THE NEW SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA BRAZENLY QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT’S SURVEILLANCE SUBTERFUGE BUT CAVES AT CRUNCH TIME.

by Nat Hentoff
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE March 2010

I was not a fan of Al Franken’s comic turns, much preferring those instigators who went deeper into our hypocrisies, namely Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor. But Franken has suddenly begun his career in the U.S. Senate as a mentor on the Constitution’s rule of law—a dim memory, if that, for many of his colleagues.

To his surprise, and mine, Franken won a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee even though he is not a lawyer. But unlike many lawyers in the Senate, Franken has deeply researched the largely un-American USA PATRIOT Act. Rushed into law soon after 9/11 before most members of Congress had a chance to even read it all, its draconian provisos remain almost entirely intact.

On September 29, 2009, David Kris—assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division—appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kris was pitching to renew a section of the PATRIOT Act that permits the FBI to obtain a warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which does not allow appeals from us mere citizens, thus totally repealing the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

These are “John Doe” warrants that do not denote the suspect’s name, nor the specific location of the phone, e-mail or any other device the suspect may use. It could also be a pay phone in any neighborhood.

If this unnamed suspect uses a phone in your office, a bar you frequent or a social club or nearby pay phone, the FBI tap on those phones will pick up all conversations, including yours. And these are national wiretaps; the FBI doesn’t have to get a warrant from any city or state jurisdiction. We’re all immediately covered. Neither President Obama nor his attorney general, Eric Holder, has expressed any objection to this torpedoing of the Fourth Amendment.

When the Justice Department’s David Kris was telling the Senate Judiciary Committee how vital these roving tools against terrorism are, Franken startled him and, I expect, most of the rest of the committee. The freshman senator announced that after taking his seat, he was given a copy of the Constitution—and by gum he actually read it!

Franken then read aloud the actual Fourth Amendment to the Justice Department official who had been extolling roving wiretaps: “No warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Looking at this representative of our Justice Department, Franken said, “That’s pretty explicit language.” So how can roving wiretaps be within the rule of law if they don’t particularly name the targeted suspect or the particular place to be tapped?

Assistant Attorney General David Kris fumbled and sputtered, “This is surreal.”

It sure is! How many times since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 has a member of Congress, an attorney general or a President asked a law-enforcement agent or a prosecutor to define any part of the Bill of Rights and then justify a law that turns the Founders’ language upside down?

Senator Franken’s target, the man from the National Security Division, finally said that the courts had ruled that even if the FBI didn’t name the suspect or the particular place for the wiretap, a description of the target would satisfy the Constitution.

Think about that. Just a description? How many people resemble you in a general way? Height, hair color, posture, gait, skin color, age as far as can be guessed, attire, facial characteristics?

Franken’s question that seemed so “surreal” to government lawyer Kris has deep roots in our history as a precipitating cause of the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers gave us the Fourth Amendment because King George III’s officers in the American colonies used what they called “a general search warrant” to invade homes and offices without going to any court. The British king’s men wrote those warrants themselves.

When Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty sent details of the brutal abuses of these “general warrants” around the colonies through the Committees of Correspondence (the Internet of the time), the cumulative outrage was a significant factor in igniting the American Revolution.

But little American history is now being taught in our schools, and there have been no rallies or marches in the streets by outraged citizens protesting roving wiretaps. Congress may eventually tweak roving wiretaps a trifle if a patriotic senator has taught American values to enough of his or her colleagues. But anyway, watch what you say on the phone or on the Internet.

But why doesn’t Washington’s elite press corps ask President Obama, who purportedly once taught Constitutional law, about using wiretaps and to define the stark differences between his disregard for the separation of powers, due process, torture practices, etc., and the commands of the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution?

I’d suggest you write such questions directly to the President, but affixing your name to such critical messages comes with a caveat. You might well be put in a database the FBI employs to search for “patterns,” possibly making you a “person of interest” not only to the FBI but also to Homeland Security and state and local police. After all, we continue to live in an ever-expanding surveillance society.

But now, guess what? Al Franken finally voted to keep roving wiretaps unchanged in the PATRIOT Act bill that the Senate Judiciary Committee recently sent to the floor for further debate. So much for Franken’s Fourth Amendment principles! Whom can we believe these days?

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

SIBEL EDMONDS HAS NAMED NAMES. WHY ISN’T THE MEDIA REPORTING THE STORY?

by Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.

“Everybody at headquarters level at the Bureau knew what she was saying was extremely accurate,” Cole said recently. “They were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet because they didn’t want Sibel to come out.”

Her under-oath testimony for the Ohio Election Commission, given in a recent videotaped deposition, is both shocking and horrifying. (Edmonds was the star witness for Congressional candidate David Krikorian in connection with a formal complaint initiated by Representative Jean Schmidt [R-Ohio]. Challenging her in 2008, a Krikorian flyer had accused Schmidt of accepting “blood money” from Turkish interests to help block a House bill recognizing Turkey’s genocide of Armenians in 1915.) The deposition was allowed to proceed by the Obama Administration, which chose not to invoke the draconian and little-known “State Secrets Privilege” to gag her, as the previous administration had done, twice.

Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a former Speaker of the House, was involved in “several categories” of corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She mentioned his “acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash” coupled with the ability “to do certain favors…make certain things happen for… [the] Turkish government’s interest.”

Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a “townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities” and said that “foreign entities knew about this. In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those…activities in that particular townhouse.”

The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years earlier, Hastert—who left Congress in 2007—now makes $35,000 a month lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.

Former Congressman Bob Livingston (RLouisiana), who was set to become Speaker prior to Hastert until evidence of a sexual affair was revealed by Larry Flynt, was described in Edmonds’s deposition as having participated in “not very legal activities on behalf of foreign interests” before leaving office in 1999. Afterward, she said, Livingston acted “as a conduit to…further foreign interests, both overtly and covertly,” and also became both a lobbyist and “an operative” representing Turkish interests.

According to Edmonds, Representative Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)—likely to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010—was “the recipient of both legally and illegally raised…campaign donations from…Turkish entities.” Edmonds also claimed that hard-right Representative Dan Burton (R-Indiana), who was instrumental in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, carried out “extremely illegal activities” and covert operations that were “against the United States citizens” and “against the United States’ interests.”

Edmonds named allegedly traitorous Democrats too. She said that former New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, now also a lobbyist, “acted as conduit to deliver or launder contributions and other bribe[s, including blackmail] to certain members of Congress.” And, according to Edmonds, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California) was said to have been involved in “not only…bribe[ry], but also…disclosing [the] highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology information both to Israel and to Turkey [and] other very serious criminal conduct.”

The most overtly salacious of the allegations involved Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is “married with…grown children, but she is bisexual,” according to Edmonds. The FBI whistleblower described how Schakowsky was “hooked” by Turkish agents into having a lesbian “sexual relationship with one of their spies,” and “the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house…was bugged…to be used for certain things that they wanted to request.”

Edmonds noted, however, that she didn’t “know if she [Schakowsky] did anything illegal afterwards” since Edmonds was fired by the FBI before learning what came of that particular setup. The Turks, she said, intended to get at Schakowsky’s husband, lobbyist Robert Creamer, who in April 2006 began serving five months in prison (and 11 months of house arrest) for check-kiting and failing to collect withholding tax.

Schakowsky’s office has vehemently denied the allegations. As head of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Schakowsky might be expected to hold hearings on any of the former FBI employee’s revelations but she has not. She has also refused Edmonds’s challenge to take a polygraph test and has not yet sued her for libel, as the whistleblower has challenged her to do.

Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, not only finds Edmonds “very credible,” but also confirms the “ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States” through a number of illegal means.

“Turkish individuals would ask for favors—ya know, ‘You help me out, and I’ll help you out’—and basically what would happen is the elected official would either receive money or some kind of gift,” Cole explained. “Or, if it was a government employee, I’ve seen it where after they retired, they get these very lucrative positions with a Turkish company, or whatever the country may be.”

As noted, Hastert now works for Turkey, and Grossman now works for a Turkish company and as a lobbyist—no doubt raking in a pretty penny from both. Hastert and Grossman repeatedly ignored requests to comment on these charges.

The mainstream U.S. media, however, apparently remain uninterested in investigating any of it. Not even after Cole himself called for a “Special Counsel” to investigate and prosecute. So what the hell is going on here?
Giraldi believes that, as with companies such as AIG and GM becoming “too big to fail,” the size and success of this massive national security espionage scandal has simply become too big to bust.

He told me, “You have to look at Marc Grossman being part of a much bigger operation in terms of the Israelis and the Turks obtaining influence over our legislators and over a number of senior government officials at the Pentagon and State Department. Because this thing was so big, and it affected both Democrats and Republicans, I think the U.S. government is terrified of opening up this Pandora’s box.”

Giraldi added, “The people in Congress and in the Justice Department who should be investigating this…and also in the media—because the media is tied hand and foot to government—this is all part of one big, you know, conspiracy, if you want to look at it this way. And, essentially, this is a story that they don’t want to get out.”

So why, exactly, isn’t the media covering Sibel Edmonds, whom the ACLU once described as “the most gagged person in the history of the U.S.,” now that she is finally able to tell her story? It’s a story, after all, that the legendary 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has deemed “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers.”

“If we had an effective mainstream media that was going after this story, that would make it come out,” Giraldi noted. “But we don’t have an effective media.” He then pointed out one more reason for the media’s reluctance to dig into this story: “According to Sibel, Grossman actually bragged that he would get from the Turks the information that they wanted to appear in an article. He would write it up, and he would fax it over to the New York Times, and they would print it just as he had written it under somebody else’s byline.”

Guess we won’t expect any coverage of this scandal from the New York Times, “the paper of record,” any time soon. And if a story isn’t covered by the Times, and thereafter picked up by everybody else, did it really happen? Given the complicity of the media with regard to Sibel Edmonds, it would appear the government never even needed to invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” in the first place.

As of this writing, HUSTLER stands to be the largest, most “corporate” U.S. outlet in which these startling, now-public, on-the-record disclosures have been reported. The moral: Pull off a large enough crime, and it becomes too big to do anything about.

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You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

SURVIVING SAILORS BREAK THEIR SILENCE 40 YEARS AFTER ISRAELI ATTACK ON US NAVY SHIP

By Paul Craig Roberts
 
June 8, 1967 — the fourth day of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan — was a beautiful day in the Mediterranean. The USS Liberty was in international waters off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft had flown over the USS Liberty in the morning and had reported that the ship was American. The crew, in close proximity to the war zone, was reassured by the presence of Israeli aircraft. But at 2:00 p.m. sailors sunbathing on the deck saw fighter jets coming at them in attack formation. Red flashes from the wings of the fighters were followed by explosions, blood and death. A beautiful afternoon suddenly became a nightmare. Who was attacking the USS Liberty and why? The attack on the Liberty was an attack on America.

The Liberty was an intelligence ship. Its purpose was to monitor Soviet and Arab communications in order to warn both Israel and Washington should the Soviets enter the war on behalf of its Arab allies. The Liberty was armed only with four machineguns to repel boarders. Its request for a destroyer escort had been denied.

The assault on the Liberty is well documented. With no warning, the Liberty was attacked by successive waves of unmarked jets using cannon, rockets and napalm. The attacking jets jammed all of the US communications frequencies, an indication they knew the Liberty was an American ship.

The air attack failed to sink the Liberty. About 30 minutes into the attack three torpedo boats appeared flying the Star of David. The Israeli boats were not on a rescue mission. They attacked the Liberty with cannon, machineguns and torpedoes. One torpedo struck the Liberty mid-ship, instantly killing 25 Americans while flooding the lower decks. The Israeli torpedo boats destroyed the life rafts the Liberty launched when the crew prepared to abandon ship, sending the message there’d be no survivors.

At approximately 3:15 two French-built Israeli helicopters carrying armed Israeli troops appeared over the Liberty. Phil Tourney could see their faces only 50/60 feet away. He gave them the finger. Surviving crewmembers are convinced the Israelis were sent to board and kill all survivors.

The Israeli jets destroyed the Liberty’s communication antennas. While under attack from the jets, crewmembers strung lines that permitted the ship to send a call for help. The USS Saratoga and the USS America launched fighters to drive off the attacking aircraft, but the rescue mission was aborted by direct orders from Washington.

When the Liberty notified the Sixth Fleet it was again under attack, this time from surface ships, the Fleet commander ordered the carriers America and Saratoga to launch fighters to destroy or drive off the attackers. The order was unencrypted and picked up by Israel, which immediately called off its attack. The torpedo boats and the hovering helicopters sped away. Israel quickly notified Washington that it had mistakenly attacked an American ship, and the US fighters were recalled a second time.

The USS Liberty suffered 70% casualties, with 34 killed and 174 wounded. Although the expensive state of the art ship was kept afloat by the heroic crew, it later proved unsalvageable and was sold as scrap.

Why didn’t help come?

No explanation has ever been given by the US government for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s orders for the Sixth Fleet to abort the rescue mission. Lt. Commander David Lewis of the Liberty told colleagues that Admiral L. R. Geis, commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force, told him that when he challenged McNamara’s order to recall the rescue mission, LBJ came on the line and said he didn’t care if the ship sank, he wasn’t going to embarrass an ally. The communications officer handling the transmission has given the same account.

A BBC documentary on the Israeli raid reports confusion about the attacker’s identity almost resulted in a US assault on Egypt. Richard Parker, US political counsel in Cairo, confirms in the BBC documentary he received official communication an American retaliatory attack on Egypt was on its way.

The US government’s official position on the USS Liberty corresponds with Israel’s: The attack was unintentional and a result of Israeli blunders. This is the official position despite the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle, and a long list of US Navy officers, government officials and Liberty survivors are on record saying the Israeli attack was intentional.

According to Helms, Battle and the minutes of a White House meeting, President Johnson believed the attack was intentional. Helms says LBJ was furious and complained when The New York Times buried the story on page 29, but that Johnson decided he had to publicly accept Israel’s explanation. “The political pressure was too much,” Helms said.

US communications personnel, intelligence analysts and ambassadors report having read US intercepts of Israeli orders to attack the Liberty. In one intercept an Israeli pilot reports that the Liberty is an American ship and asks for a repeat and clarification of his orders to attack an American ship. One Israeli who identified himself as one of the pilots later came to America and met with US Representative Pete McCloskey and Liberty survivors. The pilot said he had refused to participate in the attack when he saw it was an American ship. He was arrested upon returning to base.

The Liberty flew the US flag. The ship’s markings, GTR-5, measured several feet in height on both sides of the bow. On the stern the ship was clearly marked USS LIBERTY. Mistaking the Liberty for an Egyptian ship, as Israel claims to have done, was impossible.

Tattered flags show ferocity of the attacks

The Israelis claim the Liberty flew no flag, but two US flags full of holes from the attack exist. When the first flag was shot down, crewmen replaced it with a flag 7 feet by 13 feet. This flag with its battle scars is on display at NSA headquarters at Ft. Mead, Maryland.

Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of the current US senator, ordered Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and Captain Ward Boston to hold a court of inquiry and to complete the investigation in only one week. In a signed affidavit Captain Boston said President Johnson ordered a cover-up and that he and Admiral Kidd were prevented from doing a real investigation. Liberty survivors were ordered never to speak to anyone about the event. Their silence was finally broken when Lt. Commander Jim Ennes published his book, Assault on the Liberty.

It is now established fact that the attack on the Liberty was intentional and was covered up by President Johnson and every administration since. There has never been a congressional investigation, nor has the testimony of the majority of survivors ever been officially taken. Moreover, testimony that conflicted with the cover-up was deleted from the official record.

Disgusted by the US government’s official stance discounting the survivors’ reports, Admiral Tom Moorer, retired Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, organized the Moorer Commission to make public the known facts about the attack and cover-up. The Commission consisted of Admiral Moorer, former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy Admiral Merlin Staring, Marine Corps General Raymond G. Davis and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins.

The Commission’s Report concluded:

“That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.

“That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.

“That surviving crew members were threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and [the survivors] were abandoned by their own government.
“That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.
“That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation.”

Why did Israel attack the Liberty? Was something super secret going on that is so damaging it must be protected at all cost?

Some experts believe Tel Aviv decided to sink the Liberty because the ship’s surveillance capability would discover Israel’s impending invasion and capture of Syria’s Golan Heights, an action opposed by Washington. Others believe Israel was concerned the Liberty would discover Israel’s massacre of hundreds of Egyptian POWs, a war crime contemporaneous with the attack on the US ship. Still others believe that Israel intended to blame the attack on Egypt in order to bring America into the war. It is known the US was providing Israel with reconnaissance and that there were joint US-Israeli covert operations against the Arabs that Washington was desperate to keep secret.

Survivors with whom I spoke said the attack was the easy part of the experience. The hard part has been living with 40 years of official cover-up and betrayal by the US government. One survivor said that he was asked to leave his Baptist church when he spoke about the Liberty, because the minister and fellow church-goers felt more loyalty to Israel than to a member of the congregation who had served his country. His church’s position was that if our government believed Israel, the survivors should also.

Survivor Phil Tourney said that “being forced to live with a cover-up is like being raped and no one will believe you.”

Survivor Gary Brummett said he “feels like someone who has been locked up for 40 years on a wrongful conviction.” Until the US government acknowledges the truth of the attack, Brummett says the survivors are forced to live with the anger and dismay of being betrayed by the country they served.

Survivor Bryce Lockwood has been angry for 40 years. The torpedo that killed his shipmates, wrecked his ship and damaged his health was made in the USA.

Survivor Ernie Gallo told me he “has been haunted for four decades” by the knowledge that his commander-in-chief recalled the US fighters that could have prevented most of the Liberty’s casualties.

Every American should be troubled by the fact that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense prevented the US Sixth Fleet from protecting a US Navy ship and its 294-man crew from foreign attack. They should also be troubled that the President ordered the Navy to determine the attack was unintentional.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

This article is based entirely on documented sources and on interviews with six of the survivors, Capt. Ward Boston, and Bill Knutson, the executive officer of the USS America fighter squadron sent on the first aborted rescue mission. The Moorer Commission report is available online at usslibertyinquiry.com. For the BBC documentary on the USS Liberty, Dead in the Water, go to www.whatreallyhappened.com. See also Army War College document. A detailed account showing that the attacking Israeli pilots were aware that the Liberty was an American ship can be found in the October 2, 2007, Chicago Tribune. See New York Times, Sept. 24, 1995 for Israeli massacre of Egyptian POWs. The USS Liberty site is full of information.

THE GOP’S JIHAD AGAINST SCIENCE
by Chris Mooney

FOR SIX YEARS OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION, the scientific community has been repeatedly disdained, and the bullshitters ascendant. The Bush regime has not only politicized the Justice Department—as with the firings of at least eight U.S. Attorneys—but also politicized science.

It began early on when Bush, asserting that our knowledge about global warming was “incomplete,” rejected the Kyoto Protocol. Then he announced a truly bizarre policy for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the major hot-button political issue in the days prior to 9/11. Bush’s decision, made before he had even named his Presidential science adviser, was premised on the false “fact” that more than 60 preexisting cell lines would be eligible for federal funding even if Bush blocked funding for research on any new lines after that. But there weren’t nearly so many lines, and those that did exist were genetically limited, contaminated and had various other attributes that made them undesirable for scientific study.

Understandably annoyed by this kind of crap, scientists grew even more worried as the President left key science posts empty. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—two megagovernment agencies employing hordes of scientists—were stumbling around leaderless for a year. Bush delayed just as long in appointing a Surgeon General.

Then the real nonsense started. Although few have ever heard of them, it turns out that there are literally hundreds of committees, comprised of scientists and other experts, that advise our massive government on all kinds of technical subjects. Most of these committees are so obscure that apparently no one had thought to politicize them before the Bush Administration came along. It took true innovation (along with a certain measure of control-freakery) to interfere with this small army of nerds and technocrats.

One area where the Bush Administration messed with the scientists involved sex. Many of the President’s Christian Right supporters oppose sex before marriage. (Some probably oppose it after as well.) They also like to claim that virtually any form of contraception, or even information about contraception, encourages youthful promiscuity—rather than, say, protect kids who are going to screw around anyway. So they quickly got to work messing with an advisory committee that makes decisions regarding reproductive health drugs.

That included Plan B—the so-called “morning after” pill. It’s a form of emergency contraception that, if taken quickly after sex, can prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore a large number of abortions.

Christian conservatives hate abortions; yet paradoxically, because of their discomfort with sex, they also hate Plan B. So the Bush Administration installed on the committee its favorite gynecologist, W. David Hager, author of a book titled As Jesus Cared for Women.  After the experts deliberated, they voted 23-4 that Plan B should be available over the counter. But the highly politicized FDA rejected their view, opting instead for Hager’s minority position on the matter. Later, Hager credited God with helping him to block wider availability of Plan B.

For right-wing Christians, when it comes to deterring women from having abortions, fear is the leading tactic. This inevitably involves more bullshit: claims that having an abortion will make you go crazy, give you breast cancer, etc.

Under the Bush Administration, once again, this kind of stuff actually got a hearing. A government document suggested that abortion might indeed increase a woman’s risk of contracting breast cancer later in life (although the vast majority of experts think otherwise). At least, in this case, reality did ultimately prevail: The document eventually got changed back, as not even the Bushies could justify so indefensible a statement for very long.

During Congressional hearings in July 2007, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that his report on global health concerns was tampered with. Carmona’s original draft stressed the role of condoms in AIDS prevention, but William Steiger—a Bush appointee in the Department of Health and Human Services— sent the then-Surgeon General a memo. Steiger told Carmona to add to his report praise for Bush’s purported efforts to both curb AIDS in Third World countries and to improve public health in Afghanistan and Iraq. The HHS never released Carmona’s report, which also denounced violence against women and pollution, but had failed to ballyhoo Bush.

If possible, the administration’s distortions were still more egregious in the realm of climate science. There seemed to be a government- wide strategy of tinkering and meddling with scientific reports about global warming so as to keep the issue off the table and prevent pressure on the President to seriously address it. At one point the White House so heavily edited a government environmental report that the technocrats had to drop the global warming section entirely, rather than mislead the public.

In another case the executive branch had a lawyer named Philip Cooney—who had no scientific credentials, but had previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute [the oil industry's most influential lobbying organization]— editing the language of scientific documents pertaining to global warming. Needless to say, Cooney emphasized how uncertain everything was. Later, after his edits were revealed, he moved on to work for ExxonMobil. Talk about conflicts of interest.

And even as government scientific reports were getting the red-pen treatment, climate scientists working for the government were, at times, being blocked from talking to the press. Perhaps the most famous case involved James Hansen, arguably the world’s most famous climate scientist. Sometimes called the “father” of global warming, Hansen works for NASA. In early 2006, the scientist charged there had been a clampdown on his freedom of speech after he had given a public lecture discussing the dangers of global warming.

In one case a young NASA aide named George Deutsch helped to divert an interview request for Hansen that came from a National Public Radio show. Deutsch later resigned when it was revealed that contrary to his résumeé, he had not yet graduated from Texas A&M University.

James Hansen’s case is made all the more outrageous because of the urgent message he was struggling to convey to the rest of us. Hansen has become convinced that we have an ever-narrowing window in which to address global warming before we suffer its severest consequences—namely, the destabilization of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. This, in turn, could lead to massive sea-level rise on the order of tens of feet, and thus the submersion of many heavily inhabited continental coastal areas and islands in coming centuries.

But Hansen wasn’t the only example of a government climate scientist who experienced constraints upon his ability to discuss global warming with the broader public. Take Thomas Knutson, a constituent of Rush Holt (D-New Jersey). Knutson, a soft-spoken scientist, runs massively complex climate models on massively expensive supercomputers at a government lab in Princeton. The classic technocrat also happens to be an expert on the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. So after the devastating 2005 Atlantic hurricane season—which featured four Category 5 storms, including Katrina—Knutson was prevented by government PR flacks from giving two national television interviews.

In August 2007, Bush announced plans for an international “climate change summit.” Greenpeace responded: “It’s a step forward that Bush no longer denies man-made global warming, but there has to be a concern that this is yet another attempt to derail the U.N. climate change negotiations set for December… Bush speaks about…voluntary targets… [This summit] must not allow Bush to distract the U.N. from December’s meeting, where the goal must be the kind of deep binding emissions cuts that Bush still strongly opposes.”

You might argue, of course, that these are just anecdotes—a few outrageous stories, but scientists don’t draw general conclusions without real statistics, and neither should we.

It turns out that we do actually have statistics about how bad the situation has gotten with respect to science in the Bush Administration. A group called the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which tracks the issue, has collaborated with a number of other organizations to survey governmentemployed scientists about political interference. A number of surveys have been conducted by various branches of the government that employ lots of researchers—the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the FDA, etc.—and the results are eye-opening. For example, in a survey of government climate researchers, the UCS found that 46% of respondents felt pressure to remove the words global warming or climate change from various documents, while 43% reported that edits had altered the meaning of their scientific results.

In other words, the spreading of bullshit has become systemic within the federal government. When the interests of religious zealots, oilmen and the rest of Bush’s backers are involved, ideology always trumps science in this corrupt administration. Finally, it’s important to note that the scientific distortions aren’t merely occurring below the radar in the editing of scientific reports, the quashing of scientists or the stacking of advisory panels. The President himself has uttered them.

As recently as 2006, Bush could be found falsely claiming that a “fundamental debate” still existed over whether human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global temperatures to rise. And on an issue where there’s even more scientific certainty, evolution, the President voiced his support for teaching the pseudoscientific “intelligent design” concept in high school science classes nationwide.

Still, it’s a fair question as to why this so-called “war on science”—which involves distortions, misrepresentations and suppression across the government— has emerged under Bush rather than under previous Presidents. While there’s no single answer, it’s quite clear that many of the attacks on science are intended to reward and appease the special interests that helped put Bush in office in the first place. That’s especially true of corporate America, which has a vested interest in downplaying global warming, and the Christian Right, which obsesses about sex and abortion as well as Darwin. In short, the whole thing looks a lot like a good old-fashioned spoils system.

Reality isn’t up for a vote, though, and our government is supposed to remain competent and intact throughout multiple Presidential administrations. That’s where the true damage from the GOP jihad on science makes itself felt: A huge alphabet soup of government agencies—staffed by scientists and technocrats whose salaries are paid by the public—has now had its credibility thoroughly undermined. Why would a talented young scientist want to go work in one of these agencies, given the alarming stories about science politicization and the low morale among scientists already working there? And why would we, the public, continue to trust these agencies?

On November 7, 2006, Democrats took control of Congress and have already started investigating some of the most egregious cases in which the Bush Administration attacked science. James Hansen, Tom Knutson, Philip Cooney and George Deutsch were called to testify before Congressional committees. We’ll see whether this new, high-level pressure makes the Bush Administration more honest or not. But so far, it has only helped to prompt one of the most incredible bullshit admissions yet.

Earlier this year, the White House had the gall to put out a statement claiming that President Bush has “consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem.” It was a bold-faced lie, but a somewhat hopeful one. At least this time around, the Bush Administration’s denial of reality involves denying its previous denial of reality.

BY HARVEY WASSERMAN & BOB FITRAKIS
(February 2008 Issue)

IF YOU BELIEVE BUSH AND CHENEY WILL GIVE UP POWER, GUESS AGAIN. It is time to think about the “unthinkable.” The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election. The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don’t know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006), we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention. The real question is not how or when they might do it. It’s how, realistically, we can stop them.

In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor’s mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed.

In Ohio 2004 the arsenal of dirty tricks expanded. Based in Columbus, we have documented more than 100 different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney), we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount. As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed.

For 2008 we expect the list of vote-theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters.

This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter- Baker Commission, U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card.

Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000.

The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two Presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency and many new dirty tricks added.

But in Ohio 2006 the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The secretary of state was the essential on-theground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004. When he announced plans to run for governor, many Ohioans joked that “Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes.”

But lose he did… along with the GOP candidates for secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate. By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6% of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost.

Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6% bump couldn’t save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pled guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7% approval rating (that’s not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30% in some polls.

So while the GOP still had control of Ohio’s electoral machinery in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft. That may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it’s hard to imagine any Republican candidate getting elected. What’s also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law and for the U.S. Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a policy statement.

Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power and allow themselves to be investigated for war crimes, etc., by successor governments? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn’t they? The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branches has been carefully laid: The continuation of the drug war, as well as the USA PATRIOT Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11 terror attacks have decimated the Bill of Rights and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence and far more.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales never backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Department has provided additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the “immigration problem,” large concentration camps are under construction around the U.S.

The administration has endorsed and is exercising its “right” to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled “quaint.”

With 150-plus “signing statements” challenging over 1,150 laws, the administration acts on its belief that the “unitary executive” trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration’s use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress.

There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress—and the public—have rolled over without significant resistance. Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438 and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term “dictatorial” is a modest understatement. In particular, the May 9, 2007, Presidential Directive and July 17, 2007, Executive Order give the President the power to suspend Congress and the judiciary and to seize the assets of anyone they choose.

The Founders established our government with checks and balances, but executive orders have accumulated important precedent. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared an end to slavery in the South, Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and Harry Truman’s Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military. Most to the point, FDR’s Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 120,000-plus people of Japanese descent into the now-infamous concentration camps of World War II.

There is also precedent for a President overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains. But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision, sending 14,000 Native Americans at gunpoint to Oklahoma.

All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It’s well established that Richard Nixon—mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney—commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election.

Today we must ask: Who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a “national emergency,” such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar?

Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it appear that Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial. Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command?

The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber-stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson, Bush could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress. What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do.We also hear loose talk about “90 million gun owners.”

From the public side, the only conceivable counterforce might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general noncooperation.

But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lockstep support to whatever the regime says and does. It’s also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton.

So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup? We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail. Only one thing is certain: An aroused citizenry is our greatest defense.

Bob Fitrakis is publisher and editor of Columbus, Ohio’s progressive newspaper The Free Press, and Harvey Wasserman is its senior editor. They are coauthors of How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008 and What Happened in Ohio?—available at booksellers, FreePress.org and HarveyWasserman.com.

THE CIA’s “FAMILY JEWELS” SHOULD ENLIGHTEN SELF-RIGHTEOUS AMERICANS.

Among the many possible theories for why George W. Bush wanted so badly to rush into Iraq in 2003, one of the most popular was that “Saddam tried to kill his daddy.” Or, as the satirical newspaper The Onion put it in a garish, fake action-movie poster with Dubya as an ersatz Rambo: Gulf War II—The Vengeance.

The alleged Hussein-sponsored attempt to assassinate the first President Bush a decade earlier was blithely offered around water coolers and barbecues as a handy debate stopper. Oil? Too greedy. WMDs? Too complicated. 9/11? No Osama. Revenge? Nice.

Conveniently forgotten was our own rich history of attempting to assassinate foreign leaders with whom we took umbrage. This summer, however, the American public received—from an unlikely source—a public- service reminder that our own Cold War shenanigans, including such murder plots, often provided a blueprint for the Saddam Husseins of the world, rather than a rebuke.

Belatedly responding to a 1992 Freedom of Information Request, the CIA released the so-called Family Jewels—a 700-plus-page collection of memos and other documents generated in-house in 1973 in order to prep the agency’s chieftains on potentially embarrassing and/or illegal actions that might be uncovered by the aggressive journalistic and Congressional investigations then being spawned by Watergate.

While most of its meatiest revelations were originally exposed by the Senate’s Church Committee and various muckraking reporters like Jack Anderson and Seymour Hersh, the Family Jewels provides confirmation of some and disturbing new details on others—while also hinting at possible crimes only guessed at previously. (Perhaps most intriguing is that the document’s very first revelation is completely redacted; what could be so disturbing as to deserve such blanket censorship at this late date?) Some of the highlights we can now read include details on various CIA activities:

● Forceful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, specifically Fidel Castro (before he had allied with the Soviet Union), through the auspices of the Mafia, and anticolonialist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo with poison created and delivered by the agency’s real-life version of James Bond’s gadget master. Stalled only by the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Kennedy Administration authorized Castro kill schemes based on the deployment of FBI Most Wanted mobsters with longtime ties to Cuba’s corrupt Batista dictatorship that a popular revolution had just overthrown. In other words—as in Guatemala in 1953, Iran in 1954, South Vietnam in 1963, Chile in 1973 and numerous other non-Communist countries during the Cold War—the CIA employed despicable means to engineer the accession of right-wing dictators.

● Domestic spying activities, which are explicitly banned by the CIA’s 1947 charter to prevent it from becoming a Gestapo-style secret police agency. In particular, the documents detail the spying on journalists reporting on CIA activities, as well as anti- Vietnam War organizations. Mail was opened, phones were tapped, and reporters’ offices were staked out.

● Creepy drug-testing programs performed on ill-informed or unwitting subjects designed to discover new mind-control techniques. One program tested drugs deemed unsafe by the FDA on military personnel, while another foisted LSD on the unsuspecting to see if the hallucinogen could be an effective truth serum.

● Harsh treatment of a Soviet secret agent who defected to the U.S. and was suspected by the agency of being a plant to mislead America. The defector was secretly held in solitary confinement and interrogated for several years before finally being believed, an “off-the-books” imprisonment that presaged on a small scale the torture gulag the CIA is reportedly running as part of the so-called War on Terror.

Unfortunately, while transparency about the past provides something of a corrective to the convenient whitewashing of our nation’s history, it would be much more effective if applied to our current leaders’ trouncing of our democratic ideals and systems. It is surreal, in fact, to hear a Bush- Cheney Administration—infamous for its pathological devotion to secrecy—releasing the Family Jewels in honor of the “social contract with the American people,” in the words of CIA Director Michael Hayden. That’s like Barry Bonds turning over Mark McGwire’s steroid needles in order to preserve the sanctity of baseball.

Actually, when the story is fully told, the Bush-Cheney years will likely make the lies and crimes of their predecessors seem mild in comparison—especially when one considers that our current enemies are so much less threatening or powerful. Yet at a time when our leaders cite a single lucky attack as the rationale for all manner of crazy military adventures (is Iran next?) and civil-rights outrages, it is ever important to cut through the self-righteousness of U.S. posturing as the world’s avenging angel. As a nation, the Family Jewels remind us, we have been quite willing to terrorize others.