what principles it has embraced in general for such actions. Indeed, it refuses even to admit it did this, since it refuses even to admit that it has a drone program at all and that it is engaged in military action in Yemen. It’s just all shrouded in total secrecy. Of course, the same thing happened with the killing of Awlaki himself. The Executive Branch decided it has the authority to target U.S. citizens for death without due process, but told nobody (until it was leaked) and refuses to identify the principles that guide these decisions. It then concluded in a secret legal memo that Awlaki specifically could be killed, but refuses to disclose what it ruled or in which principles this ruling was grounded. And although the Obama administration repeatedly accused Awlaki of having an “operational role” in Terrorist plots, it has — as Davidson put it — “so far kept the evidence for that to itself.” This is all part and parcel of the Obama administration’s extreme — at times unprecedented — fixation on secrecy. Even with Senators in the President’s own party warning that the administration’s secret interpretation of its domestic surveillance powers under the Patriot Act is so warped and radical that it would shock the public if they knew, Obama officials simply refuse even to release its legal memos setting forth how it is interpreting those powers. As EFF’s Trevor Timm told The Daily Beast today: “The government classified a staggering 77 million documents last year, a 40 percent increase on the year before.” And as I wrote about many times, the Obama administration even tried — and failed — to force The New York Times‘ James Risen to reveal his source for his story about an inept, disastrous CIA effort to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program, but as Politico‘s Josh Gerstein reports today, the Obama DOJ is now appealing the decision in Risen’s favor. Gerstein writes: The executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, said the appeal was troubling for First Amendment advocates, but not unexpected. “I’m not surprised at all,” Dalglish said “The Obama administration has made it absolutely clear they detest leakers and they are going to be very aggressive against leakers.” Since Obama took office, his administration has initiated five prosecutions of alleged leakers under the Espionage Act — a sum roughly equal to the total number of such prosecutions in all prior administrations combined. . . . “It’s really looking like they want to put Risen in prison,” [the defendant's lawyer Edward] MacMahon said in a brief interview. . . . “For the journalists in the world, it’s quite a significant First Amendment appeal.” You can offer the ability to citizens to choose from one of the two parties and elect their leaders as much as you want. But “democracy” is an illusion — a sham — if the most significant acts taken by those leaders are kept concealed from the citizenry. Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote a multi-part series, and followed it up with a book, describing “Top Secret America”: the sprawling, secret government/private-sector apparatus accountable to nobody. Leaks and whistleblowers are the only real avenue remaining for citizens to know what their government does, and it’s why the Obama administration is so obsessed with persecuting whistleblowers, crushing WikiLeaks, and now even trying to imprison one of the nation’s best investigative journalists. For many people, this type of secrecy is not bothersome because — when their party controls the White House — they trust their leader to be honest and act properly; that’s what Bush followers who viewed Bush as a good, earnest Christian constantly said in response to objections over radical secrecy, and it’s what many Obama followers say now (if Obama says someone is a Terrorist, I don’t need to see evidence: I’m sure he is – if Obama says Iran is behind a Terrorist plot, I don’t need to see evidence: I’m sure they are). But that obviously isn’t a healthy mindset when forming expectations of political leaders. More so, you can’t have a functioning democracy if the government refuses even to discuss its most radical and significant acts. The Obama administration is just off waging a secret war in Yemen, killing its own citizens from the sky, and refusing to account to anyone for what it’s doing. If you accept that level of secrecy, what don’t you accept? (2) Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts. What’s most striking about this is how little effort is needed to induce America’s political and media elites to acquiesce to it. The government need do nothing more than utter empty nationalistic phrases such as “we’re at war” and “Terrorist!” and this unparalleled, endless state violence all becomes instantly justified. Yesterday, Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen wrote about the Awlaki killings: “Many Yemenis can understand (if disagree) killing the father, few can understand killing the son,” and pointed to this Facebook entry from a young Yemeni as illustration of what he meant; read the text:   I have no doubt that many Americans, probably most, would consider this comparison to be outrageous hyperbole, even offensive and slanderous. I have just as little doubt that many Americans, probably most, would be saying things quite similar to this if it were another country, engaging in far more violence than all others, routinely zapping innocent teeangers, children, women and men out out of existence on American soil using sky robots and cluster bombs (just look at America’s ongoing reaction to a single, one-day attack on its soil a full decade ago). But the U.S. does this so often, and has for so long, that most of the citizenry has either concocted or ingested mental and intellectual strategies for pretending this doesn’t happen or justifying it when they can’t. So we just killed an American teenager and his teenage cousin by drone-bombing them to death? They merely join a very long list of similar recent victims — a list that, paradoxically, makes less of an impact the longer it becomes.   UPDATE: Those who believe evidence and transparency in such matters are unnecessary because the government under Obama — unlike under Bush — would never issue false claims about such things and can be trusted without accountability should review this and this. Source

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Gaddafi’s wife asks the U.N. to investigate his death: TV

Reuters

October 21, 2011 CAIRO (Reuters) – A television station based in Syria that supported Muammar Gaddafi said Friday that the slain Libyan leader’s wife has asked for a United Nations investigation into his death. The wife of Gaddafi “asks the United Nations to investigate the death of the fighter Muammar and Mo’tassim,” Arrai television said in a news headline, referring to one of Gaddafi’s sons as well. The headline also said Gaddafi’s wife was proud of her husband’s courage and her children who, it said, stood up to 40 countries and their agents throughout six months and considered them to be martyrs. (Reporting By Omar Fahmy; Writing by Maha El Dahan; Editing by Mark Heinrich) Source

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By Max Fisher

Oct 21 2011, 6:21 AM ET 31 Libya’s rebels, the U.S., and NATO may all hold responsibility for the death — perhaps by execution — of a man they’d pledged to bring to trial

The body of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is displayed at a house in Misrata / Reuters

A few hours after the first photos emerged showing former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s lifeless body, a YouTube user named “freemisrata” posted a video appearing to show one of Qaddafi’s last living minutes. The New York Times noted of the video, which was quickly broadcast on CNN and Al Jazeera English, “The man’s injuries and clothing match those of the man said to be Colonel Qaddafi who appeared to be dead in video that emerged online earlier on Thursday.” The man, who bears an incredible resemblance to Qaddafi, appears bloody and terrified but still well enough to walk. He is surrounded by a tight crowd of screaming, angry, armed young men. Immediately after the camera cuts away, a burst of gunfire can be heard off-screen, although as the Times notes it may have been celebratory. The video, which is graphic and disturbing, is below.

At first, members of the new Libyan government had said that Qaddafi had been seized after a firefight, but they changed their story after this video’s emergence. “They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him,” a senior member of Libya’s transitional government told Reuters. The rebel fighters who captured Qaddafi found him hiding in a large concrete drainage pipe beneath a highway in the town of Sirte, photos of which are here.

How did Qaddafi end up hiding in a concrete pipe? The space is clearly too small and too unguarded to be a long-term hideaway like Saddam Hussein’s desert spiderhole. News reports have claimed that the rebels initially found Qaddafi while he was traveling in a convoy. Late today, after hours of refusing to comment on the Libyan’s death, U.S. officials started suggesting they might have played a very direct role. “US officials tell NBC News a US Predator drone fired a hellfire missile at convoy carrying Khadafy, who was then captured by rebels,” NBC News’ Ann Curry reported on Twitter. A NATO spokesperson acknowledged they had fired on a convoy.

If the U.S. and/or NATO had fired on Qaddafi convoy, this would certainly explain why rebels might find their former leader bloodied and crawling off of a road into a concrete drain pipe. It would also suggest that, even if the U.S./NATO attack wasn’t trying to kill Qaddafi (though how you bomb someone’s car in a way that isn’t also trying to kill him is a mystery), it played a direct role in the demise he met soon after.

What did happen to Qaddafi after the video above cut away? No one can seem to say for sure. Libyan interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril admitted late on Thursday that Qaddafi had been found alive but insisted he had been killed accidentally. “There was cross-fire and he was shot while they were carrying him to a truck,” Jibril said. It’s of course possible that this is accurate, but it’s difficult to imagine what crossfire there might have been. The above video showed dozens of rebels crowded around Qaddafi and no pro-Qaddafi troops in sight. How, exactly, do two bullets of “crossfire” happen to wiz their way through such a dense crowd and just happen to strike Qaddafi in the head and chest?

Jibril told NPR, “Nobody can tell if the shot was from the rebel fighters or from his own security guard.” By his own security guard? At least they’re not claiming suicide.

Revolutions are messy at best, especially when they’re led by an irregular and informally organized force of civilians who have picked up Kalashnikovs and titled themselves revolutionaries. It’s not exactly a surprise that a group of angry young men would choose not to respect the rule of law at a moment of eye-to-eye contact with — and absolute power over — the brutal dictator who had so relentlessly ruined their country, their lives, and their families’ lives. It would not have been difficult to predict, in other words, that despite the interim government’s many assurances of a peaceful and orderly civilian trial for Qaddafi, that in the end the angry young men with guns — who, after all, have led this movement from the beginning — would win out.

Still, the rule of law matters, and not just within Libya. The U.S. and European mission in Libya was premised on international law form the beginning: a resolution from the United Nations Security Council, the UN doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect,” as close as Libya could possibly get to offering NATO a popular rejection of Qaddafi and a stated invitation for outside intervention. And though NATO’s mission clearly and rapidly expanded beyond the spirit of the UN-approved “no-fly zone,” at least it remained within the letter of the resolution and within the framework of an internationally approved and Libyan-approved action. U.S. and European leaders also cited, as a premise of their intervention, the International Criminal Court warrants out for the arrest and trial of Qaddafi, son Saif, and intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi. Both NATO and Libya’s rebel leaders pledged to bring Qaddafi before a courtroom of some kind, whether in Libya or in The Hague. But the men on the ground don’t appear to have given this much mind.

For all the meticulous legality and diplomatic decorum of this war’s start, its end was as dirty as they come: the former leader of a nation hauled off the back of a truck and shot by an angry mob that was appointed by no one and accountable to nothing. It’s an inauspicious start for what the interim Libyan leadership also said was the same moment that formal political transition began.

Late on Thursday, another video emerged, this one showing son Muatassim Qaddafi apparently alive in rebel custody. Muatassim, like father Muammar, was later killed.

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Muammar Gaddafi has been killed after National Transitional Council fighters overran loyalist defences in the toppled Libyan leader’s hometown and final stronghold of Sirte.

But questions remained on Thursday over the circumstances of Gaddafi’s death as footage appeared to show he had been captured alive, following an apparent attempt to flee the besieged coastal city in a convoy which came under fire from French warplanes and a US drone aircraft.

Other footage showed Gaddafi’s lifeless and bloodied body being dragged along a road.

“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed,” Mahmoud Jibril, the de facto Libyan prime minister, told reporters on Thursday in Tripoli, the capital.

Asked what would be done with Gaddafi’s body, he said: “It doesn’t make any difference, as long as he disappears”.

Jibril said Gaddafi had been shot in the head “in crossfire” between his supporters and NTC fighters after his capture.

“He was alive up to last moment, until he arrived at hospital” in the town of Misrata, Jibril said.

After his death, Gaddafi’s body was reportedly transferred to a mosque in the city.

Crowds took to the streets of Sirte, Tripoli, Misrata and Benghazi, the eastern city that spearheaded the uprising against Gaddafi’s 42-year rule in February, to celebrate the news, with some firing guns and waving Libya’s new flag.

“I’m so proud now,” a Tripoli resident told Al Jazeera.”It’s a new era. Look to our eyes and you’ll see happiness, finally”.

Son killed

One of Gaddafi’s sons, Mutassim, was also killed on Thursday, having been hiding with his father, Mahmoud Shammam, Libya’s information minister said. Earlier reports had suggested that he had been captured alive but injured.

News of Gaddafi’s death, weeks after NTC fighters effectively ended his four-decades rule by capturing Tripoli, came shortly after the NTC captured Sirte after weeks of fierce fighting.

Mutassim Gaddafi at the White House in 2009 [Getty]

Fighters flashing V for victory took to the streets in pick-ups blaring out patriotic music.

“Thank God they have caught this person. In one hour, Sirte was liberated,” a fighter said.

Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley, reporting from Sirte, said Libyans there were celebrating the beginning of a “new Libya”.

“This is bringing a form of closure,” he said. “Gaddafi stayed true to his words, that he would stay in Libya till the end.

“It was surprising to many that he did actually stay here in Sirte - it’s taken such a bombardment in the last 13 days. Nothing could survive in here for very long. I think they were starved of food, starved of ammunition, and finally there was nothing to do but to run”.

French ‘warning shot’

Gerard Longuet, France’s defence minister, said French warplanes had fired a warning shot to stop a convoy of vehicles carrying Gaddafi before he was killed.

The convoy of several dozen vehicles “was stopped from progressing as it sought to flee Sirte but was not destroyed by the French intervention,” Longuet told reporters.

Libyan fighters then intervened, destroying the vehicles, from which “they took out Colonel Gaddafi,” he said.

Click here for more of Al Jazeera’s special coverage

A US defence official told AFP news agency that a US drone along with a French fighter jet had attacked a convoy of vehicles in Libya that the French believed was carrying Gaddafi.

In Tripoli, Jibril said he had received unconfirmed reports that Gaddafi’s most prominent son, Saif al-Islam, was trying to flee from Sirte but had been tracked down by NTC fighters who were attacking his convoy. Later reports suggested that Saif had been injured and arrested.

Footage had emerged earlier in the day of the body of Abu Bakr Younus, Gaddafi’s defence minister, who also died in what would become the last stand of the regime he served.

Abdul Hakim Al Jalil, commander of the NTC’s 11th brigade, said that Moussa Ibrahim, the former spokesman for Gaddafi’s fallen government, had been captured near Sirte. Ahmed Ibrahim, a cousin of Gaddafi, was also reportedly captured.

‘Historic transition’

Reaction from world leaders was swift, US President Barack Obama saying that the Libyan people had won their revolution.

“Across the Arab world, citizens have stood up to claim their rights,” he said. “Youth are delivering a powerful rebuke to dictatorship. And those leaders who try to deny their dignity will not succeed.

“For the region, today’s events prove once more that the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end.”

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said Gaddafi’s death marked “a historic transition for Libya”.

“In the coming days, we will witness scenes of celebration as well as grief for those who lost so much,” Ban said in New York.  “Now is the time for all Libyans to come together. Libyans can only realise the promise of the future for national unity and reconciliation.”

NATO officials said the alliance’s governing body would meet on Friday to decide to end the seven-month bombing campaign over Libya.

“NATO and our partners have successfully implemented the historic mandate of the United Nations to protect the people of Libya,” Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement.

“We will terminate our mission in co-ordination with the United Nations and the National Transitional Council. With the reported fall of Bani Walid and Sirte, that moment has now moved much closer”.

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October 19, 2011

Source: Corbett Report – James Corbett

Manhattan Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein has declinedto hold the CIA in contempt for destroying videos that it had been ordered by the courts to preserve.

The case revolves around 92 videos, depicting hundreds of hours of interrogations of detainees. The tapes allegedly contained evidence of torture, and the CIA was ordered by numerous courts to produce the videos in relation to lawsuits arising from torture allegations. The 9/11 Commission also demanded that the tapes be produced. Instead, the agency destroyed them.

Although the Obama Justice Department had already decided last year that no criminal charges would be filed for this blatant obstruction of justice, Judge Hellerstein’s recent ruling insures that the agency will not even face civil sanctions or so much as a contempt order for willfully breaking the law.

In his ruling, Judge Hellerstein, the very judge who had ordered the CIA to produce the tapes in September of 2004, notes that the agency had instead provided a description of what they say was on the tapes and “implemented new protocols” to insure that they don’t destroy evidence again, so there is no need to hold them accountable in any way.

Judge Hellerstein’s decision is not without precedent.

In 2010, Obama’s Office of Legal Council wrote a memo arguing the legality of Obama’s secret list of assassination targets, a list that apparently includes American citizens who have not been convicted or even charged of a crime. The memo was used as the legal justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen who the President ordered murdered early last year.

Now, the Obama White House is arguing that they don’t even have to show the justification for ordering the unconstitutional assassination of one of its own citizens.

Still, concerned citizens are attempting to challenge the Obama regime’s power grabs in court.

Earlier this year, Senator Wyden revealed that the federal government has a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that allows the government much more power than is suggested by the wording of the act itself.

When Charlie Savage of the New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the interpretation, he was denied on the basis that the interpretation is classified.

Last week, Savage and the Times sued the federal government for refusing to release the documents. The case is currently before Judge William Pauley of the US District Court.

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As The Washington Post reported last month, the “commingling” of CIA officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors “occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations” where “congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.”

Or any “view” at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the “dark side,” a position fully-embraced by the “hope and change” administration of Barack Obama.

Awlaki’s state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurface many unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America’s global “War on Terror.”

But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations undertaken by Obama’s national security team which culminated in Awlaki’s death.

White House “Death Panel”

Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform that the administration would create “death panels” to deny care to the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the authentic article.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama’s Justice Department “wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting” of Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum “was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi.”

That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June 2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys “David Barron and Martin Lederman.”

Both former OLC lawyers are prominent “liberals” from prestigious universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.

Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed against the previous administration’s adaptation of the “Unitary Executive Theory” promulgated by “torture memo” authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA “black sites.”

This of course begs the question: if Awlaki’s murder was “legal,” why then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials following a deliberative process which can’t be shared with the public because of “national security”?

The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood-up in Chile and Argentina during the “dirty war” period of the 1970s may now exist.

Reuters disclosed that Americans “are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.”

“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,” reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, “which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council. … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

According to Reuters, “targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC ‘principals,’ meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval.”

A “former official” told Hosenball that “one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to ‘protect’ the president,” i.e., provide Obama legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by “plausible deniability.”

McClatchy News reported that “broadly speaking” White House orders to kill Awlaki were based on claims that “the nation’s inherent right of self-defense [is] recognized under international law.” However, “international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned except to protect against ‘concrete, specific and imminent’ danger.”

And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted for death because “his role in AQAP had gone ‘from inspirational to operational’,” Reuters disclosed that “officials acknowledge that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.”

In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever that Awlaki posed an “imminent danger” to the United States, although there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked up and indicted at any time.

Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria that followed the attacks.

A “former military intelligence officer who worked with special operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets,” told the right-wing Washington Times: “I think it’s pretty easy to understand why they didn’t take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department for due process in an American court.”

That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline: the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a “hassle.”

Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Obama’s national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“A decade later,” McClatchy reported, “the Obama administration contends that this wartime authority remains even if it’s evolved for reasons the administration won’t fully elucidate.”

The relevant section of AUFM reads: “IN GENERAL — That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (emphasis added)

Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch but also planted the seeds of the administration’s preemptive war doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic surveillance powers.

More pertinently, is the reason why the administration “won’t fully elucidate” how the Bush-era AUMF “evolved” chiefly due to the fact that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of Americans, not only in Yemen or other “War on Terror” fronts, but right here in the United States itself?

After all, it’s not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top secret presidential “findings” or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon black programs, as did the previous Bush government.

Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations.

Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times disclosed in June, handed the FBI “significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

These “news rules,” the Times averred, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

It gets worse.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI “is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.”

Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a “known or suspected terrorist,” not based on evidence gathered through a criminal investigation, but solely if officials have “particularized derogatory information,” including that derived from First Amendment protected activities, to support to support an individuals’ watch listing or placement on a “no-fly” list.

One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to do otherwise would reveal “closely held deliberations within the administration,” but did so anyway because this was clearly a sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post that “what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due process in war.”

“The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi,” Finn wrote, “or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous officials operating outside the rule of law.

As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn’t used as a rhetorical hammer against assorted “new Hitlers” or geopolitical rivals whose resources corporate America seek to “liberate.”

Dead Men Tell No Tales

As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab by the Executive Branch.

While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence “failures” leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the Awlaki killing, as with last May’s murder of former bête noire and on-again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a “clean-up” operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of Agency involvement in the plot.

As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of orchestrating, though evidence can’t be supplied because it’s “secret,” The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani Hanjour who “had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.”

In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.

Similar to the 2001 attacks we were told “changed everything,” far from being a failure to “connect the dots,” intelligence and law enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

And wile Awlaki wasn’t given a free pass by the administration in that botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly set the stage.

According to History Commons, “shortly before the [FBI] investigation [into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation] is closed,” in 2000, Awlaki “is beginning to associate with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation ends.”

“For instance,” History Commons avers, “on February 4, one month before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi.”

“The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-Bayoumi’s phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999.”

Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.

In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post’s Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, and the CIA’s still-redacted Inspector General’s report, he discovered that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash, one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda’s “planes operation.”

Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA’s Alec Station Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence from investigators, concluding this “information was intentionally omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the United States.”

As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led us to believe.

In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP’s “external operations” chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an investigatory perspective: that of a “fixer,” first in San Diego where he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in “settling” Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same for Hani Hanjour.

In 2002, Newsweek revealed that “some federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers, sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000 lives.”

“Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,” Newsweek disclosed, “al-Bayoumi’s wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived “in the form of cashier’s checks, purchased from Washington’s Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family.”

With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London, where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI. Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.

The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded, the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., “that no evidence could be found of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers.”

Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Saudi family “abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter–and an open safe in a master bedroom.”

Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned that “law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights–including leader Mohamed Atta–in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

“Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,” Summers and Christensen wrote, “new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.”

In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site “that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.”

Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the author of Family of Secrets, reports that this “now-revealed link” between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida “and the highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the White House’s controversial approval for multiple charter flights allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law enforcement–despite the identification of the majority of the hijackers as Saudis.”

Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki’s casual, and inexplicable, flight from the United States?

“After 9/11″ History Commons points out, “the FBI will question al-Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to remember Almihdhar at all.” Other accounts suggest that the relationship was much closer.

“The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry,” History Commons avers, “claim that Alhazmi and Almihdhar ‘were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San Diego. … Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers’.”

“Around August 2000,” History Commons reports, “al-Awlaki resigns as imam and travels to unknown ‘various countries.’ In early 2001, he will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki’s mosque there.”

Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: “Lincoln Higgie, an antiques dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he was leaving for Kuwait. ‘He came over before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened,’ recalls Higgie.”

The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, “he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area–and got a strange response.” Higgie said, “‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why’.”

Although the FBI suspected Awlaki “had some connection with the 9/11 plot,” authorities claim there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, nor can he be deported because he’s an American citizen. And when the Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure charge of “transporting prostitutes across state lines,” that plan collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.

“But on October 10, 2002,” History Commons reports, “he makes a surprise return to the U.S.” Although his name is on a terrorist watch list and he is detained by Customs’ officials when he lands in New York, they are informed by the FBI that “his name was taken off the watch list just the day before. He is released after only three hours.”

“Throughout 2002,” History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the “subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either, or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations.”

Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI admits they were “very interested” in Awlaki, they fail to stop him leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report, “We don’t know how he got out.”

Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to leave in the first place. It certainly can’t be for lack of evidence or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen, he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American intelligence agencies.

Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki’s “contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random.”

Other investigators however, disagreed. “One detective,” the Times reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files, told staff that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that “despite, or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to leave the country.”

In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither “errors in judgement” nor “mistakes” by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.

Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been charged with providing “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of circulation.

That he wasn’t and continued to operate freely as a propagandist, despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one who had decidedly gone “off the reservation.”

Awlaki’s handling by authorities raise serious questions about just how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich global hot-spots.

As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented, Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert operations that targeted America’s geopolitical rivals even as Bin Laden’s far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States itself.

In this light, Awlaki’s “targeted killing” as with the earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues hatched by the imperialist Empire.

After all, dead men tell no tales…

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano’s Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

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October 6, 2011

Source: Reuters

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