Criminal inquiry over CIA tapes - John Durham to Lead ("Whitey" Bulger prosecutor)

The Hartford Courant (Jan 2, 2008) reports:

U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has named John Durham, the first assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to lead an investigation into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations."...

.... "An investigation of this kind, relating to the CIA, would ordinarily be conducted under the supervision of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the District in which the CIA headquarters are located," Mukasey said in a press release. "However, in an abundance of caution and on the request of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, in accordance with Department of Justice policy, his office has been recused from the investigation of this matter, in order to avoid any possible appearance of a conflict with other matters handled by that office."

"Mr. Durham is a widely respected and experienced career prosecutor who has supervised a wide range of complex investigations in the past, and I am grateful to him for his willingness to serve in this capacity. As the Acting United States Attorney for purposes of this investigation, Mr. Durham will report to the Deputy Attorney General, as do all United States Attorneys in the ordinary course. I have also directed the FBI to conduct the investigation under Mr. Durham's supervision."....

Edward Mahoney's story in the Courant (Jan 28, 2001) (Avenging Angel Takes On FBI)provides insight into who Durham is, in the eyes of his colleagues and opposition attorneys:

... One year in Connecticut, as an assistant U.S. attorney, he put a third of New England's mafia in jail. He has never lost a case....

...Two and one-half years ago, then-U.S. Attorney General Janet C. Reno appointed Durham to explore allegations that, for three decades, FBI agents and police officers in Boston have been in bed with the mob. In particular, he is looking for crimes committed by agents working with James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, two murderous gangsters who served as FBI informants for a combined 50 years.

What Durham has found to date is nothing less than sensational, judging from what has become part of the public record.

Among other things, he has accused a decorated FBI agent of setting up at least three murders and he is examining evidence suggesting that a second agent might have participated in another - the execution of a former owner of World Jai Alai Inc., once one of the country's leading parimutuel businesses. What's more, he has charged state and local police officers in Massachusetts with secretly helping Bulger and Flemmi. A half dozen bodies have been unearthed from secret graves scattered around the city.

Last month, Durham gave defense lawyers secret government memos suggesting that unscrupulous FBI officials – probably with the knowledge of ex-Director J. Edgar Hoover – framed four men for a 1965 murder. State prosecutors, after 30 years of intransigence, immediately began steps to drop charges against the four - two of whom died of old age in prison.

To say Durham has been turning heads in Boston's clubby legal community is an understatement. That's nothing new in Connecticut, where Durham has compiled one of the most successful prosecutorial records in the country.

"You underestimate Durham at your own peril," said Hugh Keefe, a New Haven defense lawyer.

Successful prosecutors often leave embittered defense lawyers and alienated witnesses in their wakes, victims of a win-at all-costs mentality. Durham, by all accounts, is a refreshing departure. A colleague, struggling for the right description, recently caught himself short and confessed: "I don't want to get maudlin here. But he really is a good person." Even defense lawyers known to attack prosecutors reflexively have little criticism.

"There is nothing negative that I can say," Boston lawyer Anthony Cardinale said. "So if you're looking for that, I'm not in that mode."

Cardinale would seem like a shoo-in for the negative, having been one of a half-dozen lawyers who squared off against Durham in Hartford in the early 1990s in what then was the biggest mob trial in the country. His client, Louis "Louie Pugs" Pugliano, got life without parole. So frustrated was Cardinale, who has defended clients in some of the country's more notable organized crime trials, that he nearly got himself jailed for contempt."

He's obviously a very fierce competitor," Cardinale said. "But he's not a zealot. And he does it by the rules. He is very professional. He is courteous. I've been up against them all over the country and I'd put him in the top echelon of federal prosecutors. He's such a decent guy you can't hate him. That can make it hard to get motivated."

The view from within law enforcement is even less complicated.

"There is no more principled, there is no more better living, there is no finer person that I know of or have encountered in my life," said Richard Farley, a former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's New Haven division.

Or, Farley might have added, anyone who pays such close attention to detail....

...He likes to hunt ducks, work trout with a fly rod and still looks fit. He has thinning hair, steel-framed glasses and probably a closet full of gray suits. He has a tart sense of humor and, despite a daunting professional schedule, is a fixture at wakes and retirements. He takes Lent seriously and rarely misses Mass on Sunday....

...Through the 1980s and '90s, Durham prosecuted or supervised every organized crime case in Connecticut. His team contributed critical evidence to the conviction in New York of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He conceived the strategy that put Connecticut's big cities a decade ahead of those in neighboring states in eradicating violent urban crack gangs - a strategy that was later adopted elsewhere in the country. He demoted himself to assistant U.S. attorney about two years ago - guilt, friends said, over spending too much time in Boston."

John was given that thing in Boston, I am quite convinced, because he has a reputation for being above the fray, of being absolutely incorruptible and of absolutely calling things the way he sees them," said Ira Grudberg, a defense lawyer in New Haven. "Despite the fact that he can be a hard ass about certain things, I believe he is a real straight shooter."

Durham has built a career on the presumptive integrity of the criminal justice system. Criminals are supposed to know that their punishments are just because the system operates without bias. Durham was sent to Boston as a special prosecutor to investigate signs that the system had failed....

CIA Torture Tapes - Destruction of War Crimes Evidence; SAAG site Hijacked

Andrew Sullivan has a good piece over at The Sunday Times (UK) {The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal}:

...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.

Fact: Zubaydah's interrogation was video and audio taped.

Fact: The FBI and CIA labeled him as INSANE.

Fact: Zubaydah's "warnings" were repeatedly used to manipulate the news cycle and remove dangerous pieces, e.g., a former FBI agent's admission of the Bush Administration having enough foreknowledge to have actually prevented the "terrorist attacks" on 9/11, and they didn't, in order to achieve an agenda.

Conclusion: Zubaydah was a PATSY, a SCAPEGOAT .... someone had to be used to play the role of "informer" in order for the CIA to have a cover for THEIR knowledge of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This is the reason the tapes were DESTROYED - Zubaydah had no information to reveal about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

See more about KSM at CooperativeResearch.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef was responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing. Mohammed's nephew's (Ammar al Baluchi) wife (Aafia Siddiqui) and (cousin) Ramzi worked at the Alkifah Refugee Center. Alkifah was a recruitment and fundraising center for the CIA's Afghan & Bosnia operations. Loads of this history is contained on the South Asia Analysis Group's website, which has been hijacked since December 22 ... just in time for the premiere of that hack piece of propaganda Charlie Wilson's War on December 21. (For a critical review of the propaganda of this movie, see the review of the propaganda book it was based on - Charlie Wilson's Betrayal.)


In August 2007, Jane Mayer's The Black Sites article ran in The New Yorker. In her story, we see how Khalid himself was used as a tool to manipulate the news cycle, remove dangerous pieces, and provide a COVER for the lead to Hambali, whose own capture and incarceration in Guantanamo provided the Indonesian courts an excuse to "clear the Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir of any involvement in the 2002 attack" (see Roger Maynard's Victims angry as cleric is cleared of Bali bombings in the Guardian, December 22, 2006):

In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

The circumstances surrounding the confession of Mohammed, whom law-enforcement officials refer to as K.S.M., were perplexing. He had no lawyer. After his capture in Pakistan, in March of 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency had detained him in undisclosed locations for more than two years; last fall, he was transferred to military custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none. Instead, they had a copy of the video that had been released on the Internet, which showed the killer’s arms but offered no other clues to his identity.

Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A British-educated terrorist who had a history of staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the crime. But the Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the matter had been delayed a remarkable number of times—at least thirty—possibly because of his reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence service, which may have helped free him after he was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. Mohammed’s confession would delay the execution further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal.

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.” She added, “I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”

Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film “A Mighty Heart”—said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. “K.S.M.’s name never came up,” he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, “My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.” A government official involved in the case said, “The fear is that K.S.M. is covering up for others, and that these people will be released.” And Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father, said, “Something is fishy. There are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say he killed Jesus—he has nothing to lose.” ....

...According to the Bush Administration, Mohammed divulged information of tremendous value during his detention. He is said to have helped point the way to the capture of Hambali, the Indonesian terrorist responsible for the 2002 bombings of night clubs in Bali. He also provided information on an Al Qaeda leader in England. Michael Sheehan, a former counterterrorism official at the State Department, said, “K.S.M. is the poster boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the reason these techniques exist. You can save lives with the kind of information he could give up.” Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled some key investigations. Perhaps under duress, he claimed involvement in thirty-one criminal plots—an improbable number, even for a high-level terrorist. Critics say that Mohammed’s case illustrates the cost of the C.I.A.’s desire for swift intelligence. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”

The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th....

...The U.S. government first began tracking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1993, shortly after his nephew Ramzi Yousef blew a gaping hole in the World Trade Center. Mohammed, officials learned, had transferred money to Yousef. Mohammed, born in either 1964 or 1965, was raised in a religious Sunni Muslim family in Kuwait, where his family had migrated from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. In the mid-eighties, he was trained as a mechanical engineer in the U.S., attending two colleges in North Carolina.

As a teen-ager, Mohammed had been drawn to militant, and increasingly violent, Muslim causes. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of sixteen, and, after his graduation from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro—where he was remembered as a class clown, but religious enough to forgo meat when eating at Burger King—he signed on with the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, receiving military training and establishing ties with Islamist terrorists. By all accounts, his animus toward the U.S. was rooted in a hatred of Israel.

In 1994, Mohammed, who was impressed by Yousef’s notoriety after the first World Trade Center bombing, joined him in scheming to blow up twelve U.S. jumbo jets over two days. The so-called Bojinka plot was disrupted in 1995, when Philippine police broke into an apartment that Yousef and other terrorists were sharing in Manila, which was filled with bomb-making materials. At the time of the raid, Mohammed was working in Doha, Qatar, at a government job. The following year, he narrowly escaped capture by F.B.I. officers and slipped into the global jihadist network, where he eventually joined forces with Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. Along the way, he married and had children....

Daniel Pearl -- It was reported in the GulfTimes that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf revealed that Daniel Pearl was actually an MI6 agent (MI6 is the UK's CIA).

The Bojinka Plots -- (Agence France Presse, December 8, 2001, on FromTheWilderness)

...It provided for 11 planes to be exploded simultaneously by bombs placed on board, but also in an alternative form for several planes flying to the United States to be hijacked and flown into civilian targets.

Among targets mentioned was the World Trade Center in New York, which was destroyed in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States that killed thousands.

Other targets mentioned were CIA offices in Virginia and the Sears Tower in Chicago, Die Welt said....

So, what we see - repeatedly - is the CIA and the Bush Administration using person after person as COVER for their KNOWLEDGE - the information they already have, and using them repeatedly to manage and manipulate the news cycle, whenever they get into a bit of trouble.

As to SAAG's website hijacking - who has the most to lose by folks having access to extensive documentation on the whole Afghanistan adventure? THE PLAYERS -- the US's CIA, the UK's MI6, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan's ISI.

CIA Torture Tapes

Roland Lloyd Parry reports on Agence France-Presse:

US government lawyers flatly denied Friday that videotapes destroyed by the CIA contained any scenes of the torture of Guantanamo Bay terror suspects, in a keenly watched court hearing here.

"It is inconceivable that the destroyed tapes could have been about abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay," lawyer Jody Hunt, representing the White House, told the court....

...Hunt said the tapes were made in 2002 and that neither of the two men shown in them "was at Guantanamo Bay during the taping of these videos."

But a lawyer for "war on terror" suspect Moahmaod Abdah, who was not shown in the destroyed tapes, has called for the court to order an investigation into the destruction of the videos.

"Where there is smoke there is fire," lawyer David Remes said....

...The tapes reportedly show the suspects undergoing waterboarding, in which prisoners are subjected to a process of simulated drowning that is widely considered torture.

Since the CIA destroyed the tapes, they can claim any ol' thing they want ... who's gonna tell the devil he's lying? How about telling the devil he's playing word games?

Matt Apuzzo from the Associated Press has this story:

... U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy is considering whether to delve into the matter and, if so, how deeply. The Bush administration is urging him to back off while it investigates.

"Why should the court not permit the Department of Justice to do just that?" Kennedy asked at a court hearing....

...Government lawyer Joseph Hunt said the joint Justice Department-CIA investigation into the destruction of the videos will also seek evidence of whether the government violated any court orders. Hunt promised the judge that, when the investigation is complete, lawyers will tell the court if its rules were violated.

"It would be unwise and imprudent" for the judge to investigate further, Hunt said.The judge had ordered the government not to destroy any evidence of mistreatment or abuse at the Navy base in Cuba. Because the two suspects — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were being held overseas in secret CIA prisons, however, they are likely not covered by the order....

..."The Justice Department may have sanctioned the destruction of these videotapes," attorney David Remes said. "Now they are asking the court to stay out, on the ground it is investigating the destruction of these videotapes."...

Torture Tape Destruction - Violation of Court Order?

Richard B. Schmitt of the Los Angeles Times (repost on CommonDreams) has the latest on the evolving case of the CIA's destruction of the torture tapes:

Over the objections of the Justice Department, a federal judge said Tuesday he would explore whether the U.S. had violated a court order to preserve evidence when the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of two terrorism suspects in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. set a hearing for Friday in Washington in response to a request from Yemeni prisoners who are challenging their detention by the U.S. at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba....

...The tapes were destroyed by a CIA official in November 2005, at a time of growing congressional and public concern about U.S. tactics in the war on terrorism, including interrogation techniques.

It was also five months after Kennedy, in the case of the Yemeni prisoners, issued an order requiring that the U.S. preserve and maintain “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now” at Guantanamo Bay....

...Destroying evidence relevant to a legislative or judicial proceeding could constitute obstruction of justice....

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board remarks:

... On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a story (the White House has consistently refused to comment), telling us that no fewer than four of President Bush's lawyers (including Lawyer of the Year Alberto Gonzales) were in on the talks on what to do with the tapes.

Yet, we're expected to trust the Justice Department to investigate itself even as it asks Congress to back off plans for an immediate hearing. We agree with Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley, who says he's "seen more reputable conduct from mob attorneys." There's no way Congress should postpone a hearing.