by TChris

The NY Times explores the genesis of the Bush administration's secret prisons:

According to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the C.I.A. understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. The directive, known as a memorandum of notification, authorized the C.I.A. for the first time to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects, providing the foundation for what became its secret prison system.

And the genesis of torture:

That 2001 directive did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, however, and senior C.I.A. officials began in late 2001 and early 2002 to draw up a list of aggressive interrogation procedures that might be used against terrorism suspects. They consulted agency psychiatrists and foreign governments to identify effective techniques beyond standard interview practices.

Policy became practice in a Thailand prison, where the CIA concluded that the FBI's standard interrogation techniques weren't inducing Abu Zubaydah to tell all he knew about al Qaeda:

by TChris

We can speculate about Ronald Ferry's motive for lying to the FBI, but whatever his reasons were, they turned Abdallah Higazy into another victim of 9/11. Ferry, ex-cop turned hotel security guard, claimed he found an aviation radio in a hotel room safe with Higazy's passport while inventorying property left behind by guests when the hotel was evacuated. The radio had actually been left in a different room, but FBI agents believed Ferry and therefore disbelieved Higazy when he told them he'd never seen the radio.

Higazy, an Egyptian graduate student, was arrested as a material witness. He knew he was in trouble when he was locked up in a maximum security wing with Zacarias Moussaoui.

Being in Moussaoui's company -- and being strip-searched, shackled and insulted by guards -- was unnerving to a moderate Muslim who had never even read the Koran.

Higazy submitted to a polygraph, but his story didn't square with the FBI's understanding of the "truth," so agents coerced Higazy into telling a story they liked better.

I'm headed to the airport -- I will be on a plane every day between today and Tuesday Sept. 12 -- including the dreaded Sept. 11 anniversary. I'll be posting, and pushing your comments through, just a little less frequently.

So, pull up a chair, what's on your mind?

Unless the pressure on ABC proves too much to bear, The Path to 9/11 will air Sunday and Monday. Here's a new wrinkle.

In another complication, President Bush has asked broadcast networks to clear time for an address to the nation Monday night at 9:01 p.m., just at the start of the last hour of "The Path to 9/11" on the East Coast. ABC announced plans Friday night to cover what is expected to be a 20-minute speech before resuming the film.

The movie is a partisan distortion of history and now we have to listen to Bush further spin both?

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Just remarkable:

I think what they're trying to do is to take the fact the specific scenes portrayed were fictional and to try to refute the underlying reality that the Clinton administration just didn't get it. And by the way, before 9/11 neither did the Bush administration," - 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman.

Believe it or not, Bill Bennett gets it right on the principle, if not the conclusion:

Look, "The Path to 9/11″ is strewn with a lot of problems and I think there were problems in the Clinton administration. But that's no reason to falsify the record, falsify conversations by either the president or his leading people and you know it just shouldn't happen.

The point is simple - if you believe Clinton was faulty in his approach to terrorism and Al Qaida, then cite the FACTS to argue your case. Frankly, I think the problem is the FACTS say otherwise. That is precisely why fiction (or more bluntly, lies) must be used to smear the Clinton Administration's work on terrorism.

by TChris

Right wing commentators have been fond of the epithet "islamofascist" for some time, but the term broke into mainstream use when the president recently uttered a variant, "Islamic fascist." The term sweeps too broadly, and in any event, associating an entire religion with the doctrine of fascism is gratuitously offensive. The term is useful only as propaganda, and in that respect, it's disturbing to see conventional journalists adopting it, apparently without giving much thought to its accuracy or value.

But the "fascism" analogy has holes in it large enough to drive an Abrams tank through, and so its spawn, "Islamofascism," is also imprecise. Any political PR offensive relies on the airwaves and printed pages of the MSM for its dissemination. By reporting "just the facts" and on news-pegged events -- in this case the various speeches by the president and his cabinet members -- the press, whether or not it thinks the term "Islamofascism" apt, is helping to disseminate propaganda. ...

If editors had some boilerplate language to insert when appropriate that would give readers at least some sense of why the term is misleading, it could help repair some of the damage done by this type of propaganda.

Good for Harvey Keitel, who plays the lead in the ABC drama Path to 9/11:

Harvey Keitel, the lead actor in the film, said in a TV interview that changes must be made in the film. He said when he was hired for the role he was told the movie was a "history" but then found that certain facts were "wrong." This led to "arguments," he recalled. "You can compile certain things as long as the truth remains the truth," he told Showbiz Tonight. "You can't put these things together, compress them and then distort the reality....

"You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected."

If these are the only changes being made, they aren't enough. Keep the pressure on.

by TChris

The president recently told Katie Couric that "[o]ne of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." Fabricating a nonexistent connection must indeed be a difficult chore, particularly as evidence disputing the connection continues to grow.

There's no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. ... It discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government ''did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,'' according to excerpts of the 400-page report provided by Democrats. ...

Bush and other administration officials have said that the presence of Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of a connection between Saddam's government and al-Qaida.

The report, available here, "also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war."

Have any of you returned home from a trip to find this in your checked luggage? I did today when I went to unpack my suitcase after my trip to Omaha. My problem with it is that I don't believe it's random. Security searched my bag on my out-bound trip (details here) -- what are the chances that 24 hours later, a surreptitious search of the same bag, this time checked, is random? There must have been some kind of coding that flagged it after the outbound flight.

This is particularly odious for traveling lawyers, most of whom are probably like me. On the outbound flight, our client files are in our carry-on luggage. We either want to review them during the flight or know we will need them immediately upon our arrival and can't take a chance on them being delayed or lost by the airline. On the return, however, rather than lug them, we check them.

But those files contain notes we made while meeting with our clients or expert witnesses, print-outs of case-related emails or memos with defense strategy. They are protected by the attorney-client and work-product privileges. In a high-profile case, what's to prevent the TSA officer from scanning them and sending them on to the Justice Department?

Suffice it to say from hereon out I will probably use fedex to return the files rather than check them in my luggage. But for those occasions where there isn't time, I'm going to create a lawyer's version of the TalkLeft 4th Amendment Subway Tote which I will pack on top of the contents of my suitcase. It will contain a warning to TSA that should any of the material in my suitcase wind up in the hands of the Government, they will be responsible for my motion to suppress and the likelihood that someone the Government regards as a serious criminal is likely to walk free. The final line on the tote will be: "Go ahead, make my day."

San Diego has been leading the charge in California against medical marijuana. So it's probably no surprise that a group of federally-funded law enforcement officers and personnel have chosen San Diego for their annual anti-cannabis cabal.

Here's the invitation:

September 5, 2006

To: Invited Guests

Re: National Marijuana Initiative Conference

The National Marijuana Initiative (NMI), funded by the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Program, will hold its annual conference October 31-November 1, 2006 in San Diego, California. This year, the NMI, in partnership with Californian's for Drug Free Youth and its local affiliate the San Diego Prevention Coalition, has expanded the conference for California and other states' Drug Free Community grantees and prevention organizations. For the first time ever, the NMI is inviting prevention professionals to join us for Day 1, and for a new Day 2. An agenda will be sent out within the next few weeks.

All of the HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas) Directors located within the "Marijuana-Seven" states have been invited to participate. The HIDTA and their appropriate state and local law enforcement personnel will share their marijuana investigations and eradication efforts on public lands on Day 1. Day 2 will focus on marijuana prevention efforts.

Via NORML:

98 Percent Of All Domestically Eradicated Marijuana Is "Ditchweed," DEA Admits

Washington, DC: More than 98 percent of all of the marijuana plants seized by law enforcement in the United States is feral hemp not cultivated cannabis, according to newly released data by the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program and the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.

According to the data, available online here , of the estimated 223 million marijuana plants destroyed by law enforcement in 2005, approximately 219 million were classified as "ditchweed," a term the agency uses to define "wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending." Unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis, and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

Previous DEA reports have indicated that between 98 and 99 percent of all the marijuana plants eradicated by US law enforcement is ditchweed.

There are still problems with the comments on TalkLeft. Here's what's happening. Since I haven't been able to restore the comment template, the comments are still open to all. But, many are being directed to the "junk comment" screen and being held. They are mixed in with real junk comments -- which since comments are now open -- now approach 200 an hour. I have to log into the junk comments, find your real comments and unjunk them so they appear on the site, while deleting the junk ones. As you can imagine, this takes a tremendous amount of my time.

In a word, so long as you don't post as "anonymous," your comments will appear, they just may not be instantaneous. I am not filtering for content, point of view, or anything besides name-calling, profanity, links not in html format and the like.