War on Terror – Page 31

Untitled

Published on March 1, 20072 Comments

So Americans wonder why the US’ NATO partners won’t step up in Afghanistan? Well, here’s a clue.

Thanks to Avedon for pointing out this excellent post at NewsHog about the insulting and arrogant threats made by US ambassador John Bellinger to the European Parliament:

US To EU – Shut Up, Or Else
If you haven’t yet seen what John Bellinger, legal adviser to Condi Rice, is telling European nations about their probe into illegal rendition flights, read it and weep for the demise of American diplomacy and the simultaneous demise of any threadbare pretense that the Bush administration give a fig for anything or anyone but itself.

The European Parliament accused Britain, Poland, Italy and other nations in mid-February of colluding with the CIA to transport terror suspects to clandestine prisons in third countries.

In a report that concluded a yearlong investigation, the parliament identified 1,254 secret CIA flights that entered the European airspace since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

It said that these flights were against international air traffic rules and suggested some of them may have carried terror suspects on board in violation of human rights principles.

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report “unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair” and called on the EU governments to challenge the suggestion that Europeans need to be concerned about secret CIA flights.

“I can understand concerns about specific incidents but we should not somehow suggest that all intelligence activity is something illegal or suspicious,” he said.

Germany, Italy and several other EU countries have been carrying out their own inquiries into secret CIA activities in Europe, probes Bellinger said “have not been helpful with respect to necessary cooperation between the United States and Europe.”

“I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation, that’s simply a fact of life,” Bellinger told reporters after meeting legal advisers to EU governments in Brussels.

EU parliamentarians have rejected Bellinger’s criticism and called on the United States to address concerns that some flights have carried kidnapped terror suspects.

“People are imprisoned without being tried first. That is unacceptable. (The U.S.) should open up to us and tell us where they’re flying and who they’re carrying,” said Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of the European Parliament.

[…]Bellinger also said the United States would refuse any Italian extradition request for CIA agents indicted in the alleged abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, one of the cases the European Parliament focused on in its inquiry.

“We’ve not got an extradition request from Italy. If we got an extradition request from Italy, we would not extradite U.S. officials to Italy,” he said.

If you read that as a blatant threat – stop these probes into our illegal actions or we will halt all our sharing of intelligence on international terrorism – then I think you’d be right there with how EU national governments will read it. If you read it as an assertion of the Bush administration’s right, by virtue of sheer might, to break international law and the laws of other nations then you’d agree with how Europeans will read it. If you read it as a blatant, American-exceptionalist, denial of international human rights and the right of other nations to apply their laws to American government personnel living and working in those very countries, with or without diplomatic immunity, then you’d be correct on that too.

Then, Bellinger utters a blatant lie:…
Read whole post

I’d read about it earlier in the week but didn’t post, (and now Cernig has done a way better job of it than I would have anyway) as I was much too angry at the shameless and malevolent disdain for even the minimum international standards of behaviour that Bellinger displayed to put my anger into any coherent form. I just had to let it go.

But of course you can’t let these things go: all these small angers, postponed, eventually coalesce into one big ugly anger. The US can’t keep showing such naked contempt like this for it’s supposed allies for very much longer – and it’s hardly the first time – and if USanians think Europeans are America-haters now, just keep on with this kind of thug diplomacy and see what happens. Soon the US won’t have a friend left in the bloody world.

Image from Bartcop.

“Republicans? Terrorists? Same Difference.” Bush Donor Bankrolls Al-Qaeda And Republicans

Published on February 26, 20072 Comments

Emptywheel at Firedoglake on the Republican nexus of money and corruption:

It really is getting to the point where we ought to start going down the list of Pioneers and Rangers and asking how each has advanced the criminal plots of the GOP, because it’s sure beginning to look like the Pioneers and Rangers program is just a brilliant front for old-style Dirty Tricks.

It’s even worse than that:

WASHINGTON: A man charged with trying to help terrorists in Afghanistan has donated some $15,000 (€11,410) to the campaign committee of Republicans in the House of Representatives, and a resume in his name indicates various other links to the party.

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in New York City to charges that include terror financing, material support of terrorism and money laundering.

From April 2002 until August 2004, the man, also known as “Michael Mixon,” gave donations ranging from $500 (€380) to $5,000 (€3,805) to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to Federal Election Commission reports and two campaign donor tracking Web sites, http://www.politicalmoneyline.com and http://www.opensecrets.org.

A resume listed in his name and posted on an MSN group Web site on Jan. 8, 2007, identifies him as being an “industrialist and philanthropist” and references previous connections to the Republican Party.

The Republicans are the party of President George W. Bush and until last month was the majority party in the House and Senate.

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Cheney – The Stormtrooper Tour

Published on February 24, 20072 Comments

What a cheery welcome Dick Cheney’s been getting on his ~~vice~~-imperial progress around the antipodes.

WSW has a report about Cheny’s visit you won’t see in the US media – how Sydney, a city in a friendly sovereign nation and the US’ military ally, was overwhelmed and locked down by US security operatives and .au government goons in full-on, strap-on, gung-ho, military paraphernalia :

[…]

Several blocks around Cheney’s hotel are being been shut for the four days, and city streets are being closed whenever Cheney’s convoy passes through, causing traffic chaos. Police and traffic authorities have urged motorists to stay out of the Sydney CBD, warning that “significant delays” will be caused by Cheney’s itinerary, which is being kept a tight secret.

For three days and nights before Cheney arrived, army Black Hawk helicopters buzzed the Sydney CBD, ostensibly for counter-terrorism training. Several residents contacted newspapers to complain of unbearable noise. One reader told the Sydney Morning Herald: “We are … being buzzed by huge noisy helicopters flying probably only about 20 storeys up. [Five] times in an hour—we can’t hear TV, we can’t talk on the phone.”

Last night, the airspace over Sydney was closed for US Air Force Two to land, and sections of the airport were virtually “locked down”. No members of the public were permitted to enter the vicinity. Dozens of police, security officers and snipers were on the tarmac, as well as inside and outside the airport. A grey Air Force plane arrived first, carrying Cheney’s cavalcade of bulletproof black limousines and an armoured van, while at least three state police helicopters hovered above.

Cue the Palpatine theme…. dum dum DUM, dum-da-dum, dum-DA-dum…

After perfunctory greetings by a handful of politicians, Cheney was swiftly taken away in his armour-plated limousine. As his 32-vehicle convoy—1.5 kilometres long—swept through the city to the Shangri-la Hotel on Sydney Harbour, traffic lights were turned red for all other vehicles, causing major disruptions.

This is the largest security operation in Australia since parts of Canberra, the capital, were shut down for US President George Bush’s one-day visit in October 2003. On that occasion, military planes and helicopters hovered overhead, the army’s elite SAS units were on standby and Bush’s secret service personnel were given unprecedented permission to carry weapons in the parliamentary precinct.

On the eve of Cheney’s arrival, the media reported that his security detachment had also been secretly granted special permission to carry guns. According to one Murdoch media report, there had been a threat to cancel the stay unless the NSW Labor government acceded to the federal government’s request to change the state’s Firearms Regulations to permit the security detail to carry sidearms.

NSW Police Minister John Watkins agreed to amend the regulations to allow possession and use of firearms “for personal protection or for the protection of another person” if the NSW Police Commissioner were satisfied that the circumstances warranted it. Defending the decision, Watkins said the federal government had “made very clear that this was critically important to the visit by the Vice President”.

[..]
[My emphasis]

How nice, they changed the law just for him too. Cheney was so touched by this warm welcome down under that he gave his hosts the ultimate gift – the refusal to refuse to rule out any options, even nuclear strikes, against those icky nasty Iranians. Really, the ultimate houseguest.

Great Moments In COINTELPRO, Part Umpty-something

Published on February 17, 2007

Look! Your tax dollars at work – not as you might think, funding public services or fighting crime, but paying agents provocateurs and Nazis to intimidate and provoke those peskily vocal yet peaceful minorities and liberals into violence.

From the Orlando Sentinel via Raw Story:

SENTINEL EXCLUSIVE
Neo-Nazi rally was organized by FBI informant

Henry Pierson Curtis | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 15, 2007

A paid FBI informant was the man behind a neo-Nazi march through the streets of Parramore that stirred up anxiety in Orlando’s black community and fears of racial unrest that triggered a major police mobilization.

That revelation came Wednesday in an unrelated federal court hearing and has prompted outrage from black leaders, some of whom demanded an investigation into whether the February 2006 march was, itself, an event staged by law-enforcement agencies.

The FBI would not comment on what it knew about the involvement of its informant, 39-year-old David Gletty of Orlando, in the neo-Nazi event. In court Wednesday, an FBI agent said the bureau has paid its informant at least $20,000 during the past two years.

“Wow,” Gletty said when reached by phone late Wednesday. “It is what it is. You were there in court. I can’t really go into any detail now.”

Read full story

You can’t even trust a fascist not to be fake these days. Why, one might almost think they were trying to provoke a reaction they could clamp down on.

It wouldn’t be the first time the FBI attempted to engineer violent political events recently. Before the big post 911 hate-on for the Moslems and antiwar activists, the big ‘danger’ was from the anticapitalist left:

One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle demonstrators is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student Environmental Action Coalition profiled in a recent Sierra magazine cover story on the new generation of environmentalists. If you were watching CNN during the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would have seen Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which Fish was documenting police harassment.

Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice against the DC police and a long list of federal agencies including the FBI. This suit–along with others in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June Organization of American States meeting across the border in Windsor, Ontario; and in Seattle–is exposing a level of surveillance and disruption of political activities not seen on the left since the FBI deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity movement during the 1980s.

Among police agencies themselves this is something of an open secret. In the spring the US Attorney’s office bestowed an award on members of the Washington, DC, police department for their “unparalleled” coordination with other police agencies during the IMF protests. “The FBI provided valuable background on the individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts and were able to impart the valuable lessons learned from Seattle,” the US Attorney declared.

The US’ population hasn’t had it’s legitimate right to dissent so closely spied on, monitored and blatantly interfered with since the worst of the McCarthy years and the days of that paranoid psychotic Nixon. The aim of this covert activity is to discredit people who organise against the Bush administration and to smear them as violent revolutionaries, even to the extent of siccing the far-right on them in the hope of engineering a violent response.

This type of covert entrapment, deliberate provocation and incitement to illegality is known as cointelpro*:

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (such as the Weathermen); non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.

According to the US government and other reports COINTELPRO officially stopped in 1971.What are all these cointelpro reports then, chopped liver?

There’s currently a leftwing activist and blogger who’s been in jail for over a year in California for refusing to release a samizdat video he made that may have featured possible FBI agents provocateurs attempting to engineer a riot at the San Francisco G8 protests.

Then there’s the mysterious yet ubiquitous supposed peace activist known as ‘Anna’ for instance, who has been doing the rounds of US peace groups attempting to incite them to illegality.

For more background on COINTELPRO and its history see here and Congress’ 1976 report here and for a review of the actual methods, see here.

[*For the pedants, I’m using lowercase cointelpro as the noun for the modern activity rather than COINTELPRO, as that’s the historical acronym for the government programme]

Don’t Trust Your Bank Unless It’s A Piggy

Published on February 16, 2007

Proof that the Blair government and Gordon Brown as Chancellor knew all along that the Bush administration was snooping through British citizens’ bank accounts without any due process comes via The Register.

UK Treasury knew of US hunt through British bank data
EU investigation closes in

By Mark Ballard Published Friday 16th February 2007 13:12 GMT

The Bank of England told HM Treasury about the secret US surveillance of international banking transactions as long as five years ago.

The US’s eager pursuit of terrorist financiers, begun within weeks of the 11 September attacks, involved a trawl through the world’s financial transactions through subpoenas on the firm that handles them for private banking clients – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communication (Swift).

European authorities, including the UK’s Information Commissioner, have since declared the US operation “illegal” and have begun to press financial institutions to put a stop to the warrantless and unprotected transfers of private banking data to the US authorities.

This programme remained a secret from privacy watchdogs – even from those people whose data was being handed over to US investigators – until the New York Times unearthed it last June. Yet HM Treasury knew about it for some years.
A spokesman for the Bank of England told The Register: “Swift told us in 2002 that it had agreed with the US subpoenas. We told Swift it should tell the government. We told HM Treasury. We felt they should know.”

[…]

But the ECB had decided not to warn “other relevant authorities” about Swift’s decision to give US authorities access to its international banking transactions because it believed its own responsibility for “professional confidentiality” among its members was more important.

[…]

HM Treasury said in a statement: “On the financial stability point/impact on business confidence, we say that there is no greater risk to the financial system that the criminal abuse of or a terrorist attack on the system.”

“As you know this is a US project, and we don’t comment on this or any other security matter,” it added.

[…]

As the ECB was reprimanded for failing to tell privacy authorities when it first learned of the Swift subpoenas, and no banking clients are thought to have known that their private financial data was, via Swift, been pawed by the US Treasury, this concession appears to indicate some progress for campaigners like Privacy International, whose complaints to watchdogs across Europe lent the EU reaction to the Swift subpoenas some vigour.

Yet it only looks good on paper, as the ECB pointed out: “Payment orders from natural persons who do not consent to the use of SWIFT will not be processed.”

So if you want to use European banking services you must acquiesce to having your private financial affairs spied on by the Bush adminsitration.They’ll carry on blithely just as they did before and say it’s OK, they have our permission because we didn’t choose not to use the banks.

Fuckers.

This investigation meant nothing and does nothing except to tell us our supposedly democratic government is in breach of it’s own data protection regulations and our human rights – again.

It’s enough to make you start changing currency into gold and stashing it under the bed.