Feds Want Rendition Lawsuit Dismissed
By Paul Elias
The Associated Press

Tuesday 05 February 2008

San Jose, California - Bush administration lawyers cited national security concerns Tuesday in urging a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA secretly fly terrorism suspects to overseas prisons to be tortured.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. last year in San Jose federal court, accusing it of aiding the CIA in the "forced disappearance, torture and inhumane treatment" of five suspected terrorists in violation of national and international laws. The ACLU alleges that Jeppesen, based in San Jose, knowingly participated in the program by supplying aircraft, crews and logistical support to the CIA flights.

On Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Judge James Ware to toss the lawsuit without further litigation because of unspecified national security risks.

In an earlier court filing, CIA Director Michael Hayden invoked the "state secrets privilege," which would let him bar evidence sensitive to national security from being used in court.

The judge appeared sympathetic to Hayden's position Tuesday, but declined to rule immediately. Ware said he would issue a written opinion soon.

ACLU lawyers argued Tuesday that Hayden's security concerns are trumped because the rendition program is public knowledge.

"No interrogation method alleged ... is a secret," ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said. "Every one of those has been publicly disclosed and confirmed and in the public record."

Wizner pointed out the Hayden even discussed "waterboarding" Tuesday in testimony before Congress.

President Bush also has confirmed the existence of the rendition program.

"Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement cannot be divulged," Bush said in a September 2006 speech defending the rendition program as a vital national security tool. "Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country."

On Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Abate said Bush and other high-ranking officials have discussed the program only in broad terms and that "this did not declassify any of the specifics."

For instance, Abate argued that the government has neither confirmed nor denied that any of the five men represented by the ACLU were ever in CIA custody. To do so would jeopardize the agency's intelligence gathering abilities, Abate argued.

Outside court, the ACLU's lawyer said the CIA's opposition to the lawsuit was the agency's latest attempt to avoid having a court rule on the legality of its rendition program.

"No court has ever ruled on the legality of the government's torture program," Wizner said.

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Dear ************

This week, POGO will finally get our day in court. For the last decade--yes, decade--the government has been badgering POGO over its decision to share with a government whistleblower the proceeds of a False Claims Act case against the oil industry. (That case, filed by POGO and others, ultimately resulted in the recovery of nearly half a billion dollars to the taxpayers). We informed the Department of Justice (DOJ) of our intentions to share our recovery with the whistleblower at the time, and the DOJ's only response was to tell us not to hold a press conference. So we didn't. After oil industry-funded Members of Congress, led by Rep. Don Young (R-AK), failed in their effort to bring a Contempt of Congress action against POGO, they harangued DOJ into filing suit against us.

The DOJ is now trying to force POGO to give the government the amount of money we shared with the whistleblower from our lawsuit settlement. We are looking forward to finally being able to present our case to the jury, and we will let you know what happens.As you can imagine, I'm going to have my hands full for the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions or would like more information about the case, please email Marthena Cowart at mcowart@pogo.org.

Warm Regards,

Danielle Brian
Executive DirectorProject On Government Oversight

Follow the link below to tell your friends about POGO. Tell-a-friend!

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for POGO.

“Revealing Deliberate Deceptions: A Truthout Interview With Daniel Ellsberg

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020408A.shtml

Mr. Ellsberg discusses his concerns regarding our current Administration.

Bush Legacy: Setting a Standard in Fear-Mongering
By Richard A. Clarke
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Friday 01 February 2008

When I left the Bush administration in 2003, it was clear to me that its strategy for defeating terrorism was leaving our nation more vulnerable and our people in a perilous place. Not only did its policies misappropriate resources, weaken the moral standing of America, and threaten long-standing legal and constitutional provisions, but the president also employed misleading and reckless rhetoric to perpetuate his agenda.

This week's State of the Union proved nothing has changed.

Besides overstating successes in Afghanistan, painting a rosy future for Iraq, and touting unfinished domestic objectives, he again used his favorite tactic - fear - as a tool to scare Congress and the American people. On one issue in particular - FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) - the president misconstrued the truth and manipulated the facts.

Let me be clear: Our ability to track and monitor terrorists overseas would not cease should the Protect America Act expire. If this were true, the president would not threaten to terminate any temporary extension with his veto pen. All surveillance currently occurring would continue even after legislative provisions lapsed because authorizations issued under the act are in effect up to a full year.

Simply put, it was wrong for the president to suggest that warrants issued in compliance with FISA would suddenly evaporate with congressional inaction. Instead - even though Congress extended the Protect America Act by two weeks - he is using the existence of the sunset provision to cast his political opponents in a negative light.

For this president, fear is an easier political tactic than compromise. With FISA, he is attempting to rattle Congress into hastily expanding his own executive powers at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional protections.

I spent most of my career in government fighting to protect this country in order to defend these very rights. And I know every member of Congress - whether Democrat or Republican - holds public office in the same pursuit.

That is why in 2001, I presented this president with a comprehensive analysis regarding the threat from al-Qaeda. It was obvious to me then - and remains a fateful reality now - that this enemy sought to attack our country. Then, the president ignored the warnings and played down the threats. Ironically, it is the fear from these extremely real threats that the president today uses as a wedge in a vast and partisan political game. This is - and has been - a very reckless way to pursue the very ominous dangers our country faces. And once again, during the current debate over FISA, he continues to place political objectives above the practical steps needed to defeat this threat.

In these still treacherous times, we can't afford to have a president who leads by manipulating emotions with fear, flaunting the law, or abusing the very inalienable rights endowed to us by the Constitution.

Though 9/11 changed the prism through which we view surveillance and intelligence, it did not in any way change the effectiveness of FISA to allow us to track and monitor our enemies. FISA has and still works as the most valuable mechanism for monitoring our enemies.

In order to defeat the violent Islamist extremists who do not believe in human rights, we need not give up the civil liberties, constitutional rights and protections that generations of Americans fought to achieve. We do not need to create Big Brother. With the administration's attempts to erode FISA's legal standing as the exclusive means by which our government can conduct electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on U.S. soil, this is unfortunately the path the president is taking us down.

So it is no surprise that in one of Bush's last acts of relevance, he once again played the fear card.

While he has failed in spreading democracy, stemming global terrorism, and leaving the country better off than when he took power, he did achieve one thing: successfully perpetuating fear for political gain.

Sadly, it may be one of the only achievements of his presidency.

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Richard A. Clarke is the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," and former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council. E-mail him at info@nsnetwork.org.
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New York Times Reporter
Subpoenaed Over Source for Book

By Philip Shenon

February 1, 2008

WASHINGTON — A federal grand jury has issued a subpoena to a reporter of The New York Times, apparently to try to force him to reveal his confidential sources for a 2006 book on the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the reporter’s lawyers said Thursday.
The subpoena was delivered last week to the New York law firm that is representing the reporter, James Risen, and ordered him to appear before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 7.

Mr. Risen’s lawyer, David N. Kelley, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan early in the Bush administration, said in an interview that the subpoena sought the source of information for a specific chapter of the book “State of War.”

The chapter asserted that the C.I.A. had unsuccessfully tried, beginning in the Clinton administration, to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program. None of the material in that chapter appeared in The New York Times.

“We intend to fight this subpoena, so we’ll likely be engaging in some sort of litigation,” Mr. Kelley said. “Jim has adhered to the highest traditions of journalism. He is the highest caliber of reporter that you can find, and he will keep his commitment to the confidentiality of his sources.”

Mr. Risen and a colleague at The Times, Eric Lichtblau, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for their disclosure of the administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants [ Whistleblower Russ Tice ]; Mr. Risen’s book expanded on their reporting about the domestic eavesdropping effort.

Mr. Risen, who is based in Washington and specializes in intelligence issues, is the latest of several reporters to face subpoenas in leak investigations overseen by the Justice Department.

A former reporter at The Times, Judith Miller, was jailed for 85 days in 2005 after initially refusing to identify a confidential source to a grand jury that was investigating the leak of the name of a covert C.I.A. operative. Ms. Miller testified after being granted a waiver by her source, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

Martha K. Levin, executive vice president and publisher of Free Press, which published Mr. Risen’s book and is a unit of Simon & Schuster Inc., said in a statement that “the American people have been well served by Mr. Risen’s reporting.” Ms. Levin’s statement also said that “the ability to publish confidentially sourced information about our government’s practices and policies is one of the bedrock principles of a free and open society.”

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said the paper “strongly supports Mr. Risen and deplores what seems to be a growing trend of government leak investigations focusing on journalists, particularly in the national security area.”

Ms. Mathis would not say why the material about the C.I.A. program involving Iran appeared in Mr. Risen’s book but not in pages of The Times. “We don’t discuss matters not published in The Times,” she said.

The Justice Department would not comment on the work of the grand jury that issued the subpoena to Mr. Risen. “The department does not comment on pending investigations,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/washington/01inquire.html?_r=1&ex=1359608400&en=c3e78e71efa39b03&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin