The government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, the former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed last night.

She also said the Americans concealed from Britain the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks.

"The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing," Lady Manningham-Buller told a meeting at the House of Lords.

She also admitted MI5 were slow to recognise that the US was torturing detainees. Asked if Britain protested, she replied: "We did lodge a protest." She declined to elaborate but it is believed that the protests were made at ministerial level.

More at the Guardian.
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Here's a Justice Department report on laws broken by the FBI, with the full cooperation of certain phone companies:

http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1001r.pdf

(you'll need a PDF reader like Foxit Reader or Adobe Reader)

And here's a PC World article about it:

US DOJ: Operators helped FBI illegally obtain phone records
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From the Washington Post:

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.

And the road to hell is paved with...
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Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.

The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.

As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

From the Guardian
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It's bad enough that the Obama administration refused to publicly investigate and expose the mistakes of the previous administration. It now appears that they refuse to even learn from those mistakes.

According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is "only marginally relevant" to Nato's overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.

Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers", the report says.

It claims that some battalion-level officers looking for an overview of the political and economic situation in key areas "acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries".

Tony Blair used "deceit" to persuade parliament and the British people to support war in Iraq, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said today.

In an article in the Times, Macdonald attacked Blair for engaging in "alarming subterfuge", for displaying "sycophancy" towards George Bush and for refusing to accept that his decisions were wrong.

Macdonald's comments about Blair's decision to go to war are more critical than anything that has been said so far by any of the senior civil servants who worked in Whitehall when Blair was prime minister.

MacDonald is telling us something we already know, but it's still nice to hear it from someone who was close to the action.

It would have been a lot nicer to hear it back in 2003.
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We've heard all this before, but this is the first time we've heard it on the record from high-ranking British officials. They were giving evidence at the UK government's inquiry into the Iraq war. I urge all Americans to read the accounts of the British inquiry, since it seems clear that we will never have such an investigation here in the US.

There was a "dire" lack of planning in Washington for what would happen in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, a senior British diplomat has said.

The US had a "touching faith" that its troops would be welcomed in Iraq and democracy would soon follow, Edward Chaplin told the Iraq inquiry.

Mr Chaplin, director of Middle East policy at the Foreign Office in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and ambassador to Baghdad after the war, said preparations for what would follow the toppling of Saddam Hussein were a "real blind spot" in Washington.

Although the State Department looked at the issue in detail, Mr Chaplin said there was less interest "elsewhere" in Washington and that policy was largely dictated by the White House and Pentagon.

"They [US officials] had a touching faith that once Iraq had been liberated from the terrible tyranny of Saddam Hussein everybody would be grateful and dancing in the streets and there would be really be no further difficulty.

"And then the Iraqis would somehow magically take over and restore their state to the democratic state it should be in.

"We tried to point that this was extremely optimistic."

The US put too much faith in Iraqi opposition groups and political exiles about how quickly the country could be stabilised after the invasion, Mr Chaplin said, while coalition forces did not fully realise how "fractured" Iraqi society had become under Saddam Hussein.

From BBC News
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It must suck to be elected president and have to do your predecessor's job in addition to your own.

The Obama administration today ordered that the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four others be transferred from Guantánamo Bay to New York to stand trial.

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, told a press conference in Washington he would be seeking the death penalty.

President Obama, speaking at a press conference during a trip to Japan, said he was sure Mohammed would receive a fair trial, in spite of the problems of finding unbiased jurors in New York, and of evidence being tainted by torture. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it, and my administration insists on it," he said.

The US ambassador in Kabul has written to the White House arguing against sending thousands more American troops to Afghanistan.

In a leaked cable, Karl Eikenberry expressed doubts about the competence of President Hamid Karzai's government.

Mr Eikenberry, a former US commander in Afghanistan, also raised concerns about corruption within the Afghan government.

He said it was "not a good idea" to send more troops, the BBC has been told.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't support the current nation-building project in Afghanistan, but I do support the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and I think we should commit however many troops it takes to get that job done.

But one thing we shouldn't do is say we want to achieve an objective but then fail to commit the resources for it. We should go all in or not at all.
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From the New York Times:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater's ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater's president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

Twenty-three Americans were tonight convicted of kidnapping by an Italian court at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme for abducting terrorist suspects.

The former head of the CIA in Milan Robert Lady was given an eight-year jail sentence for his part in the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, who claimed that he was subsequently tortured in Egypt. Lady's superior, Jeff Castelli, the then head of the CIA in Italy, and two other Americans were acquitted on the grounds that they enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

But another 21 alleged CIA operatives and a US air force officer were each sentenced to five years in jail. All were tried in absentia and those who were convicted will be regarded as fugitives under Italian law.

Extraordinary rendition, which has been criticised as "torture by proxy', involves the snatching of suspects and their forcible transfer for interrogation to third countries – often those states where torture is routinely employed.

Now to get these guys extradited. If they're smart, they'll testify against the people who gave them orders.

Edited to add a link to the BBC story. I was going to link to this one originally but the BBC website was having problems.

CIA agents guilty of Italy kidnap

The Obama administration has expressed its disappointment at the convictions.

"We are disappointed by the verdicts," state department spokesman Ian Kelly said in Washington.

He declined to comment further pending a written opinion from the judge, but said an appeal was likely.

Instead of being disappointed, he should be arranging for extradition of these criminals. You can contact the White House here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Pat Tillman was the poster boy for the US war in Iraq.

President Bush heralded him as a hero in life when the young American football player walked away from a multimillion dollar contract to serve in Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, and an even greater hero in death when Tillman was killed in Afghanistan two years later - until it came out that the Pentagon had lied to cover up that his death was from friendly fire.

What Bush did not know was that Tillman regarded him as a "cowboy" who had led the country in to an "illegal and unjust" war in Iraq.

I'm seeing a lot of outrage, real or feigned, about Representative Joe Wilson yelling "You lie!" during President Obama's speech. I don't think it was a nice thing to say, because the claim Obama was making was probably true. False accusations of lying aren't cool. I don't know if it's outrageous enough to warrant the amount of hubbub it generated.

What would be equally outrageous, if not more so, would be if a president did lie during a speech to Congress and nobody in Congress objected. That's what happened on several occasions between 2002 and 2008. Some of the same people now objecting to Wilson's false accusation are the very same people who didn't say anything when George W. Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and being involved with al Qaeda.

There seems to be a current of thought lately that speaking directly and bluntly to the president, as Joe Wilson did to Obama and as hundreds of Democratic representatives and senators should have done to Bush, is unacceptable behavior, that showing extreme deference to the president is somehow good for our country.

Fuck that. This is America. We purposefully did away with kings when we made this country. The president is a citizen, like the rest of us. He or she is someone we choose to do a job. If he lies, we should say he lied. If he gets a few blow jobs from an intern, we should say he got a few blow jobs from an intern. Pussyfooting around the truth is bad for a republic.

Joe Wilson was wrong, but the people criticizing him are doing so for the wrong reasons. If you're going to call someone a liar, get your facts straight first. But if your facts are straight, call him a liar. If you don't, you're enabling his lies.

Labels: bush, congress, liars, lies, lying, obama, wilson

The actual headline of the article I'm linking to is Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics. The headline made me angry, as I suppose it was designed to do. Why would you be surprised that your enemy would adapt to your tactics and change theirs?

It's important to remember that the reporters who write newspaper articles do not get to write the headlines. As I read the article, I realized the officers in Afghanistan aren't surprised. And they shouldn't be. The Taliban is doing what most insurgent forces do against a larger and better-equipped enemy.

The insurgents have largely abandoned the large-unit attacks they used several years ago. "In 2005, Marines and Army units were having pretty decisive engagements" against massed Taliban fighters, another senior officer said, adding that "every time, we killed them in very large numbers." Small bases and checkpoints manned by Afghan national security forces have become preferred targets for the Taliban, he said, because they are "isolated and easy to kill," and the Afghan units are relatively easy to infiltrate for intelligence.

The Taliban has also taken advantage of changes in U.S. air and artillery tactics, adopted to decrease civilian casualties that have alienated the population. U.S. airstrikes and culturally offensive night ground raids are authorized far more selectively than they were. The Taliban has also adjusted its own tactics, gathering in populated areas and increasing its night operations, and "the playing field is leveled," one U.S. officer said.

A number of officials and experts, within and outside the military, said that while the Taliban was able to regroup militarily while U.S. attention was diverted to Iraq, its widening influence has as much to do with Afghan government corruption, tensions among regional ethnic groups, lack of state service and justice in rural areas, and high rates of unemployment as it does with insurgent efforts.

Military officials expressed confidence in the evolving U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, but also concern about whether there is time to make it work. "I'm not one myself to believe it's a zero-sum game of winning and losing," said an official with long experience in Afghanistan.

"To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing," he said. "They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast the international community's attempt to stabilize Afghanistan. It's really a game of will to them."

This was always the danger of pursuing a nation-building project instead of limiting the mission to Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leaders associated with him. It didn't help that the Afghanistan mission was deprived of resources because of the Iraq campaign.

Labels: afghanistan, nation building, taliban