Author: Sam Koritz

cov·er-up
Function: noun

1 : a device or stratagem for masking or concealing ; also : a usually concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public

“Four 9/11 Moms Watch Rumsfeld And Grumble” by Gail Sheehy, March 30, 2004, New York Observer:

The Moms had tried to get their most pressing questions to the commission … but their efforts had foundered at the hands of Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director. Indeed, it was only with the recent publication of Richard Clarke’s memoir of his counterterrorism days in the White House, Against All Enemies, that the Moms found out that Mr. Zelikow … was actually one of the select few in the new Bush administration who had been warned, nine months before 9/11, that Osama bin Laden was the No. 1 security threat to the country. They are now calling for Mr. Zelikow’s resignation. …

They point out that it is Mr. Zelikow who decides which among the many people offering information will be interviewed. Efforts by the families to get the commission to hear from a raft of administration and intelligence-agency whistleblowers have been largely ignored at his behest. And it is Mr. Zelikow who oversees what investigative material the commissioners will be briefed on, and who decides the topics for the hearings. Mr. Zelikow’s statement at the January hearing sounded to the Moms like a whitewash waiting to happen: “This was everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault.”

“We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001,” by Eric Boehlert, March 26, 2004, Salon.com:

… She was assigned to the FBI’s investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases, where she translated reams of documents seized by agents who, for the previous year, had been rounding up suspected terrorists. … Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly because she’s been under a Justice Department gag order since 2002. …

This week Edmonds attended the commission hearings and plans to return in April when FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify. “I’m hoping the commission asks him real questions – like, in April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate information indicating the use of airplanes for an attack on major cities? And is it true that through an FBI informant, who’d been used [by the Bureau] for 10 years, did you get information about specific terrorist plans and specific cells in this country? He couldn’t say no,” she insists. …

As a result of her reports, Edmonds says she was harassed at the FBI. She was fired in March 2002. Litigation followed, and in October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss the Edmonds case, taking the extraordinary step of invoking the rarely used state secrets privilege in order “to protect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” …

During a 2002 segment on “60 Minutes” exploring Edmonds’ initial charges of FBI internal abuses, Sen. Grassley was asked if Edmonds is credible. “She’s credible and the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story,” he said. The Inspector General’s office then launched an investigation into Edmonds’ charges and told her to expect a finding in the fall of 2002. The report has yet to be released. …

“Spectators attend 9-11 hearing for a variety of reasons,” by Marta Lillo Bustos, Scripps Howard Foundation Wire, March 28, 2004:

The former FBI translator said she is prohibited from giving details. “They offered me a raise, they offered me a full-time position, to just drop the case,” Edmonds said. She said she has been threatened with jail if she speaks about the specifics.

“Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.,” by Gail Sheehy, January 25, 2004, New York Observer:

… Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up at the door of the Ms. Edmonds’ townhouse to seize her home computer. She was then called in to be polygraphed—a test which, she found out later, she passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied by her lawyer on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms. Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee. …

After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee to whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his investigators check her out. Then they, along with staffers for Senator Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the summer of 2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the language division and an internal security official. In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as bizarre, the windows fogged up as the session finished; it was that tense, “None of the F.B.I. officials’ answers washed, and they could tell we didn’t believe them.” He chuckles remembering one of the Congressional investigators saying, “You basically admitted almost all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there’s no problem here. What’s wrong with this picture?” …

The translator had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on March 7, 2002. She was told then that an investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. And a Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I. for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after the November election.

When Ms. Edmonds wouldn’t go away or keep still, F.B.I. Director Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Mr. Ashcroft obliged. The State Secrets Privilege is the neutron bomb of legal tactics. In the rare cases where the government invokes it to withhold evidence or to block discovery in the name of national security, it can effectively terminate the case. …

She was one of three Turkish translators working on real time wiretaps, e-mails, and documents related to 9/11 investigations.

…it was her other colleague who gave her the greatest cause for concern – and her reports to her superiors as well as an alphabet soup of government commissions and agencies remain unanswered. Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman, married to a major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to be called informally “Jan.” The account that follows, which comes from extended interviews with Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee.

“I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001” said Ms. Edmonds. “In conversation Jan mentioned these suspects and said ‘I can’t believe they’re monitoring these people.'” “How would you know?” Ms. Edmonds remembers saying. She said Dickerson told her she had worked for them in a Turkish organization; she talked about how she shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Alexandria. Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon after, Ms. Dickerson tried to establish social ties with her, suggesting they meet in Alexandria and introduce their husbands to each other.

When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said, Major Dickerson began asking Matthew Edmonds if the couple had many friends from Turkey here in the U.S. Mr. Edmonds said he didn’t speak Turkish, so they didn’t associate with many Turkish people. The Air Force officer then began talking up a Turkish organization in Washington that he described, according to the Edmondses, as “a great place to make connections and it could be very profitable.”

Sibel was sickened. This organization was the very one she and Jan Dickerson were monitoring in a 9/11 investigation. Since Sibel had adhered to the rule that an F.B.I. employee does not discuss bureau matters with one’s mate, her husband innocently continued the conversation. Ms. Dickerson and her husband offered to introduce the Edmondses to people connected to the Turkish embassy in Washington who belonged to this organization.

“These two people were the top targets of our investigation!” Ms. Edmonds said of the people the Dickersons proposed to introduce them to. …

These are classic “pitch activities” to get somebody to spy for you, according to a Judiciary Committee staffer who investigated Ms. Edmonds’ claims. “You’d think the F.B.I. would be jumping out of their seats about all these red flags,” the staffer said.

The targets of that F.B.I. investigation left the country abruptly in 2002. Later, Ms. Edmonds discovered that Ms. Dickerson had managed to get hold of translations meant for Ms. Edmonds, forge her signature, and render the communications useless.

“These were documents directly related to a 9/11 investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to field agents in at least two cities.” By accident, Ms. Edmonds discovered the breach—up to 400 pages of translations marked “not pertinent”—and insisted that those classified translations be sent back so she could retranslate them. “We discovered some amazing stuff,” she remembered.

The first half-dozen translations were transcripts from an F.B.I. wiretap targeting a Turkish intelligence officer working out of the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. A staff-member of the Judiciary committee later confirmed to this writer that the intelligence officer was the target of the wiretap Ms. Dickerson had mistranslated, signing Ms. Edmonds’ name to the printouts. Ms. Edmonds said she found them to reveal that the officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon—but that information would not have reached field agents unless Ms. Edmonds had retranslated them. She only got through about 100 more pages before she was fired. …

Turning a Blind Eye to Ayman. Overshadowed by former US “terror czar” Richard Clarke’s terrific interview on 60 Minutes, was the show’s short piece on Al Qaeda mastermind Ayman Zawahiri. Egypt’s former terror czar is interviewed and says that he warned the US about aiding the jihadis but the US didn’t listen. Zawahiri himself visited the USA on fundraising trips in the ’90s – after he had co-founded al Qaeda, and while he was a wanted man charged with terrorism in Egypt – either “many” times, or at least 3 times, according to an interviewed terror expert and show’s talking head, respectively.

Zawahiri met bin Laden during the Afghan jihad, in which they were aided by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the CIA, and Saudi intelligence, and the same players keep reappearing. In a story released this week, Pakistani journalist Hamad Mir describes Zawahiri bragging about al Qaeda buying a nuke (“Journalist says al-Qaeda has black market nuclear bombs“). A number of news reports suggested that Pakistan’s army had Zawahiri trapped in a semi-autonomous border region but now that seems unlikely. Pakistan’s military has promised a group of international Afghan war vets /al Qaeda suspects there that if they surrender they won’t be turned over to any foreign power (“Peace Deal Sought With Pakistan Militants“) – such as the foreigners who are directing the attack (“US directing operations in Pakistan border battle“).

Blind Eye to Khan. Someone else who Pakistan is protecting from an interview with Americans is Islamist scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan – pardoned by Pakistan’s dictator Pervez Musharraf after confessing to dealing nukes to dictators. This week, UPI editor Arnaud de Borchgrave “exposed” an alleged plot to replace Musharraf with Khan (“Exclusive: Pakistani Plot Exposed“). The alleged mastermind of the alleged coup plot is Gen. Hamid Gul, who was head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (of jihad- and Taliban-supporting fame) and is now “strategic adviser” to MMA, a coalition of Muslim Pakistani political parties.

Also according to press reports this week (“Malaysian company in nuclear parts scandal to sell businesses“), Dr. Khan’s nuke network included a company run by the only son of Malaysia’s Prime Minister. Former Malaysian PM Mahathir claimed that the US knew about this company’s nuke shipments years ago (“Mahathir: US asked Malaysia to stop nuclear shipment once before“). So the nuke network shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. In any event, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists scooped the world’s governments by re-publishing Khan’s centrifuge sales brochure last May. Six months later Khan confessed to what we can only hope isn’t a lesser charge. The see-no-evil Pakistan “surprise,” right after the invasion of WMD-free Iraq would seem to support the BBC’s claim that the Bushies spiked the investigation of Khan’s nuke program in order to protect its alleged Saudi financial backers.

Teflon Terrorists. Then there’s the wacky charity, Benevolence International, that was set up by Saudi sheik Adil Abdul Galil Batargy, a bin Laden associate, during the Afghan war. In the early ’90s, when US and Saudi intelligence were moving the jihad to the Balkans, BI moved its headquarters to Illinois. While in Illinois, according to the FBI, its leaders lied about connections to terrorists, while supporting people who tried to obtain nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden starting in the early ’90s (“Islamic charity tied to al-Qaida“). Until nearly a decade later, after the 9/11 attacks, BI received corporate matching funds (“‘TERROR’ CHARITY GOT FORTUNE 500 CASH“), while the corporate donors got US tax breaks. What’s a little al Qaeda nuke when you have Slavic competitors to undermine?

Rise of the Vulcans. This week, the Denver Post published an excerpt from the book Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann. Mann explains how post-WWII the government recruited experts among business leaders, and in the Vietnam era the experts came from the universities.

“The Vulcans were the military generation. Their wellspring, the common institution in their careers, was the Pentagon. The top levels of the foreign policy team that took office in 2001 included two former secretaries of defense (Cheney and Rumsfeld), one former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Powell), one former undersecretary of defense (Wolfowitz) and one former assistant secretary of defense (Armitage). Even Rice had started her career in Washington with a stint at the Pentagon, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. … The story of the Vulcans serves as a reminder that this bifurcation of history into cold war and post-cold war is ultimately artificial. In their careers, the Vulcans worked on both sides of the arbitrary divide. ‘While working in government, they confronted firsthand both the world of the Berlin Wall and the world without it.”

Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes:

“I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.”

Tomorrow’s Blowback Today. One of the Afghan jihad era Cold Warriors, California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, was in the New York Times this week – staying ahead of the curve, his new cause is supporting Cambodian terrorists (defined as such by the US government) who are organizing in Long Beach (“The Strip-Mall Revolutionaries”). (Last time the government turned a blind eye to terrorists in California things didn’t turn out too well for most Americans not part of the military industrial espionage complex.)

But Someone is Planning Ahead. And to end on a creepy note, this week SF Chronicle writer David Lazarus reported that there are 3 companies licensed to manufacture over-the-counter potassium iodide pills, used to treat radiation poisoning. One of them is tiny, one is foreign, and the third is the Bushie-Saudi influence-peddling investment company, the Carlyle Group (“A firm in position to profit“).

The media seem to be taking pretty seriously the claim by alleged al Qaeda franchisee Abu-Hafs al-Masri /al-Qaeda Brigades that they’re calling off attacks on Spain for the time being and are targeting Japan, Italy, Britain or Australia — The Australian‘s headline: “Al-Qa’ida puts us on target list.” Yet this alleged group also claimed responsibility for last year’s huge US/Canada blackouts, which the FBI claims is absurd. In fact Abu al-HM isn’t connected to any known act of terror, & some experts question the group’s existence.

Meanwhile France has been threatened in a letter signed by a previously unknown alleged Islamist group. Some news reports claim that the letter is signed “Servants of Allah the Powerful and Wise” and others “the Brigade of Movsar Barayev.” About this letter, France’s interior minister said: “The specialized services believe that the phrasing does not correspond to the rhythm typically used by extremists in these kinds of messages.” He later suggested that French right-wingers could be responsible.

The alleged group’s namesake, Movsar Barayev, was the chief Islamist leader in Chechnya, before he was killed in the Moscow theater siege. Barayev’s successor is quoted as saying: “There is no such thing as a ‘Brigade of Movsar Barayev.'” Meanwhile, the Socialists have accused the French PM of fearmongering before the regional elections.

In my last post I mentioned Michael Scott Doran’s article “The Saudi Paradox.” For a more complex, though not necessarily contradictory view of the Saudi power struggle there’s Robert Baer’s Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

Baer, who was a CIA case officer in the Mideast and Central Asia for decades, opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he wants to drop the drug war, end industrial espionage against the EU and disband the CIA. He opposes messianic universalist democratism but unfortunately has retained his support for military interventionism in principle. Regardless, his tales of astonishing government corruption and ineptitude could cause a reasonable person to question the whole militarist project. Despite the book’s regrettable title, Baer is no knee-jerk Saudi-basher; he praises the nominal rulers of the country, particularly Crown Prince ‘Abdallah, and he criticizes the US and Israeli governments’ roles in fomenting the jihad movement. Baer is also refreshingly nonpartisan; for example, after criticizing “the oilmen who now occupy the White House” he writes, “not that I want to let the Clinton people off the hook, or the first Bush team, or the Reaganites, Carterites, Fordites, or Nixonites: Screwing up Saudi Arabia might be the most successful bipartisan undertaking of the last half century.”

Here’s my Cliff Notes version of Baer’s view of the creation of the international jihad movement:

The goal of the US military /intelligence /espionage complex was to defeat the Soviet Union (rather than, say, to protect Americans). That dualistic worldview led to US opposition to secular Arab nationalism, which was viewed as compatible with Soviet socialism, and support for Zionism, monarchial despotism, and Sunni theocracy, which were not. The victory of Israel – “a tiny state based on religious cohesiveness” – over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967 discredited secular Arab nationalism and began to shift the balance of power away from the corrupt, hedonistic monarchs, and in favor of the theocrats. The CIA and Saudi intelligence used government-controlled charities (for plausible deniability) to funnel billions of dollars of aid to the most radical mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan – the most expensive covert op in history. International jihad groups were organized and funded: next stop the Balkans, Chechnya, and New York. King Fahd’s stroke in 1995 was a turning point, which led to a near-coup by one of his wives in cahoots with his favorite son, Azouzi, and led to a still-unresolved power struggle among corrupt princes, the theocratic establishment, the conservative reformist Crown Prince ‘Abdullah, and rebel theocrats – in various combinations of alliances. The stakes are high: Baer claims, for instance, that Azouzi received one bribe in the mind-boggling amount of $900,000,000.

The US military when stationed in Saudi Arabia was viewed as a guarantor of the Saudi royal family – an obstacle to irregular succession or regime change. The terrorist attacks against US civilians were perpetrated by Sunni militants yet in response the Bushies targeted a bogus “axis” of Arab nationalists, Communists, and Shi’ites – that is, opponents of militant Sunnism. Sleeping with the Devil helps us understand why.

“The Saudi Paradox,” by Michael Scott Doran, published in the Jan/Feb Foreign Affairs is a good source of background information on the likely motivation for this week’s anti-Shi’ite terrorist attacks (though I don’t agree with all of his conclusions):

“To better understand how al Qaeda reads Saudi Arabia’s political map, one can turn to the work of Yusuf al-Ayyiri, a prolific al Qaeda propagandist who died last June in a skirmish with the Saudi security services. Just before his death he wrote a revealing book, The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, which gives a good picture of how al Qaeda activists perceive the world around them. … In its plot to denature Islam, al-Ayyiri claims, Zio-Crusaderism embraces three local allies: secularists, Shi`ites, and lax Sunnis (that is, those who sympathize with the idea of separating religion from state). …

“Radical Sunni Islamists hate Shi`ites more than any other group, including Jews and Christians. Al-Qaeda’s basic credo minces no words on the subject: ‘We believe that the Shi`ite heretics are a sect of idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under the heavens.’ For its part, the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment expresses similar views. The fatwas, sermons, and statements of established Saudi clerics uniformly denounce Shi`ite belief and practice. A recent fatwa by Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a respected professor at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (which trains official clerics), is a case in point. Asked whether it was permissible for Sunnis to launch a jihad against Shi`ites, al-Barrak answered that if the Shi`ites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then yes, the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them. Al-Barrak’s answer, it is worth noting, assumes that the Shi`ites are not Muslims at all. …”

Doran also offers an explanation of why the Saudi state has funded jihadis critical of the monarchy:

“The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. … Ever since King Fahd’s stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne. …

“Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis. The economy cannot keep pace with population growth, the welfare state is rapidly deteriorating, and regional and sectarian resentments are rising to the fore. These problems have been exacerbated by an upsurge in radical Islamic activism. …

“The Saudi monarchy functions as the intermediary between two distinct political communities: a Westernized elite that looks to Europe and the United States as models of political development, and a Wahhabi religious establishment that holds up its interpretation of Islam’s golden age as a guide. The clerics consider any plan that gives a voice to non-Wahhabis as idolatrous. Saudi Arabia’s two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.

“The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the principle of Tawhid, or ‘monotheism,’ as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. …

“The doctrine of Tawhid ensures a unique political status for the clerics in Saudi Arabia. After all, they alone have the necessary training to detect and root out idolatry so as to safeguard the purity of the realm. Tawhid is thus not just an intolerant religious doctrine but also a political principle that legitimizes the repressiveness of the Saudi state. It is no wonder, therefore, that Nayef, head of the secret security apparatus, is a strong supporter of Tawhid. Not known personally as a pious man, Nayef zealously defends Wahhabi puritanism because he knows on which side his bread is buttered — as do others with a stake in the repressive status quo. … On the domestic front, Nayef indirectly controls the controversial Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), the religious police.”

One of the most famous thought-experiments in economics is Bastiat‘s story of the broken window, which the French economist used to argue against the common belief that destruction stimulates economic activity. In Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt uses the broken window to argue against the belief that war stimulates economic activity. What follows is Hazlitt on war. Those who want to read the background, Hazlitt on the broken window, should click MORE, below.

“…SO WE HAVE finished with the broken window. An elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments’ thought. Yet the broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more rampant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio and television commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities. In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction.

“Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They all tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see ‘miracles of production’ which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a world made prosperous by an enormous ‘accumulated’ or ‘backed-up’ demand. In Europe, after World War II, they joyously counted the houses, the whole cities that had been leveled to the ground and that ‘had to be replaced.’ In America they counted the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent radios and refrigerators. They brought together formidable totals.

“It was merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat beyond recognition. This time it was supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It confused need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power. The needs of India today are incomparably greater than the needs of America. But its purchasing power, and therefore the ‘new business’ that it can stimulate, are incomparably smaller. …

“Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction – the collectivity, the ‘nation’ – and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning. No one could think that the destruction of war was an economic advantage who began by thinking first of all of the people whose property was destroyed.

“Those who think that the destruction of war increases total ‘demand’ forget that demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact to offer in exchange for the things they want. In this sense the farmers’ supply of wheat constitutes their demand for automobiles and other goods. All this is inherent in the modern division of labor and in an exchange economy. …

“In all this discussion, moreover, we have so far omitted a central consideration. Plants and equipment cannot be replaced by an individual (or a Socialist government) unless he or it has acquired or can acquire the savings, the capital accumulation, to make the replacement. But war destroys accumulated capital.”

Continue reading “The Blessings of Destruction”