Admit it. You thought twice about the timing of the operation to free the hostages in Colombia. McCain. Trailing in the polls. Goes to speak about Free Trade in Colombia. The week a CNN poll found that 51% of Americans now 'feel threatened by free trade.' As President Bush continues to try to push through a new Free Trade agreement with Colombia before leaving office. The Republican Presidential nominee. And one-time prisoner of war. Is briefed about the rescue operation prior to its execution. The raid is a success. Cable news headlines like "McCain Knew" and "McCain met with Colombians prior to Hostage Rescue" and "Colombian Hostages Free" are read by millions of Americans watching muted TVs in bars, gyms, and noisy households across America. Heading into the Fourth of July weekend. When those Americans will stand around the grill and say, perhaps jokingly, but with the same predictable effect:

The same CIA operative that tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraq before the runup to the March 2003 invasion has now come out to say the agency is doing the same thing with Iran. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in late 2007 said Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

Barred from using his real name, the onetime undercover agent, filed a motion in federal court late Friday requesting that the government declassify legal documents showing what he contends was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency claims. He alleged in a 2004 suit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior intelligence managers over his attempts to report direct challenges to the conventional wisdom at the time about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The CIA refuses to make the claims public because it deems the information top secret.

Of course I don't mean people here. I mean your average voters who watch some news and make attempts to educate themselves on the candidates. Do they know?

I mean it's all so incredible. A man who was himself tortured -- endorsing torture? It is unbelievable in the most literal sense of the word. And yet that's John McCain.

Earlier today when I was piecing this diary together, I asked the community whether people realize McCain is pro-torture. Kossack AnnCetera said that they do not, but added that accurate information might help people see the truth -- so long as it's palatable.

Unfortunately there's nothing palatable about the fact that torture is now a campaign issue in the year 2008 in the United States of America. But what is worse perhaps is people who are against torture voting for a man who is not.

Something very odd occurred during the hearings last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the use of torture against detainees. Something crucial was missed. But before we examine that, let's first examine how the so-called responsible U.S. press covered the revelations oozing out of Washington.

When the New York Times's Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane wrote their June 18 article on the testimony in the SASC hearings on torture of detainees at U.S. prison sites, they made a tremendous blunder in the very first paragraph. (At least I am going to grant it was a mistake, and not something more sinister.)

also on C-span 3

http://www.cspan.org

click on the watch link under Scottie's pic.

This more of a head's up than a diary, unless some of you want to live blog it.

Now, I need three hundred words to get this published and posted before the hearing begins.

Did I mention he is testifying to the Iraq/CIA leaks. John Conyers is about to speak.

John McCain's campaign launched a new effort this week to whitewash his calamitous record of egregious errors and flawed forecasts when it comes to Iraq.  As ThinkProgress reported, the McCain web site has unveiled a very elegant – and very selective - new timeline highlighting John McCain's "judgment" on Iraq.  Hoping that voters will forget his disastrous predictions throughout 2002 and 2003 in the run-up to the war, the McCain timeline unsurprisingly starts in August 2003.  Unfortunately, a timely Los Angeles Times interview with the infamous "Curveball" will remind Americans just how wrong John McCain has been about Iraq from the very beginning.

My original cartoon...

That, apparently, is the difference between good torture and bad torture. At least according to the CIA.

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting

This is all according to some information which has not been made public this week, but should not be confused with the study that came out today citing signs of physical abuse/torture found on inmates examed by Doctors who are being held at Guantanamo.

The New York Times is trying to sell the story that Iran was the primary client of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network, and received miniaturized warhead designs. http://www.nytimes.com/...

That is about as accurate as Judith Miller's stories that Iraq had WMDs.

The fact is, as James Risen told us, by the late 1990s Iran caught on to the fact that Khan's network operated as a CIA front.  A failed effort to transfer bogus warhead designs to Iran was code-named Operation Merlin.

The Agency had a major role in creating and nurturing A.Q Khan's nuclear program.  It was originally part of the 1976 deal that CIA Director George H.W. Bush made with Princes Kamal Adham and Turki al-Faisal, co-heads of Saudi external intelligence, the GID. In exchange for Saudi funding of U.S. intelligence operations banned by the Democratic Congress since the Church Commmittee hearings, the Agency looked the other way as the Saudis implemented their own covert operations around the world, including Pakistan's bomb program, influence operations and financial frauds inside the U.S., which included BCCI and the S&L scandals.

MORE below . . .  

The Senate Armed Services Committee will be holding hearings into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Tomorrow is part one, as Senator Levin's committee looks into the origins of U.S. aggressive interrogation techniques. A new article by AP makes clear that these techniques were approved at the highest levels, and that the resulting torture revelations were not due to the actions of a few "bad apples."

Also, on Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing entitled "From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay", which is the second part of its inquiry into administration lawyers, like John Yoo, and their role in writing and approving torture and guidelines for abusive interrogation.

THis is a short film narrated by Naomi Klein and based on her book The Shock Doctrine, which is probably the most must-read book to come out in years.

I'm not going to comment on it too much. I'll let the video speak for itself. But I will say, Klein's book is not just another well crafted depiction of how screwed up things are. There are plenty of those. This book, however, is, as Tim Robbins says, "a revelation". I've yet to see another work so completely encapsulate the dark forces shaping our world, and their origins. This little movie, while shocking in itself, is just hint of what the book contains. It is required reading for any citizen who desires to be informed.

The White House likes to pretend that it has not created a kafkaesque spiderweb of prisons and military tribunals, despite all the evidence to the contrary: kidnapping, the purchase of prisoners for "bounties", torture and abuse, coerced confessions, locking up known innocents for years at a time, secrecy and lies, destruction of evidence, poor access for lawyers and human rights watchdogs, prolonged imprisonment without trial, a series of kangaroo-court procedures, reprisals against military lawyers who uphold standards of justice, and the flagrant politicization of trials. Well, add another stone to the mountain of evidence against this "administration".

A Gitmo defense lawyer stumbled upon a Pentagon manual that advises interrogators to destroy their hand-written notes in order to thwart any inquiries at trial into wrong-doing by officials.

Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were told to destroy their notes to stop them potentially being used to highlight the mistreatment of detainees, according to a US military lawyer.

William Kuebler, a lieutenant commander who is defending Omar Khadr, a Canadian national facing trial for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, said the classified instructions were included in an operations manual that prosecutors allowed him to see last week...

He told reporters the instruction was contained in a US military manual of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for interrogators that was shown to him during a pre-trial review of possible evidence.

The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify ... Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimise certain legal issues," the document was cited as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler...

Kuebler said the operations manual, from January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report into alleged detainee abuse at Guantánamo, but that the section covering the manual was not made public at the time.

Omar Khadr was 15 years old when the military imprisoned him. His defense alleges that interrogators coerced a false confession from Khadr partly through abuse and threats to rape him:

Mr. Khadr's defence team at Guantanamo Bay had asked the prosecution to provide handwritten notes relating to Mr. Khadr's interrogations in both Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"Counsel for the government claim that, after a diligent search, they have been unable to locate and unable to provide responsive materials," LCdr. Kuebler writes in his affidavit.

It looks like Kuebler is right that the Pentagon insured that interrogators "routinely destroyed evidence" that might have been used to defend the Khadr and other detainees.

For its part, the Pentagon didn't even try to defend the destruction of evidence when the SOP was exposed.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.

Destruction of evidence is in fact routine at Guantanamo. Last December we learned that in 2005 the CIA ordered the destruction of videotapes of interrogations, apparently at the behest of the White House.

If the Guantanamo tribunals really are legitimate courts of law, as the WH insists, then the destruction of videotapes and interrogators' notes ought to count as obstruction of justice. This report from March remains relevant:

“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”

In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.

“This is like any other cover-up,” Mr. Remes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface.”

Indeed, as the new revelation about the Pentagon manual demonstrates. Kuebler's find has been reported widely outside the US. Shame that there's only a single, brief report in the American news media.

++++

See also the diary by Christian Dem in NC.

Update [2008-6-9 18:11:51 by smintheus]: See also Lyle Denniston on the ramifications of Kuebler's discovery for the important habeas cases now before SCOTUS, Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States.

While having a discussion on nuclear energy, it came to my realization that for whatever efforts we expound upon Obama being a good candidate we are not thinking of him as a president.

Being President will involve a lot of very tough decisions and ones that I think he will be able to make. But we cannot confuse good, with just, or moral. Every President has had to deal with something.

Many of us have heard about this story in Salon by Shaun McCanna,

I diaried about this a while back.

And here.

http://www.salon.com/...
"It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan" - Aug 2007

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/...
"Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time" - July 2007

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/...
"US/NATO military shipping heroin out of Afghanistan" - Feb 2008

(I will admit this article may be a bit hyperbolic to an extent, but the charges .. just seems too close to home to ignore.)

It's remarkable, really.

The US government has taken some extreme measures to silence former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. Among other reasons, they are obviously very nervous about information that Sibel has regarding the involvement of US, Israeli, and Turkish officials in supplying the nuclear black market.

Now we have this: The US Government apparently demanded that the Swiss government destroy all evidence - all 30,000 pages of it - related to the pending prosecution of the Tinner family. The Tinners were "very key suppliers" of AQ Khan's nuclear proliferation network, but their court case is now unlikely to proceed, given the destruction of the evidence.

Uh-oh:

Report accuses Bush of misrepresenting Iraq intel
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
58 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee

.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles, Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wants the FBI transcripts from the interviews conducted with President Bush and Vice President Cheney about the CIA leak case, and is going to Attorney General Michael Mukasey to get them.

Read Rep. Waxman's letter to the Department of Justice here

That is straight from the Party website and i was surprised.  I hope we do not let this fall through the cracks and not get the attention it deserves.

Part 2:  McCain’s 30-Years of Service to Saudi Bank Raiders and Junk Bond Kings

Beginning tomorrow, the McCain campaign will bombard you with all the noble details about how John McCain is the "reform" candidate for President.  Obama, they will tell you, is all about "change you don't want."

Here's what needs to said about that:

From BCCI, to Milken’s Junk Bond Kings, to Jack Abramoff, Senator John McCain has long provided the All-American face to the dirty job of cleaning up after the looting of America.

Senator John McCain has made a career out of serving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and covering up after its army of lobbyists, bagmen, and corrupt bankers.

The ugly details the corporate aren't yet willing to share with you, BELOW . . .