Saturday, December 29, 2007

CIA tapes were destroyed to ’save image.’

The New York Times reports that the CIA’s “every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.” The Times adds:

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

The tapes recorded a program “so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with intelligence officials’ advice that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons.

Navy JAG Andrew Williams Resigns Over Torture

From Think Progress:

Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, recently resigned his commission over the alleged use of torture by the United States and the destruction of video tapes said to contain instances of that torture.

As ThinkProgress reported in December, Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture.

Explaining his resignation in a letter to his Gig Harbor, WA, newspaper — the Peninsula Gateway — Williams said Hartmann’s testimony was “the final straw”:

The final straw for me was listening to General Hartmann, the highest-ranking military lawyer in charge of the military commissions, testify that he refused to say that waterboarding captured U.S. soldiers by Iranian operatives would be torture.

His testimony had just sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river. Indeed, he would not rule out waterboarding as torture when done by the United States and indeed felt evidence obtained by such methods could be used in future trials.

Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.

In the middle ages, the Inquisition called waterboarding “toca” and used it with great success. In colonial times, it was used by the Dutch East India Company during the Amboyna Massacre of 1623.

Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai. In World War II, our grandfathers had the wisdom to convict Japanese Officer Yukio Asano of waterboarding and other torture practices in 1947, giving him 15 years hard labor.

Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.

Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out.

Williams’ resignation follows on the heels of several high profile issues relating to the JAG corps. In 2006, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was passed over for promotion and forced out of the Navy after he vigorously defended Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. And just this month, the Bush administration planned to take control of the promotion system for military lawyers, a plan which was dropped due to the uproar it caused in the military and in Congress.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Convicted Guantanamo detainee walks free from jail


The only Guantanamo Bay inmate convicted of terrorism offences, Australian David Hicks, was released from prison on Saturday morning after spending over six years behind bars, the majority in solitary confinement.

Hicks, 32, returned to Australia from the U.S. military prison on the island of Cuba in May after pleading guilty to terrorism charges. He left prison in his hometown of Adelaide in south Australia.

Wearing a green polo T-shirt and blue jeans, Hicks walked out of Adelaide's maximum security Yatala prison and was immediately driven away to a secret location in a blue sedan, escorted by police.

In a statement read by his lawyer, Hicks asked for privacy and said he would need time to readjust to society.

"I had hoped to be able to speak to the media but I am just not strong enough at the moment, it's as simple as that," Hicks said through his lawyer David McLeod.

Hicks also said he would need to get medical help for "the consequences of five and a half years at Guantanamo Bay".

He added that he would not speak to the media before March 30, 2008, as stipulated under terms of his release from Guantanamo Bay.

"Right now I am looking forward to some quiet time with my wonderful Dad, my family and friends," Hicks said.

Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and spent over five years in Guantanamo before becoming the first person to be sentenced under the alternate war crimes tribunals created by President George W. Bush's administration to try non-American captives.

The former kangaroo skinner admitted training with al Qaeda and meeting its leader Osama bin Laden, whom he described as "lovely", according to police evidence given to the court.

Media reports last week said Hicks was unprepared for freedom, suffered agoraphobia and had retreated to solitary confinement in his Australian prison cell.

Hicks will still be subject to a strict control order that includes a midnight to dawn curfew. He will not be allowed to leave Australia.

Under a plea bargain with U.S. military authorities, Hicks agreed to a gag order barring him from talking about his experiences for a year, ending on March 26, while any money offered for interviews could be confiscated under Australian law.

Guantanamo Terror Convict to Be Set Free

Convicted terror supporter David Hicks will walk free Saturday after being held captive in Guantanamo Bay and Australia for nearly seven years, though the Australian government has imposed strict controls on his movements.

Hicks became the first person convicted at a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II when he pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida.

The former Outback cowboy was captured in December 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban. A month later, he was sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he spent more than five years without trial.

A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Hicks - a Muslim convert who has since renounced the faith - to seven years in prison, with all but nine months being suspended, after he confessed to aiding al-Qaida during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001.

Under a plea bargain, Hicks was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence at Yatala prison in his hometown of Adelaide in South Australia state, but was ordered to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.

Hicks' sentence ends Saturday, when he will be allowed to walk out of Yatala, where a throng of media were already gathered Friday to catch a glimpse of the confessed Taliban-allied gunman.

Under the terms of his plea deal, Hicks has forfeited any right to appeal his conviction and also agreed to a gag order that prevents him speaking with news media for a year from his sentencing date. However, legal rights groups have questioned whether the gag order can be enforced in Australia, where Hicks has not been convicted of any crime.

Hicks, who has been described as depressed and anxious by family members, was not expected to speak to the media upon his release. But his father, Terry, said Hicks would issue a brief statement through his lawyer, David McLeod, apologizing for any inconvenience.

"It is important to him that he gets this message across and thanks everybody who has been supportive of him," Terry Hicks told Sky News television.

Throughout his ordeal, Hicks' lawyers repeatedly described their client as an immature adventurer who traveled to Afghanistan only after his application to enlist in the Australian army was rejected because of his lack of education.

In the months leading up to his plea deal, his lawyers and family said Hicks was severely depressed at Guantanamo, where he was isolated in small, solid-walled cell.

Terry Hicks said his son was eager to resume a normal life in Australia, and hoped to find a job and attend university.

But Hicks' life outside of prison will be far from normal.

A federal court ruled last week that Hicks was still a risk to national security and agreed to impose a control order on him under Australia's strict anti-terror laws.

The order, requested by federal police, requires Hicks to report to police three times a week and obey a curfew by staying indoors at premises to be agreed on by police. Other restrictions include that he not leave Australia or contact a list of terror suspects.

The restrictions will last for one year. Hicks will have an opportunity to challenge the orders at a hearing set for Feb. 18, though his lawyers say they doubt he will do so.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Fallujah: The hidden massacre

Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Top 10 myths about Iraq 2007

10. Myth: The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.



In a recent ABC News/ Washington Post poll, Iraq and the economy were virtually tied among voters nationally, with nearly a quarter of voters in each case saying it was their number one issue. The economy had become more important to them than in previous months (in November only 14% said it was their most pressing concern), but Iraq still rivals it as an issue!


9. Myth: There have been steps toward religious and political reconciliation in Iraq in 2007. Fact: The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has for the moment lost the support of the Sunni Arabs in parliament. The Sunnis in his cabinet have resigned. Even some Shiite parties have abandoned the government. Sunni Arabs, who are aware that under his government Sunnis have largely been ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, see al-Maliki as a sectarian politician uninterested in the welfare of Sunnis.

8. Myth: The US troop surge stopped the civil war that had been raging between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.


Fact: The civil war in Baghdad escalated during the US troop escalation. Between January, 2007, and July, 2007, Baghdad went from 65% Shiite to 75% Shiite. UN polling among Iraqi refugees in Syria suggests that 78% are from Baghdad and that nearly a million refugees relocated to Syria from Iraq in 2007 alone. This data suggests that over 700,000 residents of Baghdad have fled this city of 6 million during the US 'surge,' or more than 10 percent of the capital's population. Among the primary effects of the 'surge' has been to turn Baghdad into an overwhelmingly Shiite city and to displace hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the capital.


7. Myth: Iran was supplying explosively formed projectiles (a deadly form of roadside bomb) to Salafi Jihadi (radical Sunni) guerrilla groups in Iraq. Fact: Iran has not been proved to have sent weapons to any Iraqi guerrillas at all. It certainly would not send weapons to those who have a raging hostility toward Shiites. (Iran may have supplied war materiel to its client, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI), which was then sold off from warehouses because of graft, going on the arms market and being bought by guerrillas and militiamen.

6. Myth: The US overthrow of the Baath regime and military occupation of Iraq has helped liberate Iraqi women. Fact: Iraqi women have suffered significant reversals of status, ability to circulate freely, and economic situation under the Bush administration.

5. Myth: Some progress has been made by the Iraqi government in meeting the "benchmarks" worked out with the Bush administration. Fact: in the words of Democratic Senator Carl Levin, "Those legislative benchmarks include approving a hydrocarbon law, approving a debaathification law, completing the work of a constitutional review committee, and holding provincial elections. Those commitments, made 1 1/2 years ago, which were to have been completed by January of 2007, have not yet been kept by the Iraqi political leaders despite the breathing space the surge has provided."

4. Myth: The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants. Fact: In interviews with the Western press, Awakening Council tribesmen often speak of attacking the Shiites after they have polished off al-Qaeda. A major pollster working in Iraq observed,
' Most of the recent survey results he has seen about political reconciliation, Warshaw said, are "more about [Iraqis] reconciling with the United States within their own particular territory, like in Anbar. . . . But it doesn't say anything about how Sunni groups feel about Shiite groups in Baghdad." Warshaw added: "In Iraq, I just don't hear statements that come from any of the Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish groups that say 'We recognize that we need to share power with the others, that we can't truly dominate.' " ' '
The polling shows that "the Iraqi government has still made no significant progress toward its fundamental goal of national reconciliation."

3. Myth: The Iraqi north is relatively quiet and a site of economic growth. Fact: The subterranean battle among Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs for control of the oil-rich Kirkuk province makes the Iraqi north a political mine field. Kurdistan now also hosts the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas that sneak over the border and kill Turkish troops. The north is so unstable that the Iraqi north is now undergoing regular bombing raids from Turkey.

2. Myth: Iraq has been "calm" in fall of 2007 and the Iraqi public, despite some grumbling, is not eager for the US to depart. Fact: in the past 6 weeks, there have been an average of 600 attacks a month, or 20 a day, which has held steady since the beginning of November. About 600 civilians are being killed in direct political violence per month, but that number excludes deaths of soldiers and police. Across the board, Iraqis believe that their conflicts are mainly caused by the US military presence and they are eager for it to end.

1. Myth: The reduction in violence in Iraq is mostly because of the escalation in the number of US troops, or "surge."


Fact: Although violence has been reduced in Iraq, much of the reduction did not take place because of US troop activity. Guerrilla attacks in al-Anbar Province were reduced from 400 a week to 100 a week between July, 2006 and July, 2007. But there was no significant US troop escalation in al-Anbar. Likewise, attacks on British troops in Basra have declined precipitously since they were moved out to the airport away from population centers. But this change had nothing to do with US troops.

Senate blocks recess appointment of torture advocate.

A nine-second session gaveled in and out by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., prevented Bush from appointing as an assistant attorney general a nominee roundly rejected by majority Democrats. Without the pro forma session, the Senate would be technically adjourned, allowing the president to install officials without Senate confirmation. […]

Democrats wanted to block one such recess appointment in particular: Steven Bradbury, acting chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Counsel. Bush nominated Bradbury for the job and asked the Senate to remove the “acting” in his title.

Democrats would have none of it, complaining Bradbury had signed two secret memos in 2005 saying it was OK for the CIA to use harsh interrogation techniques — some call it torture — on terrorism detainees.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Al Jazeera and Abu Ghraib scuttled US war in Fallujah

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld launched the failed April 2004 assault on the Iraqi town of Fallujah before marines were ready because it had become "a symbol of resistance that dominated international headlines" and similar considerations eventually destroyed the operation — both according to a highly classified U.S. intelligence report into the defeat.

"During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where they filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the Palestinian Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day."

Coalition air strikes were conducted during the three week cease-fire, which was a "bit of a misnomer" and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal contributed to the politically driven final peace settlement. The settlement left Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer "furious".

By the end of April, 600-700 Iraqis and 18 marines had been killed inside the town with 62 marines killed in the broader operational area and 565 wounded in action.

Fallujah's defenders were diverse but united to oppose the U.S. offensive. They included former regime soldiers, "nationalists, local Islamic extremists, foreign fighters and criminals" together comprising not so much a military organization, but "an evil Rotary club".

The revelations come from a highly classified report on the attack released today by the open government group Wikileaks, which has in the past month released a number of sensitive U.S. documents including manuals for Guantanamo Bay, Camp Bucca prison and Department of Defense detainee operations.

The report was penned last year by the U.S Army National Ground Intelligence Center and is classified "SECRET/NOFORN" -- meaning the report was not to be shared with Coalition partners.

The Fallujah assault was initiated when on March 31 2004 four private military personnel from the U.S firm Blackwater were killed in the town and photos of their burnt bodies received international coverage.

The report said the coverage had prompted Rumsfeld, General Abizaid and the then Coalition Provisional Authority Chief Paul Bremer to order an "immediate military response".

The report not only blames media driven political pressures for launching the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force before it was ready, but states similar political considerations led to a cease-fire five days later.

The three week official cease-fire was "a bit of a misnomer", with Coalition air strikes continuing and snipers on both sides making movement hazardous. On the town's resistance, the report claims the number one "enemy strategy" was "to gain media attention and sympathy" in-order to push political pressure "to a boiling point."

Contributing to the peace settlement at the end of the month was British opposition to the battle, an Iraqi Shia uprising over the forced closure of the newspaper "al-Hawza" and Abu Ghraib.

Paul Bremer was "furious when he found out about it, but he was in little position to overturn it since he had insisted on the cease-fire in the first place. Complicating matters was the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal broke on 29 April, consuming the attention of senior leaders in the U.S. government. Bremer could not organize a consensus to overturn the Fallujah decision."

During the battle U.S. psychological operations loud speakers "blasted rock music or taunted the insurgents into attacking with insults about their marksmanship."

Marines used the M1A1 Abrams tank as bait, to lure defenders out into the open, however this ruse didn't work for long as "The enemy.. would initiate an ambush with small-arms fire on one side of a tank in order to get the tank crew to turn its armor in the direction of fire. They would then fire a coordinated 5 or 6 RPG [rocket propelled grenade] salvo into the exposed rear of the tank".

The report states "Approximately 150 air strikes destroyed 75 buildings, including two mosques" and that the operation "stirred up a hornets nest across the Al Anbar provence".

Concluding, the report states "Information operations are increasingly important in a 21st Century world where cable television runs 24 hours a day..the Iraqi government was nascent and weak and they offered no political cover for U.S. commanders to finish the operation in a reasonable time period... Abu Ghurayb.. and the Shia uprising further enflamed a politically precarious situation and could not have happened at a worse time for Coalition forces."

U.S. forces retook Fallujah during November 2004 in what was to be the most bloody battle of the occupation.

Monday, December 24, 2007

9/11 Commission Chairman: ‘No Question’ CIA Attempted ‘To Impede Our Investigation’

In its attempts to uncover all materials related to the 9/11 attacks, the 9/11 Commission specifically requested material about the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The New York Times has revealed that the CIA destroyed tapes of the two men’s interrogation without informing the 9/11 Commission about their existence.

On Saturday, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin told CNN:

I think it’s ludicrous to suggest, in fact, that we withheld anything of consequence from the 9/11 Commission. Anything that was on the tapes that would be relevant to their inquiry was given to them in writing, and the tapes would have simply not advanced their inquiry at all.

In fact, the tapes were highly relevant to the Commission’s inquiry. Philip Zelikow — the former staff director of the 9/11 Commission — explained: “The Commission was not investigating the treatment of captives. But it did seek information not only about the 9/11 plot, but also any intelligence information about the history and evolution of al Qaeda and its connections to other terrorist entities. Therefore, from the start, the Commission sought to obtain all relevant information gleaned from the interrogation of captives.”

This morning on CNN, 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean there is “no question” the CIA was aware that its now-destroyed videotapes depicting severe interrogations were among evidence being sought by 9/11 Commission investigators, and the destruction of the tapes was an attempt to “impede our investigation”:

We asked for every single thing that they had. And then my vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, looked the director of the CIA in the face, and said, Look, even if we haven’t asked for something, if it’s pertinent to our investigation, make it available to us. And our staff asked again and again of their staff and the tapes were not given to us. So, there was no question.[…]

I mean, no question that we again and again and again asked for everything, and we needed it, and we weren’t given it. And so, the only conclusion we can draw is it was withheld from us. And that can only be seen to me as an attempt to impede our investigation.

Watch it:



CIA spokesman Mike Mansfield said recently that the tapes weren’t destroyed until 2005 “because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point.” So, the CIA withheld the tapes and destroyed the evidence later, ensuring no one could view them to determine whether they were relevant to the Commission’s inquiry.

Torture, interrogation and intelligence

Summary, Read the rest at FRUQTADA

Lecture on torture techniques by Dr. Larry Forness of the American Military University (Dec 2005). The document explains the rationale behind torturing prisoners, torture methods, and a justification for ignoring international law. Forness advocates the injection of truth serums, threatening to inject Muslim prisoners with pigs' blood, and torturing detainees' friends and family.
The American Military University teaches courses primarily to US military and associated personnel. Forness, in his faculty biography states "Dr. Larry Forness is a former United States Marine, with expertise in intelligence and unconventional warfare. He provides consulting services to various units of the U.S. Military. He has also worked with special units of our allies, particularly Israel and South Korea.".

Although the document was likely intended for Forness' students, it was subsequently circulated within the US military, where it came to the attention of the Wikileaks whistleblower Peryton, who also disclosed Guantanamo Bay's main manual Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure (2004), which was authenticated publicly by Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

CIA chief to drag White House into torture cover-up storm

THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top Al-Qaeda suspects has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee.

Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.

It has emerged that at least four White House staff were approached for advice about the tapes, including David Addington, a senior aide to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, but none has admitted to recommending their destruction.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, said it was impossible for Rodriguez to have acted on his own: “If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez – one of the most cautious men I have ever met – have gone ahead and destroyed them?”

The tapes recorded the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two suspected Al-Qaeda leaders, over hundreds of hours while they were held in secret “ghost” prisons. According to testimony from a former CIA officer, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning, and “broke” after 35 seconds. He is believed to have been interrogated in Thailand. The tapes were destroyed in 2005. Both men are now held in Guantanamo Bay.

The House intelligence committee has subpoenaed Rodriguez to appear for a hearing on January 16. Last week the CIA began opening its files to congressional investigators. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat who is chairing the committee, has said he was “not looking for scapegoats” – a hint to Rodriguez that he would like him to talk.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, believes the scandal could reach deep into the White House. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process. He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Johnson says Rodriguez got his fingers burnt during the Iran-contra scandal while working for the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Even then he sought authorisation from senior officials. But when summoned to the FBI for questioning, he was told Iran-contra was “political – get your own lawyer”.

He learnt his lesson and recently appointed Robert Bennett, one of Washington’s most skilled lawyers, to handle the case of the destroyed interrogation tapes. “He has been starting to get his story out and was smart to get Bennett,” said Johnson.

The Justice Department has launched its own inquiry into the destruction of the tapes. It emerged yesterday that the CIA had misled members of the 9-11 Commission by not disclosing the existence of the tapes, in potential violation of the law. President George W Bush said last week he could not recall learning about the tapes before being briefed about them on December 6 by Michael Hayden, the CIA director.

“It looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House,” said Johnson. He believes it is “highly likely” that Bush saw one of the videos, as he was interested in Zubaydah’s case and received frequent updates on his interrogation from George Tenet, the CIA director at the time.

It has emerged that the CIA did preserve two videotapes and an audiotape of detainee interrogations conducted by a foreign government, which may have been relevant to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Al-Qaeda conspirator.

The CIA told a federal judge in 2003 that no such recordings existed but has now retracted that testimony. One of the tapes could show the interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a September 11 conspirator, who was allegedly handed to Jordan for questioning.

Rodriguez may seek immunity in torture tapes probe

Jose Rodriguez, the CIA official who reportedly ordered the destruction of the torture tapes, “has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee.” Rodriguez is “determined not to become the fall guy” for the White House, according to intelligence sources.

FBI Recorded 27 Million FISA 'Sessions' in 2006

From Wired:


At the end of 2006, the FBI's Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Strikingly, the report said that the FBI's software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.

Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

According to the math that means each court order resulted in 12,742 "sessions," all in regards to phone, not internet, surveillance.

FISA watchers have long wondered whether FISA warrants covered more than one person. Knowing how many calls or text messages the FBI captured could add a piece to the puzzle.

Unfortunately, nothing in the documents turned over yet to the Electronic Frontier Foundation explain what a session is. Does it refer to one session of listening in on a target's conversation, even if it is minimized for not being relevant? Does it include text messages? Does the incoming call number and the recording of the call count as two sessions? Do cell phone pings that reveal the general location of a target count as a session? Unknown.

Steven Aftergood, who runs Secrecy News for the Federation of American Scientists, says it's an odd, and not so useful statistic:

I've never seen a number like that. When I hear 27 million sessions that sounds like they are talking about individual communications that were monitored for each individual target.
Aftergood thinks that if you take the number of targets and add them up, it's not that crazy a number. He also suspects that there are likely less than 2,100 foreign surveillance targets and that each target likely gets multiple orders - one for a fax line, one for a cell phone, one for a secret house search, etc.

It's a surprising statistic to keep because it doesn't tell you much. What you want to know is how many of the foreign intelligence surveillance sessions were of significance. If only three out of 27 million were useful, that would tell you something, but one number without the other is meaningless.
Of note is that the software at issue, the DCS-5000 gets information from carriers after they turn on surveillance on their switches once they get a court order (CALEA mandates the switches be wiretap-compliant). That means this number ostensibly has nothing to do with the government's secret warrantless wiretapping program, or the government's data-mining of billions of call records.

The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal

Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.

There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.

And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique – information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: “The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me.” That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something - not that it didn’t happen. That’s the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.

This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.

But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.

Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah’s interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.

Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It’s the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man’s land. But Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.

What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: “I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up.”

It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.

Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet unwritten.