Jose Rodriguez, former Director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service

Law-abiding US citizens have been appalled that Jose Rodriguez, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service until his retirement in 2007, was invited onto CBS’s “60 Minutes” program last weekend to promote his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, in which he defends the use of torture on “high-value detainees” captured in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” even though that was — and is — illegal under US and international law.

Rodriguez joins an elite club of war criminals — including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who, instead of being prosecuted for using torture, or authorizing its use, have, instead, been allowed to write books, go on book tours and appear on mainstream TV to attempt to justify their unjustifiable actions.

All claim to be protected by the “golden shield” offered by their inside man, John Yoo, part of a group of lawyers who aggressively pushed the lawlessness of the “war on terror.” Abusing his position as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose mandate is to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo instead attempted to redefine torture and approved its use — including the use of waterboarding, an ancient torture technique and a form of controlled drowning — on an alleged “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, in two memos, dated August 1, 2002, that will forever be known as the “torture memos.”

Unfortunately, for those who abhor the use of torture and respect the rule of law, President Obama refused to allow Yoo — and his boss, Jay S. Bybee — to be punished. A four-year internal ethics investigation concluded in January 2010 that Yoo and Bybee had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” which would have led to professional sanctions, but a senior DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed — or encouraged — to override those conclusions, stating instead that both men had, understandably, been under great pressure following the 9/11 attacks, and had only exercised “poor judgment,” which was the equivalent of nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

No one bothered mentioning that Article 2.2 of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the US became a signatory under Ronald Reagan, declares: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

And so, last Sunday, Jose Rodriguez was allowed to undertake his own redefinition of torture, essentially unchallenged, and on mainstream TV. With a disturbingly macho presentation that left Charles Pierce of Esquire “pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac,” as well as a war criminal, he brushed off criticism of the use of torture by saying, “We made some al-Qaeda with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days, but we did the right thing for the right reason. The right reason to protect the homeland and to protect American lives.”

As Amy Davidson noted in the New Yorker, he also “bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer,” stating, “We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed,” and “talked as if torture were an expression of strength, rather than momentary domination masking the most abject moral and practical weakness.” For Glenn Greenwald, the reference to “big boy pants” exposed “a whole new level of psychosexual creepiness.”

On specific techniques, Rodriguez defended the use of waterboarding by saying, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times, “I don’t know what kind of man it takes to cut the throat of someone in front of a camera like that [a reference to KSM's unproved confession that he personally killed US journalist Daniel Pearl], but I can tell you this is probably someone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about having water poured on his face.”

He also defended the use of physical violence and nudity by pointing out that “[t]he objective is to let him [the detainee] know there’s a new sheriff in town and he better pay attention,” compared sleep deprivation to “jet lag,” and, reflecting on the use of “stress positions” over many hours, said, “I was thinking about this the other day. The objective was to induce muscle fatigue, and most people who work out do a lot more fatiguing of the muscles.”

At another point in the interview, Rodriguez also made reference to the psychologists — including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — who had worked on the US military’s program for using torture to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, which was reverse engineered and provided the basis of the torture program in the “war on terror.” Their particular contribution was to stress that detainees must be broken down to a state of “learned helplessness” (a concept conceived by US psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1960s), in which all resistance is futile, and the detainee becomes completely dependant on his interrogators. Speaking of this, Rodriguez stated, “This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.”

To be spouting all of the above on mainstream TV without, essentially, any comeback from the host, Lesley Stahl, or from those who should be enforcing America’s obligations to prosecute torturers, is depressing enough, but it was not all that was wrong. Rodriguez also spoke openly of the crime for which he is most generally known — the destruction of 92 videotapes that contained the “interrogations” in Thailand of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value detainee” who was waterboarded. As Glenn Greenwald explained last week:

At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the US Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al-Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”).

As with John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, Rodriguez was never punished. An investigation into the destruction of the videotapes began under George W. Bush, and continued under Obama, but in November 2010 the DoJ announced that the investigation would be closed without any charges being filed. As Greenwald explained, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who had ordered the CIA to preserve and produce the tapes, “refused even to hold the CIA in contempt for deliberately disregarding his own order.” Instead, he “reasoned that punishment for the CIA was unnecessary because, as he put it, new rules issued by the CIA ‘should lead to greater accountability within the agency and prevent another episode like the videotapes’ destruction.’”

However, while Rodriguez — like John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and senior Bush administration officials, up to and including the President — continues to get away with his crimes, it is uncertain if, overall, the apologists for torture are winning. For them to succeed in persuading enough ordinary Americans that the law doesn’t actually apply to the US president, or anyone working for him, they also need to establish that all this torturing kept America safe, and on this front, despite their protestations over the years, they have no proof that torture worked.

In his interview, Rodriguez wheeled out the tired old lies about torture leading to the capture of “high-value detainees.” In a moment of courage, Lesley Stahl mentioned well-established claims that Abu Zubaydah’s torture had led operatives on countless wild goose chases, to which Rodriguez replied, “Bullshit. He gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of Al-Qaeda senior leaders.” In contrast, of course, former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan pointed out last year that torture did not yield important leads, and that, for example, information from Abu Zubaydeh pointing to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s central role in the 9/11 attacks came before the CIA’s torturers took over his interrogations.

Soufan also pointed out the difference between torturers and skilled interrogators, which CNN described as follows:

“There is a difference between compliance and cooperation,” he said. Compliance can result from torture — a detainee will do anything to make the rough treatment end. But real cooperation, says Soufan, comes from engaging the detainee after learning everything possible about them.

Torture’s apologists always want to deny the importance of skilled interrogators, who conduct extensive research on their subjects and often spend a long time building up a rapport with them. Instead, they permanently seek to reinforce the macho idiocy of their preferred approach, which is driven more by vengeance and bloodlust than anything else.

In Rodriguez’s case, he also resorted to claims that torture had led to the capture of Osama bin Laden, telling Dana Priest of the Washington Post last week, “I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques, approved at the highest levels of the US government, certified by the Department of Justice, and briefed to and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees, shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.”

In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a joint statement (PDF) condemning the remarks made by Rodriguez and others — including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA director Michael Hayden — who had leapt on the bandwagon as the anniversary of bin Laden’s death approached, calling them “inconsistent with CIA records,” and “misguided and misinformed,” and expressing their disappointment that “Mr. Rodriguez and others, who left government positions prior to the OBL operation and are not privy to all of the intelligence that led to the raid, continue to insist that the CIA’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used many years ago were a central component of our success.”

The statement, as the New York Times explained, “rebutted various claims that critical information about bin Laden’s courier” came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or from Abu Faraj al-Libi, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in 2005, and held at Guantánamo, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees,” since September 2006. In addition, the Times noted that the statement “rejected claims that tough treatment drew valuable information about bin Laden’s courier from a third detainee, unidentified in the statement,” but elsewhere identified as Hassan Ghul, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Iraq in 2004, who was never held at Guantánamo. The statement noted that, “While this third detainee did provide relevant information, he did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

“Instead,” the Times explained, Sens. Feinstein and Levin stated, without elaborating, that “the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

This is significant, but what is needed now is for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to complete its comprehensive review of the CIA’s former detention and interrogation program, and publish it. As the statement also explained, “Committee staff have reviewed more than 6 million pages of records and the Committee’s final report, which we expect to exceed 5000 pages, will provide a detailed, factual description of how interrogation techniques were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was — or wasn’t — gained from the program.”

As Dan Froomkin explained in the Huffington Post, the investigation by Democrats, which has taken nearly three years, and has involved Republican lawmakers refusing to take part, “concludes that records from the Bush administration fail to support claims that torture was effective in stopping any terrorist attack,” or in leading to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last year.

While people like Jose Rodriguez remain free to peddle their lies and distortions about torture, and to profit from it, America’s name not only continues to be tarnished, but the American public also continue to be shamefully misled. The long-awaited report into the CIA’s torture program should be published as soon as possible, to let people know what really happened, and hopefully to play a part in tearing down the “golden shield” that has so far protected the Bush administration’s torturers from prosecution.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

In cooperation with Author/Journalist Douglas Valentine, Cryptocomb is publishing over 8GB’s of audio recordings that Mr. Valentine collected throughout his personal interviews with former CIA and U.S. Military Officers while researching for his book, “The Phoenix Program”. The Phoenix Program for the unacquainted was a CIA generated operation that sponsored mass arrests, terrorism, torture, murder and lies during the war in Vietnam. Many of the players went on to walk the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and major National Security Corporations.

Cryptocomb noted that the Phoenix Program “is the template for the targeted killings in the war on terror.” Valentine, the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Phoenix Program,” also made Phoenix Program documents available at Cryptocomb. On his website, Valentine said the materials  “show the development of ‘targeted kills,’ ‘administrative detention’ and ‘High Value’ rewards programs, among other things relevant to the eternal war on terror and Homeland Security.”

The interview Valentine conducted with William Colby, the former director of CIA who was chief of station in Vietnam who ran the agency’s covert operations in Southeast Asia, about the program is chilling.

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency’s first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was “withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions,” according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, “attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S.”

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the “torture memo,” drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah’s torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as “Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions,” has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration’s torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed – and subsequently approved – for Zubaydah in May 2002.

This report was written by veteran intelligence reporter Richard Sale and originally published on Truthout.

They are dying one by one.

They are Iran’s nuclear scientists, and they are being murdered. Since 2007, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in Iranian territory, many victims dying from magnetic bombs that terrorists had attached to the exterior of their cars.

The latest attack took place on January 11, 2012, when Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan, deputy director in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, died without warning in a blast in Tehran shortly after two assailants on a motorcycle placed a bomb on his car.

According to news reports, confirmed by Truthout, the United States denied that it was to blame for the killing of the 32-year-old Roshan after Tehran said Washington and Israel were responsible for the attack. “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters when asked about Iranian allegations over the attack.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor added, “The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this.”

Former and serving US intelligence officials said that President Barack Obama reacted angrily to the latest killing because, since his election, he had tried to prevent any acceleration in the covert US-Israeli war directed at Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Israeli program, which has been in place for almost a decade, involves not only targeted killings of key Iranian assets, but also disrupting and sabotaging the Iran nuclear technology by infecting Iran’s enrichment computers with a US-Israel virus that heavily damaged them and by sabotaging Iran’s purchasing network abroad, these sources said.

US opposition to the program initially intensified as President Obama made overtures aimed at thawing decades-old tension between the two countries. Part of his strategy was driven by America’s desire to use Iran’s roads into Afghanistan to help resupply US-NATO forces there.

But in spite of Obama’s desire to relax tensions, Israel continues to carry out killings using its proxies, including an armed group of Iranian dissidents, a group that has high-level political backers in the United States despite being a terrorist organization.

Former senior CIA officials said that Israeli terrorists were members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), who are paid by Israel to do targeted killings of Iranian nationals.

“The MEK is being used as the assassination arm of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,” said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrrorism. He said that the MEK is in charge of executing “the motor attacks on Iranian targets chosen by Israel. They go to Israel for training, and Israel pays them.”

The MEK has a shadowy and unsavory history. Founded in the 1970s, the group was stridently anti-shah and allied itself with the dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from which it received most of its supplies. Performing security for Saddam, the MEK assisted him in the slaughter of his domestic opponents and the massacre of Iraqi Shias and Kurds in the 1991 uprising.

As the military wing of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK targeted Iranian officials and government facilities in Iran and abroad. The group also attacked and killed Americans in the 1970s. According to one former senior CIA official, the MEK is particularly violent. In France, they did killings in Paris, including six or seven US Army sergeants. He added that the French “were terrified of them.”

Its most spectacular act of terror was the 1991 near-simultaneous attack on 13 countries around the world.

In 2003, the United States listed the NCRI as a terrorist organization and closed its Washington office. US forces in Iraq captured the MEK’s weapons and turned the MEK over for investigation of terrorist acts. Since then, the group has been peeling off Iranian nuclear scientists one by one.

When I asked Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran, whether Israel was killing secondary or tertiary scientists instead of its major ones, he replied, “Israel kills any Iranians it can.”

The range of damage caused by the MEK is not confined to merely killing individuals. On October 12, just before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to arrive in Lebanon, a huge blast destroyed an underground site near the town of Khorramabad in western Iran that housed most of Iran’s Shehab-3 medium-range missiles capable of reaching Israel and Iraq. A far right-wing Israeli web site, Debka, reported that Iran has suffered a blow” to its nuclear program. The blast killed 18 and wounded several more. The MEK was strongly suspected as the killers, but “There is no conclusive evidence yet,” said Cannistraro. But one former senior US intelligence official said, “Israel did it using the MEK and Kurdish fighters.”

Early History

Mossad has a long history of killing opponents. At first, Israel viewed Palestinians as the chief threat, killing off several Black September assassins involved in the 1972 Munich massacres. In 1986, right-wingers in Israel plotted to kill Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and replace him with someone who would be unacceptable to the West. Mossad’s motives were not simply revenge, but a desire to ruin any chance of a Middle East peace. Israel’s moderates pointed out that Arafat was the legitimate leader of the Palestinians, and that, while the best of a bad lot, he was an educated man and courageous. The debate finally decided against killing him.

In the early 1980s, the chief threat to Israel’s existence was no longer Arafat, but Arab scientists. On June 7, 1981, in “Operation Sphinx,” Israel’s fighter planes destroyed the Iraq nuclear complex, Tamuze 17, at Osirak. Israel, then set out to eliminate Arab scientists that could be seen as a threat to Israel’s future security. “Israel has been killing Iranian or even Arab nuclear scientists for some time,” said a veteran CIA station chief.

A former senior Department of Defense (DoD) official said, “Israel killed Arab scientists without compunction.”

An incident recounted by former Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky in his book, “By Way of Deception,” (verified by my interview with him) told how Mossad targeted an Arab nuclear scientist, an Egyptian from Cairo, who assisted Iraq’s nuclear program after Osirak.

Mossad and Aman, Israel’s military intelligence group, did the planning, but it was Mossad that did the killing. Mossad’s chain of reasoning was Byzantine. Mossad officially believes that it kills only people who have Israeli blood on their hands, but the Egyptian had to be killed because he would have had the blood of Israel’s children on his hands if he had completed his nuclear project. So why wait?

The scientist was passionate about his work, having said he would pursue this program of building an Arab nuclear weapon even if it cost him his life. When he arrived for a stay in Paris, Mossad approached the scientist directly and tried to recruit him. They got a volley of abuse instead. Then, Mossad sent in a hooker. After the scientist had sex and had gone to sleep, two Mossad agents with a passkey got in and slit his throat.

His blood-soaked body was found by a chambermaid. Nothing had been stolen, no money, no documents. When the hooker heard about the matter, she was shocked. After all, she knew the man had been alive when she’d left him. To protect herself, she went to the French police and reported that when she had arrived, the scientist was angry because someone had approached him offering him money for information. After talking to the police, the hooker told her story to a colleague, who unknowingly passed it to a sayanim, a Mossad volunteer. Such people were all over Paris.

A few weeks later in July of 1982, the hooker was working on the Left Bank when a Mercedes pulled up and the driver asked her to come to his side of the car. As she leaned in to talk, another Mercedes came speeding up and the first driver suddenly pushed the hooker into the oncoming car. She was killed instantly.

Both victims were handled by Mossad in different ways. The hooker’s killing was classified as an “operational emergency.” The decision to kill her was made quickly and emanated from an ultra-secret internal system involving a formal “execution list,” that required the personal approval of the Israeli prime minister. The number of names on that list varied considerably. The request for a killing was made by Mossad to the prime minister. (Israeli targets are different from Jewish targets). The prime minister must sign the order, read the execution list and initial each name on it.

No state has any ethics, only its own interests, said a British diplomat, but Israel is just as remorseless a killer as any of its self-designated enemies. Israel’s training of the secret police of terrorist countries often gets it into trouble and compromises its stance as the region’s Western democracy. For example, until the fall of Iran’s shah, Israel trained the Third Department of SAVAK, the shah’s dreaded secret police. It sold weapons and intelligence to Serbian dictator Sloban Milosevic. When Israel wanted to obtain the head of an Exocet shipping missile, it agreed to train Chile’s secret police to kill its enemies. Mossad likes to keep its techniques to itself, but it trained Chile’s assassins and got its missile. In September 1976, I was three blocks away when I heard the blast along Embassy Row in Washington and found a gutted automobile and ambulances when I arrived. The victims were Orlando Letelier, 44, a former Chilean cabinet minister, and his American aide, Ronnie Moffit, 25. Israel wasn’t directly responsible – but indirectly it was.

The Rationale

As terrorist/intelligence correspondent for UPI, I wrote a story in January 2003 about how the Bush administration had given permission to Israel to assassinate on US soil. Following phone calls and a trip to Washington, I met with a former Israeli Defense Force member with ties to Israeli intelligence, Gal Luft. We talked a great deal about Israel’s assassinations, and Luft soon produced a masterful piece on it, “The Logic of Israel’s Targeted Killing,” for The Middle East Quarterly.

In it, Luft said that Israelis “dislike the term ‘assassination policy.’” He said that they would rather use another term, “extrajudicial punishment,” “selective targeting” or “long-range hot pursuit,” to describe this particular pillar of their counterterrorism doctrine. He then noted that, since the 1970s, “dozens of terrorists have been assassinated by Israel’s security forces, and in the two years of the Aqsa intifada, there have been at least 80 additional cases of Israel gunning down or blowing up Palestinian militants involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks.”

Luft acknowledged that many thought the killings illegal or operationally senseless because “assassinating Palestinian militants only brings harsh retaliatory action, resulting in even more Israeli casualties.” He conceded that it “infringes on the sovereignty of foreign political entities and because it gives the security services discretion to decide on the killing of certain individuals without due process.” But he concluded thus: “the policy does have shortcomings. What is less apparent is the profound cumulative effect of targeted killing on terrorist organizations. Constant elimination of their leaders leaves terrorist organizations in a state of confusion and disarray. Those next in line for succession take a long time to step into their predecessors’ shoes. They know that by choosing to take the lead, they add their names to Israel’s target list, where life is Hobbesian.”

Pillar recently mounted a brilliant counterargument to Luft in The National Interest, entitled “Deeper into Terrorism.” He said, “With or without confirmation of details of this story, the assassinations are terrorism. (The official US government definition of terrorism for reporting and statistic-keeping purposes is ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.’)”

Noting that assassination is immoral, he added, “Terrorism denies the high ground to anyone who uses it, including the use of it in disagreements with Iran. It also hastens the slide through mutually reinforcing hostility into what may be a far more destructive form of violence (i.e., a war). Although the United States has not been involved in the assassinations, the nature of its relationship with Israel, both real and perceived (President Obama commented the other day about staying in ‘lockstep’ with Israel on Iran), means that Israel’s actions suck the United States farther down the slide.”

Specialization

Assassinations used to be quick, sloppy, haphazard and often relied on luck. This has changed. Targeted killing today is much more sophisticated and requires a lot of preparation and training by different teams. There are those who plan an attack, but do not carry it out. The planning groups do research; rely on field reports, files, communications traffic. They observe the victims’ movements, their locales, the places they frequent, traffic patterns. They study logistics, escape routes, access. They provide cover stories, fake passports and false identities. They figure out where the target is likely to stay.

There can be complications. In the 1970s, a Mossad team mistakenly shot a Norwegian waiter, thinking he was Ali Hassan Salemheh, the mastermind of the Munich massacre. Phony identities and false passports can backfire. Six suspected Mossad agents were expelled by Dubai when it was found they were using forged Irish passports. Ireland replied by expelling an Israeli Embassy official.

The Logic of Events

Repeated insults to Iranian sovereignty meant that Tehran would one day begin to stage reprisals for Mossad killings in countries with an Israeli presence. Countries with weak security would be Iran’s battlefields of choice for hitting back at Israel.

This finally happened. On February 13, one of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah, launched attacks in New Delhi, Georgia and a site in Bangkok. The attack on Israel’s Embassy in New Delhi was well-planned and well-executed. It was possible only by painstaking collection of information regarding the movements and activities of Israeli diplomats, and a capability for undetected clandestine activity in Indian territory for the procurement of explosive material and the fabrication of the improvised explosive device (IED), according to a friend of this reporter, Bahukumbi Raman, a former senior official in India’s CIA. In an email with multiple recipients, Raman said the attack coincided with the fourth anniversary of the assassination of a senior leader of the Hezbollah in Damascus and the first anniversary of the death of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Teheran caused by a similar sticky bomb explosion.

Talya Yehoshua-Kioren, wife of the Defense Ministry representative in India, and three others were injured by a sticky bomb planted on her SUV. At almost exactly the same time, a similar device was safely defused in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi due to the detection and neutralization of the IED before it could explode.

Two theories immediately sprang to life. One was that Israel had faked the attacks itself; the other, that the Hezbollah proxies of Iran were the culprits. According to Pillar the second surmise was the correct one. “The wife of an Israeli Embassy official is a high value target,” he told me.

One serving intelligence official said, “The Iranian leadership has worked to reduce its own terrorist arm. Picking New Delhi or Georgia demonstrates Iran’s increasing desperation in the face of so many verbal attacks.”

A right-wing Israeli site, Debka, said, “… Iran and Hezbollah are clearly determined to keep on trying until they achieve their objective of killing targeted Israelis.”

The fear is that the vicious circle of Iran-Israeli reprisals will prove destabilizing to the world order. Several sources, including former US diplomats, told me that seeing your enemy as the seat of all evil in the world, being obsessed with the special wickedness of your opponent, blinds people to the logic of events. Seeing a foreign policy predicament as a melodrama with good versus bad freezes history into insoluble dilemmas where any common ground or parallel interests are irrelevant. Assassinations can change history, but they don’t necessarily achieve the long-term objectives of the agencies that employ them, said a former DoD official.

The basis of Israel’s lavish financing of the MEK is to try to delay any Iranian progress towards a nuclear weapon, even if Iran has not decided to make one, but the fear that Iran might have a weapon calls up a vision of Iran as “a regional marauder that would recklessly throw its weight around the Middle East in damaging ways, according to Pillar. And he pointed out that there is already such a state in the Middle East. It is Israel.

In The National Interest, he said, “This state invades neighboring countries, ruthlessly inflicting destruction on civilian populations, and seizes and colonizes territory through military force. It also uses terrorist group proxies as well as its own agents to conduct assassinations in other countries in the region.” Pillar still holds these views.

In a 2009 article for Middle East Times, this reporter interviewed Pat Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, about Israel’s assassinations. He said, “That’s what the Israelis would do, what we would expect them to do. They would kill Iranian scientists.”

Asked about the mounting administration disapproval, Clawson said of the killings, “It would be implausible to call off all covert ops.” He added, “If the US pressures Israel, then the Israelis will simply stop talking to us about it.”

Pillar pointed out that unlike Iran, Israel has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or admitted an international inspector to any of its nuclear facilities and, in fact, Israel “has kept its nuclear program completely out of reach of any international scrutiny or arms control regime and does not even acknowledge the program’s existence. It is so intent on maintaining its regional nuclear weapons monopoly.”

He added, “The United States needs to distance itself as much as possible from this ugliness, for the sake of adhering to its own principles as well as trying to avoid sliding any further toward catastrophe.” Pillar confirmed these views in an interview.

A former senior US military official summed it up, “Israel is out of step with American policy.”

Richard Sale was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, with his entry given a National Press Club Award for “excellence in diplomatic reporting” in 1989. He has been reporting on intelligence since 1977. Sale’s book, “Clinton’s Secret Wars,” was selected by the History and Military Book Clubs and Book of the Month Club.

Photo: CIA; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t

This report was originally published on Truthout.

Last September, the CIA quietly changed its long-standing policy for how it would process certain records requests by implementing a new fee structure that will essentially discourage the public from trying to get the agency to declassify secret government documents because the costs are too high, open-government advocates have charged.

The policy, which the CIA started to enforce last December, applies to Mandatory Declassification Reviews (MDR), a procedure under a section of an executive order signed by President Obama (which replaced a similar executive order signed by former President Bush), that allows the public to seek the declassification of specific CIA records and appeal unfavorable rulings to an independent panel.

Truthout filed several MDR’s last year to try and gain access to materials in custody of the CIA that were written by a high-value detainee and other classified documents pertaining to the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. All except one of our requests were made prior to the implementation of the new regulations.

“Overnight, without public comment or notice, the [CIA] decreed that declassification reviews would now cost requesters up to $72 per hour, even if no information is found or released,” wrote Nate Jones of George Washington University’s National Security Archive, a historical research group that files numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and publishes declassified documents.

Previously, the CIA charged the public fees that were on par with general requests for agency records filed under FOIA. Jones, who first spotted the policy changes in the Federal Register, said the new regulations are “are a covert attack on the most effective tool, [MDR], that the public uses to declassify the CIA’s secret documents” and undercuts the transparency promises Barack Obama made after he was sworn in as president three years ago.

The CIA said it made the changes after conducting a review of public MDR regulations “that govern certain aspects of its processing of MDR requests,” according to language contained in the Federal Register.

“As a result of this review, the Agency has revised its MDR regulations to more clearly reflect the current CIA organizational structure and policies and practices…,” the agency said. “This rule is being issues as a final rule without prior notice of porposed rulemaking as allowed by the Administrative Procedure Act for rules of agency procedure and interpretation.”

The CIA then goes on to break down the exorbitant new costs associated with searches analysts conduct for responsive records pertaining to MDR requests.

But a lawsuit filed last week against the agency in US District Court in Washington, DC, aims to void the changes the CIA made to its MDR regulations and declare it a willful violation of the law.

The complaint was filed by attorneys Bradley Moss and Kel McClanahan on behalf of Jeff Stein, the veteran reporter who has written extensively about intelligence and national security-related issues; Katelyn Sack, a University of Virginia graduate student conducting research on lie detectors; and Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents national security whistleblowers. Zaid is also the founder of the James Madison Project, an organization that works to reduce government secrecy. McClanahan is the executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based public interest law firm National Security Counselors, which is also listed as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. (Full disclosure: McClanahan is representing this reporter in a FOIA lawsuit filed earlier this month against the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies.)

What’s unusual about the lawsuit is that it seeks class-action status on behalf of all of the individuals who filed MDR’s and were impacted by the CIA’s new fee structure. McClanahan said he has requested the CIA provide him with copies of all the MDR responses the agency issued last year so he could determine the exact number of people affected by the CIA’s “declassification tax.” The lawsuit demands the CIA “contact every MDR requester whose request was wrongfully rejected and offer the opportunity to reinstate their respective requests and then process accordingly.”

The complaint, in addition to leveling claims that the CIA violated federal law associated with the new MDR fees, also alleges the agency has violated provisions of FOIA – and three decades of case law – by “unilaterally declaring that requesters are not allowed to limit the amount of money they will spend on FOIA requests,” McClanahan said.

The CIA has done this by first demanding that FOIA requesters agree to pay all fees for records or the agency will refuse to process the request. Moreover, the lawsuit alleges the CIA “violated FOIA by counting time spent by computers performing automated searches for fee purposes.”

“The entire point of this lawsuit is to expose and invalidate some of the CIA’s most problematic information access policies,” McClanahan said in an email. “Not only did the CIA unlawfully bypass the entire notice and comment process when publishing this rule, citing an exception to normal rulemaking procedures that only applies in very narrow circumstances (none of which are even close to relevant here), but even had the CIA followed the rules when promulgating this regulation, it would have been against the express will of all three branches of government.”

“Nearly forty years ago the Supreme Court stated that while it is legal to charge individuals reasonable fees for government services, according to a law passed by Congress and signed by the President, it was not legal to charge individuals for services which benefited the public generally,” McClanahan added. “In this era of purported transparency, it is outrageous to argue that declassifying information that no longer needs to remain secret is not in the public interest. Not only is this fee hike unwise, it’s illegal.”

The CIA would not comment on the litigation.

Since Jones revealed the new MDR fee structure earlier this month, more than three dozen good-government groups, including Jones’ National Security Archive, sent a letter to the CIA last week calling upon the agency to reverse the new fee policy.

The letter said the new rules “price the public out of submitting MDR requests.”

“Unlike FOIA requests, if an agency fails to declassify and release the information under the MDR process, requesters can appeal the agency’s decision to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) for independent review,” the letter states. “According to the Information Security Oversight Office, ISCAP officials have overruled agency classification decisions more than 65 percent of the time since 1996.”

Additionally, the transparency advocacy organization, OpentheGovernent.org, has been asking individuals to sign an online petition demanding the CIA “withdraw this retrograde regulation.”

Kenneth F. Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, which provided McClanahan’s law firm with a grant to file the lawsuit, said the CIA is “an out-of-control agency that wants to operate with accountability to no one.”

“We understand and even appreciate that secrecy is inherent in their culture,” Bunting said. “But allowing them to operate with total disregard for rules and laws that affect the rest of government serves no good national interest.”

McClanahan, whose law firm is also a signatory to the letter, said the pressure good-government groups are placing on the CIA via the petition and letter-writing campaign “complements our litigation perfectly. ”

“I will toast our success if this campaign results in the voluntary reversal of this policy, but I still hold out hope that this case will result in no agency being able to do this ever again,” he said. “The fact that a letter-writing campaign was even necessary in the first place is the reason we filed this suit.”

Turns out that after all the investigations in a raft of countries, a virtual treasure trove of never-seen-before documents has reached the major European legal charity, Reprieve.

As a result, Reprieve is calling on Lithuanian authorities to re-open their investigation into CIA renditions and secret prisons on their own soil, and to focus on a newly-discovered web of new documents exposing well-disguised CIA flights through Europe that demonstrate the European Union’s complicity in the CIA’s secret prisons program.

Reprieve charges that “data focusing on Lithuania, but linked to suspected CIA activity in a raft of other countries in Europe, North America, the Middle East and North Africa, has been identified by Reprieve investigators and passed to the Lithuanian prosecutor.”

In a letter to Lithuania’s Deputy Prosecutor General, Darius Raulušaitis, Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith said: “Compelling new information that has now come to light about the landings of CIA-connected planes in Lithuania makes a rigorous and wide-ranging investigation all the more urgent. It is now clear that previous efforts to chart the extent of the CIA’s rendition operations in Europe revealed ONLY the tip of the iceberg.”

Reprieve claims that the new documents show that:

• Lithuania’s attempts to establish what the CIA did in the country between 2004-06 have been oddly unsuccessful, failing to identify key clues to several potential rendition flights;
• Two flights entered Lithuania from Morocco and Bucharest – known secret prison sites – in February 2005, around the time that ‘High Value Detainee’ Abu Zubaydah was transferred to a CIA black site in Lithuania;
• A crucial plane identified by the previous Lithuanian inquiry (registered as N787WH) tried to disguise its true destination (Lithuania) by filing a route plan to Gothenburg, Sweden;
• Many other European countries now linked to the CIA’s rendition flight program have questions to answer, including Austria, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Jordan, Portugal, Romania and the USA;

Filling in key details, Reprieve said:

• Documents recently released by Reprieve show how the US-based conglomerate, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), contracted a Richmor Aviation plane, N85VM, to perform renditions and other government missions on behalf of the CIA between 2002 and 2005.

• Confidential documents in possession of Reprieve show that the same corporation contracted two other jets in February 2005 to fly into Lithuania from two other known secret prison sites: Morocco and Bucharest. The flight plans of each plane included multiple stop-offs, and multiple possibilities for disguising the true provenance and purpose of the flights. The arrival of these planes in Lithuania was confirmed by a freedom of information request made jointly by Reprieve and Access Info Europe.

• The planes flew into Lithuania within 24 hours of each other in February 2005 – significant timing in the light of public source accounts stating that “high value detainee” Abu Zubaydah was moved from Morocco to Lithuania around this time.

• Records collected by a previous Lithuanian inquiry showed that a plane registered as N787WH flew from Bucharest, Romania to Lithuania on 18 February 2005. Documents obtained by Reprieve and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights show that this plane disguised its true destination by filing a route plan to Gothenburg, Sweden. Furthermore, it has yet to be disclosed where this plane stopped prior to Bucharest; in particular, the question arises as to whether it shared some of the same stop-off points as N724CL, which landed in Lithuania en route from Morocco on the previous day.

• Freedom of Information replies from the Lithuanian Civil Aviation Authority, showing the landings of N724CL and N787WH in Lithuania; from Vilnius Airport, confirming the landing of N724CL in Vilnius; and from the Polish civil aviation authority showing the overflight permission for N787WH and its disguised route plan (to Gothenburg) are available on Reprieve’s website.

Lydia Medland of Access Info Europe said: “Once information about violations of human rights has come to light through compliance with the public’s right to know, government have an obligation both to act on this information and to ensure that they release all other related documents.”

Access Info Europe is a human rights organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the right of access to information in Europe and globally as a tool for holding governments accountable.

Computer Sciences Corporation is an American information technology (IT) and outsourcing company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. It is one of the largest independent outsourcing organizations in the world,  employing about 93,000 people in 90 countries.

Amid the intense white noise surrounding the killing of bin Laden and al-Awlaki, the trial of the so-called “underwear bomber”, and the recent alleged terrorist plots against the homeland, extraordinary rendition and CIA black sites have virtually vanished from the news.

The Washington DC press corps seems quite content taking down its stenography and presenting it as news. I can find no evidence that Reprieve’s latest disclosures resulted in any coverage whatsoever from the Beltway press corps, either in print or on radio or television.

Is it important that the public has a way to access this kind of information? You betcha! A government’s commitment to transparency – not just in words but in actions – is a pretty good barometer of how well it trusts its own people. When governments stonewall, it is those very people – taxpayers and voters – who begin to distrust those it hired to do the people’s business.

President Obama promised a new era of transparency and accountability when he took office. American citizens are still waiting for him to deliver.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

It could just be coincidence, of course. But just as a huge scandal unfolds in Washington over a seemingly botched guns-drug operation, and a possibly cover-up by Attorney General Eric Holder, the Department of Justice has announced a big crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, long the leader in the medical marijuana movement. Something is very wrong here.

The guns-drug operation, run through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), was titled “Fast and Furious.” According to the Arizona Republic (h/t bmaz), it was “a federal gun-trafficking investigation that put hundreds of rifles and handguns from Arizona into the hands of criminals in Mexico.” “Legal guidance” to the BATF was provided through the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office. As the botched operation became known, an early casualty of the scandal was AZ U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, who resigned over the affair last August. Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of the BATF, would follow Burke out months later.

How botched was this operation, run, according to Congressional testimony, with help from the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement? According to a Jan. 8, 2010 briefing paper (PDF) from the BATF Phoenix Field Division Group, from September 2009 through January 2010 (date of the briefing), at least 20 gun traffickers had “purchased in excess of 650 firearms (mainly AK-47 variants) for which they have paid cash totaling more than $350,000.” According to news reports, ultimately, the number of guns sent over the border to Mexican drug cartels would number in the thousands, including hundreds of weapons to the brutal Sinaloa drug cartel. Meanwhile, ATF honchos watched the sales over closed-circuit video feed.

In December 2010, a Border Patrol agent was gunned down by a weapon traced to the “Fast and Furious” program, and that was too much for one BATF whistleblower: “Senior agents including [John] Dodson told CBS News they confronted their supervisors over and over…. “We just knew it wasn’t going to end well. There’s just no way it could,” Dodson said.

And what happened to all those guns, which were supposed to be tracked by U.S. agents? The BATF says it simply lost track of the weapons, which beggars all sense. As reported at Forbes:

ATF field agents were sending protests up their chain of command, because, as ATF Special Agent John Dodson told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011, he and fellow agents were regularly ordered to abandon surveillance of suspicious gun purchases “knowing all the while that just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico”….

ATF Special Agent Olindo James Casa also said at the June hearing that “on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms.”

According to Washington Times journalists Robert Farago and Ralph Dixon in an article last August, the Fast and Furious program was a cover-story for a covert CIA program to arm the Sinaloa cartel in prevent the competing Los Zetas cartel from staging a coup against the Mexican government. And — shades of the late Gary Webb! — the journalists claim the relationship extended to “(allowing) the Sinaloas to fly a 747 cargo plane packed with cocaine into American airspace – unmolested.”

First, the government instructed gun dealers to sell guns to suspicious characters, which were then “walked” across the border. Then the government failed to inform Mexican authorities anything about the operation (possibly because they didn’t trust them?). In any case, we are supposed to believe that government authorities simply lost track of the weapons?

The Dirty History of the CIA and the War on Drugs

The U.S. intelligence agencies have a long history of using drug running and drug proceeds to finance off-the-books covert activities, including wars, the buying of elected officials, and the smuggling of weapons to favored groups. The late Gary Webb, referenced above, was castigated by the mainstream press, did ground-breaking work on the connection between gun-running to the Contras, paid for by cocaine trafficking in the U.S., officially denied by the U.S. government, but later documented in Congressional hearings by John Kerry (see this 2004 Salon article). Webb lost his career and later his life to bring the truth to the American people.

The GOP and the right will only threaten Obama and Holder with scandal up to a point. They certainly will pull back before the intel community cries uncle too loudly, and only seek to investigate to smear the Obama administration, not to really blow the lid off sixty years of U.S. dirty games with drug traffickers.

The links between the CIA and Mexican drug cartels were highlighted recently in the federal criminal case against alleged Sinaloa cartel “kingpin,” Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. According to an article by Bill Conroy at Narcosphere, “US government prosecutors filed pleadings in the case late last week seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a measure designed to assure national security information does not surface in public court proceedings.” Why CIPA in this case? Niebla has asserted in court filings last July that “the US government… [cut] a deal with the the ‘Sinaloa Cartel’ that gave its leadership ‘carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States.’”

The use of the supposed war on drugs to hide money, guns and influence, and at times to actually deal drugs at the behest of the government has been the subject of some notable and influential investigations over the years. Besides Webb, there was Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, and more recently, Douglas Valentine’s The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs.

Guns to Drug Lords, Jail for Medicinal Marijuana Club Owners

The GOP and right-wing press has been having a field day with this story, and the sudden appearance of documents showing Holder was briefed on the program when he appeared to say he knew nothing about it, has sharpened the GOP’s talons, out for Administration blood.

So what’s an embattled DoJ to do? They appear to have decided now is a good time to crack down on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, the better to burnish their anti-drug credentials. According to the Washington Post, “at least 16 pot shops or their landlords received letters this week warning face they would face criminal charges and confiscation of their property if the dispensaries do not shut down in 45 days.”

A story at NPR suggests the roots for the crackdown are in a memo put out last June by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole. Noting that the Administration’s policy had been that limited funds precluded going after pot sold to caregivers and the ill, Cole announced that things had changed (bold emphasis added):

The Department’s view of the efficient use of limited federal resources as articulated in the Ogden Memorandum has not changed. There has, however, been an increase in the scope of commercial cultivation, sale, distribution and use of marijuana for purported medical purposes….

The Ogden Memorandum was never intended to shield such activities from federal enforcement action and prosecution, even where those activities purport to comply with state law. Persons who are in the business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law. Consistent with resource constraints and the discretion you may exercise in your district, such persons are subject to federal enforcement action, including potential prosecution. State laws or local ordinances are not a defense to civil or criminal enforcement of federal law….

The Obama administration has taken a much tougher line when it comes to the recreational or medicinal user of marijuana than it does to drug cartel gangsters. And the GOP, anxious to make Holder look bad, will line up behind the anti-marijuana crusade.

Truly the hypocrisy in this country is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a buzz saw. There should be investigations over the “Fast and Furious” operation and possible intelligence connections to the drug cartels; meanwhile, the administration should pull back from their anti-marijuana stance. The drug should not be illegal, but licensed, controlled, and sold commercially for the relatively mild intoxicant that it is, one that also has some beneficial medical uses (just like alcohol!). Abuse of the drug is a matter for public health policy, not jails.

Originally published on The Dissenter.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

mam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen October 2008. Photo: Muhammad ud-Deen/Wikimedia.

Now that U.S.-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has been killed by a drone strike in Yemen, human rights groups and legal experts are again debating the central question: Was it legal?

And today, as was the case in previous discussions of this question, the answer seems far from unanimous.

Most of the major human rights groups condemned the killing as an affront to the U.S. Justice system and the values underlying it.

Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “U.S. airstrikes in Yemen today killed an American citizen who has never been charged with any crime.”

He added, “The targeted killing program violates both U.S. and international law. As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts. The government’s authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific and imminent. It is a mistake to invest the President – any President – with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country.”

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which had previously brought a challenge in federal court to the legality of the authorization to target U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, agrees.

He said, “The assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki by American drone attacks is the latest of many affronts to domestic and international law. The targeted assassination program that started under President Bush and expanded under the Obama administration essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight, or any of

the rights afforded by our Constitution. If we allow such gross overreaches of power to continue, we are setting the stage for increasing erosions of civil liberties and the rule of law.”

A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization reiterated that the calls to violence made by Anwar al-Awlaki, “have been firmly rejected by American Muslims.”

In a statement reacting to al-Awlaki’s death, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said:

“As we have stated repeatedly in the past, the American Muslim community firmly repudiated Anwar al-Awlaki’s incitement to violence, which occurred after he left the United States. While a voice of hate has been eliminated, we urge our nation’s leaders to address the constitutional issues raised by the assassination of American citizens without due process of law.”

Law professors we contacted are not quite so unanimous.

For example, Marjorie Cohn a professor at the Thomas Jefferson law school, told us, “Targeted assassinations violate international law. Sometimes called political assassinations or extrajudicial executions, they are unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. They are unlawful, even in armed conflict.”

She noted that a 1998 United Nations report concluded that “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.”

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law described the killing as “a real body blow against the United States Constitution by the Obama administration — the murder and assassination of a U.S. citizen in gross violation of the Fifth Amendment: ‘No person shall …be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.’ The fact that this Mafia-style ‘hit’ on a U.S. citizen was authorized by President Obama, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School and used to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School proves how degraded and bankrupt legal education at such elite institutions has become.”

But Prof. Peter M. Shane of Ohio State law school takes a different view. He told us, “I don’t think there’s much real doubt that the killing was lawful. The right to use military force for national self-defense is recognized by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The Authorization to Use Military Force enacted in the wake of 9/11 explicitly authorizes the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those . . . organizations . . . he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, . . . in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

He concluded: “There is no question that this authorization allows the use of military force against al Qaeda, and it likewise seems beyond dispute that al-Awlaki sought out and played a leadership role in al Qaeda or a co- belligerent organization, continuing to both plan and call for attacks against the United States and Americans. As a citizen of the United States, al- Awlaki may well have been entitled to some form of ‘due process’ in the determination that he was actually at war with the United States; I imagine that what due process requires in cases like his, however, is a course of fact- finding within the executive branch that is stringent in its rigor and intensity. I would be surprised to learn that such fact-finding had not taken place, especially since the facts justifying his targeting seem clear.”

But some of the most forceful rejections of Prof. Shane’s position came from two journalists, both of whom are lawyers.

Scott Horton, Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine, told us that “the manner of Al-Awlaki’s death raises a series of important questions about U.S. policies concerning targeted killings or extrajudicial executions.”

He continued: “The broader problem is this: if it’s okay for the United States to kill al-Awlaki in Yemen, then why wouldn’t it be okay for the Russians to plant a car bomb in a vehicle used by a Chechen leader in London or Vienna, or for the Chinese to drop a bomb on a Uighur in Istanbul or Athens? The conditions in Yemen and the dysfunctionality of the criminal justice system there would be critical points for a distinction–and it is therefore extremely important for the White House to speak up and explain itself. Covering everything with the curtain of “covert action” only serves to undermine our security in the end if it makes us look capricious or foolish.”

And Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon.com, was even more unshakable in his view that the US had committed an egregious error that would come back to haunt the nation for years to come. He declared, “The due-process- free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality.”

He wrote, “It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was ‘considering’ indicting him).”

He continued: “Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.”

Greenwald added, “The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced. What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Stencil graffiti of Osama bin Laden in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Bixentro / flickr)

Editor’s Note: A slightly different version of this report was originally published on Truthout on  June 13, 2011.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, just as he has done in years past, a top military intelligence analyst identified by the US government only as “Iron Man” will hunker down in front of his television and watch a particularly gruesome scene of the carnage left behind on that fateful day.

“Although I try to avoid it, I glimpse a film clip, a scene, of people throwing themselves from a burning tower, people who deserved better protection from their country, from me and the men I worked with, and I hear the sounds of the lobby in the [World Trade Center] on tape,” said the man, whose alter ego chosen by the government appears to be paying homage to the flawed Marvel Comics superhero. “To me, the sights and sounds, the smoke of that day are not yet history. They are a knot, a silence, a facial tick, a missing friend in Iraq. They are not history yet.”

For many Americans, the emotional reaction to President Barack Obama’s announcement that a Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid at his compound in Pakistan was celebratory. But for others, like the mysterious Iron Man, who has spent his career lurking in the shadows, the death of the al-Qaeda leader is a painful reminder of how close he and his colleagues in the intelligence community came to capturing Bin Laden before 9/11.

The “intelligence failures” leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are an issue the media – and lawmakers – put to bed years ago, despite the fact that new information continues to trickle out, undercutting the integrity of the official investigations into who knew what and when.

It was an exclusive story Truthout published May 23 in the wake of Bin Laden’s death, focusing on a little-known intelligence unit ordered to stop tracking his movements prior to 9/11, that led Iron Man to contact Truthout to share previously undisclosed documents he recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which appear to cast further doubt on the official narrative and suggests high-level military and intelligence officials withheld key evidence from Congressional lawmakers probing the attacks.

The materials Iron Man provided to Truthout stand as the most revealing information to surface in years regarding Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States.

This is the first page of “Iron Man’s” complaint to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General related to intelligence work he did on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. [Click here to download and read the documents.]

Formal Complaint

Five years ago, Iron Man, who requested Truthout conceal his true identity out of concern for his family’s privacy, lodged a formal complaint with the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General after he was accused of improperly handling classified material.

Iron Man filed a FOIA request in September 2006, seeking a declassified copy of the six-page complaint he filed with the inspector general’s office. He finally received a copy on April 8, just a few weeks prior to the raid on Bin Laden’s compound.

What he revealed in that letter, portions of which were redacted by the government because the information is classified, is the inner workings of an elite intelligence unit he headed at one point: the Asymmetric Threats Division, formed in 1999, and “charged with reporting on asymmetric threats, especially terrorism.”

The unit worked with Joint Task Force-Civil Support (JTF-CS), also set up in 1999. According to the Defense Department (DoD), JTF-CS was charged with supporting “terrorist response operations in the continental US” and providing “military assistance to civil authorities.”

The Asymmetric Threats Division is referred to as DO5, a branch of the Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), whose responsibilities included, among other things, vetting human intelligence sources on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). From 1998 to 2001, Iron Man was working as a counterterrorism/counterintelligence analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), assigned to JFIC.

JFIC falls under the authority of the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and “had a direct and assigned purview on international terrorism against the US, to include the operations of al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attackers.”

In 2005, it was renamed the Joint Intelligence Command for Intelligence. Last month, JFCOM was shuttered, reportedly due to Pentagon budget cuts, and as a subcommand, JFIC was believed to have been disbanded along with it.

Much of JFIC’s work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy and has not been cited in media reports revolving around pre-9/11 intelligence, which has focused heavily over the past decade on CIA and FBI “intelligence failures.” Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced since then, notably in reports published by Truthout.

JFIC was responsible for, among other things, monitoring Bin Laden and other suspected terrorists who resided in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 and was charged with constructing likely scenarios that could be carried out by terrorists and possible government responses.

“JFIC’s role” and the DoD’s “role, in the pursuit of al-Qa’ida before 9/11 and timely analysis of the targets actually struck by the 9/11 attackers have remained unknown even to senior DoD officials,” Iron Man’s complaint letter says.

Iron Man noted that the “motivation for this complaint is multi-faceted.” He said the “purpose” of the letter  “is to formally complain” to the inspector general that “JFIC, when instructed in or before May 2002 to provide all original material it might have relevant to al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attacks for a Congressional inquiry, intentionally misinformed the Department of Defense that it had no purview on such matters and no such material.”

Moreover, there has never been a public accounting of the work conducted by DO5. But Iron Man’s letter provides deep insight into the secret military intelligence group’s highly classified activities.

Tracking Terrorists

DO5 was “a fore-runner of current all-source fusion centers,” the letter Iron Man wrote says. Individuals assigned to the unit had “a wide mix of skills” in intelligence disciplines, including human and open-source intelligence, signals intelligence and imagery and signature intelligence.

DO5 drafted “numerous original reports … identifying probable and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar,” including likely identification of the house where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allegedly planned the 9/11 attacks.

From 1999 to 2001, the intelligence unit also “conducted imagery analysis of Jalalabad and Qandahar” and other parts of Afghanistan as they were “pulled into a community-wide initiative on al-Qa’ida.”

The letter further states, “DO5 was able to ‘scoop’ [the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency],” an agency which played a crucial role in identifying the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden had been hiding.

According to US government officials, it was one of Bin Laden’s most trusted couriers, whom intelligence operatives identified about five years ago, that led the CIA to pinpoint Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.

But Iron Man’s 2006 letter states that DO5 worked closely with DIA and was instrumental in identifying “a likely financial courier” for al-Qaeda, one who may have led intelligence officials directly to Bin Laden before 9/11.

Early Intelligence Pointed to the World Trade Center, Pentagon

In 2002, following his departure to DIA, Iron Man returned to JFIC to teach two classes on asymmetric warfare, and he kept “numerous” slides related to DO5′s work on “pre-9/11 briefings.”

As Iron Man explained in his letter of complaint to DoD’s inspector general, “upon my arrival at DIA, I had these documents e-mailed from JFIC to my DIA account, so that I could use them as references for the asymmetric warfare course I was drafting for DIA, and as references for any future counter-terrorism work I might pursue at DIA.”

It appears that the allegation Iron Man mishandled classified material stems from a decision he made to email the briefing slides to his DIA account. Iron Man declined to elaborate about the circumstances of the allegations leveled against him. Still, what he reveals in his carefully worded letter in response to those charges is explosive.

“I kept the original classifications on the slides, as historical documents, although the fact that al-Qa’ida was likely to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was clearly no longer classified.” (Emphasis added.)

Iron Man further elaborated on this point by stating that high-level DoD officials held discussions about DO5′s intelligence activities between the summer of 2000 and June 2001 revolving around al-Qaeda’s interest in striking the Pentagon, the World Trade Center (WTC), and other targets.

In other words, the Bush administration was fully aware the terrorist organization had set its sights on those structures prior to 9/11 and, apparently, government officials failed to act on those warnings.

For example, Iron Man states in his letter that in the summer of 2000, DO5 briefed USJFCOM senior intelligence officials and staffers, including the deputy commander in chief, on the “WMD Threat to the U.S.”

Iron Man describes a “sensitive,” “oral briefing” that took place that summer “indicating that the World Trade Centers #1 and #2 were the most likely buildings to be attacked [by al-Qaeda], followed closely by the Pentagon. The briefer indicated that the worst case scenario would be one tower collapsed onto another.”

Furthermore, as he states in his letter, Iron Man was certain that such a scenario was part of a “red cell analysis” discussion that took place prior to the intelligence briefing and included a finding that the buildings “could be struck by a jetliner.” He wrote that there was a suggestion about alerting WTC security and engineering or architectural staff, “but the idea was not further explored because of a command climate discouraging contact with the civilian community.”

One official who attended the DO5 briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander in chief (DCINC), USJFCOM (Iron Man’s complaint does not identify Meyer by name, but notes the presence of the “DCINC” for USJFCOM). But despite the red flags raised during the briefing, Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.’”

Mayer retired from the Navy in 2003 and was hired by defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Intelligence Withheld From Congress

Even worse, according to Iron Man’s letter, the information DO5 had collected about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the lead up to 9/11 was withheld from Congress after the House and Senate Intelligence Committees launched an investigation into the attacks.

“When the Justice Department requested all documents relating to 9/11 from DoD in May 2002, I notified [redacted] in the DIA Congressional Affairs office that I retained these documents,” Iron Man’s letter states. “I spoke to [redacted] JFIC DI1 [an individual who works in the command administrative staff], who informed me that JFIC had already submitted a response without any documents. I was surprised and disappointed when my successor at DO5 [redacted] notified me of the full JFIC non-response. I notified [redacted] in the Congressional Affairs office, and was told to submit the documents as DIA documents, with an explanatory e-mail. I did so on 29 May 2002, presuming (probably correctly) that the documents might be overlooked, since they originated at JFIC. I forwarded copies to [redacted] (who was departing JFIC that week), (his subordinate), and [redacted] (who was also departing JFIC that week).”

A DoD spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees also did not respond to calls for comment.

After raising his concerns, Iron Man, who from late 2000 to June 2001 was acting head of DO5, was told by his former boss that JFIC’s formal response to Congress’ inquiries was that “al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks had been outside JFIC’s purview and that JFIC consequently held no material on those issues,” which was a lie.

Iron Man’s boss said, “He insisted [to officials who responded to the Congressional inquiries] that such was not the case, but was told this was JFIC’s response.”

Iron Man wrote that “many people” working at government agencies were knowledgeable about JFIC’s “role in preparing original analysis” on al-Qaeda, including officials at the CIA, NCIS, USJFCOM, DIA and NSA, whose names were redacted in the letter he sent to DoD’s inspector general.

However, after conducting at least 300 interviews and reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, the final report issued by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in December 2002, into “Intelligence Community Activities Before And After The Terrorist Attacks Of September 11, 2001” did not cite any of DO5′s work on al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or the fact that the intelligence unit was able to identify the terrorist group’s top two targets in the US. The later 2004 9/11 Commission Report did not mention DO5 or JFIC.

Flawed DoD Investigation

Although the inspector general acted on Iron Man’s complaint and launched an investigation, the findings of the probe, outlined in a report, declassified last year, previously reported by Truthout, was highly flawed and failed to address Iron Man’s charges that intelligence was withheld from Congress.

Indeed, it appears the author of the inspector general’s report confused Congress’ investigation into the 9/11 attacks with the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9/11 Commission, created in late 2002 by legislation passed by Congress. The inspector general’s report insisted it did not find any “evidence that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command misled Congress by withholding operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission.”

But Iron Man’s complaint specifically addressed intelligence withheld from Congress’ inquiries into the 9/11 attacks, not the independent panel’s probe, thereby dismissing an allegation Iron Man had never made.

Iron Man told Truthout the inspector general’s final report “was, shall we say, very incorrect, and intentionally did not address the full scope of the [his] complaint. ”

The watchdog did not tackle another of Iron Man’s explosive claims about DO5 briefings that centered on “numerous examples and suggestions of how [Osama bin Laden] was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the [intelligence community].”

One such briefing held for a “DIA senior intelligence officer on counterterrorism” was entitled “The Search (for Osama bin Laden) – A [commander in chief] Level View,” which included “a compendium of imagery of [a] suspected [Bin Laden] house dating from 23 August 1999 until 11 April 2000.”

At the briefing, intelligence officials were informed that “eleven special reports” by DO5 had been disseminated in the “Daily Intelligence Summary on [Bin Laden], Taliban leadership, Afghan military movements, UN locations, and the economic status of Afghanistan.”

Another briefing for the counterintelligence/counterterrorism chief at NCIS, and about 30 NCIS agents, “clearly stated the JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division monitored ‘worldwide [counterterrorism/counterintelligence] traffic’ and routinely prepared ‘analytic reports’ and ‘supplements national agencies with original intelligence on [Bin Laden] and Afghanistan.’”

Congress was kept in the dark about those discussions and was not shown the documents distributed to intelligence officials at the briefings. The inspector general never bothered to find out why. Remarkably, the watchdog stated in its report, “JFIC did not have the mission to track Usama Bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.”

Iron Man told Truthout it was key intelligence withheld from Congress about al-Qaeda and Bin Laden’s pre-9/11 activities that also played a part in his decision to file a complaint with the inspector general.

“My concern was not only that the 9/11 commission had not been informed, but the larger Congress, in its larger oversight responsibilities, had also not been informed,” he said.

A Heavy Burden

What remains unclear is exactly what took place back in May 2006 that prompted Iron Man’s complaint to the inspector general, given that the issues he had raised centered on events that unfolded four years earlier.

The answer to that question can be found in these passages of Iron Man’s letter, particularly the last few sentences:

“I do believe that knowledge of the work done by DO5 would add to DoD’s understanding of its role in the events leading up to 9/11, and how to avoid future attacks,” Iron Man wrote. “I have been falsely accused of revealing classified information on DO5′s work, when I am certain that information is not and has not been classified since 9/11, and I do want to see myself cleared of that false accusation.

“In addition, I and the deputy of that team, [redacted], especially carried the burden of knowledge of how close DoD came to bin Ladin and perhaps being able to reduce the number of lives lost on 9/11 …”

The deputy whose name the government redacted from Iron Man’s letter, is believed to be Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain and intelligence analyst, who was working for the US Army as a contractor in Iraq and disappeared in October 2003 while traveling between Tikrit and Kirkuk. A computer, a briefcase containing $40,000, and other materials were found in von Ackerman’s vehicle after he went missing.

Because von Ackerman’s name was classified in the complaint Iron Man filed with the inspector general, he could not confirm whether von Ackerman is the individual he was referring to.

Just three months after Iron Man filed his complaint with DoD’s inspector general, in August 2006, the Army Criminal Investigative Service concluded that von Ackerman had been kidnapped and killed. His remains have never been found nor has anyone claimed responsibility for his death.

Von Ackerman’s tragic story has been previously reported by journalist-blogger Susie Dow on the web site e Pluribus Media, but has largely remained under the radar. In a May 6 article she published on her personal blog, Dow identified von Ackermann as a member of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threats Division. Iron Man’s complaint suggests he ultimately became deputy chief of DO5.

In October 2006, Dow wrote that von Ackermann was “assigned to a counterterrorism team.”

“You’ll find no mention of either Kirk von Ackermann or his team in the 9-11 Commission report…. Well before 9-11, Kirk von Ackermann predicted aircraft could be hijacked and used as weapons against the United States. He also predicted potential targets.”

Von Ackerman’s wife, Megan von Ackerman, has maintained a blog called “Missing in Iraq,” dedicated to her missing husband. In March 2006, she wrote that her husband had planned for such a catastrophic event, but his warnings were ignored:

“… When 9/11 happened everyone around us reacted as normal, civilians would – shock, horror, fear … but Kirk, isolated from the intelligence and military community of people who knew what he knew, felt what he felt, was essentially alone,” Megan von Ackerman wrote. “For a year he had spent his days imagining just this sort of scenario. He had come up with countless plans, evaluated targets, totaled up casualties and estimated political value. He had thought like a terrorist so he could stop them. Now he had to watch it made horribly real – the nightmare he had worked so hard to avoid … Kirk had tried to make the warning, he had worked endless hours to stop this very thing happening. He knew he had no guilt that he had been ignored. But he retained an enormous sense of responsibility – not only for what happened, but for dealing with the new world that 9/11 ushered in.”

Knowing exactly how close he, von Ackerman and DO5 came to capturing Bin Laden and possibly thwarting the attacks on 9/11 is a “burden” Iron Man said he “no longer wants to carry.”

“[Redacted] and I discussed this issue the last time we spoke,” Iron Man wrote in the final paragraph of his letter to the inspector general, likely referring to von Ackerman. “He remains the longest missing man in Iraq in this war, and I want, one day, to be able to explain to his children what their father foresaw.”