Obama: Remember, He Does This Every Day Now

Obama NSA Defense FAIL: The al-Mihdar Red Herring
By Juan Cole / Jan. 17, 2014

In his speech on the National Security Agency domestic surveillance program on Friday, Obama offered an explanation of its origins:

The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar – made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe-house in Yemen. NSA saw that call, but could not see that it was coming from an individual already in the United States. The telephone metadata program under Section 215 was designed to map the communications of terrorists, so we can see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible.

This is, of course, a steaming crock of crap. The fact is that Khalid al-Mihdar was under surveillance and so was his contact in Yemen. The US even had videotape of al-Mihdar at an al-Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur shortly before he went to San Diego. And US intelligence knew that al-Mihdar was in the United States.

The problem? The various intelligence agencies were each looking to make their own bust and refused to properly share information with one another.

They don’t need to spy on all of our smartphone information and track 310 million people’s telephone calls and whereabouts! They need to talk with each other there in Washington! And in fact there is a joint FBI/ CIA facility in the DC area now where files can be accessed by officers with the right clearances across agencies.



Obama’s anecdote simply does not support the case for holding phone metadata, either in the government or by private telcos. And since I don’t think Obama is ignorant or lacking in smarts, I think he and whoever crafted that reference to 9/11 into his violent assault on the Fourth Amendment were doing so in a calculated and wholly dishonest fashion.

Obama was from 2007 frank that he admired Ronald Reagan. What you’re a little afraid of is that he may harbor some sneaking admiration for Tricky Dick Nixon.

Jim Gilmore writes at PBS:

In September 2002, agents and officials from the CIA and FBI testified before a joint congressional panel about how their security agencies failed to fully share information about suspected terrorists and their activities in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

As much as anyone working in counterterrorism, John O’Neill knew about this communication breakdown. In fact, just two months before Sept. 11, in a speech to Spanish police on interagency cooperation, he had asked his audience, “How much more successful could we all be if we really knew what our agencies really knew?” O’Neill’s last major FBI investigation — the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000 — was a case study of just how bad inter-agency communication had become.

-The Critical Meeting in Malaysia

The story of this intelligence failure begins with a 1999 CIA breakthrough — the interception of communications from an Al Qaeda logistics center in Yemen about a meeting of operatives that would take place in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The names of two of the participants were mentioned: Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

The CIA tracked Almidhar on his way to Malaysia. An agent told FRONTLINE that during a passport check at a stopover, the CIA even got access to his Saudi Arabian passport and learned Almidhar had been issued a multiple-entry visa to the U.S.

Once in Kuala Lumpur, the Al Qaeda operatives were photographed — at the CIA’s request — by Malaysian authorities at a series of meetings. Reportedly, no sound recordings were made, but intelligence sources now believe the meetings were held to plan future Al Qaeda attacks. Among the men captured in the surveillance photos were:

Almidhar and Alhazmi (later hijackers of American Flight 77 which flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11);
Ramzi bin al-Shibh (a Sept. 11 co-conspirator and Mohamed Atta’s roommate. It would not be until after Sept. 11 that bin al-Shibh would be identified in the Malaysia surveillance photos);
Tawfiq bin-Atash — AKA “Khallad” (a suspected intermediary between bin Laden and plotters of the October 2000 USS Cole attack).

The CIA maintains that it did notify the FBI by e-mail of the Malaysia meetings soon after they occurred — and that it did mention Almidhar had a U.S. visa. The FBI, however, states they have no record of this notification.

The CIA admits that it did not inform the bureau that after the Malaysia meetings ended, it tracked Almidhar and Alhazmi to Los Angeles. The CIA further admits that it failed to warn the INS or the State Department, and as a result, the men’s names were not added to a terrorist watch list.

h/t for the tweet that inspired this post to @ZoeSCarpenter

Source / Informed Comment

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Al-Qaida: The Endless American Bogeyman

Mythical al-Qaida fortress portrayed by CIA analysts.
Osama’s Almost Letter To Me
By Eric Margolis / May 6, 2012

Why was I named in alleged al-Qaida letters last week as a recipient for documents about 9/11?

Al-Qaida was not founded by Osama bin Laden, as many wrongly believe, but in the mid-1980’s in Peshawar, Pakistan, by a revolutionary scholar, Sheik Abdullah Azzam.

I know this because I interviewed Azzam numerous times at al-Qaida HQ in Peshawar while covering the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Azzam set up al-Qaida, which means “the base” in Arabic, to help CIA and Saudi-financed Arab volunteers going to fight in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In those days, the west hailed them as “freedom fighters.”

In letters allegedly captured by US special forces from bin Laden’s compound, Al-Qaida’s public relations people cited me and 19 other western journalists as potential recipients of new documents about the 9/11 attacks on the US.

No surprise there. I’ve followed al-Qaida for the past 26 years as a writer, broadcaster and military consultant. My columns are read widely across South Asia and the Gulf. I have a reputation for being fiercely independent-minded and determined to get at the truth, no matter how unpopular.

The big US news networks heavily censored al-Qaida’s statements on government orders, or misreported them, complete with fake videos of bin Laden.

The report cites redoubtable British writer Robert Fisk, the New Yorker’s ace investigator Seymour Hersh, ABC News investigator Brian Ross, and me as journalists who reported fairly and accurately on the region.

All of us veterans have tried to report facts honestly and cut through propaganda from all sides. We have all been strong critics of al-Qaida and terror attacks, but also critics of heavy-handed, often counter-productive US and western policies in the Muslim world.

As these letters shows, Al-Qaida was never the vast, worldwide terror organization that President George W. Bush claimed. As I witnessed, it was always tiny, no more than 200 men. Al-Qaida’s original goal was to fight the mostly Tajik and Uzbek Afghan Communists and their Soviet masters.

Al-Qaida became an ally of Taliban in this anti-Communist struggle. But Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. As the renowned journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave reported from Afghanistan, Taliban’s tribal chiefs tried to oust firebrand Bin Laden from their nation.

Today, what’s left of al-Qaida numbers no more than 25 men in Afghanistan, according to US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Yet President Barack Obama cites the alleged al-Qaida “threat” as the reason for keeping US forces in Afghanistan and keeping Pakistan under semi-occupation. That was the real purpose for releasing these letters. Al-Qaida has become an integral part of US politics.

Al-Qaida is being used as a bogeyman by America’s Republicans to defend bloated US military spending and defend torture as having led to finding bin Laden. My sources tell me a huge bribe led the US to bin Laden, not torture.

The Pentagon has been leaking so-called information claiming bin Laden was planning a wave of terror attacks just before he died. In fact, bin Laden had become an isolated, powerless jihadi living in retirement when he was killed.

Why was he not brought back to the US for trial?

An open trial would have finally allowed Americans to discover the truth about the crime of 9/11, al-Qaida, and anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Tragically, this did not happen. Dead men tell no tales.

We still don’t know how much bin Laden was involved in 9/11, or if it was hatched in Pakistan. My own understanding is that 9/11 was planned in Hamburg and Madrid, and executed by mostly Saudi citizens.

Al-Qaida lives on after bin Laden, but as a tiny bunch of western-hating militants with no power and little ability to stage major attacks. Violent anti-American groups from West Africa to Indonesia have adopted the title al-Qaida. For example, al-Qaida in Iraq never existed before the US invasion.

It’s like the slaves in the film “Spartacus” crying out, “we are all Spartacus.”

These stepsons of al-Qaida are not centrally linked and have nothing in common except for opposing western domination of the Muslim world and espousing religious law. As US intervention in Africa and Central Asia intensifies, so will they spread. It’s a perpetual terrorist motion machine.

[Columnist and author Eric Margolis is a veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.]

Source / EricMargolis.com

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Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse

Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
By Tom Engelhardt / April 3, 2012

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism -- about you and me, that is -- for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years -- or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part -- and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte. Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that. He wrote a piece for Wired magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah. Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, “including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails -- parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The NSA, adds Bamford, “has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.”

Which brings us to yottabyte -- which is, Bamford assures us, equivalant to septillion bytes, a number “so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.” The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world. In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with an estimated annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees. Opened in 2011, it's the third-largest federal building in the Washington area. (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its gleaming new headquarters.) Or what about the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their “Top Secret America” series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go “underwater” and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow. And there’s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.

A System That Creates Its Own Reality

To leave the country, of course, I had to briefly surrender my shoes, hat, belt, computer -- you know the routine -- and even then, stripped to the basics, I had to pass through a scanner of a sort that not so long ago caused protest and upset but now is evidently as American as apple pie. Then I spent those nine days touring some of Spain’s architectural wonders, including the Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or Great Mosque of Cordoba, and that city’s ancient synagogue (the only one to survive the expulsion of the Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, his vast Barcelona basilica, without once -- in a country with its own grim history of terror attacks -- being wanded or patted down or questioned or even passing through a metal detector. Afterwards, I took a flight back to a country whose national security architecture had again expanded subtly in the name of “my” safety.

Now, I don’t want to overdo it. In truth, those new guidelines were no big deal. The information on -- as far as anyone knows -- innocent Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those extra 4½ years was already being held ad infinitum by one or another of our 17 major intelligence agencies and organizations. So the latest announcement seems to represent little more than bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit of extra scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or basilica of the new American intelligence labyrinth. It certainly was nothing to write home about, no less trap a fictional character in.

Admittedly, since 9/11 the U.S. Intelligence Community, as it likes to call itself, has expanded to staggering proportions. With those 17 outfits having a combined annual intelligence budget of more than $80 billion (a figure which doesn't even include all intelligence expenditures), you could think of that community as having carried out a statistical coup d'état. In fact, at a moment when America’s enemies -- a few thousand scattered jihadis, the odd minority insurgency, and a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Venezuela) -- couldn’t be less imposing, its growth has been little short of an institutional miracle. By now, it has a momentum all its own. You might even say that it creates its own reality.

Of classic American checks and balances, we, the taxpayers, now write the checks and they, the officials of the National Security Complex, are free to be as unbalanced as they want in their actions. Whatever you do, though, don’t mistake Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the Gaudís of the new intelligence world. Don’t think of them as the architects of the structure they are building. What they preside over is visibly a competitive bureaucratic mess of overlapping principalities whose “mission” might be summed up in one word: more.

In a sense -- though they would undoubtedly never think of themselves this way -- I suspect they are bureaucratic versions of Kafka’s Joseph K., trapped in a labyrinthine structure they are continually, blindly, adding to. And because their “mission” has no end point, their edifice has neither windows nor exits, and for all anyone knows is being erected on a foundation of quicksand.

Keep calling it “intelligence” if you want, but the monstrosity they are building is neither intelligent nor architecturally elegant. It is nonetheless a system elaborating itself with undeniable energy. Whatever the changing cast of characters, the structure only grows. It no longer seems to matter whether the figure who officially sits atop it is a former part-owner of a baseball team and former governor, a former constitutional law professor, or -- looking to possible futures -- a former corporate raider.

A Basilica of Chaos

Evidently, it’s our fate -- increasing numbers of us anyway -- to be transformed into intelligence data (just as we are being eternally transformed into commercial data), our identities sliced, diced, and passed around the labyrinth, our bytes stored up to be “mined” at their convenience.

You might wonder: What is this basilica of chaos that calls itself the U.S. Intelligence Community? Bamford describes whistleblower William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician “largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network,” as holding “his thumb and forefinger close together” and saying, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

It’s an understandable description for someone who has emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt it’s on target. Ours is unlikely to ever be a Soviet-style system, even if it exhibits a striking urge toward totality; towards, that is, engulfing everything, including every trace you’ve left anywhere in the world. It’s probably not a Soviet-style state in the making, even if traditional legal boundaries and prohibitions against spying upon and surveilling Americans are of remarkably little interest to it.

Its urge is to data mine and decode the planet in an eternal search for enemies who are imagined to lurk everywhere, ready to strike at any moment. Anyone might be a terrorist or, wittingly or not, in touch with one, even perfectly innocent-seeming Americans whose data must be held until the moment when the true pattern of eneminess comes into view and everything is revealed.

In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted -- except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves above any law. The system that they are constructing (or that, perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do with democracy or an American republic or the Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style state. Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name. Like the yottabyte, it’s something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.

For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and so, conveniently enough, continues to expand right before our eyes, strangely unseen.

If you don’t believe me, leave the country for nine days and just see if, in that brief span of time, something else isn't drawn within its orbit. After all, it’s inexorable, this rough beast slouching through Washington to be born.

Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new world. One thing is guaranteed: it has a byte.

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt reflects on the unnatural growth of the U.S. national security state, click here, or download it to your iPod here.]

Source / TomDispatch

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The War Criminals Knew What They Were Doing

Donald Rumsfeld believed that releasing the innocent detainees would harm the Administration, according to a signed declaration by a top aide to Colin Powell. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS.
George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
By Tim Reid / April 9, 2010

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by U.S. military guards at Camp X-Ray in the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base , Cuba. Photo: Andres Leighton/AP.

He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.

Source / London Times

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Government Terrorist Cases: Bad Techniques, Bad Outcomes

2008 habeas ruling may pose snag as U.S. weighs indefinite Guantanamo detentions
By Del Quentin Wilber / February 13, 2010

The case against Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim seemed ironclad.

The Justice Department alleged that Hatim, a detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, trained at an al-Qaeda military camp in Afghanistan, stayed at terrorist guesthouses and even fought in the battle of Tora Bora. The accusations were built on Hatim's own words and those of a witness, a fellow Guantanamo Bay detainee, court records show.

But a federal judge reviewed the case and found the government's evidence too weak to justify Hatim's confinement. The judge ordered the detainee's release, ruling that he could not rely on Hatim's statements because they had been coerced. He also found that the government's informer was "profoundly unreliable."

The case is more the rule than the exception. Federal judges, acting under a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling that grants Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to challenge their confinements, have ordered the government to free 32 prisoners and backed the detention of nine others. In their opinions, the judges have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants. Even when ruling for the government, the judges have not always endorsed the Justice Department's case.
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The rulings in the Hatim case and the 31 others may be a harbinger of trouble for the Obama administration, which is considering plans to indefinitely detain dozens of Guantanamo Bay prisoners without civilian or military trials. Although the detainees will never face a jury, they are entitled to their day in court under the Supreme Court ruling.

Legal scholars and outside experts who have studied the issue say the government is likely to suffer further losses because many cases appear to be built on the same kinds of evidence that have drawn such skepticism -- incriminating statements by detainees and informers.

"Nobody who has looked at the last 18 months of litigation can emerge with a high confidence level that the government is going to prevail uniformly in cases of people it regards as extremely dangerous," said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently co-authored a long paper about the detainee challenges.

The detainees' lawsuits have been brought under the centuries-old legal doctrine of habeas corpus, which permits prisoners to contest confinements before judges.

Of the 192 detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, a Justice Department-led task force has concluded that about 110 can be safely released, either immediately or eventually. It recommended that about 35 be prosecuted in federal or military courts, leaving about 50 who are considered too dangerous to be freed but cannot face trial because the evidence is too shaky to hold up in court. Justice Department officials say they are also concerned that public trials might expose intelligence operations or other classified information.

The number of detainees in that category might rise. Authorities think they must continue to detain at least 30 Yemenis, perhaps more, until the security situation in their homeland stabilizes. About 90 Yemenis are detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Burden of proof

Obama officials are optimistic that they will prevail in upcoming habeas challenges. The Justice Department task force evaluated detainee files for months, and the strength of the habeas cases was a top factor in deciding whether to detain prisoners without trials, the officials said.

"We're confident in our ability to demonstrate to the courts that these individuals are being lawfully held," a department official said.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said four prisoners who lost habeas challenges are assigned to the indefinite-detention group. The official would not say how many of those ordered released would have been put in the indefinite-detention category if the judges had ruled differently or not yet ruled.

Another Justice Department official noted that the win-loss ratio is affected by 17 Chinese Muslims who have been ordered released but are not considered enemies of the United States. The department abandoned efforts to justify their detentions before a federal judge. Ten have been transferred to third countries.

Habeas rulings do not always guarantee the immediate release of detainees. Under an appeals court ruling, judges do not have the authority to order the release of prisoners into the United States; that matter is before the Supreme Court. They may only order the government to engage in diplomatic negotiations to facilitate the transfer of detainees.

Federal judges in the District, who preside over all Guantanamo Bay habeas challenges, have established procedures that generally favor the government, allowing the Justice Department to justify detentions based on the "preponderance of evidence," a standard by which the government wins if the facts tip slightly in its favor. In criminal cases, prosecutors must prove a case "beyond a reasonable doubt."
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A recent appeals court decision backed that standard and suggested that the burden of proof might be even lower. The appeals panel adopted a broad definition of who may be subject to detention, which could ease the government's burden in future cases.

The reliability issue

Even so, the effect of such rulings remains unclear because judges have being focusing intensely on the building blocks of the government's cases: its witnesses and other evidence.

They have been particularly troubled by the dependability of detainees who become government informants. One in particular, Yasim Muhammed Basardah, has been problematic. The Yemeni has serious psychological problems that include suicide attempts, hallucinations, a severe personality disorder and depression, according to court records, as well as lawyers and government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the litigation.

At least three judges have concluded that they could not rely on Basardah's information. He was the principal witness against Hatim, the detainee recently ordered freed by U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, who found that Basardah's "grasp on reality appears to have been tenuous at best."

Urbina did not identify the informant by name, but a review of court records makes it clear that he was referring to Basardah.

The government also relied on Hatim's interrogations and his testimony at military hearings, during which he is said to have admitted to training at an al-Qaeda military camp. Judges have been skeptical of such statements unless the government provides evidence that the men were not seriously mistreated. In Hatim's case, the Justice Department did not dispute his contention that he was tortured in U.S. custody and that he made those admissions to avoid further mistreatment.

In November, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the release of an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, despite government contentions that he was a member of al-Qaeda.

The judge was particularly puzzled by the government's reliance on statements by Binyam Mohamed, a fellow detainee who has since been freed. Mohamed, an Ethiopian, provided the government its most sensational allegation: He told interrogators that the Algerian trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. Kessler wrote that she could not credit Mohamed's allegations because he had been mistreated in foreign and U.S. custody. The government did not dispute his well-publicized accounts of torture. On Wednesday, the British government released a long-secret description of how Mohamed suffered "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment at the hands of U.S. authorities.

In December, U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out incriminating statements made by a 28-year-old Yemeni to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that the government used to justify his detention. Musa'ab al-Madhwani had admitted to interrogators and testified before military hearings that he had trained at an al-Qaeda camp and traveled with its members in Afghanistan and Pakistan, records show.

But the detainees' attorneys argued that the statements were tainted because their client was brutally tortured while in U.S. custody before his arrival in Cuba. He confessed only to prevent further mistreatment, they argued. The government did not contest Madhwani's claims.

Although he threw out the statements to interrogators, Hogan considered the detainee's testimony during military hearings because he did not believe they had been made under duress. That was enough to justify the Yemeni's detention, Hogan ruled. Still, the judge said, "it's a very close case."

[Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.]

Source / Washington Post

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GWOT: What a Shining Success Story

Here is a report concerning the success of the GWOT. Only politicians of the deepest cynicism could argue that this is success, that this is gaining anyone anything at all.

Richard Jehn / Fluxed Up World

US drones killed 123 civilians, three al-Qaeda men in January
By Amir Mir / February 01, 2010

LAHORE: Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks.

The unprecedented rise in the predator strikes with the beginning of the year 2010 is being attributed to December 30, 2009 suicide bombing in the Khost area of Afghanistan bordering North Waziristan, which killed seven CIA agents. US officials later identified the bomber as Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian national linked to both al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

In a subsequent posthumous video tape released by Al-Jazeera, Balawi claimed while sitting next to TTP Chief Commander Hakimullah Mehsud that he would blow himself up in the CIA base to avenge the killing of former TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud in a US drone attack. The consequent increase in US strikes, first in North Waziristan and then South Waziristan, specifically targeting the fugitive TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud clearly shows that revenge is the major motive for these attacks. The US intelligence sleuths stationed in Afghanistan are convinced the Khost suicide attack was planned in Waziristan with the help of the TTP. Therefore, it is believed Afghanistan-based American drones will continue to hunt the most wanted al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, especially Hakimullah, with a view to avenge the loss of the seven CIA agents and to raise morale of its forces in Afghanistan.

According to the data compiled by the interior ministry, the first US drone strike was conducted on January 1 which struck a vehicle near Ghundikala village in North Waziristan and killed four people. The second attack came on January 3, targeting the Mosakki village in North Waziristan, killing five people. Two separate missile strikes carried out on January 6 killed 35 people in Sanzalai village of North Waziristan. The fifth predator attack was carried out on January 8 in the Tappi village of North Waziristan, killing five people. The sixth attack on January 9 in Ismail Khan village of North Waziristan killed four people, including two al-Qaeda leaders. Mahmoud Mehdi Zeidan, the bodyguard for al-Qaeda leader Sayeed al-Masri, and Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, who had been involved in hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in 1986, were reportedly killed in this missile strike.

The seventh US attack on January 14 in the Pasalkot village of North Waziristan killed 15 people, amidst rumours Hakimullah Mehsud could be among the dead.

The eighth drone attack came on January 15 in the Zannini village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan, killing 14 people, including an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist, Abdul Basit Usman, a Filipino wanted by the Americans. The ninth strike was carried out on January 17 in the Shaktoi area of South Waziristan, which killed 23 people. The tenth drone attack came on January 19 when two missiles were fired at a compound and vehicle in Booya village of Datakhel subdivision, 35km west of Miramshah, in North Waziristan, killing eight people. The eleventh strike carried out on January 29 targeting a compound belonging to the Haqqani network in the Muhammad Khel town of North Waziristan, killed six people. The twelfth and the last predator attack of the month came on January 30, killing nine people in the Lend Mohammad Khel area of North Waziristan.

Source / International The News

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