DHS says FBI "possibly funded" Terrorist Group

It was most surprising to come across the following entry at the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism (known by the acronym START), which is run by the Department of Homeland Security out of the University of Maryland. According to DHS, START is one of their "centers of excellence," an academic center sponsored by the DHS's Science and Technology Directorate.

The webpage concerns the "Terrorist Organization Profile" for the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing terrorist group in the early 1970s, a group START writes was "possibly funded by the FBI." [You may have to go through a menu and look up SAO by name to get to the appropriate webpage.]

According to START, "The Secret Army Organization (SAO), a right-wing militant group based in San Diego, was active from 1969 to 1972. They targeted individuals and groups who spoke out against the Vietnam War, especially those who organized public demonstrations and distributed anti-war literature."

Indeed, if we could turn the clock back to June 1975, we would read an article in the New York Times, "A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded 'Army' to Terrorize Antiwar Protesters."

According to the Times, the ACLU compiled a 5,000 page report on the SAO, a group of former Minutemen and other right-wingers and violent home-grown fascists, for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "alleging the Federal Bureau of Intelligence recruited a band of right-wing terrorists and supplied them with money and weapons to attack young antiwar demonstrators."

But that's not all, the SAO engaged in bombing and attempted assassination, and guess whose house the weapons turned up in? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's let the DHS's "Center of Excellence" inform us of this important episode in our history, which came, by the way, after the FBI claimed they had stopped their Cointelpro program of disruption of the Left.

Assassination Attempt, FBI Agent Hides the Weapon

From START's SAO webpage:

The report also stated that the SAO planned to kidnap and murder protestors of the 1972 Republican National Convention, which was to be held in San Diego before being relocated to Miami Beach. An assassination attempt of Dr. Peter Bohmer, professor at San Diego State University, and Paula Tharp, reporter for the San Diego Street Journal, brought about the arrests of several SAO members who later acknowledge an FBI connection. During the investigation, the gun used in the assassination attempt was found in the home of FBI agent Steven Christiansen, who was subsequently identified as a SAO contact. In 1973, Godfrey, testifying as an FBI informant, claimed he received up to $20,000 in weapons and a $250 per month income from the FBI to recruit new SAO members and provide information to agents. He also testified to the criminal acts of several SAO operatives, including fellow leader Jerry Lynn Davis. Official statements from the FBI claimed no involvement with the SAO, and no agents were prosecuted.

The story of the SAO is a forgotten piece of contemporary history that is directly relevant to a number of current issues, including the prosecution of the bogus "war on terror," and the FBI's role in it; the debates about government participation in and legalization of assassination of its own citizens; and government surveillance of and attacks upon dissent in this country.

It also could be considered a prime example of the historical amnesia that plagues our times, an amnesia hastened by disinterest by the major media, cheered on by government agencies none too interested in accountability for government overreach or even criminality.

Links to the President

According to the Ann Arbor Sun at the time, the ACLU tagged the SAO as "an interagency apparatus organized 'at the direction of Richard M. Nixon.'"

Reportedly the link to Nixon came via Watergate burglar White House "plumbers" operative Donald Segretti, who affidavits claimed had given funds and military hardware to SAO to disrupt the 1972 GOP convention in San Diego. (The convention was subsequently moved to Miami Beach.)

But it was the FBI who seems to have been operationally in charge.

From the Sun: "SAO operative Jerry Lynn Davis, who once participated in the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion, revealed that [admitted FBI informant Howard Barry] Godfrey had regularly supplied the SAO with money and weapons on behalf of the FBI."

A newspaper office was attacked. A car firebombed. Informants infiltrated, while meetings were monitored. There were plans to poison the punch at antiwar meetings. A theater was bombed. Bulletins were published on "how to make booby traps, how to use ammonium nitrate in high explosives," And then, there was the assassination plot, or rather plots, as the SAO bungled one assassination attempt after another to kill a left-wing professor at San Diego State.

How It Went Down, and the Cover-up

A 1973 article by Richard Popkin at Ramparts described the threats and the attack, when an SAO hitman with a FBI-paid driver tried to kill an American college professor on January 6, 1972, solely because of his political views and activism.

But first, we should realize this was not the first of the assassination plans. An Associated Press article at the time described another failed plot that had yet another FBI informant, Gilbert Romero, and a San Diego undercover cop kidnapping Peter Bohmer and taking him to Tijuana, and setting him up to be killed by Mexican police. The New York Times wrote that the ACLU report included testimony from a FBI informant, John Raspberry, who said in the winter of 1971-72, the FBI approached him to kill Bohmer. For some reason, the attack never took place.

According to Popkin, Godfrey "was assigned to [FBI] agent Steve Christianson, to whom he reported verbally every day, Godfrey was to work on the militant right wing, and was paid two hundred fifty dollars per month by the FBI."

Popkin continued, "Apparently, Godfrey himself was among the more dangerous elements in the SAO, and [FBI] agent Christianson among the more dangerous eminences grises of the operation.... Godfrey admitted that he had driven the car from which another SAO member, George Hoover, had fired into Bohmer's house, wounding Paula Tharp. Subsequently, he had taken the weapon to Christianson, who had hidden it for six months. (This was evidently insufficient grounds for the FBI to take disciplinary action against agent Christianson. He continued as Godfrey's contact until the bombing of the Guild Theatre, at which point he was removed by L. Patrick Gray himself...)"

The START page on SAO commented dryly on the aftermath of the botched assassination. "The SAO became inactive after the assassination case drew much public attention to the group's operations," DHS's Center for Excellence reports. "The testimony of Godfrey against SAO members resulted in prison terms for a significant portion of the San Diego group. Of course, if the SAO was actually FBI-run, the notoriety drawn to the case would have been the impetus to dissolve the group."

No kidding?

Bohmer's Story

I think it's appropriate to give the last words here to Peter Bohmer himself, who survived the attack and while he lost his job at San Diego State, the victim of a witchhunt, went on to join the faculty at Evergreen at Evergreen State College in Washington.

A few words about CoIntelpro before I come back to my story. It is short for counterintelligence program. Cointlepro was/is a program coordinated by the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups.... Although Cointelpro officially ended in 1971, it has continued although in a somewhat less extreme form without the name up to September 11th 2001. Since then we are going backwards towards more police powers, infiltration and framing of activists....

Although no group I worked in San Diego planned or carried out any violent actions, and many groups were purely educational; 20 people I knew in these groups turned out to be police or FBI agents or informers, many worked for both. They worked hard to cause divisions among individuals and groups. Some but not all were provocateurs.... the FBI visited my employer, SDSU to get me fired, they visited landlords where I lived to get us evicted. They opened my mail, and monitored my checking accounts. We got anonymous phone calls about people being agents who I am sure weren’t....

FBI sponsored groups did firebombings, slashed tires of my cars, continual death threats, put out a wanted poster on me distributed in San Diego in 1971. The Secret Army Organization or (SAO) a group financed from FBI funds and led by an FBI informant, shot into a collective I lived in with the bullet permanently injuring a member of the collective, Paula Tharp in January 1972.

Howard Barry Godfrey, a well-paid FBI informant and head of the Secret Army Organization (SAO) admitted almost a year later in court to driving the car the night of the shooting but claimed another SAO member did the actual shooting. After the shooting into my house, other FBI agents in San Diego covered up the crime and hid the evidence such as the gun used in the shooting. The head of the FBI in LA, working with SD FBI, at this time was Richard W. Held who has been involved in the cases against many activists and political prisoners such as Judi Bari, Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt.

After the shooting, threats and harassment continued. After the Secret Army Organization began threatening liberals as well as radicals and bombed a pornography theater where some police were present, the San Diego police demanded that the FBI reveal their informants in the SAO and the SAO were arrested in the summer of 1972 on numerous charges. Government lawyers hired by the FBI claimed various privileges such as not having to reveal much of the behavior because of security concerns. The full FBI involvement in this attempted murder didn’t come out although one FBI agent was forced to resign. Godfrey, the FBI informant and provocateur in the Secret Army Organization (SAO) didn’t go to prison although two other members of the SAO did.

Amnesia?

As I read this many thoughts come to mind: about the Occupy protests last year, the monitoring of antiwar and peace groups, arrests of activists at the political conventions, the legitimization of state assassination by President Obama, the consolidation of ever-greater power in the hands of the FBI.

What came to mind for you? Will this important episode from history simply drop back into the abyss of forgotten American memories?

I'd like to know what happened to that ACLU report and what action (if any) the Senate Intelligence Committee took on it. I intend to find out.

Cross-posted from Firedoglake/MyFDL

Did NYPD "Undercover Agent" Try to Suborn Tarek Mehanna into a "Terrorist Plot"?

Many bloggers and the press have reposted Tarek Mehanna's impassioned speech to the court as he was sentenced to 17-1/2 years for supposedly providing "material support" to terrorists. (See here, here, here, and especially the ACLU's Nancy Murray's widely quoted article at the Boston Globe here.) But few have commented on Mehanna's charges that he was set up by an undercover agent to participate in a terrorist plot, and that he refused the agent's overtures.

These are the relevant portions of Mehanna's statement at his sentencing hearing (bold emphases added):

Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy“ way, as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard — and the government spent millions of tax dollars — to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell....

It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to “kill Americans” at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government’s own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little “terror plots,” but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

The Telegram and Gazette described the uproar in the courtroom when Mehanna brought up the accusations regarding the undercover agent's attempt to recruit him into a terrorist plot.

After Mr. Mehanna said the government had sent an undercover agent to prod him into participating in a terror plot — that he refused — Mr. Chakravarty rose to call that “categorically false.” Mr. Mehanna yelled to him that “you’re a liar.”

Two U.S. marshals strode to Mr. Mehanna seated at the defense table in an orange prison jump suit, put a hand on him and spoke to him, but Judge O’Toole did not allow Mr. Chakravarty to continue.

What actually lie behind these accusations, the prosecutor's interruption, and the Judge's subsequent actions? (O'Toole later chided Mehanna for "lack of remorse" and "a quality of defiance.")

The answer can be found in a February 25 posting by Mehanna at the Facebook page, "Free Tarek Mehanna." While one can easily find online the young man's stirring defense of himself in his April 12 sentencing statement, his statement about the attempt to frame him as part of a government-inspired terrorist "plot," has virtually escaped coverage outside of some small blogs concerned with defending Islamic or Palestinian causes and defense (with the one notable exception of Richard Hugus at Boston IndyMedia).

This is not surprising as the widespread use of government undercover agents to gin up the terror threat in the U.S. is not fit matter for the mainstream press, who report these incidents as if they were gospel descended from the heaven populated by covert intelligence agencies. I think Mehanna's accusations merit further investigation, and the way he describes (see below) the way the matter was kept out of court leaves little doubt that there is much to what he says.

In summary, Mehanna claims he was approached by a stranger in late 2005. This individual on numerous occasions tried to get him to "find American soldiers returning from Iraq (whose addresses he supposedly had) and kill them." Mehanna subsequently cut off contact with this person because he would not let up on trying to seduce Mehanna into some kind of crime.

Mehanna wrote that in early summer 2011, his attorney was contacted by an AP reporter who had heard that "two sources within the NYPD had contacted her and confirmed to her that the NYPD had sent an undercover agent up to Boston to 'befriend' me, and try to prod me into carrying out a 'terrorist attack,' and that I had refused to go along (bingo!)." Mehanna's attorneys filed a "motion asking the judge to compel the government to disclose these details so that they could be mentioned at trial." The motion was denied after Judge O'Toole met with prosecutors in a closed hearing (closed to the defense).

Mehanna notes, "A brief mention of the motion and the hearing was made in an August 2th 2011 article in the Boston Globe, written by Milton Valencia. But the article was published before O’Toole had officially denied the motion. This was the only media attention that this incident received." I was not able to verify there was such an article or coverage, as nothing about this comes up on Internet search or at the Boston Globe search engine.

What follows is Mehanna's complete FB post, with only some bolding of certain text added for editorial emphasis:

My arrest and trial had little to do with “terrorism.”

The overwhelming majority of “terrorism” cases in America can fit into a category in which the FBI picks the gullible Muslim youth, sends an undercover agent to “befriend” him, and over a period of time, prod him to agree to carry out some attack. The agreement is recorded on tape. The undercover FBI agent offers the kid weapons, and arrests him as soon as he is about to proceed with the so-called “plot.” While the intended impression is that the Feds swooped in to save the day, the reality is that they “foiled” their own plot. An artificial victory, and this is the formula which you see every other day when you read the news, whose purpose is to compensate for the lack of authentic “terror plots.”

The government attempted this strategy with me, but failed. This has been one of the most underreported aspects of my case, despite it being in the public record. This is what happened:

In late 2005, I was approached by an individual whom I’d never met. Over the course of two years, he attempted to befriend me, and gradually began shifting otherwise mundane conversations to suggesting the need to “do something.” Eventually, this “something” that he was hounding me to “do” emerged as a plan of his to find American soldiers returning from Iraq (whose addresses he supposedly had) and kill them. He would show up at my house uninvited, and always try to steer the conversation in this directions, and I would steer it away and bury it, but he would never give up. Finally, I told this individual to never contact me again.

Two years later, I found myself here in a Plymouth jail awaiting trial on terrorism charges. From day one, I related this to my lawyers, and that I was 100% sure this had been an attempt by the FBI to entrap me in one of their artificial “plots” so that they could have additional firepower in this case. But my lawyers explained that without some acknowledgement from the government, it would be impossible to prove. So we filed numerous motions over the course of the two years before trial requesting exculpatory evidence (i.e., evidence that would be in my favor) from the government regarding this, but they feigned ignorance, and said that they had nothing.

Finally, in the early summer of 2011, my lawyer, Jay Carney, got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said that two sources within the NYPD had contacted her and confirmed to her that the NYPD had sent an undercover agent up to Boston to “befriend” me, and try to prod me into carrying out a “terrorist attack,” and that I had refused to go along (bingo!). Furthermore, these sources in the NYPD told this journalist that when the prosecutors in my case found out about this – the same prosecutors at my trial, Aloke Chakravarty and Jeffrey Auerhahn – they became frantic and called the NYPD to come up to Boston for a meeting, where they admonished them for “interfering” in my case. With this information, my lawyers filed an additional motion asking the judge to compel the government to disclose these details so that they could be mentioned at trial – the logic being that this is a “terrorism” trial, and here was an attempt by the government to actually push me to carry out an act of “terrorism,” and I had refused, and they were trying to cover this up. The motion was filed on July 15th, 2011.

A hearing took place in court on August 3rd, 2011 to discuss this. A number of other motions were discussed first, then at the end, Jay got up to argue this one. He mentioned to the judge tat [sic] we were seeking exculpatory evidence from the government, as they had thus far given us none. And then he mentioned that from the items we sought were details of an attempt by the NYPD to prod me to engage in a domestic attack, which I refused, etc. This was apparently the first the prosecutors knew that we were privy to this, and the surprise was evident on their faces. The judge asked them if they knew anything about this, and Mr. Chakravarty’s response was an ambiguous “we have no information from our office on this, and it is the defendant who should know,” to which Jay stood up again, faced Mr. Chakravarty, and asked: “So you’re willing to say, on record, before the court, that no members of the NYPD came up to Boston at anytime to meet with you to discuss an attempt to prod Tarek Mehanna to engage in an act of terrorism that he refused to go along with?” The prosecutor’s response, verbatim, was: “Well, I didn’t say that either…”

O’Toole said he would wait to rule on the motion, and immediately, the prosecutors requested a private meeting with him in the judge’s chambers. He granted their request. My lawyers stood outside the judge’s door as the prosecutors walked in and protested: “Well, that’s not fair. How are you going to meet with the judge privately about this motion, and we have no idea what is being said?” But the judge met with them for almost 20 minutes. We will never know what was said in that meeting, but the next morning, O’Toole denied our motion, and that was the last anyone had ever heard of it: nothing about this topic was allowed to be mentioned to the jury at trial. Not a single word.

A brief mention of the motion and the hearing was made in an August 2th 2011 article in the Boston Globe, written by Milton Valencia. But the article was published before O’Toole had officially denied the motion. This was the only media attention that this incident received.

Conversely, the baseless “shopping mall plot” received the lion’s share of media attention, and was freely introduced at trial by the government. The progression of this particular story is interesting, and quite telling as to how dishonest the government is:

-October 21st, 2009: I’m introduced to the world as having plotted to gun down shoppers at a local mall.

-10/21/09 to 10/24/11: The two year period before my trial: not a single additional detail is presented about this.

-My trial: Not only was no evidence presented to support this, but the government’s own witnesses admitted that I never participated in any such discussions, and that I in fact spoke against such ideas.

-Closing arguments at trial: The prosecutor backtracks, and says that even if these were not my ideas, that I knew people who had these ideas was enough.

In the end, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. At this point, it should be clear that my trial was about many things, but it was not about “terrorism.”

(To be continued…)

- Tariq Mehanna

One can only assume that Mehanna's story of being approached by undercover operatives and informants, of being "recruited" into government-originated terrorists "plots" is so consistent with other such reports that what we have here is an orchestrated government program (or even, as we see with the NYPD accusations above) competing programs meant to frame-up militant Muslims, radicalized, or even just made angry, about U.S. government policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The end result is meant to feed the domestic police and intelligence agencies need for "enemies" and "threats," the better to justify their existence. An added justification could be the government's paranoid need to destroy what it sees as a threat -- in this case Muslim "extremism" or opposition to US aims in the Muslim world -- and it is using COINTELPRO methods to do just that.

I don't doubt that bad or even deranged people exist, people who mean to cause harm to others, or who even have adopted terrorist methods as a means of furthering their cause. This certainly isn't restricted to Muslims (as this Murray article linked above makes clear), nor even to our own time or era. But what is clear is that U.S. government agencies have acted in secrecy and in bad faith, and without any means to hold them to account, we are all Tarek Mehanna, we are all threatened by a government that feels it can use any method it wishes to undermine differing points of view.

What's Past is Prologue: the Case of COINTELPRO (Video)

In "Notes on Civil Liberties" this morning, Kevin highlighted the Bill of Rights Defense Committee's (BORDC) campaign, "Shine a Light on the FBI." I thought I'd add a bit to that discussion.

BORDC, along with 40 other organizations, including Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Torture Accountability, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Defending Dissent Foundation and the National Lawyers Guild, among others, wrote a letter [PDF] on July 12 to members of Congress, "request[ing] that you vote against the White House proposal to extend the term of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III. The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislation to implement the proposal, but did so without adequate process and without meaningfully addressing any of the numerous outstanding oversight issues and constitutional abuses for which the Bureau continues to evade accountability."

As part of their campaign, BORDC has produced a great short video, "The unPATRIOTic Act & COINTELPRO 2.0," in which a number of former FBI and U.S. military figures, along with human rights activists, explain how the Patriot Act and government surveillance of and attacks on current activists, including Quakers and antiwar groups, are redolent of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program of the 1950s-1970s. The video is definitely worth viewing.



On the earlier COINTELPRO program, see this 1976 report by the U.S. Senate's Church committee, or this webpage dedicated to the subject at Political Research Associates, which includes links to many of the released COINTELPRO documents.

Despite the fact the FBI used agents provocateurs, forged documents, and various nefarious activities, including trying to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide, no U.S. officials were ever prosecuted for these activities.

BORDC reminds us that those interested can sign on to their letter to Congress.

Originally posted at The Dissenter/FDL

Sentenced to "Hell": Use of SAMs and Informants in the Case of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Cross-posted from Firedoglake/MyFDL

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science at CUNY's Brooklyn College, one who takes the responsibility of her profession towards her students, and to the society she lives in, very seriously. When she discovered that one of her former students, Syed Farad Hashmi, was being treated unjustly by the U.S. judicial system, she spoke out, and she continues to do so.

A new article at the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews Hashmi's ordeal, and links the attacks on civil liberties made after 9/11, especially on Muslims and including those that swept up Hashmi, to earlier periods of modern U.S. history, including the internment of Japanese during World War II, the McCarthy period, and the Cointelpro attacks on Native American, African-American, and other organizations, particularly on the left.

A year ago now, Hashmi was sentenced for fifteen years a year ago when, after suffering three years in extreme solitary confinement under Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) approved by the Attorney Generals Mukasey and Holder, he accepted a plea bargain on the single charge of conspriacy to provide "material support" to "a foreign terrorist organization. (Three other charges were dropped.) But lacking any actual links to terrorism, or any history of violence whatsoever, evidence points to governmental animus against Hashmi for his outspoken public criticism of denial of Muslim civil rights and constitutional protections in the post-9/11 period.

Like the Preventive of Injury (POI) orders imposed on alleged Wikileaks leaker PFC Bradley Manning, who is currently in isolation at the Marine Corps Quantico brig, and like Hashmi is essentially a political prisoner, the onerous conditions of detention imposed by the SAMs -- which restrict exercise, access to the media, to reading materials or the outside world in general, allow for no privacy, and are intrusive upon the actual body of the prisoner (strip searches, forced nakedness) -- are restrictions supposedly made in the name of safety. But just as Manning has showed no proclivity for self-harm, nor has he been violent in jail, Hashmi, who is currently at the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, has no history of violence. In fact his entire association with "terrorism" comes from the fact he let a friend stay in his apartment for a few weeks, someone who it turned out had a suitcase full of ponchos, raincoats and waterproof socks supposedly intended for delivery to an Al Qaeda-linked figure. (More on that below.)

In his first months in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, following extradition from England, where Hashmi was completing a masters degree in international relations, Farad was treated as an ordinary detainee awaiting trial, with no untoward behaviors or problems.

As Theoharis put it:

In the first months of detention, family members could visit him together and talk about their visits with friends and family. Fahad had a radio and could receive and read newspapers and magazines. He could shower outside of the view of the camera. His lawyer could talk freely with him and with others.

... there had been no complaint about his behavior in his first five months at the correctional center.

But he was not cooperating with American authorities. The U.S. attorney had made it clear that this could all go away if he would. As Fahad explained at his sentencing three years later, "And in all reality, I had nothing to cooperate about." Much like other forms of torture, his treatment was a coercive punishment for not doing what the government wanted.

Someone who did "cooperate" was his friend, Junaid Babar, the man with the suitcase full of rain gear. Babar, who was, as the UK Guardian reported, an "American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers learned how to manufacture explosives", was "quietly released" from prison after serving less than five years of his 70-year sentence.

The early release was because Babar agreed to become a government informer -- or "Supergrass" as the British media puts it. Just last month, a Guardian investigation revealed that Babar's release came despite the fact that he "still supported the killing of US soldiers and civilians in 'occupied' Muslim countries."

The pre-sentence report, known as a 5K1, submitted by the US attorney's office, stated: "Babar has advised that he supports the killing of Americans (both military and civilian) in Muslim countries 'occupied' by the United States"....

When asked by the sentencing judge about Babar's support for violence against US citizens, Brendan McGuire, assistant attorney for the southern New York district, said: "I do believe that that is Mr Babar's view as of today. [However] I think there is a distinction, and the government draws a distinction between Mr Babar's views and Mr Babar's intent on acting on that view."

And the evidence of such intent? No doubt it is his "cooperation," which included testifying against Hashmi, as well as meeting with "US government and foreign government figures on nearly 100 occasions." Hashmi wouldn't "cooperate", and now he is buried alive at the Florence Supermax prison, which its former warden told CBS's 60 Minutes was "pretty close" to "hell."

The Supermax prisons rely on severe, long-term solitary confinement and environmental control. Hashmi's extra restrictions via SAMs, even inside the Supermax prison, were renewed by Attorney General Holder last October.

As Jeanne Theoharis wrote:

The use of torture and other human-rights violations in America's war on terrorism has been framed as a problem occurring largely outside our shores. Our public conversation blames a set of bad guys—the "torture lawyers" John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their patrons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney—who twisted the law to allow "enhanced interrogation" in secret and offshore locations.

But enhanced-interrogation techniques are only one facet of the human-rights devolution in the aftermath of September 11. In a campaign against terrorism that requires evidence of the effectiveness of law enforcement, a record of conviction is paramount. Prosecuting alleged terrorists has significant cachet for politically aspiring U.S. attorneys, not to mention financial imperatives as various government agencies compete for money made available to fight terrorism. Under the cover of law, U.S. attorneys use prolonged solitary confinement and sensory deprivation to help produce convictions. As John McCain, a former POW, wrote, such treatment "crushes the spirit."

The use of prolonged solitary confinement is increasingly out of step with world opinion and practice, and is deemed torture by international standards. On July 8, 2010, the European Court of Human Rights kept in place an injunction barring the extradition of four terrorism suspects to the United States, based on the inhumane conditions in so-called Supermax prisons, including the use of postconviction SAMs. Evidence of Hashmi's pretrial treatment formed part of the background for the decision.

The list of injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government grows ever longer. We must ask now that the SAMs on Hashmi, as well as the POI on Bradley Manning, be lifted, or cause shown why they should not. The inhumane isolation regimes in prisons across this country, and perpetrated by the military in its Army Field Manual's Appendix M on supposed "unprivileged enemy combatants" (as the Obama administration now styles them) must end, as must the Cointelpro-like action of the government, using informers to frame and help imprison individuals only for their leadership or potential leadership.

Hashmi is in prison because he was an articulate spokesperson for civil rights of Muslims, and of political positions the U.S. government does not like. Theoharis notes, "The government was prepared to introduce tapes of his political activities at trial, tapes that indicated considerable surveillance of his activism as a college student, years before Babar's visit to his apartment." This kind of treatment is illegal, and meant to enforce political homogeneity and discourage, if not spike, all dissent.

It is a cliché that tyrannies endure because ordinary people don't speak out. Jeanne Theoharis is asking, along with Educators for Civil Liberties and Theaters Against War, that her article be spread far and wide, as the Hashmi case highlights the abuses of the civilian federal court and prison system. I think that's a very good idea.

The Hashmi case may be politically inconvenient for some who are promoting civil trials, for instance, as opposed to the military commissions system or closing Guantanamo for supposed more humane incarceration at Supermax facilities in the U.S. But there is really no contradiction here, only consistency in opposing inhumane standards and the injustice of use of secret evidence, coercion, governmental interference and setup via a system of exploitation of prisoners to serve political ends, not justice.

For more information on Syed Fahad Hashmi's case

ACLU: Political Spying by U.S. Law Enforcement on the Rise

Revelations of domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens exercising their constitutional rights led to a number of Congressional investigations and new laws in the years after Watergate. In the intervening years, and with accelerated fervor since 9/11, the U.S. government has sought to regain what powers of overarching surveillance it may have lost in the years of the Church and Pike investigations.

A press release today from the ACLU describes the latest ways in which the FBI, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies, now armed with the latest stealth and drone technology, are spying upon and harassing citizens attempting to exercise their right to political speech and affiliation. ACLU's "spyfiles" database, open to the public, looks like it offers much of interest to those of us, bloggers, journalists, attorneys, just-plain-citizens, who are concerned over the movement in the United States towards a full-fledged police state. Do not say it cannot happen here, as it can.

New ACLU Report And Web Hub Reveal Rise In Political Spying Across United States
Review Finds Incidents In At Least 33 States

WASHINGTON – Political surveillance and harassment by U.S. law enforcement agencies are on the rise with incidents reported in at least 33 states since 9/11, according to a review published today by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU also announced the launch of a new “Spyfiles” web hub on domestic political surveillance, which will serve as a comprehensive resource on domestic spying.

Political spying – rampant during the Cold War under the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA’s Operation Chaos and other programs – has experienced a steady resurgence in the years following 9/11 as state and local law enforcement are being urged by federal law enforcement agencies to participate in counterterrorism practices.

“In our country, under our Constitution, the authorities aren’t allowed to spy on you unless they have specific and individual suspicion that you are doing something illegal,” said Michael German, ACLU Policy Counsel and former FBI Special Agent. “Unfortunately, law enforcement in our country seems to be reverting to certain old, bad behaviors when it comes to political surveillance. Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.

The ACLU released its report of 111 incidents in 33 states and the District of Columbia in conjunction with the launch of its new “Spyfiles” web hub on domestic political surveillance, which will serve as a major new resource on domestic spying for the benefit of reporters, researchers, bloggers and any other interested members of the public. It will include a database of documents obtained through state and federal open-records requests as well as links to news reports and other relevant materials.

“In a democracy, there is no place for political spying or surveillance or the collection of information about routine daily activities of citizens by government,” said German. “The ACLU has been warning against domestic political spying for several years now. From our lawsuits against Defense Department spying in the middle of the past decade, to our work on fusion centers, to our ongoing close cooperation with our affiliates in states across the nation to monitor and combat these activities, the ACLU is determined to prevent the emergence of a domestic secret police apparatus in this country.”

United States law enforcement agencies, from the FBI to local police, have a long history of spying on American citizens and infiltrating or otherwise obstructing political activist groups.

“We are determined to prevent the emergence of a domestic secret police apparatus in this country,” said German. “Yet, as the ACLU’s report shows, these activities continue to take place with a regularity that shows there are systemic problems at work that must be monitored closely.”

The ACLU’s review of domestic surveillance incidents can be found at: www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security/policing-free-speech-police-surveillance-and-obstruction-first-amendme

The ACLU’s Spyfiles page can be found at: www.aclu.org/spyfiles

Holder/DoJ Cover-up on Torture Memos Investigation: Who is David Margolis?

Adapted from an article previously published at The Seminal/FDL

Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have scooped the press with a Newsweek article claiming to know the verdict of the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility report on the investigations into misconduct and unprofessional behavior by the Bush administration attorneys involved drafting the memos allowing the use of coercive interrogation techniques on prisoners. These techniques were largely derived from reverse-engineering torture inoculation procedures from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE programs.

According to Isikoff and Klaidman, the original verdict of the report was changed after the report was reviewed by the attorneys accused, and then reassessed by long-time DoJ honcho, David Margolis. The Newsweek article explains (emphasis added):

Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources….The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

In an initial assessment by bmaz at Emptywheel, for whom I owe the H/T for the Newsweek article:

Margolis is nearly 70 years old and has a long career at DOJ and is fairly well though of. Margolis was tasked by Jim Comey to shepherd Pat Fitzgerald’s Libby investigation. In short, the man has some bona fides....

Margolis is, however, also tied to the DOJ and its culture for over forty years, not to mention his service in upper management as Associate Attorney General during the Bush Administration when the overt acts of torture and justification by Margolis’ contemporaries and friends were committed. For one such filter to redraw the findings and conclusions of such a critical investigation in order to exculpate his colleagues is unimaginable.

But the involvement of Margolis in defanging the OPR report, and thereby assuring that governmental agencies or bar associations will not hold John Yoo, Jay Bybee and other Bush-era attorneys accountable for paving the way for legalistic torture, is perhaps not an incidental fact.

Dubious David

The role of Margolis, and the man himself, deserve a closer look. It does not take long to see that 40+ year DoJ veteran David Margolis has some skeletons in his closet, and that his track record is not unblemished.

In a July 2000 letter to the New York Review of Books by by E.L. Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Rose Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, singled out Margolis as "point man" on a DoJ "vendetta" against Cointelpro victim Leonard Peltier.

Three months ago, in March, I had a phone call from a lawyer who has never been involved in the Peltier case but was aware of my longtime concern. A friend in the Justice Department had just mentioned to him that the FBI was intensifying its anti-Peltier vendetta within the department, with Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis as the point man.

More recently, a 2008 Los Angeles Times story indicated that Margolis had changed DoJ policy and decided to withhold summaries of OPR investigations. The article noted that " the resolution of most matters investigated by the OPR remains closely guarded, even in cases where courts have found evidence of serious prosecutorial misconduct."

The LA Times continued:

Publishing the summaries "reassures the public that [the Department of Justice] takes its self-regulatory responsibilities seriously and puts prosecutors on notice that they face public embarrassment if they are caught engaging in wrongdoing," said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Fordham Law School in New York.

Associate Deputy Atty. Gen. David Margolis said it was his decision to excuse the OPR from preparing summaries of cases that might be released to the public. He said the decision reflected a lack of resources, as well as concern about balancing public interests with the privacy rights of individual attorneys facing accusations.

A 1999 story involves then Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder and Margolis acting together to spike a serious investigation into the 1993 Waco disaster, and in particular after it was discovered the FBI and DoJ had lied for years about using military incendiary devices at the Branch Davidian siege. Holder was overseeing an investigation led by Republican Senator John Danforth into the Waco Branch Davidian government siege. Bill Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno had taken the investigation out of the hands of U.S. Attorneys in Texas and given to GOP stalwart Danforth, who later exonerated the FBI of any wrongdoing, and recommended indictment of the only whistleblower in the case, U.S. Attorney William Johnston.

From a 9/15/99 Washington Post story:

The Justice Department has removed the entire U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas from further work related to the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex. The broad recusal is intended to avoid conflicts that could impede a fresh investigation being led by former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), a senior Justice Department official said yesterday.

Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg, whose office handled the criminal trial of the Branch Davidians in 1994, requested that his Western District office be recused from further work on Waco. Holder said that it is routine to approve recusal requests and that David Margolis, the senior department official who handled the details of the matter, told him he had never turned down a recusal request….

One of the attorneys in Blagg’s office who is being recused is Assistant U.S. Attorney William Johnston, who recently sent Attorney General Janet Reno a strongly worded letter warning that she had been misled by people within her department about the Waco siege. Holder said the broad recusal had nothing to do with Johnston’s letter.

Holder, who is second-in-command at the Justice Department, has been overseeing the Danforth probe since last week, when Reno recused herself from the matter because she too anticipates being a witness in the Danforth inquiry.

I’d say that Margolis’s “clean” reputation has been meticulously assembled, and I’m sorry if there are progressives who fell for it. Until I investigated further, I had no reason to question it myself. It goes to show that received wisdom if often not wisdom at all, and that we need to have a curious mind when it comes to acceptance of good intentions by this particular government (or maybe any government).

Margolis Covers-up Earlier Interrogation Scandal?

More speculatively, and intriguing, given the claims involved, is Margolis’s involvement in the investigation of a forgotten FBI sting operation against NASA contractors in the early 1990s. Operation Lightning Strike was, according to a Washington Post article at the time, a "20-month Justice Department sting operation focusing on NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston… [resulting] in criminal fraud and bribery charges against nine men and one contractor."

Later, in 1996, a defense committee was formed to support the "NASA-13". The committee, in a petitionto the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee claimed that the men caught up in the Operation Lightning Strike, some of whom were victims of "’frame-ups’ and torture, to obtain prosecutions." David Margolis was mentioned as admitting that an OPR investigation into the case was begun in 1994 to look into "investigative and prosecutive misconduct." However, no results from that report were ever made public. The involvement of Margolis in this case deserves further scrutiny, given it involved serious allegations about coercive interrogations and torture.

A defense committee press release was more specific about the abuses conducted by the FBI:

In a report submitted to Congress today, a team of defense attorneys representing the so-called "NASA-13," requested the US. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee to hold hearings and appoint a Special Prosecutor, not affiliated with the U.S. government, to investigate the "NASA-13" cases in the light of scientific research competed by a team of NASA industry experts, defense attorneys and behavioral scientists. This report furnishes evidence that at least one of the NASA/IG Federal agents who conducted the NASA sting operation in Houston from 1991 to 1994 was in fact a highly qualified military intelligence interrogator, who with the FBI, employed a highly dangerous form of "psycho-technology" known in the behavioral science community as "Coercive Persuasion" or "CP", a form of mind control.

The phenomenon of "CP" was first observed in the post-traumatic reactions of Korean War military and civilian POWs. Many of these prisoners had confessed to non-existent crimes and cooperated with the enemy after having been subjected to what was then called "brainwashing."

Given that these claims are coming from a pre-9/11 era, they cannot be said to be derivative of recent news reports and scandals. I am not convinced about what actually went on in this case, but it is notable that the defense committee procured a letter from well-known psychologist, and former government Margaret Thaler Singer backing the claims of the defendants:

I have reviewed the Lightning Strike Victims Questionnaires and summary provided by the NASA-13 Defense Committee, and I concur with the committee’s assessment that there is substantial data in these highly consistent statements to confirm that a program of Coercive Influence was employed in the Interrogations of the Lightning Strike Suspects . The questionnaires uniformly reveal a systematic application of psychological techniques, in an organized programmatic way, within a constructed and managed environment, which was aimed at the participants sense of self and sense of reality, producing extreme anxiety and emotional distress….

Such programs can and regularly do produce psychiatric casualties. Practitioners of these programs attempt to hold the subject at the point of maximum stress, without inducing psychosis. My experience over the past four decades and in observing over 3,000 cases since participating in the evaluation of released Korean POW’s, unfortunately reveals that practitioners of these nefarious methods frequently exceed the limits with devastating results.

According to the defense committee, Department of Defense interrogators played key roles in the interrogations of the defendants, as aspect of the case that has also never been explained.

Now this may all be a lot of smoke, but when one adds in the latest role played by Mr. Margolis in spiking the initial results of misconduct on behalf of Yoo, Bybee, Addington, et al. (if we can believe the Newsweek leak), his appearance in this role does not seem so remarkable. Margolis appears to have a long history of involvement in government frame-up and/or obfuscation of internal misconduct by the FBI or Justice Department prosecutors.

Will we see the intrepid U.S. press look more deeply into this? One could wish this were true. Every once in a while the mainstream press shows what it’s capable of, as with the exposure of torture at Bagram under Obama’s administration, or with Scott Horton’s Harper’s revelations on the 2003 killings of three Guantanamo prisoners, covered-up as supposed "suicides".

But the OPR report is shaping up to be one gigantic cover-up, assuming we ever get to see much of it, after the government censors get done with it.

The country is thick with torture and crime, and unable to free itself from thralldom to its governmental enablers. Let’s see how easily Holder, Obama, and Margolis get away with their cover-up of Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, and Addington’s lies and alibis. Meanwhile, torture continues as official policy of the Obama administration in the guise of an appendix to the Army Field Manual. But outside of Emptywheel, some former interrogators, and a few others, no one seems to care.

And so it goes.

On Ayers, Obama and "Terrorism"

Meteor Blades has an interesting post up over at Daily Kos. He describes his previous association with David Gilbert, who, like Bill Ayers, was a member of the Weather Underground approximately 40 years ago. MB makes the obvious point:

As others have observed, palling around with terrorists has a long and sordid history in America. Just take the six decades I’ve been alive. Venerated Senators and Representatives made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, whose murders were the ultimate backstop for maintaining American apartheid. That system, you may recall, rested on ruthless white rule over the portion of the United States which allegedly lost the Civil War. It reinstituted slavery in a visible but widely ignored form, and for 90 years it destroyed every civil right of African-Americans, enforcing this with terror, including lynchings and other murders.

Fast forward to Henry Kissinger, the architect of raining terror on Cambodia, a policy that led to tens of thousands of dead civilians and contributed to the ascendance of the previously minuscule Khmer Rouge. Their astounding butchery and terrorism against their own people was not enough to persuade the United States to stop supporting them in their effort to keep control of Cambodia’s U.N. seat after their cross-border aggression was defeated, government overthrown and genocide stopped by Vietnam. Not to mention Kissinger’s role in Indonesia and Chile.

Please note that war criminal and terrorist Kissinger is also an honorary co-chair of McCain's campaign, although because he is a member of the U.S. elite, that connection is not seen as nefarious by the establishment press and its blogger tail.

Meteor Blades goes on to mention other atrocious criminals in American government who better deserve the terrorist label than Bill Ayers, a former WU member involved in some symbolic bombings who later became a local liberal-radical activist along more traditional lines, and hence came into contact with Barack Obama. Ayers never thoroughly renounced his WU past. Why?

To answer that question, I reproduce here my comment over at MB's Daily Kos post, as it is relevant to both the question of "terrorism" in general, and on the meaning of attacking Ayers and linking him to liberal presidential candidate Barack Obama, more specifically. I've added a few links to my comment, for the benefit of my readers:

The modern left begins with the fight among the Russsian social democrats as to whether they should support the terrorist tactics of the Narodniks, who were fighting in the latter 19th century to overthrow the czar.

Although few know it, the faction that would later call themselves the Communists opposed terrorism as a tactic, as it tended to bring strong oppressive reaction while at the same time sending a message to the people at large that they did not have to engage in political struggle, leaving such struggle to a heroic elite. Hence, at a time of greater oppression, the masses of people were disarmed by non-involvement in political struggle.

However, the early left made a distinction between the terror tactics of left -- the actions ostensibly to support an oppressed people, or to oppose imperial power - and the terror tactics of the government or the right, which were meant to silence the left, or to further seal state or right-wing power against the workers, farmers/peasants, and lower middle-classes.

The Weather Underground members had lost faith in a working class, classic-style revolution. They also believed that the bulk of the middle class was bought off by the excess wealth generated by the exploitation of the "third world". Hence, despairing of any other way, they sought terror as a method of "sparking" resistance, which they hoped would begin among the most impoverished sections of U.S. society, e.g., poor black Americans, native Americans, etc. In this, they were supported by agents provocateurs working for the government, as an perusal of the subject of "Cointelpro" or the Church Committee hearings in Congress will demonstrate to anyone so interested.

The attacks against Obama on the Ayers issue represent, in part, a continuing struggle over the meaning of the Southeast Asian colonial wars, in which the United States butchered over a million people, and tortured tens of thousands. As Meteor Blades makes so very clear, the really hardcore terrorists were Kissinger, MacNamara, Johnson, Nixon, and so many more (including Alexander Haig, a McCain supporter).

On one hand, the purported Ayers-Obama link is just plain silly, as there's really nothing to it. But the politics behind it is very real. Ayers and other radical supporters of the antiwar movement were no criminals: they were trying to stop a massive crime being committed. That they sometimes chose self-defeating methods is very regrettable, but the damage they caused was nothing compared to the damage caused by the great evil they opposed.

MB's story of his experience with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), its internecine splits, the communal left such as it existed in the 1960s-1970s, and the fights over strategy and tactics, and how this all affected the individuals involved, is worth reading in and of itself. I only wish it had been longer, as its evident MB has a lot of experience to relate.

APA & CIA Study Deception to Help Undercover Police

I've written before about the July 2003 American Psychological Association/CIA/Rand Corporation workshop on deception that looked at, among other things, the use of drugs and sensory overload to "overwhelm the senses" and break down those imprisoned by state agencies.

But it turns out there was another workshop held roughly a year later, on Interpersonal Deceptive Practices, a "RAND Project sponsored by CIA Behavioral Sciences Staff." APA Science Policy staff were key participants in the meeting, which was aimed at helping law enforcement and intelligence agencies in their "undercover" work (among other things). The funding was part of a $500,000 grant authorized by Congress for the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to produce "not less than two workshops on the coordination of Federal Government research on the use of behavioral, psychological, and physiological assessments of individuals in the conduct of security evaluations."

Here's the skinny on the 2004 workshop:

On June 24th, Science Policy staff attended a day-long meeting designed to forge collaborations between operational staff working in the intelligence community and scientists conducting research on interpersonal deception. Generously funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the meeting was held near RAND headquarters in Arlington, VA and was facilitated by RAND policy analyst Scott Gerwehr. Gerwehr provided a conceptual framework for the meeting while Susan Brandon, Assistant Director of Social, Behavioral and Educational Sciences for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy [and former APA "Senior Scientist] and APA Science Policy Director Geoff Mumford concentrated on the logistics of inviting the particpants [sic] representing, the FBI, US Secret Service, CIA, DoD, Department of Homeland Security, UK Ministry of Defense, New Scotland Yard, and the UK Home Office as well as a long list of academic institutions.

Gerwehr's notion was essentially the reverse of a previous workshop conducted as a joint CIA/RAND/APA exercise on the theme of detecting deception....

Provided with that background, presentations were grouped thematically with Scott serving as facilitator throughout: 1) Interpersonal deception & deception detection: operational challenges; 2) Technological advances; behavioral challenges; 3) Empirical & ethical challenges.

The following is taken from Gerwehr's own introduction to the 2004 workshop (bold emphases added):

There is a long and robust record of scientific investigation into detecting interpersonal deception (highlights include De Paulo et al, 2003; Vrij, 2000; Zuckerman et al, 1981; Ekman & Friesen, 1969).... However, despite the significant amount of scientific work on detecting deception, there is astonishingly little on conducting interpersonal deception.... Those professions or vocations that feature interpersonal deception as a central component of the job (e.g., undercover police work) frequently have little written doctrine on how to deceive, and even more rarely have subjected that doctrine to rigorous scientific inquiry. This project aims to 1) systematically comb through the existing scientific literature for guidance on effectively practicing interpersonal deception, 2) survey a wide-variety of professionals who practice deception, in order to compile a broad knowledge base containing "best practices" of conducting deception, 3) identify gaps or untested hypotheses regarding the practice of deception in both the scientific literature and professional knowledge base, and 4) formulate a "road map" of scientific experimentation to address shortcomings, inaccuracies, and gaps in existing doctrine on deceiving....

Individuals who professionally practice deception (e.g., smugglers, undercover cops) may have a great deal of explicit and implicit information about what variables are key, what methods work and don't work....

For effective interpersonal deception there may be some generalities common to a number of fields (e.g., acting, undercover work, smuggling, unscrupulous sales or con artistry). In your opinion, for effective interpersonal deception:

-- What, if anything, do you need to know ahead of time about the audience?
-- How do you find out the critical information about the audience?
-- What audience traits/states are "showstoppers"?
-- Does it matter to you how many audience members there are?
-- What aspects of the milieu would you like to control?
-- What milieu features are "showstoppers"?
-- What milieu features do you capitalize on?
-- How much time is the appropriate amount of time to effectively deceive? Would you rather have more time or less time in any given situation (i.e., operate more or less quickly than the "usual")? If the answer is "it depends", then depends on what?
-- What are the critical variables about yourself necessary to ensure deception?
-- What do you do/not do with your: Hands? Eyes? Posture? ...?
-- What, if anything, is it important to keep in mind while deceiving? Objective? Story? Character?
-- How important is the style or tone of your speaking?
-- How important is the actual content?
-- How do construct the narrative? What are the key choices you have to make?
-- What is the right mix of truth, falsehood, and omission? How does this change with the objective? Audience? Environment?
-- Does the deception have to be perfect to be effective? What % is enough?

[Excuse me, I know it's the middle of the article, but I have to go take a shower right now. Be right back. *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***]

I'm sure undercover cops and agents are very excited that the scientists that gobble up government research money are now turning towards a scientific examination of their craft. Given the attendance at the meeting by members of the CIA, FBI, Scotland Yard, and other police agencies, the emphasis will be on what helps cops plant undercover spies in anti-war and other government opposition groups, like the "teams of undercover New York City police officers" that the New York Times reported "traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the [2004 GOP] convention"; or the Fresno peace group who was infiltrated by "an agent working for the Fresno Sheriff’s Department and local anti-terrorism unit"; or the two Oakland, California undercover police who infiltrated a local antiwar group in 2006; or the "widespread" undercover surveillance of activists in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as revealed by scores of documents released to the ACLU under Freedom of Information Act requests.

The implantation of undercover agents, in addition to agents provocateurs, into government opposition groups has a long and checkered history, both in the U.S. and abroad. It was a specialty of the FBI anti-radical program, COINTELPRO, and use of such surveillance was a major operation by military intelligence during the 1960s (bold emphasis added).

In July 1969, the Department of Defense opened a new war room in the basement of the Pentagon. Staffed by some 180 people and packed with all the latest equipment -data processing machines, closed circuit television, teletype networks, elaborate situation maps-the new operation was a marvel of military technology.... This was not a regular command center but a very special operation-a "domestic war room," the headquarters of the Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. It was the coordinating center for the Pentagon's domestic war operations.

The office, now known as the Division of Military Services, played a central role in the military's widespread intelligence operations against the American people, a sweeping campaign of civilian surveillance which ultimately affected more than 100,000 citizens. In the fall of 1968, there were more Army Counter-Intelligence Analysis Branch personnel assigned to monitor domestic citizen protests than were assigned to any other counter-intelligence operation in the world, including Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War.' In the later part of the 1960s and early 1970s, 1,500 army plainclothes intelligence agents with the services of more than 350 separate offices and record centers watched and infiltrated thousands of legitimate civilian political organizations. Data banks with as many as 100,000 entries each were maintained at intelligence headquarters at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and at Fourth Army headquarters at Fort Sam Houston, Texas....

The growth of the army intelligence bureaucracy paralleled the growth of dissident protest movements through the 1960s. Military intelligence undercover agents focused on the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and then moved to the New Left anti-Vietnam War coalitions of later years. No political gathering, no matter how small, was considered insignificant. No distinction was made between groups preaching violent action and those advocating peaceful dissent. Even the most established and nonviolent groups such as the NAACP and the American Friends Service Committee became targets of military surveillance.

With the exception of the FBI, the military intelligence services collected more information on American politics in the sixties than any other federal agency.... The attitude pervading these army operations was best stated by Robert E. Jordan III, general counsel to the army: "the people on the other side were essentially the enemy. The army conducted a de facto war against all citizen protest, legitimate and illegitimate, violent and peaceful, white and black."

In its quest to serve the National Security State as the best providers of supposed scientific support, the American Psychological Association has prostituted itself right into the heart of the worst kind of secretive and anti-democratic government activity that exists in our society. One wonders what kind of individuals do this kind of work? And for those who believe that CIA and Rand and APA are interested in infiltrating Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, consider only the information above. It's not that the police or government groups don't sometimes operate to protect the nation or its citizens from harm. What's at stake here is the irrefutable proof that they so often turn their weapons, both figuratively and literally, upon those same citizens when they are in political opposition to the government.

But, for instance, don't the FBI make "sting" arrests on some bad criminals? No doubt they do, or they have, but I don't think these are the kinds of arrest scenarios these folks have in mind, having only a year earlier speculated on ways to break down or psychologically overwhelm a detainee -- via drugs or sensory overload.

Perhaps some members of APA will read this and ponder, as they ready for the next convention of APA this August in Boston. Or maybe, they will wonder why, after months and months, their organization cannot still bring themselves to call for a closure of the torture chambers at Guantanamo? No, most likely they will congratulate themselves for all the "progress" the organization has made, with such progress measured in toothless resolutions and the amount of government research gold piling up for psychologists to spend on projects such as the one described above.

U.S. Government Culpability in Death of Martin Luther King

On this 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., there's been a lot of speechifying and article-writing. But I have seen precious little that recounts the campaign of the United States government to discredit and vilify Dr. King. The activities of the FBI's Cointelpro program were documented by the United States Senate in its Church Committee Report. The "likelihood" that King was shot by James Earl Ray "as a result of a conspiracy" was the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1975. Unlike the JFK case, the HSCA documents on the MLK assassination remain classified to this day.

Yet we will hear nothing about these facts in today's mainstream news. It's unlikely that much will even be said at the liberal blogs. Yet, outside of the work of Dr. King himself, it's the most salient fact about this day of dark remembrance.

I am charging the U.S. government, and most specifically the FBI, with culpability in the assassination of Martin Luther King. What does "culpability" mean?

Culpability generally implies that an act performed is wrong but does not involve any evil intent by the wrongdoer. The connotation of the term is fault rather than malice or a guilty purpose. It has limited significance in Criminal Law except in cases of reckless Homicide in which a person acts negligently or demonstrates a reckless disregard for life, which results in another person's death. In general, however, culpability has milder connotations. It is used to mean reprehensible rather than wantonly or grossly negligent behavior. Culpable conduct may be wrong but it is not necessarily criminal.

I personally believe the guilt of the U.S. government is greater, but I don't have the evidence to prove it. Such a charge of complicity requires much more evidence than the circumstantial but damaging facts I will quote from the Church Committee report below. However, the activities of the FBI in the King case clearly helped create an atmosphere of hatred and distrust around the person of Dr. King. Rather than seeking to protect American leaders from harm, the FBI clearly sought to cripple the life and reputation of the U.S. civil rights leader.

Let's look at the Church Report itself. All bolded material is my emphasis. All footnotes must be referenced in the original document via link:

SUPPLEMENTARY DETAILED STAFF REPORTS
ON INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE
RIGHTS OF AMERICANS

_____

BOOK III
_____

FINAL REPORT

OF THE

SELECT COMMITTEE
TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS

WITH RESPECT TO

INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES
UNITED STATES SENATE

APRIL 23 (under authority of the order of April 14), 1976

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., CASE STUDY

I. INTRODUCTION

From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI's "war" against Dr. King:

No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business. 1

The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them. 2

FBI informants in the civil rights movement and reports from field offices kept the Bureau's headquarters informed of developments in the civil rights field. The FBI's presence was so intrusive that one major figure in the civil rights movement testified that his colleagues referred to themselves as members of "the FBI's golden record club." 3

The FBI's formal program to discredit Dr. King with Government officials began with the distribution of a "monograph" which the FBI realized could "be regarded as a personal attack on Martin Luther King," 4 and which was subsequently described by a Justice Department official as "a personal diatribe ... a personal attack without evidentiary support."5

Congressional leaders were warned "off the record" about alleged dangers posed by Reverend King....

The FBI's program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press. Steps were taken to attempt to convince the National Council of Churches, the Baptist World Alliance, and leading Protestant ministers to halt financial support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to persuade them that "Negro leaders should completely isolate King and remove him from the role he is now occupying in civil rights activities." 6 When the FBI learned that Dr. King intended to visit the Pope, an agent was dispatched to persuade Francis Cardinal Spellman to warn the Pope about "the likely embarrassment that may result to the Pope should he grant King an audience." 7 The FBI sought to influence universities to withhold honorary degrees from Dr. King. Attempts were made to prevent the publication of articles favorable to Dr. King and to find "friendly" news sources that would print unfavorable articles. The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King's hotel rooms.

The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from its microphone coverage. According to the Chief of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division, the tape was intended to precipitate a separation between Dr. King and his wife in the belief that the separation would reduce Dr. King's stature. 7a The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide. The FBI also made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited." 8

The campaign against Dr. King included attempts to destroy the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by cutting off its sources of funds. The FBI considered, and on some occasions executed, plans to cut off the support of some of the SCLC's major contributors, including religious organizations, a labor union, and donors of grants such as the Ford Foundation. One FBI field office recommended that the FBI send letters to the SCLC's donors over Dr. King's forged signature warning them that the SCLC was under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS files on Dr. King and the SCLC were carefully scrutinized for financial irregularities. For over a year, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to establish that Dr. King had a secret foreign bank account in which he was sequestering funds.

The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy Dr. King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness. As early as 1962, Director Hoover penned on an FBI memorandum, "King is no good." 9 At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King told the country of his dream that "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last."' 10 The FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division described this "demagogic speech" as yet more evidence that Dr. King was "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country".... The depth of Director Hoover's bitterness toward Dr. King, a bitterness which he had effectively communicated to his subordinates in the FBI, was apparent from the FBI's attempts to sully Dr. King's reputation long after his death. Plans were made to "brief" congressional leaders in 1969 to prevent the passage of a "Martin Luther King Day." In 1970, Director Hoover told reporters that Dr. King was the "last one in the world who should ever have received" the Nobel Peace Prize. 13

The extent to which Government officials outside of the FBI must bear responsibility for the FBI's campaign to discredit Dr. King is not clear. Government officials outside of the FBI were not aware of most of the specific FBI actions to discredit Dr. King. Officials in the Justice Department and White House were aware, however, that the FBI was conducting an intelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation, of Dr. King; that the FBI had written authorization from the Attorney General to wiretap Dr. King and the SCLC offices in New York and Washington; and that the FBI reports on Dr. King contained considerable information of a political and personal nature which was "irrelevant and spurious" to the stated reasons for the investigation. 14 Those high executive branch officials were also aware that the FBI was disseminating vicious characterizations of Dr. King within the Government; that the FBI had tape recordings embarrassing to Dr. King which it had offered to play to a White House official and to reporters; and that the FBI had offered to "leak" to reporters highly damaging accusations that some of Dr. King's advisers were communists. Although some of those officials did ask top FBI officials about these charges, they did not inquire further after receiving false denials. In light of what those officials did know about the FBI's conduct toward Dr. King, they were remiss in falling to take appropriate steps to curb the Bureau's behavior. To the extent that their neglect permitted the Bureau's activities to go on unchecked, those officials must share responsibility for what occurred. The FBI now agrees that its efforts to discredit Dr. King were unjustified.

"The FBI now agrees... its efforts to discredit Dr. King were unjustified" -- ya think? In Taylor Branch's well-regarded biography of MLK, we find the following (NYT link & Google cache link):

The systematic character of the F.B.I. vendetta astonishes to this day. After the bureau learned of assassination threats against a number of prominent Americans, each was notified -- except King.

Forty years after Dr. King was assassinated, we must demand that the government declassify its files on the case. This is the proper way to remember the civil rights leader. Re the suppression of the MLK files, I also found this at Wikipedia:

In January 31, 1977, in the cases of Bernard S. Lee v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. United States District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

I don't care if Obama, or Hillary, or McCain (who voted against a Martin Luther King Day holiday when it was first proposed), or anyone attended any memorial service. It's all pious posturing. Let us seek justice for the murdered leader, and know the full truth about U.S. culpability (or worse) in King's murder.

McCain and the Cross of Coal: GOP Front-Runner Tied to Theft of Navajo Lands

According to an article over at the American Computer Science Organization:

A public research website: http://www.cain2008.org has brought together diverse historical elements of factual proof that Senator John McCain's was the key "point man" introducing, enacting and enforcing law that removed Dineh-Navajo Families from their reservation on the Black Mesa in Arizona. The McCain revised law relocated them to Church's Hill, Nevada (a Nuclear Waste Superfund Site, called "the New Lands" in PL 93-531). The Dineh-Navajo, a deeply spiritual and peaceful people, engaged in only peaceful resistance to being moved off lands they'd owned since 1500 A.D. Nonetheless, the Public Press and UN depicted brutalization, rights deprivation and forcible relocation.

The cain2008 website quotes from the UN report directly:

"The Black Mesa region in Arizona, USA is home to the indigenous communities of the Dineh (Navajo) and Hopi peoples. This region also contains major deposits of coal which are being extracted by North America's largest strip mining operation. The coal mines have had a major impact on families in the region. Local water sources have been poisoned, resulting in the death of livestock. Homes near the mines suffer from blasting damage. The coal dust is pervasive, as well as smoke from frequent fires in the stockpiles. Not coincidentally, the people in the area have an unusually high incidence of kidney and respiratory disease."

"The Dineh (otherwise known as Navajo) were stripped of all land title and forced to relocate. Their land was turned over to the coal companies without making any provisions to protect the burial or sacred sites that would be destroyed by the mines. People whose lives were based in their deep spiritual and life-giving relationship with the land were relocated into cities, often without compensation, forbidden to return to the land that their families had occupied for generations. People became homeless with significant increases in alcoholism, suicide, family break up, emotional abuse and death."

-- Marsha Monestersky for the UN Commission on Human Rights and Women Enacting Change at the UN

Will we hear more about the plight of the Sovereign Dineh Nation (SDN) in the mainstream media, or from the Democratic candidates? I won't hold my breath, as Native American issues don't even seem to register on their radar. That was made more than clear when Democratic President Bill Clinton left American Indian Movement [AIM] leader Leonard Peltier to rot in prison on frame-up murder charges, after already serving 25 years. Oh, and this was despite pleas for executive clemency for Peltier from Coretta Scott King, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Humans Rights, among others.

The Minnesota History Society briefly describes AIM's history:

AIM's leaders spoke out against high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians whose situation bred illness and poverty. They opened the K-12 Heart of the Earth Survival School in 1971, and in 1972, mounted the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, D.C., where they took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in protest of its policies, and with demands for their reform.

The revolutionary fervor of AIM's leaders drew the attention of the FBI and the CIA, who then set out to crush the movement.

Leonard Peltier was a victim of the FBI program, Cointelpro. But it's not just secretive policies of the FBI and CIA. Mainstream politicians have participated in the rape and destruction of Native Americans since this nation's inception. Politicans like McCain work in tandem with the repressive apparatus of the state to line the pockets of the coal, mining and energy companies at the expense of the lives of poor Native Americans, mindlessly destroying their cultures in the process.

John McCain's lurid participation in the latest scandal is part of a terrible history, part of a history that must be cleaned up if this country is to survive in any effective sense, and not continue its dizzying descent into moral and economic chaos and violent repression.

Hat tip to Winter Rabbit for alerting me to this story. See her excellent article on it at Daily Kos.

MLK on "Maladjustment" & Social Justice

While probably not his most famous speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke before the annual convention of the American Psychological Association back in September 1967, held in Washington D.C. Dr. King would be dead before the next convention could meet, the victim of an assassination. While the plot that ended his life may have been murky or ultimately unprovable, it is a fact that Dr. King was a central target for disruption and disinformation by the U.S. federal government, especially as part of the FBI's Cointelpro program.

A copy of the speech was published in the APA's house organ in January 1999, most likely as a commemorative to Dr. King on his eponymous federal holiday. It was originally published in the Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1968). I thought it would be worth quoting a small excerpt (and thanks to colleagues B.O. and E.T. who brought this to the attention of the APA's Social Justice listserv):

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks, Explorers and Geminies are dashing through outer space, when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can finally win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence or nonexistence....

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.

Cover-up: FBI Threatens Suspect's Family with Torture (Updated)

Like a scenario out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, an innocent man was accused of assisting the 9/11 hijackers in their terrorist plot. Abdallah Higazy was an Egyptian national studying computer engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. In December 2001, he was coerced into falsely confessing his "role" in 9/11 after the FBI was tipped that he supposedly owned an air-band transceiver capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground communication.

The transceiver turned out to belong to an airline pilot staying in Abdallah's NY hotel. Higazy was released after 34 days in custody. He subsequently sued both his FBI interrogator and the hotel he stayed in, whose security officers had found the radio. The hotel settled, but initially the FBI suit was dismissed. Upon appeal, the 2nd Circuit remanded the case to district court.

Now here's what's really amazing: the court brief clearly shows that the FBI threatened torture of Higazy's family back in Egypt. When the brief was published online, it was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a censored version, without the torture threats. Blogger Howard Bashman had the first version however, posted it, and then received a call from the court demanding he take down the unredacted version.

The case, including the bizarre attempt at cover-up, was widely covered in the legal blogs (see here and here), but barely merited coverage by the mainstream press. Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting story about the poor media coverage. [There were two previous diary entries at Daily Kos, brought to my attention after my posting here. Dday posted The FBI, Egyptian Torture, and the Court Opinion That Wasn't on October 23. Albaum followed up the story, with emphasis on the issue of court redaction, in the diary Federal Appeals Court Covers Up Abuse? Both diaries are well-worth the read.]

There was one article in the Washington Post last week:

The FBI interviewer allegedly gave Abdallah Higazy a choice: Admit to having a special pilot's radio in a hotel room near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, or the security service in his native Egypt would give his family "hell." Higazy responded by confessing to a crime he didn't commit....

In an unusual move, however, the appeals court withdrew the first opinion within minutes on Thursday and issued a second opinion Friday, with the details of Higazy's allegations removed.

"This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal," the new ruling reads. "For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

Howard Bashman, who writes a legal blog "devoted to appellate litigation", HowAppealing.com, gets the credit for breaking this story. He was, as already noted, approached by a clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, and told to take down his post of the original court opinion. According to an article posted at ABA Journal, the clerk, one Catherine O'Hagan Wolfe, said the material was redacted to protect Higazy and his family, and that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department requested the material be censored. But a number of commentators have seriously questioned that.

A Look at Censorship in Action

OK, let's compare the versions and you make up your mind. This is from the currently posted (redacted) version of the opinion. The excerpt picks up during a description of the FBI polygraph of Higazy, a procedure requested by Higazy himself, although he found it physically painful:

Templeton unhooked the polygraph, and according to Higazy, called Higazy a baby and told him that a nine-year-old could tolerate this pain. Templeton left the room to get Higazy water, and upon his return, Higazy asked whether anybody else had ever suffered physical pain during the polygraph, to which Templeton replied: “[i]t never happened to anyone who told the truth.”

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate . . . .

This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced.

Higazy then gave Templeton a series of explanations as to how he obtained the radio.

First, he admitted that he stole the radio from J&R, an electronics store. Then he recanted this story, and explained that he found it near J&R. Higazy next denied ever seeing or possessing the radio. Templeton allegedly banged on the table and screamed at Higazy: “You lied to me again! This is what? How many lies?” Higazy then lied again, this time telling Templeton that he found the radio on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Higazy recalled that Templeton “turned so red I thought he was going to hit me.” Templeton accused Higazy of being a liar, and said that he would “tell Agent Sullivan in my expert opinion you are a terrorist.” Finally, Higazy told Templeton that he had stolen the radio from the Egyptian military and had used it to eavesdrop on telephone conversations.

Templeton then wrote out a statement providing that Higazy had stolen the radio from the Egyptian military, which he asked Higazy to sign.

Among other things, Higazy's experience and reactions are a textbook case in how to elicit a false confession. But why did Higazy cave? Was he a crybaby, as his interrogator suggested? Consider the fully uncensored version, and note that the court accepts this version, even if it redacted it later (emphases are added).

Templeton unhooked the polygraph, and according to Higazy, called Higazy a baby and told him that a nine-year-old could tolerate this pain. Templeton left the room to get Higazy water, and upon his return, Higazy asked whether anybody else had ever suffered physical pain during the polygraph, to which Templeton replied: “[i]t never happened to anyone who told the truth.”

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, [begin unredacted portion] and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

Higazy later said, “I knew that I couldn’t prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger.” He explained that “[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family’s in danger. If I say this device is mine, I’m screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is -- they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force — as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

And Higazy added:

[L]et’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be — might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay. [End redacted portion]

Higazy then gave Templeton a series of explanations as to how he obtained the radio. First, he admitted that he stole the radio from J&R, an electronics store....

The FBI Is Not Clean on Torture

What else can we conclude? In the controversies over CIA and military torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (and particularly over the interrogaton of Abu Zubeida), the FBI were portrayed as whistleblowers, as real interrogation professionals who eschew torture. But here we can witness the FBI practicing a form of torture - threats to family - to induce a coerced confession. And then somebody tried to cover up the tracks when the embarrassing information popped up in a legal opinion. Apparently it was posted for only minutes before it was withdrawn, but it was too late for the government censors.

What else can we conclude but that this is how some, not all, FBI interrogations are conducted. How often does this happen? We don't know. How much is covered-up? We don't know, mainly because we can't estimate things done in secret.

But we do know something about FBI history. During the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI ran a domestic counterintelligence campaign targeting U.S. dissidents and radicals, Cointelpro. This is from Brian Glick's 1989 book, War at Home:

In early 1971, the FBI's domestic counterintelligence program (code named "COINTELPRO") was brought to light when a "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" removed secret files from an FBI office in Media, PA and released them to the press....

When congressional investigations, political trials and other traditional legal methods of repression failed to counter the growing movements of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, and even helped fuel them, the FBI and police moved outside the law. They used secret and systematic methods of fraud and force, far beyond mere surveillance, to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity. The purpose of the program was, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" specific groups and individuals. Its targets in this period included the American Indian Movement, the Communist Party, the Socialist Worker's Party, Black Nationalist groups, and many members of the New Left (SDS, and a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, feminist, lesbian and gay, environmentalist and other groups). Many other groups and individuals seeking racial, gender and class justice were targets who came under attack, including Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, the NAACP, the National Lawyer's Guild, SANE-Freeze, American Friends Service Committee, and many, many others....

Much of what was done outside the law under COINTELPRO was later legalized by Executive Order 12333 (12/4/81) [under President Ronald Reagan].

One could argue that the practices of Cointelpro did not involve torture or the elicitation of false confessions. But they do reveal a pattern of operating in secret and outside the law.

Some terrible things have been happening in this country. The naive belief that the FBI is somehow above the barbaric practices of the CIA and the military, with the latter highlighted over the waterboarding issue roiling the Mukasey nomination, must give way to an informed and sophisticated view of how the government really operates, particularly its police branches. We got to peek at how some of some of government secrecy operates to protect its police agents and their abuse. We must demand an end to such secrecy, a restoration of the FOIA to its full 1970s power, and the prosecution of those who use torture or cruel treatment, and those who pursue it as state or agency policy.

Blogger Steve Bergstein summed up the Higazy revelations:

That's how they do it, folks. If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family. And punishment in a place like Egypt is not like punishment here. Punishment here consists of solitary confinement and a very long prison term. Punishment over there is torture.

Update: For those who really like to get into the nitty-gritty of the case, Mary2002 gave an important link in the comments [over at Daily Kos]. She noted that the information that was redacted in the court opinion had been available elsewhere publicly online. The matter at the link gives evidence that the FBI had been conducting a cover-up on Higazy for some time.

Here's the link, and a brief explanation from the site as to what it contains (and a tip of the hat to all the brilliant and informative comments from the readers). Note that the matter below was written before the Second Circuit opinion, and before Agent Templeton, for the purposes of the summary judgment motion, "did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced":

[Posted] are pages 2-11 of the report on the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) prepared by Deputy U.S. Attorney David N. Kelley in behalf of U.S. Attorney James B. Comey, Southern District of New York, on how an FBI polygrapher came to extract a false confession from Abdallah Higazy. The first page of the report was not available....

The OIG report's main conclusion, that "there is insufficient evidence to corroborate Higazy's allegations that the polygrapher threatened him" was foreordained by the FBI's deliberate policy of not audio- or video-recording polygraph examinations, a policy that ensures there will be no record of any such misconduct by a polygrapher.

Higazy's lawyer, Robert S. Dunn, has characterized the OIG report as a whitewash. This view is supported by the fact that the OIG failed to even review Higazy's polygraph charts before filing its report. That the OIG was biased against Higazy and in favor of the polygrapher is evidenced by the fact that in reporting on its interview of Higazy, almost everything Higazy said is caveated with prefatory words such as "Higazy stated," "Higazy said," "According to Higazy," and "According to Higazy's account," whereas in reporting on the polygrapher's interview, such prefatory remarks appear relatively infrequently, and much of the polygrapher's account is presented as if it were undisputed fact.