I found this over on pen-l, under spooks in the news [Jim Devine]:
``The New York Times leads with word that the CIA hired contractors from Blackwater USA to take part in an assassination program that targeted top al-Qaida operatives. Blackwater is a private security contractor, now known as Xe Services LLC, that has come under scrutiny for using excessive force against Iraqi civilians. The Washington Post also leads the news in its late edition, and while it gives credit to the NYT for first reporting the story, it takes it a step further by saying that the whole of the assassination program was outsourced to Blackwater in 2004 and the private contractor was given "operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders." For its part, the NYT isn't clear as to whether the contractors were going to be used to kill or capture al-Qaida suspects or just for training and surveillance in the larger program. Regardless, the program was canceled before any missions were actually carried out....''
http://www.slate.com/id/2225812/
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Okay now read this:
``Leading GOP lawmakers cautioned U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday [August 19] against opening an investigation into alleged CIA interrogation abuses, saying that such an inquiry could have serious national security repercussions.
"It is well past time for the Obama administration to lift the cloud that has been placed over those in the intelligence community and let them return to the job of saving American lives," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Holder signed by nine Republican senators. An investigation that distracts the CIA, the lawmakers said, "could leave us more vulnerable to attack."
Among those who signed the letter were Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the minority whip; Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee; and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the judiciary committee...''
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-interrogate20-2009aug20,0,201403.story
I am posting all this because last week I finished Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater and James Risen's State of War. I'd recommend them to anybody interested in learning about how the US government goes to war these days.
Scahill completely backgrounds the whole private industry involvement in the US military, the Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA and on and on. The political link between Blackwater and the government is through a series of hard rightwing cronies in the Bush WH, Executive branch, Senate and Congress. The link to DoD was through Rumsfeld and his necon advisers.
Then Risen expanded the view by working up the background in the State Department, CIA. and slightly different aspects to the DoD involvement under Rumsfeld.
Now you have to put all of that together with the letter to Holder, which pulled classic excuse of endangering national security.
Next you have to go back to Watergate. I am afraid you have to be over fifty to understand what Watergate was. The hearings themselves did not create a constitutional crisis. Nixon's unconstitutional actions and crimes created the constitutional crisis. For some reason, it has become political wisdom that the hearings created a crisis of government. This is exactly backward. The President's crimes created the crisis, not the process of bringing these crimes to public view.
You have to keep that in mind, when you think about what's going on in these news stories. Obama and the Democratic leadership are setting on a constitutional crisis that was created by the Bush administration in its work up for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again in the way they prosecuted the war, and now in their methods of covering up their own crimes and unconstitutional activities.
When you go through both books and think for awhile you can see that we have had rightwing coup'd'etat. The Bush team created a secrete government within the executive branch. It had private death squads, secrete courts, mass civilian surveillance, wholesale round up of people with no criminal charges, who were subject to murder, torture, and indefinite imprisonment. And what's worse, there was no governmental and legal way to stop it. There was literally no power in the other two branches of government to stop. The Democratic leadership castrated itself when Pelosi et al refused to allow an impeachment bill to move out of committee.
Okay. Bush is out now, but the entire apparatus he constructed is still part of government. It has to be gotten rid of.
There has to be something like a Watergate style investigation by a special prosecutor and then a Congressional committee assembled with subpoena powers. The various provisions of the Patriot Act that were used as the pretext for some of this wrong doing, have to annulled.
I suspect Obama, Holder and congressional leadership has the idea it was the Watergate hearings that produced the crisis, when in fact it was president's crimes that produced the crisis.
One of the first things Obama should have done was to set-up a commission to investigate the entire Bush administration and produce a public report on all the crimes and unconstitutional conduct. The reason ge gave for not doing so was the mistakes of the past are past, and we need to move on. But that's trouble the crimes and unconstitutional system is still going on. In fact, that secret government within the executive branch is now the whole basis for conducting the war. It is also a system that Obama needs in order to run and escalate the war in Afghanistan.
So then Holder is trapped between investigating CIA misconduct, which as a prosecutor he must know will get bigger and bigger. The more he looks into a case against the CIA he will see its connections to a whole web of executive branch wrong doing and cover-up.
Now the reasons for the Obama administration's foot dragging are simple to see. According to Scahill there are 250,000 contractors fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole system of private contractors in embedded in the way the US military and Pentagon run the wars. This is thanks to the way Rumsfeld put together his whole extra-Judaical intelligence and covert operations system within the military. (See, State of War, Risen)
If Holder goes ahead with an investigation he most certainly will endanger national security.
He will in effect expose not just unconstitutional and criminal conduct by the Bush administration, he will end up disclosing massive violations of the UN Charters and the Geneva Conventions as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity. If Holder is thorough enough he will hand the International Criminal Court at the Hague all it needs to indict most of the top Bush administration officials. A court in Spain already has a list of lower level former Bush officials on arrest warrants. If they are spotted in the EU, according to European Union agreements, these ex-officials can be arrested and taken to the Spanish court to stand trial.
In fact, the US is in violation of the Hague charter as long as the US government does not bring all the detainees it holds into US courts, get them lawyers and hold preliminary hearings on whether or not those detained have committed a crime under either US statues or various UN agreements.
Here is another process announced by Jan Schakowsky back in July 17, working its way slowly down the pipeline to unraveling the US executive branch:
``This investigation will seek to review the process for notifying Congress and the Committee’s role to oversee the intelligence community. It is very important for us to set the record straight going forward that the Congress wants to be, and needs to be, able to conduct its oversight function...''
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/il09_schakowsky/pr_intelcomciainvest_7_17_09.shtml
If Schakowsky doesn't carefully manage the disclosure process in the document phase, she is likely to come across a track leading straight back to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Tenet---which is detailed out in Risen's book State of War. This book also explains how Rumsfeld created a military and private contractor based intelligence network of his own. It is this network that operates within the secret military prison system, were low level Army soldiers took the blame for prisoner abuse. Somehow it escaped notice the the whole point to abusing prisoners was to make them talk and ruin their lives.
I am pretty sure I sound like an obsessed paranoid. I can't help that. The books by Scahill and Risen, my memory of the early Bush years, the absurdities of the Patriot Act, all combined in my mind to paint another Watergate period which should happen again, needs to happen again.