Police Departments' New Tool: Drones

Published on Friday, January 20, 2012 by Common Dreams

Police Departments' New Tool: Drones

- Common Dreams staff 

 

Drones are no longer just part of the military's arsenal of tools. Police departments across the U.S. are getting them too.

 

Honeywell, manufacturer of the RQ-16A T-Hawk spy drone, likes to say that the device fits in a backpack. (DOD) FlaglerLive reports:

With financial help from the federal government, police departments across the country are marshaling a new generation of remote-controlled airborne surveillance devices to be their eyes in the sky.

The Miami-Dade Police Department now has drones ready to use. NBC Miami reports:

The Miami-Dade Police Department finally stands ready to launch their two micro air vehicles, or MAVs, the next time a shooting standoff or hostage situation could use a bird's eye boost, more than two years after getting the drones.

"It has no weapons," said Sergeant Andrew Cohen, one of the county's 12 pilot officers. "It's just a camera, basically a flying camera."

The potential far-reaching surveillance has the ACLU sounding the need for caution:

“Our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values,” warns the ACLU report, Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance. “We need a system of rules to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this technology without bringing us a large step closer to a ‘surveillance society’ in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities.”

RT notes:

“There can be a very lucrative market in the United States for drones in police departments who are already militarized – from tanks to assault vehicles to assault rifles, flap jackets, the helmets,” John Whitehead [a constitutional attorney from the Rutherford Institute] said. “The modern police look like the military so now they are going to be using military equipment.”

RT looks further with this video:

Endless Evil: The Drug War’s Continuing Collateral Damage

 
 

Endless Evil: The Drug War’s Continuing Collateral Damage

by Radley Balko, Posted October 27, 2011

Part 1

 

In September 2009, 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers pulled into a gas station in Stephens County, Georgia, to withdraw money from an ATM. Ayers, a pastor, had just given $23, all the cash he had in his pocket, to Johanna Barrett, a drug addict alleged to be a prostitute to whom Ayers had been ministering. His purpose was to help Barrett pay rent at the motel where she was living with her boyfriend. According to friends and family members, it wasn’t unusual for Ayers to give the money he was carrying to help those to whom he was ministering get out of a jam.

Shortly after Ayers returned to his car from the ATM, a black Escalade tore into the parking lot. Three police officers, all undercover, got out of the vehicle and raced toward Ayers’s car. The startled pastor started his car and attempted to flee the parking lot. As he pulled out of the gas station, his vehicle grazed Officer Chance Oxner. Officer Billy Shane Harrison opened fire, putting a bullet through Ayers’s window that struck the pastor in the stomach. Ayers continued to drive, fleeing down the road for about a thousand yards before eventually crashing his car. He died at the hospital. His last words to his family and medical staff were that he thought he was being robbed. The police found no illicit drugs in his car, and there was no trace of any illegal substance in his body.

The police officers were part of a multi-jurisdictional drug task force. They had been following Barrett, who they say was selling small amounts of illicit drugs to support her own habit. They latched on to Ayers when they saw him hand her money while she was under surveillance. Rather than investigate further, at which point they would have discovered that Ayers was a pastor with no criminal history, they chose to confront him as if he were a violent fugitive on the lam. Subsequent investigations by the DA’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of the police. It took a lawsuit by Ayers’s widow and some reporting from a local TV news reporter to discover that Harrison, the officer who shot Ayers, had received no training in the use of lethal force. In fact, he had so little training that under Georgia law he wasn’t legally permitted to carry a gun or work as an active-duty police officer. Even now, while Abigail Ayers’s lawsuit is still pending, there has been no disciplinary action taken against the officers involved in Jonathan Ayers’s death. He is collateral damage in America’s drug war.

Ayers’s story is too familiar. Consider Isaac Singletary, an 80-year-old man shot and killed by undercover police in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2008. The cops were posing as drug dealers, soliciting clients from Singletary’s front lawn. When Singletary came out of his home with a rifle to scare off what he thought were loitering drug pushers, the undercover cops panicked and killed him. Once again, no one was to blame. Jacksonville Sheriff John Rutherford described Singletary as “an honest citizen trying to do good.” Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida called Singletary’s death one of the “challenges in fighting crime.” The officers who killed Singletary were cleared of any blame.

There are more examples, from just the last few years. In January of this year, 68-year-old Eurie Stamps was killed by the Framingham, Massachusetts, SWAT team that raided his home. Stamps wasn’t a suspect and he wasn’t armed. In fact, the police nabbed the two suspects they were looking for — the son of Stamps’s live-in girlfriend and a friend of his — outside the house.

In 2008, Gonzalo Guizan was shot and killed by a SWAT team raiding the Easton, Connecticut, home of Ronald Terebesi Jr. Police were acting on a tip from a prostitute that Terebesi was using (not selling) cocaine. Guizan’s family says Guizan was visiting Terebesi to discuss their opening a business together. Guizan was shot when he ran toward the invading police officers as they broke into the home.
Also in 2008, a police officer in Lima, Ohio, shot and killed 26-year-old Tarika Wilson during a drug raid targeting Wilson’s boyfriend. As one officer shot and killed the boyfriend’s dogs, another officer mistook those shots for hostile gunfire. That officer then emptied his weapon into the bedroom where Wilson was on her knees, holding her infant son, complying with the officers’ orders. Wilson was killed. Her son lost use of his right hand.

When Richard Nixon first uttered the phrase “war on drugs” in 1971, he didn’t choose those words by accident. Government declarations of war signal to the country that the threat it is facing is so perilous, so grave, so existential, that in order to defeat it, Americans should prepare to give up basic freedoms, make significant sacrifices, and accept the inevitable collateral damage they may endure on “their” way to victory. Whatever one may think about the justness and morality of America’s actual wars, they were at least all predicated on the idea that the United States faced an enemy that threatened its very way of life. (Of course, that was true only in a small number of cases.) The drug war doesn’t even put up that sort of pretense. Elected officials argue — and Americans have mostly played along — that all of this sacrifice, erosion of civil liberties, and collateral damage are necessary to ... keep people from getting high.

The “war on drugs” metaphor grew increasingly literal during the Reagan administration. And through Reagan’s, Clinton’s, both Bushes’, and Obama’s administration, both major political parties have only inflated and doubled down on what has arguably been the most destructive and wasteful government policy of the last 40 years. The drug war touches nearly every area of American life, and distorts nearly all facets of American public policy. But there are a few examples of where drug prohibition has done more damage than others.

Police militarization
 
In May 2010, a video of a drug raid in Columbia, Missouri, made its way to the Internet and went viral. In it, a SWAT team uses a battering ram to force its way into a home after nightfall. Within seconds, shots ring out. You next hear the screeches of a dying dog, followed by the protesting wails of homeowner Jonathan Whitworth upon learning that the police had shot and killed one of his dogs and wounded the other. The video then shows police rounding up Whitworth, his wife, and their young son at gunpoint. Whitworth is handcuffed and arrested. The police found only a small amount of marijuana in the home, not even enough to charge him with a misdemeanor. (Marijuana had been decriminalized in Columbia.)

Reaction to the video was fascinating. People from all over the country — indeed the world — condemned the Columbia Police Department for the violent tactics. The department was inundated with email, phone calls, and faxes. Within days, more than a million people watched the video on YouTube. But the interesting thing is that there was nothing unusual about that video. Everything about it was standard procedure, from the battering ram, to the paramilitary gear to the perfunctory slaughter of the dog. Raids just like it happen dozens of times each day in the United States. It was as if America had suddenly realized just how militant its war on drugs really was. The outrage was encouraging, but such invasions have been going on for a generation. And while reaction to the video did effect some modest reforms in Columbia, it had almost no substantive effect outside the city.

The proliferation of SWAT teams began in the 1980s. America’s long (and wise) constraint on using the military for domestic policing, codified in the post–Civil War Posse Comitatus Act, began to blur as states deployed National Guard troops to search for marijuana hidden in fields and forests and, in some cases, to patrol drug-riddled inner cities. The line between cop and soldier further blurred when Ronald Reagan authorized active-duty elite military units to train with narcotics police.

But the most significant threat to Posse Comitatus may not come from the use of soldiers as cops, but from the increasing tendency of cops to act like soldiers, a troubling trend best seen in the 30-year rise in the use of paramilitary SWAT teams in America. SWAT teams are ubiquitous now, thanks in large part to a number of bad federal incentives, including a Pentagon program that since the late 1980s has given millions of pieces of surplus military gear to local police departments for free or at a steep discount.

In the 1970s, only a handful of police departments had SWAT teams, and they were deployed only a few hundred times per year across the entire country. That number soared to around 4,000 per year by the early 1980s, and to an incredible 50,000 per year by the mid 2000s. There are now 130–150 SWAT raids per day in America. In most, police force their way into private homes, usually at night, then violently secure the premises at gunpoint. They sometimes deploy flash grenades, which are designed to cause sensory paralysis of everyone inside. And the purpose of the vast majority of these raids is to serve search warrants on people suspected of nonviolent, consensual drug crimes. According to my own research, at least 48 innocent people have died in such raids. That is, people who weren’t caught with — or even suspected of having — any illicit drugs. Dozens more nonviolent drug offenders have been killed, as have about 30 police officers.

Politicians have dressed police like soldiers, trained them in paramilitary tactics, given them military weapons and armor, and told them they’re fighting a “war.” And as everyone knows, sometimes in a war, innocent people die.

Foreign policy
Just months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government gave $43 million to Afghanistan — a way of compensating Afghan farmers hurt by the Taliban’s compliance with a U.S. request to crack down on that country’s opium farms. (As it turns out, the Taliban eradicated only those farms in competition with the Taliban’s own producers.)

Americans don’t seem to have learned. The Western world’s prohibition on opium has made poppies a lucrative crop for impoverished Afghan farmers, and is a valuable recruiting tool for insurgents and remnant Taliban forces. At the same time, DEA agents and U.S. and UN troops rove the Afghan countryside on search-and-destroy missions, setting the livelihoods of Afghan farmers — their poppies — aflame before their very eyes. That is not the way to build alliances. As Misha Glenny, author of a book on the global drug trade, explained in a 2008 article for the Washington Post,

the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income.... The “War on Drugs” is defeating the “war on terror.”

But it isn’t just in Afghanistan. The United States has a long history of turning a blind eye to human-rights abuses and unintended consequences in the name of eradicating illicit drugs overseas. Between 2001 and 2003, the United States gave more than $12 million to Thailand for drug interdiction efforts. Over 10 months in 2003, the Thai government sent out anti-drug “death squads” to carry out the extra-judicial executions of as many as 4,000 suspected drug offenders. Many were later found to have had nothing to do with the drug trade. Though the U.S. State Department denounced the killings, the United States still continued to give the same Thai regime millions in aid for counternarcotics operations with little control over how that money was spent.

Then there’s the bloody civil war in Mexico, where the U.S.-backed and heavily U.S.-funded drug war has wreaked incomprehensible carnage. An estimated 15,000 people were murdered by drug cartels in 2010 alone. Some 30,000 have been murdered since 2006 when, at the urging of the U.S. government, President Felipe Calderon of Mexico called up the Mexican military to put more war in the country’s drug war. Five years later, the policy has produced enough bodies to populate a small town. And yet the drug trade still flourishes. News reports indicate that astonishing numbers of Mexican police forces, politicians, and customs agents are now on cartel payrolls. Drug lords brazenly murder journalists, pop singers, and sports stars. The border town of Praxedis G. Guerrero recently hired 20-year-old college student Marisol Valles García as its new police chief. The previous chief, like those in nearby towns, had been assassinated. Garcia was the only one to apply for the job.

Meanwhile, U.S. drug agents and politicians have callously dismissed all of this brutal violence in Mexico as collateral damage in the quest for a drug-free America. One former federal drug warrior wrote in an Arizona newspaper in 2008 that all the death and carnage in Mexico is actually good news — Mexicans slaughtering one another is a sign that “we’re” winning. Other U.S. officials have since echoed that horrifying claim. This cynical, ends-justifies-the-means mentality isn’t surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less immoral. If thousands of Mexicans have to die in order to stop Americans from getting high, well, that’s a sacrifice U.S. anti-drug officials are willing to make. How noble of them. In 2009, the U.S. Congress approved another $400 million in drug-war aid to Mexico, despite concern from human-rights organizations that the Mexican military may be killing innocent Mexican citizens in its vigor to crack down on the drug lords.

In South America, the “Plan Colombia” drug interdiction effort spearheaded by Bill Clinton has also been a disaster, as U.S. military aid has funded right-wing paramilitary groups responsible for mass human-rights abuses and spawned public support for the FARC guerrilla organization that periodically rises up to threaten the country’s stability. The other main component of the plan — the mass spraying of concentrated herbicide on Colombian coca fields — has poisoned vast tracts of farmland (and, some say, many people), depriving many Colombians of their livelihood. That, again, isn’t likely to foster warm feelings toward the United States.

U.S. citizens occasionally get picked off in U.S. overseas anti-drug efforts, too. In 2001, the CIA ordered the Peruvian Air Force to shoot down what they thought was a drug plane. They were mistaken. Instead, they had shot down a plane filled with U.S. missionaries. Veronica Bowers, 35, and her seven-month-old daughter Charity died in the ensuing crash. Just more collateral damage.

Part 2 

“The Fourth Amendment has been virtually repealed by court decisions,” Yale law professor Steven Duke told Wired magazine in 2000, “most of which involve drug searches.” 

The rise of no-knock raids and SWAT teams is one example (discussed in part one of this series), but there are others. James Bovard once wrote, for example, of the almost comically comprehensive list of suspicious “drug mule” behavior for which one can be legally detained and invasively searched at an airport. The list includes being the first person off a plane, the last person off a plane, or someone who authorities believe is conspicuously in the middle of exiting passengers. Bovard adds that federal courts have upheld detainments and searches for people who “had nonstop flights — and those who changed planes; persons traveling alone — and persons traveling with a companion; people who appeared nervous — and people who appeared too calm.” 

In New York City, police have used suspicionless “stop and frisk” pat-downs to trick marijuana users into incriminating themselves. Possession of small amounts of the drug isn’t a criminal offense in the Big Apple, but publicly displaying the drug is. So when police stop a suspected pot user on the basis of nothing more than a hunch (which they now do more than half a million times per year), they ask their mark to empty his pockets. If doing so requires him to reveal a joint or small bag of pot, the cops arrest him. It doesn’t matter that pot is decriminalized, or that the offender had no intention of smoking or showing the drug in public. The number of marijuana-possession arrests in New York City has consequently exploded, from 900 in 1992 to more than 40,000 in 2009. 

In many areas of the country, police are also now conducting “administrative searches” at bars and clubs. These obvious searches for criminal conduct are cloaked as regulatory inspections, which conveniently gets around the need for a search warrant. Police in some cities, including New Haven, Atlanta, Orlando, and Manassas Park, Virginia, have sent huge SWAT teams into bars, nightclubs, even barbershops, under the pretense of verifying that the bar is complying with various administrative regulations. They then search the entire place, including the persons of customers and employees, for illegal drugs. 

For 20 years now, America’s absurd, drug-war inspired civil asset-forfeiture laws have operated on the legal fiction that property can be guilty of a crime. The mere presence of an illicit substance in a person’s home or car allows the government to seize his property, sell it, and keep the proceeds. The onus is on the accused to prove he obtained his property legally, and the cost of fighting the state in court can often exceed the value of the property cops have taken. They don’t even need to actually find any drugs. The government has seized and kept money under the absurd argument that merely carrying large amounts of cash is indicative of criminal activity. That money then goes to buy new cop cars, exercise equipment for the police station, plane tickets for training conferences or junkets for cops and prosecutors, and, in one of my personal favorite anecdotes, a margarita machine for the DA’s office. 

The drug war has undermined the rule of law in less-obvious ways, too. As was the case with alcohol prohibition, and is the case with the prohibition of any consensual activity, the people who are asked to police those crimes often have to break the very laws they’re enforcing. The presence of large sums of unaccounted money can be tempting and corrupting for cops, and there are plenty of stories of police officers lured into the drug trade. But the drug war breeds corruption in more mundane ways, too. Politicians and prosecutors like to tout their successes with statistics — they want lots of arrests, big busts, and lots of drug seizures. 

The temptation for cops to take shortcuts on their way to a big bust looms large. We saw this in Atlanta in 2006 when, during a botched drug raid, police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. Subsequent investigations revealed not only that police in that case had lied about nearly every aspect of the Johnston case, but that lying on search-warrant requests was common among Atlanta’s narcotics cops. Following the rules simply took too long for cops facing pressure to meet monthly drug-arrest quotas. 

The cops in the Johnston case also lied about their use of a confidential informant, another common temptation in drug policing. Police abuse of the drug-informant system led to the high-profile scandals in Tulia and Hearne, Texas, as well as other scandals in St. Louis and Cleveland and at the FBI. The use of street informants is bad enough. But there’s also the problem of jailhouse informants, convicts facing long sentences who testify against drug suspects in exchange for a reduction in their time behind bars. Despite the obvious shortcomings in their trustworthiness — they are cons who have everything to gain and nothing to lose by lying — countless innocents have been wrongly convicted on the word of jailhouse snitches. 

The inherent problems with the informant system have fostered growing distrust and contempt for law enforcement, giving rise in some cities to the “Stop Snitch’n” movement, which encourages citizens to never cooperate with police under any circumstances, not even during the investigation of violent crimes. And so we now have yet another ongoing American tragedy wrought by the drug war: there are entire communities in the United States that have completely given up on the people charged with protecting them. Many people understandably find the “Stop Snitch’n” movement repugnant, but it’s important to understand its context. There are places in America where the drug war has completely eradicated all respect for the law, even among citizens who aren’t involved in the drug trade.

Pain treatment

 

By now most people are familiar with the basics of the medical marijuana debate. The federal government’s anti-pot hysteria has delayed research into the drug’s possible medical benefits by decades, and has led to the incredible sight of gun-toting federal SWAT teams pointing guns at AIDS and cancer patients during raids on medical marijuana clinics in states where the therapeutic use of the drug has been legalized. 

But less known is the way the drug war has also hampered the treatment of chronic pain. By some estimates, as many as 30 million Americans suffer from untreated chronic pain. That number is likely only to rise as the country continues to age. A promising new treatment called high-dose opiate therapy has proven successful at keeping chronic pain at bay in many patients. As patients build up resistance to drugs such as OxyContin, doctors titrate up their dosages. The resistance eventually plateaus, but when it does, some patients may be taking 40 or more pills per day. Those patients don’t get high, and they don’t suffer any ill effects from the medication. They aren’t addicted; they’re merely dependent. Take the medication away, and the pain comes back. 

Unfortunately, because some addicts also use opioid painkillers to get high, the Drug Enforcement Administration has decided to play doctor, determining that no patient should ever need more than some arbitrary dose (usually determined by drug cops with no medical training), and that any doctor prescribing drugs above those dosages should be assumed to be dealing. This aggressive, unnuanced pursuit of pain doctors has put the fear of prosecution into physicians who specialize in pain treatment. (It’s also scaring young doctors from even entering the field.) Driven by politicians spooked by a spate of irresponsible press reports warning that an OxyContin fad is sweeping the country, the DEA’s high-profile pursuit of pain specialists has created a poisonous relationship of suspicion between pain doctors and their patients and has left the country with a dire shortage of physicians willing to prescribe pain medication to people who are suffering. 

Siobhan Reynolds, who started an advocacy group for pain patients after her now-late husband’s physician was arrested by the DEA, recently learned that one doesn’t even need to be a doctor to feel the blunt end of federal drug policy. Reynolds used her public-relations savvy to launch countercampaigns against federal law-enforcement authorities when she thought they were targeting a physician. She would encourage patients such a doctor had successfully treated to speak out. She deservedly takes credit for shifting the debate on the issue. 

That didn’t sit well with federal authorities. When Reynolds recently launched one of her countercampaigns to defend an accused doctor in Kansas, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway launched a criminal investigation ... of Reynolds. In a clear attempt at intimidation, Treadway issued her an extraordinarily broad subpoena that jeopardized Reynolds’s relationship with the doctors and patients for whom she advocated. Reynolds challenged the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. She not only lost, but the subpoena, her challenge to it, and all briefs related to both cases were sealed by federal judges, a clear violation of her First Amendment rights that, unfortunately, was upheld in late 2010 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Verdun analogy

 

All just collateral damage. The DEA’s mission is to prevent people from getting high. If it takes an overbroad, overaggressive, speech-chilling campaign against doctors, patients, and advocates to do that, leaving millions of people in needless, sometimes debilitating pain, so be it. This is a war.

Even if the drug war were working — even if all the horrible things the federal government says are caused by illicit drugs were accurate (and some of them admittedly are), and even if the war on drugs were proving successful in eradicating or even significantly diminishing access to those drugs — it would be difficult to argue that the benefits would be worth the costs. (And even that, of course, leaves aside the critical question of whether preventing people from harming themselves is a legitimate function of government. It isn’t.) 

But of course it isn’t working. Most of the federal government claims about the evils associated with illicit drugs are either exaggerated or misapplied effects not of the drugs, but of the government’s prohibition of them. 

More to the point, none of it is working, even if one takes the positions of drug warriors at face value. It is as easy to achieve an illegal high today as it was in 1981, as it was in 1971, as it was in 1915, when the first federal anti-drug law was passed. Anyone reading this very likely knows where to get a bag of marijuana or knows someone who knows where to get one. Specific drugs come into and go out of vogue, but the desire to alter one’s consciousness, to escape life’s drab monotonies, or just to call in a different mindset, is as strong and pervasive as it’s ever been, going back to the Stone Age. And it’s easier than ever to fulfill. 

In a 1986 speech designed to drum up public support for yet another round of drug-war legislation, Ronald Reagan officially designated illicit drugs a threat to America’s national security. After declaring, “We’re running up a battle flag,” he compared America’s determination in the war on drugs to that of the French troops at the World War I Battle of Verdun. As the journalist Dan Baum notes while explaining Reagan’s speech in his book Smoke and Mirrors, Verdun was a protracted, bloody, brutal battle of attrition. A quarter-million troops lost their lives and another 700,000 were wounded, all in a months-long battle for a small strip of land that offered little practical advantage to either army. In fact, in much of Europe Verdun has come to symbolize the futility of war and the way callous government leaders can write off a mass loss of blood and treasure as mere collateral damage in the pursuit of some supposedly noble but ultimately shallow and elusive aim. As it turns out, Reagan’s analogy was far more appropriate than he probably intended. 

Part 1 | Part 2 

Radley Balko is a senior writer and investigative reporter for the Huffington Post.

This article originally appeared in the September 2011 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

 

Obama to be challenged over human cost of CIA drone strikes

News  World news  Unmanned drones

Obama to be challenged over human cost of CIA drone strikes

Campaigners to meet in Washington to highlight how CIA is operating in seceret and inflicting civilian casualties abroad

• Karen McVeigh
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 April 2012 13.22 EDT
• Article history

The US has been criticised for not widely reporting casualties of CIA drone strikes abroad. Photograph: Bonny Schoonakker/AFP/Getty Images

 

The human cost of the US government's clandestine drone strikes strategy, including the deaths of young children in Pakistan and Yemen, will be highlighted this weekend as campaigners attempt to challenge domestic support for the Obama administration's controversial policy.

A conference in Washington, at which new video testimony will be shown from the relatives of victims, is the first step in a collaborative campaign to challenge Barack Obama's claim in February that the strikes, aimed at terror suspects, were kept on a "tight leash" and had not inflicted huge civilian casualties.
The summit's organisers – the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and the peace group Code Pink – hope it will increase awareness of how the CIA-controlled programme is operating in secret, without a clear legal framework and without any accountability to Congress.

Earlier this month, the US government announced it was expanding its controversial use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Yemen.

Chris Woods, a journalist at the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who exposed CIA drone attacks on rescuers and funeralgoers in Pakistan, described the summit as an "extraordinary heavyweight gathering". He said: "Washington has not seen anything like this before."

Woods criticised the US media for not widely reporting civilian casualties of US drone strikes abroad, which he said give a "warped understanding of what is taking place."

"Unfortunately, although journalists in Pakistan are doing a good job of reporting what's going on, it's not getting through. The American media is doing a bad job of reporting the civilian side of things."

He cites the case of the killing of militant Pakistani leader Badar Mansoor, in North Waziristan this year. On 9 February, reports of his death were widely reported, but reports of the others killed were mixed. The New York Times reported Mansoor's death and said that five others died in the strike; the Huffington Post quoted intelligence officials as saying five suspected militants died in the attack; while Reuters reported that Mansoor was one of five people killed in the strike. It quoted a Pakistani Taliban commander saying the dead included Mansoor's wife and two other relatives.

"Our current understanding is that Mansoor's wife and one of his young sons died in the strike," said Woods, who said that the BIJ was still investigating the story.

The British-based BIJ's most recent investigation found that since Obama took office three years ago, 535 civilians have been killed, including more than 60 children.

On Wednesday, Reprieve and Islamabad-based lawyer Shahzad Akbar of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which focuses on civilian victims of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, launched a challenge at the High Court in London to British involvement in a CIA-drone strike that killed 53 people, most of them civilians in a Pakistan village in 2011.

Woods said: "The CIA have been saying there have been no civilian deaths in Pakistan since May 2010.The evidence is overwhelming that that is simply not the case."

Medea Benjamin, author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, and the summit organiser, said: "We never see drone victims on our TV screens and we never hear about them. At the conference, we will see first hand footage of drone victims and pictures of them in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia."
A recent poll by ABC News/Washington Post found that 83% of Americans approve of Obama's use of drones to kill terrorist suspects abroad. Public opinion is one of the key areas Benjamin wants to see change.

"We want to expose the secretive nature of drones here and overseas and to force transparency and for Congress to take responsibility for that oversight" she said. "I would like to see drones out of the the hands of the CIA."
Benjamin is concerned about the covert nature of drone use, even in the US.
"When the Federal Aviation Agency opens up airspace completely in 2015 we will see greater use by police and border patrol and other agencies. They will try to use them in secretive ways unless we force them to open up."
"Here at home we have to sue the FAA just to find out who has permits to use them."

Pardiss Kebriaei, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, has just filed a Freedom of Information request to eight separate US government agencies to find out the legal basis for a drone attack in Al Majalah in Yemen in 2009, which killed 41 civilians, including women and 21 children.
Kebriaei said: "This was a community. There were two families living in the area. It is not clear why it was carried out, whey they were targeted, but whatever the target was, there were a large number of women and children, some as young as two."

CCR and the American Civil Liberties Union also requested information on the US state department's diplomatic cover-up of the Al Majalah killings, which WikiLeaks exposed in its release of embassy cables.
Kebriaei, who was lead counsel in the CCR's case against Obama over the controversial killing of American-born al-Qaida suspect Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, said: "Drone strikes are escalating in Yemen and Pakistan. Given we know that the practice is escalating it's critical that there's more of a discussion about it."

Saturday, Nov 5, 2011 12:05 PM Eastern Standard Time

The drone mentality

(updated below [Sun.])

In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith describes a meeting he had in Pakistan with residents from the Afghan-Pakistani border region that has been relentlessly bombed by American drones; if I had one political wish this week, it would be that everyone who supports (or acquiesces to) President Obama’s wildly accelerated drone attacks would read this:

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey. . . .

On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.

The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them. . . .

On Monday, [Tariq] was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.

But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.

And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.

This tragedy repeats itself over and over. After I linked to this Op-Ed yesterday on Twitter — by writing that “every American who cheers for drone strikes should confront the victims of their aggression” — I was predictably deluged with responses justifying Obama’s drone attacks on the ground that they are necessary to kill The Terrorists. Reading the responses, I could clearly discern the mentality driving them: I have never heard of 99% of the people my government kills with drones, nor have I ever seen any evidence about them, but I am sure they are Terrorists. That is the drone mentality in both senses of the word; it’s that combination of pure ignorance and blind faith in government authorities that you will inevitably hear from anyone defending President Obama’s militarism. As Jonathan Schwarz observed after the U.S. unveiled the dastardly Iranian plot to hire a failed used car salesman to kill America’s close friend, the Saudi Ambassador: “I’d bet the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. has closer ‘ties’ to Al Qaeda than 90% of the people we’ve killed with drones.”

As it turns out, it isn’t only the President’s drone-cheering supporters who have no idea who is being killed by the program they support; neither does the CIA itself. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described internal dissension in the administration to Obama’s broad standards for when drone strikes are permitted, and noted that the “bulk” of the drone attacks — the bulk of them – “target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups”; moreover, the administration refuses to describe what it even means by being “associated” with a Terrorist group (indeed, it steadfastly refuses to tell citizens anything about the legal principles governing its covert drone wars).

Of course, nobody inside the U.S. Government is objecting on the ground that it is wrong to blow people up without having any knowledge of who they are and without any evidence they have done anything wrong. Rather, the internal dissent is grounded in the concern that these drone attacks undermine U.S. objectives by increasing anti-American sentiment in the region (there’s that primitive, inscrutable Muslim culture rearing its head again: they strangely seem to get very angry when foreign governments send sky robots over their countries and blow up their neighbors, teenagers and children). But whatever else is true, huge numbers of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — defend Obama’s massive escalation of drone attacks on the ground that he’s killing Terrorists even though they — and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama himself — usually don’t even know whose lives they’re snuffing out. Remember, though: we have to kill The Muslim Terrorists because they have no regard for human life.

This is why it’s so imperative to do everything possible to shine a light on the victims of President Obama’s aggression in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere: ignoring the victims, rendering them invisible, is a crucial prerequisite to sustaining propaganda and maintaining support for this militarism (that’s the same reason John Brennan lied — yet again — by assuring Americans that there are no innocent victims of drone attacks). Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.

Over the last week, I had the genuine privilege of spending substantial amounts of time with participants in the truly inspiring Occupy movement around the country, including visiting Occupy Oakland on Thursday. This same dynamic is at play there. Many sneer at the protest encampments because they include the homeless, the unstable, the “dirty,” the jobless, and those who are otherwise downtrodden, dispossessed and unable to live decent lives. Much of that sneering is due to the desire that these people remain hidden from sight, invisible, so that we can avoid facing the reality of what our society has produced on a large scale (having Dirty, Disobedient People be part of a movement vaguely associated with liberalism also harms the ability of progressive media stars to maintain their access to the Halls of Seriousness). But they are and should be part of that movement precisely because the disappearance of the middle class and booming wealth and income inequality produces exactly this type of human suffering. There are those who love to parade around as supporters of the marginalized and poor who prefer that they remain silent and invisible — distant abstractions — because being viscerally confronted with their human realness is unpleasant and uncomfortable. That’s exactly why victims of President Obama’s relentless drone attacks remain invisible and many prefer to keep it that way — it’s best not to confront the reality of the misery that one’s policies wreak — and it’s exactly why everything should be done to prevent that disappearing from happening.

* * * * *

Pratap Chatterjee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism attended the meeting in Islamabad which Smith describes in that Op-Ed and wrote in detail about it. Chatterjee posted video of Tariq at that meeting — who is seen on the video, posted below, in the dark shirt and yellow hat just days before his death-by-American-drone — and wrote the following:

Among the group was Tariq Aziz, a quiet 16-year-old, who had come after he received a phone call from a lawyer in Islamabad offering him an opportunity to learn basic photography to help document these strikes. . . .

Tariq was proud to be part of this meeting. About 18 months earlier, in April 2010, his cousin Aswar Ullah was killed by a missile fired from a drone as he rode a motorcycle near Norak. . . .

What none of us could have imagined was that 72 hours later, this football-loving teenager would himself be killed by a CIA drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed Khan. . . .

Tariq and Waheed’s death brought the total number of children killed in drone strikes to 175, according to the Bureau’s own findings. As part of an ongoing investigation, the Bureau has documented 306 strikes from remotely piloted drones that have killed between 2,359 and 2,959 people. Over 85% of them have been launched by the administration of President Barack Obama.

Tariq came from a poor community on the border with Afghanistan. He was the youngest of seven children. His father, Mumtaz Khan, was away working in the United Arab Emirates as a driver to support his family. Waheed’s family was equally poor – the 12-year-old worked in a local shop for a salary of just Rs 2000 a month (roughly £15 or $23)

As I’ve noted before, the statistical methodology used by the Bureau to count innocent victims is the most conservative possible, meaning the numbers are almost certainly much higher. The only thing unusual about Tariq is that his death is receiving substantial attention because of the coincidence that he met with Westerners 72 hours before his life was ended. Most Tariqs simply die without anyone in the country responsible being bothered with hearing about it.

Tariq Short from TBIJ on Vimeo.

Tariq Short from TBIJ on Vimeo.

UPDATE [Sun.]: VastLeft comments on these matters by cartoon.

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

The Terrible Post-9/11 Truth: Our Government's Been Hijacked. Democracy has been commandeered by a self-interested gang.

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The Terrible Post-9/11 Truth: Our Government's Been Hijacked. Democracy has been commandeered by a self-interested gang.

by Michael Winship | September 26, 2011 - 8:55am

About a year after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, I visited Oklahoma City and went to the bombsite with a friend who had covered the attack as a television news cameraman. No memorial or museum had yet been built; fencing covered with teddy bears, flags and scrawled messages surrounded an empty, grass-covered lot.

There was a simplicity to that empty lot that appealed, an understated eloquence that, to me at least, said all that needed to be said. Now, despite all the hubbub and handwringing surrounding its design and construction, in many ways, the new 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in Manhattan captures some of that same, straightforward plainness -- the names of the dead punched into bronze, the waterfalls gracing two great voids where the towers used to be, muting the noise of visitors’ voices and quieting the surrounding city. No filigree or statues.

We went to the new memorial for the first time last week. It was a perfect, end-of-summer day. Sunlight sparkled in the two pools, and you could see in one of them the wavy reflection of an American flag hanging from across the street. When the breeze was just right, a light mist from the waterfalls caressed your face.

I was pleased, too, by the vast plaza, so reminiscent of the one that used to separate the original towers, the wind corkscrewing around their height and sending hats into orbit. In the next few years, when all the construction around the site has ceased and the landscaped trees and other greenery have more fully grown, this will be the place for contemplation that was intended. And perhaps those who come here will reflect not only on the events of 9/11 but their unexpected consequences and whether we as a nation are ever prepared for what comes next.

On the afternoon we visited the memorial, I was already downtown, attending a daylong conference on post 9/11 worker protection and community health, sponsored by the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a coalition of labor, civil rights, medical, faith-based and environmental organizations.

"Are we ready for another 9/11?" Dr. Linda Rae Murray, president of the American Public Health Association, asked us. "Hell, no! Were we ready for Katrina? Or the tornadoes? Or the H1N1 flu? We don’t have the resources; we’ve let our infrastructure disappear. No, we’re not ready."

The World Trade Center collapse created the largest number of workplace fatalities in the history of the United States. Government bumbling and dissembling about air quality downtown and conditions at the site, the rush back to business as usual, may have irreparably killed and injured countless others. In the words of Bruce Lippy, formerly with the International Union of Engineers, who spent weeks working on the pile, "They didn’t want to turn Manhattan into a Superfund site." Chip Hughes of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of the NIH) added, "There should be an apology."

Many of the health consequences for those who survived and continued as rescue and recovery workers have been summed up in a recent study of 27,449 participants in the World Trade Center Screening, Monitoring, and Treatment Program. The stark statistics were published in the September 3 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet:

"Findings: 9-year cumulative incidence of asthma was 27.6% (number at risk: 7027), sinusitis 42.3% (5870), and gastro-esophageal reflux disease 39.3% (5650). In police officers, cumulative incidence of depression was 7.0% (number at risk: 3648), PTSD 9.3% (3761), and panic disorder 8.4% (3780). In other rescue and recovery workers, cumulative incidence of depression was 27.5% (number at risk: 4200), PTSD 31.9% (4342), and panic disorder 21.2% (4953). 9-year cumulative incidence for spirometric [lung capacity] abnormalities was 41.8% (number at risk: 5769); three-quarters of these abnormalities were low forced vital capacity."

This doesn’t include all the others who lived, worked or studied at or near Ground Zero, inhaling smoke, ash and dust -- air some have described as more caustic than Drano. Nor does it include the cases of neurological disorders, mesothelioma, and other cancers appearing more and more among 9/11 survivors -- illnesses that legislators and activists are now battling to add to the list of conditions covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

It was hard enough passing the Zadroga Act in the first place, beating back years of resistance and wrangling in Congress, a GOP filibuster and so-called "compassion fatigue" around the rest of the country (at the NYCOSH conference, Jon Stewart was applauded as a local hero for his role shaming opponents of Zadroga into approval). Seeking new coverage for 9/11 cancer patients is another uphill fight against indifference and overt hostility.

So for those who will come to Manhattan from everywhere else to pause and reflect at the new 9/11 Memorial, better perhaps to consider some other implications and side effects of the terrorist attacks that impact not just the greater New York area but the entire country and beyond. In fact, many of the issues being battled over in Washington and across the Dr. Seuss-like landscape of the 2012 election campaign have a direct bearing on future 9/11’s in America, no matter where and when they may happen. (And why do all the Republican presidential debates remind me of those cheesy paintings of dogs playing poker?)

Infrastructure? Think of all those decaying roads, bridges and tunnels, and the chaos if they fail during an evacuation. Deregulation? If anything, 9/11 demonstrates that certain OSHA and EPA rules on safety, clean air and water need expansion and better enforcement. Conservative attacks on public employees and organized labor? The first at the scene on 9/11 were the firemen, police, emergency medical technicians and union construction workers who stayed on the pile until the last scrap of steel was gone, not to mention the Communication Workers of America members who risked their lives restoring phones, microwave links and IT; the electricians, plumbers, and engineers.

Budget cuts adversely affect training and response times. Politics interfere with scientific research. State labs are underfunded or closing. Universal health care, if it existed, already would have taken care of many of the doctor’s appointments, tests, treatments and medications being funded, but still only in part, by Zadroga and other programs.

Another article in that September 3 issue of The Lancet chronicles "Adverse health consequences of US Government responses to the 2001 terrorist attacks." According to its authors, Dr. Barry S. Levy and Dr. Victor W. Sidel, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "caused many deaths of non-combatant civilians, further damaged the health-supporting infrastructure and the environment (already adversely affected by previous wars), forced many people to migrate, led to violations of human rights, and diverted resources away from important health needs."

In Iraq, "Oil spillages, contaminated ash, unexploded ordinance, and depleted uranium at and around US military bases have all caused environmental damage." The health status of Afghans is "lower than almost any other country," life expectancy at birth is 48 years, only 27 percent of the population has access to clean water.

According to the report, "The initial $204 billion spent on the Iraq War could have reduced hunger throughout the world by 50% and provided enough funds to cover the needs for HIV/AIDS medicine, clean water and sanitation, and immunization for all children in developing countries for almost 3 years. Within the USA, the federal budget for the 2011 fiscal year for the war in Afghanistan -- $107 billion -- could have provided medical care for 14 million US military veterans for 1 year."

Domestically, "After 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak shortly afterwards, the USA and other countries have improved emergency preparedness and response capabilities, but these actions have often diverted attention and resources from more urgent health issues."

The coalitions and alliances that have formed in the decade since 9/11 -- the professionals and ordinary citizens who from day one have stepped up when official bureaucracy has not -- are the one bright light shining through tragedy. But it’s not enough. "Do we understand that we’ve been hijacked by a small group of people using government for their own benefit? This is our government," the Public Health Association’s Linda Rae Murray declared. "It doesn’t work well but it’s ours and we have to seize control of it and put in place what we need to keep ourselves and our neighbors healthy."

When you visit the 9/11 Memorial, think about that simple, fundamental truth as you remember the fallen, the heroes -- and everyone else struggling to survive.
_______

About author Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

Robert Scheer's Columns

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

Posted on Sep 8, 2011

AP / Brennan Linsley

An unidentified detainee peers out from his cell inside the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

By Robert Scheer

For a decade, the main questions about 9/11 have gone unanswered while the alleged perpetrators who survived the attacks have never been publicly cross-examined as to their methods and motives. It is not conspiratorial but rather obviously plausible to suggest that they have been kept out of sight because legal due process, constitutionally guaranteed to even the most heinous of criminals, might provide information that our government would find embarrassing.

We remain in ignorance as to what drove religious zealots formerly allied with the United States to turn against us, and what was the role of our ally, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for most of the hijackers and their financing. Why in the aftermath of the attack did the United States embrace Pakistan, which was one of only three governments (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the others) to diplomatically recognize the Taliban and which turned out to be harboring the fugitive Osama bin Laden? And why did we instead invade Iraq, a nation known to be engaged in a deadly war with bin Laden and his al-Qaida?

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to “rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members” that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

“We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.”

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That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.

The fear of a public trial is apparently that it will be an occasion to humanize the presumed perpetrators of barbaric acts, but by that standard no alleged murderer should ever be tried in civilian court. The counterargument is that we as a society have, from the drafting of our Constitution, been committed to due process of law. But an even more compelling objection to the present secrecy flows not from the inalienable rights of the accused to justice but rather from the need to fully inform the public as to the dangers faced by our society.

Major policy developments, including two undeclared wars, were conducted in the name of defeating the perpetrators of 9/11 without the public being made aware of the relevant facts. Surely a public trial would have revealed, to the deep embarrassment of the Bush administration, that there was no connection between the 9/11 hijackers and the government of Iraq that the United States overthrew.

At the very least, such testimony would have shed light on the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the key leaders of al-Qaida, particularly the American-educated Mohammed, recruited by the CIA to join the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It certainly could also have proved embarrassing to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who, during the Bush administration, opposed public trials and managed last March to get President Barack Obama to reverse his pledge of civilian trials. Gates boasted in his 1996 memoir of his long history of working with Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, dating to his days in the Carter administration. As his book publisher bragged at the time, Gates exposed “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Of course 9/11 changed everything; nations were invaded, trillions of dollars were wasted, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives were lost, torture became acceptable and the public has come to tolerate a daily governmental assault on privacy as normal. But for all of the high drama and cost of the U.S. response, when it comes to understanding the forces behind the attack, we still do not know what we are talking about.

Robert Scheer’s column has moved to Thursday. Sign up for our newsletter and get Scheer in your inbox.

Secrecy Killed on 9/11

Secrecy Kills

WHO IS RICH BLEE?

What do they have to say?

Read the joint statement in response to the video by CIA Director George Tenet, CTC Director J. Cofer Black, and Richard Blee of Alec Station.

Also see our email back and forth with Tenet, Black and Blee, and our reply to their joint statement.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Get the latest news from @SecrecyKills and our Facebook page.

From: FF4 Films
Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM
Subject: Request for response from George Tenet (At the Center of the Storm)
To: ZZZZZ

ZZZZZ,
It was a pleasure to speak with you briefly over the phone late last Thursday. Thank you for forwarding the following request to Mr. Tenet, as per our conversation.

Best,
Ryan

---

Dear Mr. Tenet,

I write as part of a documentary production team working in association with the Emmy-winning media firm Globalvision, also the winner of a George Polk Award for Journalism. We've been investigating the Mihdahr/Hazmi matter for several years, and we would like to speak with you by phone soon, either for a recorded interview or, less preferably, off-the-record.

CIA insiders, as well as others at NSC, FBI, and DOD, have already spoken to us, and if you will speak with us I think you will be interested to learn that the picture they've painted often differs greatly from that recounted in your book At the Center of the Storm.

In ten days, we will be releasing via public television one such interview -- with Richard Clarke -- ahead of our full release on the 9/11 anniversary. We are providing it to you now in a private YouTube link here:

YouTube Video (link has been changed to allow public access)

We sincerely hope that you will speak with us in order to set the record straight and respond to specific allegations made by Clarke and others.

Thank you,
Ryan XXXXX
Associate Producer

FF4 Films
Globalvision

From: Bill Harlow
Date: Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 11:25 AM
Subject: Your Request To Interview George Tenet
To: FF4 Films

Mr. XXXXX,

ZZZZZ relayed to us your request to interview George Tenet.

Mr. Tenet does not wish to be interviewed either on camera or on background for your project.

However, in light of some of the absurd and patently false statements made by Richard Clarke in the YouTube clip you shared, Mr. Tenet reached out to Cofer Black and Richard Blee. Together they are providing the attached joint statement to you. We request that you make their statement available, in its entirety, to any media organization to which you distribute your interview with Richard Clarke.

Bill Harlow

Joint Statement
from George J. Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee

August 3, 2011

Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years. But his recently released comments about the run up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.

Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.

He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11.

The handling of the information in question was exhaustively looked at by the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the CIA Inspector General and other groups.

The 9/11 Commission quite correctly concluded that “...no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case.”

In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.

Since 9/11 many systemic changes have been made to improve the watchlisting process and enhance information sharing within and across agencies.

Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate--which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination--that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.

Many years after testifying himself at length before the 9/11 Commission and writing several books but making no mention of his wild theory, Mr. Clarke has suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.

We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony.

###

On 8/4/2011 3:37 PM, FF4 Films wrote:

Mr. Harlow, Thank you very much for providing that joint statement. We will make it available in its entirety to any media organization to which we distribute the Clarke interview, as requested.

We are passionate about telling an accurate story, but the refusal of Mr. Tenet, Mr. Black, and Mr. Blee to discuss it even on background makes that impossible, as we are forced to rely on the info we've been provided by those who will talk to us. I have summarized the highlights of that information in an attached doc, including many, many issues still unaccounted for with regard to CIA's handling of Mihdhar/Hazmi, none of which have anything to do with Mr. Clarke's judgement or accuracy.

If there are simple -- even benign or admirable -- explanations for those issues, I sincerely wish Mr. Tenet, et al, would break their media silence and simply provide those answers. I want them to realize that their failure to do so only appears to give credence to speculation like that in the Clarke interview.

Furthermore, Mr. Clarke is not the only gov't insider who has stated to us that he/she believes these unexplained events can be explained by high-level deliberate choices within the CIA. If these folks are wrong, Mr. Tenet, et al, could easily choose to make them look foolish and set the record straight for all concerned by going through this story with us and providing explanations in detail, case by case. Their motivations in continuing to refuse to do so a full decade after the terrible tragedy and in the face of accusations from other gov't officials is, frankly, baffling to me.

Also, a quick correction on a couple items in the joint statement: Mr. Clarke did previously make this same accusation in his 2009 book Your Government Failed You, p. 165-171. Also, the Commission line quoted, "no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case" actually began "It appears that..." and concerned only the search for Mihdhar/Hazmi from Aug 2001 onward, although we have spoken to an insider from Alec who claims even that simple fact was not the case. In fact, they should be made aware that in our interview with Chairman Tom Kean, he told us explicitly that he believed the withholding of Mihdhar info was deliberate and purposeful (though he believed this was due to an absurd culture of secrecy within the Agency) and also stated that he and his staff believed Mr. Tenet provided false testimony on a number of points ("No, I don't think he misspoke. I think he misled.")

If you will, please pass on the attached list of issues with the CIA story, if anyone wants to provide a more detailed response. Thank you again.

Best,
Ray Nova
Producer / Co-Director

FF4 Films
Globalvision

On Aug 9, 2011, at 3:30 PM, Bill Harlow wrote:

Got your voice mail message over the weekend...sorry it has taken a little while to get back to you.

Yes....the material you originally sent via XXX was made available to Tenet, Black and Blee and the statement I provided to you was their response in light of that material.

None of them have any plans to go beyond that statement or to respond to the additional material you sent via email on 8/4/11.

Bill Harlow

From: FF4 Films
Date: Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: Your Request To Interview George Tenet
To: Bill Harlow

Understood, Mr. Harlow. Thank you for the response. Also, we truly hope Mr. Blee feels better soon.

Cordially,
Ray

AP Review Finds No WikiLeaks Sources Threatened

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2011 by the Associated Press

AP Review Finds No WikiLeaks Sources Threatened

by Bradley Klapper and Cassandra Vinograd

WASHINGTON — Federica Ferrari Bravo's story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

In this July 14, 2011 photo, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to members of the media during a news conference in central London. The U.S. has condemned the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks for putting lives in danger. But how many is unclear. An Associated Press review of some of the hundreds of U.S. diplomatic contacts deemed especially sensitive turns up several people who are either comfortable with their names out in the open or even surprised that their information was so highly valued, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011. So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

"I don't think I said anything that would put me at risk," the Italian diplomat said.

There are similar stories involving other foreign lawmakers, diplomats and activists cited in the U.S. cables as sources to "strictly protect."

An Associated Press review of those sources raises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaks' disclosures and the Obama administration's angry claims, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening. U.S. examples have been strictly theoretical.

The question of whether the dire warnings are warranted or overblown became more acute with the recent release all of the 251,287 diplomatic memos WikiLeaks held.

Tens of thousands of confidential exchanges were dumped, emptying a trove of documents. They were released piecemeal since last year, initially with the cooperation of a select group of newspapers and magazines that blacked out some names and information before publishing the documents.

The latest cables were published in full, without names blacked out. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland branded the action "irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous," and the U.S. said the release exposed the names of hundreds of sensitive sources.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has blamed Britain's Guardian newspaper for publishing a secret encryption code, allowing intelligence agencies to access the cables and forcing WikiLeaks to provide the people affected the same information.

But the AP's review of the sources found several of them comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death. Others are dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations. Some have written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government.

The AP survey is selective and incomplete; it focused on those sources the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky.

The AP did not attempt to contact every named source in the new trove. It's generally up to the embassies themselves to decide which identities require heightened vigilance, officials say.

Hadzira Hamzic, a 73-year-old Bosnian refugee, wasn't bothered about being identified as one of thousands of victims from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

"I never hid that," she told the AP. "It is always hard when I have to tell about how I had been raped, but that is part of what happened and I have to talk about it."

In Asia, former Malaysian diplomat Shazryl Eskay Abdullah was shocked that an "unofficial lunch meeting" he had several years ago with a U.S. official meant his name ended up on a formal report. But he said his role in southern Thailand peace talks was well known. "I don't see why anyone would come after me," Shazryl said.

Ferrari Bravo's subject matter was also by no means mundane. A veteran of her nation's embassy in Tehran, Ferrari Bravo worked at the time on the Italian Foreign Ministry's Iran desk and discussed with the U.S. her government's view of the Iranian nuclear standoff. She urged continued dialogue.

"There is nothing that we said that was not known to our bosses, to our ministers, to our heads of state," she said. On having her identity protected, she said: "We didn't ask. There is nothing to protect."

U.S. officials say they have two criteria for sensitive sources. The first deals with people in totalitarian societies or failed states who could be imprisoned or killed, or perhaps denied housing, schooling, food or other services if exposed as having helped the United States.

The State Department also has sought to censor names of people who might lose their jobs or suffer major embarrassment even in friendly countries, if they were seen offering the U.S. candid insights or restricted information.

One such case involved the dismissal in December of a top aide to German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle after he provided details on coalition talks and debates over issues such as U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.

Still, the total damage appears limited and the State Department has steadfastly refused to describe any situation in which they've felt a source's life was in danger. They say a handful of people had to be relocated away from danger but won't provide any details on those few cases.

Units throughout the department have been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be "outed." Some, such as Hamzic, Sharzyl and Ferrari Bravo, say they were never contacted. Presumably, endangered individuals would have been prioritized.

Clearly, sensitivities depend on context. Revelations that may cause personal or political discomfort for a U.S. embassy contact in Western Europe may be life-threatening for an informant in an undemocratic nation. In the cables, they may both be "strictly protected" sources, highlighting relative danger levels in different places.

In Vietnam, the U.S. seemed to be dealing with sources whose names demanded vigilance: the wife of a dissident sentenced to five years in prison; a Buddhist leader condemning the arrest of a fellow priest; a dissident who says people "held his family hostage" until he renounced his activism; a Christian preacher complaining of police pressure on him to renounce his faith; another who speaks of a colleague forcibly sent to a mental institute.

A Syrian human rights activist warned the U.S. of a looming crackdown on anti-government activists as far back as 2009. If the activist wasn't threatened by the disclosure last year, he may be now that the country is in the throes of a brutal five-month security operation.

In Mexico, the term "strictly protect" appeared to be attached to interlocutors indiscriminately, even when officials offered only flattering assessments of their government or said little that wasn't common knowledge. It perhaps makes more sense in the context of a country where organized crime networks have essentially fought an insurgency against the government, where allowing a valued source's name to get out could affect that person's safety.

Assange, an Australian, has defended his actions by saying no one has died as a result of WikiLeaks.

Current and former American officials say that argument misses the point.

Making people think twice before providing the U.S. with information — or simply refuse ever again to help — hurts the good causes of human rights and democracy that American officials are promoting, they argue.

Take Arnold Sundquist, a Swede whose life isn't in danger. He provided the U.S. Embassy with sensitive details on an Iranian attempt to buy helicopters and said he was unhappy that his actions were now public. Last year, Swedish media with access to the WikiLeaks trove reported on the incident but didn't mention him by name.

"It is what it is," he said. "I can't do anything about it."

But will he or others in a similar situation, be as ready to help American authorities again?

Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda thinks not. His identity was exposed in a document describing how he told the U.S. ambassador in 2009 that according to one of his sources, Colombian rebel leaders had visited Caracas for secret meetings with senior Venezuelan government officials. Bocaranda published the account in one of his newspaper columns.

"I feel betrayed by WikiLeaks," Bocaranda told the AP on Friday. But he said that as a journalist it's natural for him to talk with diplomats from various countries. "I think the ones who have been betrayed basically are the American diplomats," he said.

"It's going to be more difficult for them because I think no one is going to want to talk for fear of coming out in print with their name," he said, adding that would apply those who might otherwise supply sensitive information.

He said he doesn't feel his work or personal security face additional threats as a result of his name being exposed but said he suspects President Hugo Chavez's government could try to "cast doubts on me, to say that I am a member of the CIA."

Bocaranda said that he has nothing to hide and that the information he publishes in his newspaper columns and on the Internet is public. "I don't think my sources are going to shut me out," he said.

Other governments have echoed the U.S. criticism of WikiLeaks, saying it jeopardizes invaluable diplomacy — the exchanges that aim to promote understanding, avoid war and improve global security.

The anger from Assange's home nation, Australia, was prompted not by the release of sources, but of 23 Australians who had been in contact with a Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and were being monitored. Still, a government statement couldn't point to a direct threat from the disclosure, only a potential danger.

"The large-scale distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified United States government documents is reckless, irresponsible and potentially dangerous," Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland said.

Vinograd reported from London. Associated Press writers Nicole Winfield in Rome; Sean Yoong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sabina Niksic in Sarajevo, Bosnia; Ian James in Venezuela; and Karl Ritter in Stockholm contributed to this report.

© 2011 Associated Press