The U.S. does not hold a monopoly on corruption and coverups. Read about Great Britain’s struggles and Tony Blairs blocking of bribes inquiery involving Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and his family. -VM

BAE: Secret Papers Reveal Threats from Saudi Prince
By David Leigh and Rob Evans
The Guardian UK
Friday 15 February 2008

Spectre of 'another 7/7' led Tony Blair to block bribes inquiry, high court told.
Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.
Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.
Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.
He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.
Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government.
The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals.
Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.
The judge said he was surprised the government had not tried to persuade the Saudis to withdraw their threats. He said: "If that happened in our jurisdiction [the UK], they would have been guilty of a criminal offence". Counsel for the claimants said it would amount to perverting the course of justice.
Wardle told the court in a witness statement: "The idea of discontinuing the investigation went against my every instinct as a prosecutor. I wanted to see where the evidence led."
But a paper trail set out in court showed that days after Bandar flew to London to lobby the government, Blair had written to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and the SFO was pressed to halt its investigation.
The case officer on the inquiry, Matthew Cowie, was described by the judge as "a complete hero" for standing up to pressure from BAE's lawyers, who went behind his back and tried to secretly lobby the attorney general to step in at an early stage and halt the investigations.
The campaigners argued yesterday that when BAE failed at its first attempt to stop the case, it changed tactics. Having argued it should not be investigated in order to promote arms sales, it then recruited ministers and their Saudi associates to make the case that "national security" demanded the case be covered up.
Moses said that after BAE's commercial arguments failed, "Lo and behold, the next thing there is a threat to national security!" Dinah Rose, counsel for the Corner House and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, said: "Yes, they start to think of a different way of putting it." Moses responded: "That's very unkind!"
Documents seen yesterday also show the SFO warned the attorney general that if he dropped the case, it was likely it would be taken up by the Swiss and the US. These predictions proved accurate.
Bandar's payments were published in the Guardian and Switzerland subsequently launched a money-laundering inquiry into the Saudi arms deal. The US department of justice has launched its own investigation under the foreign corrupt practices act into the British money received in the US by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington.
Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided. The group alleges that BAE made £1bn of "illegal bribe payments" to Bandar while claiming to be a "highly ethical, law-abiding corporation".

Government Accountability Chief Resigns
By Elizabeth Williamson
The Washington Post
Saturday 16 February 2008

One of government's chief internal watchdogs resigned yesterday, as Comptroller General David M. Walker, an outspoken gadfly and frequent witness on Capitol Hill, announced his plans to lead a new foundation focused on U.S. fiscal responsibility.
Walker has led the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative agency, for a decade.
Walker was an outspoken critic of the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare spending - issues on which the Democratic-led Congress, and Republicans before it, have had trouble building consensus.
In September, the administration and the military took issue with a bleak GAO assessment of progress in Iraq; the top military command in Baghdad described the assessment as flawed and "factually incorrect." Despite last-minute changes to address the criticism, the final report cast serious doubt on U.S. efforts to build a functioning democracy in Iraq.
At the time, Walker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Given the fact that significant progress has not been made in improving the living conditions of the Iraqis on a day-to-day basis with regard to things that all citizens care about - safe streets, clean water, reliable electricity, a variety of other basic things ... I think you'd have to say it's dysfunctional - the government is dysfunctional."
Most of Walker's tenure was spent with Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress, and he has frequently irritated both bodies with his dire warnings on reining in spending.
During that time, "I would give Walker high marks for trying to stand up for GAO priorities even though he had a Congress that was trying to block him and which didn't want to know what the White House was up to," said Scott Lilly, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.
"He handled it as forcefully as he could, given that the Congress that was funding him was discouraging him."
The Walker-era GAO filed, but then declined to appeal, legal action to force Vice President Cheney to provide notes and information about meetings he held with energy companies while developing U.S. energy policy. A related suit wound up before the Supreme Court, which upheld the vice president's refusal to make the information public.
Walker's resignation takes effect March 12. He will lead the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a new think tank whose mission, according to its Web site is "to enhance public understanding of the nature and urgency of selected key sustainability challenges that threaten America's future," including "unsustainable" growth in entitlement spending, and energy consumption.
The GAO's chief operating officer, Gene Dodaro, will serve as acting comptroller general until a successor for Walker is found.
"The one thing that bothers me the most, given this president's record on nominations: It's not likely we're going to get a new comptroller before next year," Lilly said.
"That's a very sad thing, given how much institutional leadership means toward improving oversight over government."

Error Gave FBI Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

By Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times
Sunday 17 February 2008

Washington - A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network - perhaps hundreds of accounts or more - instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an "apparent miscommunication" with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a "surge" in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.


The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government's wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: "It's inevitable that these things will happen. It's not weekly, but it's common."

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau's authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.


In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States - in apparent violation of the program's protocols - because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as "overproduction" - in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau's general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of "third-party error," in which a private company "provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek."

The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the technical and policy controls that the F.B.I. had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

"How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?" Ms. Hofmann asked.

In the cyber era, the incident is the equivalent of law enforcement officials getting a subpoena to search a single apartment, but instead having the landlord give them the keys to every apartment in the building. In February 2006, an F.B.I. technical unit noticed "a surge in data being collected" as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal bureau report. An Internet provider was supposed to be providing access to the e-mail of a single target of that investigation, but the F.B.I. soon realized that the filtering controls used by the company "were improperly set and appeared to be collecting data on the entire e-mail domain" used by the individual, according to the report.


The bureau had first gotten authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the e-mail of the individual target 10 months earlier, in April 2005, according to the internal F.B.I. document. But Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed. "It was unintentional on their part," he said.

Mr. Kortan would not disclose the name of the Internet provider or the network domain because the national security investigation, which is classified, is continuing. The improperly collected e-mail was first segregated from the court-authorized data and later was destroyed through unspecified means. The individuals whose e-mail was collected apparently were never informed of the problem. Mr. Kortan said he could not say how much e-mail was mistakenly collected as a result of the error, but he said the volume "was enough to get our attention." Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who reviewed the documents, said it would most likely have taken hundreds or perhaps thousands of extra messages to produce the type of "surge" described in the F.B.I.'s internal reports.

Mr. Kortan said that once the problem was detected the foreign intelligence court was notified, along with the Intelligence Oversight Board, which receives reports of possible wiretapping violations.

"This was a technical glitch in an area of evolving tools and technology and fast-paced investigations," Mr. Kortan said. "We moved quickly to resolve it and stop it. The system worked exactly the way it's designed."
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Court Dismisses Lawsuit on Secret Kidnapping
Reuters
Wednesday 13 February 2008
San Francisco - A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in May accusing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc of providing flight and logistical support to the U.S. government with at least 15 aircraft on 70 "extraordinary-rendition" flights.
"In sum, at the core of plaintiffs' case against Defendant Jeppesen are 'allegations' of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals - clearly a subject matter which is a state secret," Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday evening.
The court "grants the United States' motion to dismiss on the ground that the very subject matter of the case is a state secret."
The complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleged Jeppesen "falsified flight plans to European air traffic control authorities to avoid public scrutiny of CIA flights."
The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of five men who say the CIA had them flown to foreign prisons for interrogations and torture. The plaintiffs are an Ethiopian living in Britain; an Italian who was working in Pakistan; an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden; a Yemeni; and an Iraqi who is a British resident.
The government argued the case should be dismissed because they could not confirm details of the operations.
Those details "include whether any private entities or other countries assisted the CIA in conducting the program; the dates and locations of any detentions and interrogations; the methods of interrogation employed in the program; and the names of any individuals detained and interrogated by the CIA (other than fifteen individuals whose identities have been divulged so that they can be brought to trial)," the U.S. government said in its filing last year.
The judge mentioned he had reviewed a classified declaration from Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, in its assessment of the case.
"The Court's review of General Hayden's public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case," Ware wrote.
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Reporting by Adam Tanner; Editing by Peter Cooney

By John Holusha
The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to cite two White House aides for contempt for refusing to testify about their participation in the firing of federal law enforcement officials.
The measure calls for House officials to seek enforcement of the contempt citation by the courts if, as expected, the Justice Department declines to act on the resolution.
The vote was a lopsided 223 to 32 in favor of the contempt citation, after most Republican members walked out to protest what their leaders called a political move. Instead, they said, the House should be voting on the extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act approved by the Senate earlier this week.
The resolution would seek to compel testimony from Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when several United States attorneys were replaced; Democrats contend that replacements were for political reasons.
It would also order Joshua B. Bolten, the president's chief of staff, to produce documents related to the dismissals.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said that the House vote came about six months after the Judiciary Committee voted for contempt and that the White House resisted any effort to reach a reasonable compromise.
Both Ms. Miers and Mr. Bolten were instructed by the White House not to comply with the Judiciary Committee's requests for testimony and information and neither appeared before the panel.
Ms. Pelosi framed the dispute in constitutional terms, saying that if Congress could not compel testimony from White House officials, it would lose it power of oversight on the administration's actions.
Republicans said the House was wasting its time on a partisan stunt while the nation's security was being endangered by allowing legislation allowing advanced eavesdropping to expire.
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