[OT] What Is "Terrorism?"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...525EDT0539.DTL

Lawmakers Accuse Administration of Protecting Saudi Sentiment
with Secrecy

William C. Mann
Associated Press

Sunday 27 July 2003

12:39 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration should make
public the facts about Saudi Arabia's complicity with terrorists
rather than
worry about offending the kingdom, lawmakers said Sunday.

One senator said 95 percent of the classified pages of a
congressional
report released last week into the work of intelligence agencies
before the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was kept secret only to keep from
embarrassing
a foreign government.

"I think they're classified for the wrong reason," Sen. Richard
Shelby,
former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC's
"Meet the Press."

"I went back and read every one of those pages, thoroughly. ...
My
judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified,
become
uncensored so the American people would know," said Shelby, R-Ala.

Asked why the section was blacked out, Shelby said: "I think it
might be
embarrassing to international relations."

In unclassified pages of the report, released Thursday, several
unidentified government officials complained of a lack of Saudi
cooperation. "According to a U.S. government official, it was clear
from
about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the
United
States on matters related to Osama bin Laden," the report says.

Bin Laden, head of the al-Qaida terrorist network, was born in
Saudi
Arabia to a prominent and rich family. He turned against the Saudi
government after it allowed the United States to station troops and
equipment in their country. The Saudi government revoked his
citizenship.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., former chairman of the Senate
Intelligence
Committee, accused the administration of using classification to
"disguise
and keep from the American people ineptitude and incompetence, which
was a contributing factor toward Sept. 11."

He said there might be parts of blanked section that would
compromise
sources or methods of intelligence-gathering, "but it would be a
sentence
or a paragraph, not 28 pages."

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Graham, a Democratic presidential
candidate, would not confirm that Saudi Arabia is the country
discussed in
the pages; discussing classified information is a crime.

But he said, "High officials in this government, who I assume
were not
just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial
contributions to
the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated
their
ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of Sept. 11."

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, who killed close to 3,000 people in
New York,
suburban Washington and Pennsylvania, were Saudis.

The current committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., agreed
on
CBS' "Face the Nation" that too much was removed but said he expects
more to be revealed.

"I think at some future date it will be made public," Roberts
said. "I was
upset with the process, and I was upset with the amount of material
that
was redacted."

Only Roberts' counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee,
Rep.
Porter Goss, R-Fla., who formerly worked for the CIA, said the
administration was justified in its deletions. He said on NBC the
joint
committee recommended a full investigation of foreign involvement, and
"we do not want to contaminate that investigation."

He said he expects to pages to be revealed after the
investigation is
ended.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/national/27WATE.html

Ex-Aide Says Nixon Agreed to Break-In at Watergate

By The Associated Press

Sunday 27 July 2003

WASHINGTON, July 26 (AP) - Three decades after Watergate, a
former
top aide to President Richard M. Nixon says that Nixon personally
ordered
the break-in that led to his resignation.

The aide, Jeb Stuart Magruder, previously had said only that John
Mitchell, the former attorney general who was running the Nixon
re-election
campaign in 1972, approved the plan to break into the Democratic
National
Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex near
the
White House and tap the telephone of the chairman, Larry O'Brien.

Mr. Magruder, in a PBS documentary that will be broadcast
Wednesday
and in an Associated Press interview last week, says he was meeting
with
Mr. Mitchell on March 30, 1972, when he heard Nixon tell Mr. Mitchell
over
the phone to go ahead with the plan.

The break-in occurred about two months later, on June 17, 1972.

Mr. Magruder, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and perjury
charges
stemming from the break-in and spent seven months in prison, explained
his three decades of silence about Nixon's culpability by saying,
"Nobody
ever asked me a question about that."

Some historians said they doubted the statements by Mr. Magruder,
who
was Nixon's deputy campaign director and deputy communications
director
at the White House. Stanley Kutler, an expert on Nixon's White House
tapes,
called it "the dubious word of a dubious character."

John Dean, the former White House counsel, said he was surprised
when Mr. Magruder recently told him that Nixon had encouraged the
break-in in advance.

"I have no reason to doubt that it happened as he describes it,"
Mr. Dean
said, "but I have never seen a scintilla of evidence that Nixon knew
about the
plans for the Watergate break-in."

In all, 25 people went to jail for their roles in the break-in or
the attempt to cover it up.

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0331/hentoff.php

Who Made George W. Bush Our King?
He Can Designate Any of Us an Enemy Combatant

By Nat Hentoff
VillageVoice.com

Friday 25 July 2003

Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual
freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time
of war, when our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must
accommodate the vital needs of national security while guarding the
liberties the Constitution promises all citizens. -Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals judge Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld,
July 9.

Some of the most glorious illuminations of the Bill of Rights in
American history have been contained in Supreme Court dissents by,
among others, Louis Brandeis, William Brennan, Hugo Black, and
Thurgood Marshall. Equal to those was the stinging dissent by judge
Diana Gribbon Motz when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (8 to 4)
gave George W. Bush a fearsome power that can be found nowhere in
the Constitution-the sole authority to imprison an American citizen
indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer.

This case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which will
determine whether this president-or his successors until the end of the
war on terrorism-can subvert the Bill of Rights to the peril of all of us.

Judge Motz began her dissent-which got only a couple of lines in the
brief coverage of the case in scattered media reporting-by stating
plainly what the Bush administration has done to scuttle the Bill of
Rights:

"For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi,
has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary
confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged
with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president]
will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive
allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or
communicate in any way with the outside world."

I have not seen what I am about to quote from her dissent anywhere
in the media. You might want to send what follows to your member of
Congress and senator. Judge Motz said accusingly:

"I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the indefinite
detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any American
citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive
designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts
that the area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat
zone,' and the detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel,
cannot dispute this fact." (Emphasis added).

As I have detailed in two previous columns ("A Citizen Shorn of All
Rights," Voice, January 1-7, 2003, and "Liberty's Court of Last Resort,"
Voice, January 29-February 4, 2003), Hamdi was taken into custody by
the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then declared an "enemy
combatant" by order of George W. Bush on the flimsiest of "evidence"
that he had been a soldier of the Taliban-an accusation that Hamdi has
not been able to rebut in a court of alleged law.

Judge Motz is not engaging in scare tactics when she says that with
the president having assumed the powers of an absolute monarch, in
this kind of case, any American citizen can be hauled off an American
street and stripped of all his or her rights. On June 5, Attorney General
John Ashcroft unequivocally told the House Judiciary Committee that
the streets of America are now "a war zone."

Furthermore, The Washington Post-in a July 13, 2002, lead editorial,
a year before the Motz Fourth Circuit dissent-warned of the increasing
tendency of the courts to defer to the dangerously overreaching
executive branch:

"FBI Director Robert Mueller has said that a sizable number of
people in this country are associated with terrorist groups, yet have so
far done nothing wrong [so] there is therefore no basis to indict them.
How many of them, one wonders, might the government [by bypassing
the courts] hold as enemy combatants? And how many of them would
later turn out to be something else entirely?"

But how much later would these innocent citizens-locked away until
the war on terrorism is over-be let out?

This is an unprecedentedly serious assault, folks, on the core of our
system of justice. As Judge Motz said in her passionate dissent, "[This
court's] decision marks the first time in our history that a federal court
has approved the elimination of protections afforded a citizen by the
Constitution solely on the basis of the Executive's designation of that
citizen as an enemy combatant, without testing the accuracy of the
designation. Neither the Constitution nor controlling precedent
sanctions this holding." (Emphasis added).

As for the government's "evidence" that Hamdi is an enemy
combatant, Judge Motz emphasizes that all the Defense Department
offered is a two-page, nine-paragraph statement by Michael Mobbs, a
special adviser for policy in the Defense Department. The buck stops
with Donald Rumsfeld.

As Judge Motz points out, the majority of the Fourth Circuit, in its
"breathtaking holding" relying on the Mobbs declaration, ruled that it is
"undisputed" that Hamdi was captured in a zone of active combat. This,
she charges, is "pure hearsay . . . a thin reed on which to rest
abrogation of constitutional rights, and one that collapses entirely upon
examination. For Hamdi has never been given the opportunity to
dispute any facts."

Before this case reached the Fourth Circuit, it was heard in Federal
District Court-with Hamdi unable to be present or to communicate at all
with his public defender, Frank Dunham, who therefore could not
contest the Mobbs declaration. Nevertheless, Judge Robert Doumar, a
Reagan appointee, scathingly demolished the government's
"evidence."

"A close inspection of the [Mobbs] declaration reveals that [it] never
claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a
member of the Taliban. . . . Is there anything in the Mobbs declaration
that says Hamdi ever fired a weapon?" (Emphasis added.)

In the January 9 New York Times, Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights exposed an earlier decision by a panel of
the Fourth Circuit to bow to Bush and to continue the stripping of
Hamdi's citizen's rights. "[The Fourth Circuit] seems to be saying that it
has no role whatsoever in overseeing the administration's conduct of
the war on terrorism . . . the beginning and end of which is left solely to
the president's discretion."

Now, the full Fourth Circuit bench has handed George W. Bush the
crown that George Washington disdained. What if the Supreme Court
agrees? Bush will be King George IV.

The Bush administration continues to fight, successfully, to prevent
public knowledge of what now-public intelligence information the
president was exposed to prior to 9/11. They claim this is a matter
of "national security." If anyone on this thread thinks they can
formulate a coherent argument for why the president's knowledge of
information already in the public domain needs to be kept secret in
the interests of the common defense, I would really, really like to
hear it.

Until then, I will continue to believe that this is just one more
cynical self-serving maneuver by a president facing reelection who
wants to protect himself from well-deserved political embarrassment
and condign public censure, and who wants to claim that he is really
just doing it for our own good.

Chris (USA)


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=dcorn

The 9/11 Investigation
By David Corn
TheNation.com

Thursday 24 July 2003

The attacks of September 11 might have been prevented had the
US intelligence community been more competent. And the Bush
Administration is refusing to tell the public what intelligence the
President saw before 9/11 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

These are two findings contained in the long-awaited, 800-page
final report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted the Senate and House
intelligence committees, which was released on July 24. As is
traditional in Washington, the contents of the report were selectively
leaked before it was officially unveiled. And several news outfits
noted that the report contained "no smoking guns" and concluded, as
the
Associated Press put it, that "no evidence surfaced in the probe...to
show that the government could have prevented the attacks." Those
reports were wrong--and probably based on information parceled out
by sources looking to protect the government and the intelligence
community.

In the report's first finding, the committees note that the
intelligence community did not have information on the "time, place
and specific
nature" of the 9/11 attacks, but that it had "amassed a great deal of
valuable intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden and his terrorist
activities," and that this information could have been used to thwart
the assault. "Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that
was
available prior to September 11," the report says, "there were various
threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are
both relevant and significant. The degree to which the [intelligence]
community was or was not able to build on that information to discern
the bigger picture successfully is a critical part of the context for
the September 11 attacks." One Congressional source familiar with the
report observes, "We couldn't say, 'Yes, the intelligence community
had all the specifics ahead of time.' But that is not the same as
saying this attack could not have been prevented."

The final report is an indictment of the intelligence
agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II)
that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to
capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of
available information.... As
a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September
11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at
least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other
investigative
work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened
state
of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever
know what might have happened had more connections been drawn
between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point
is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not
bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could
have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing
Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11,
2001."

The committees' report covers many missed--and
botched--opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either
ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports
released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does
contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly
conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would
have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The
message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source
familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement
of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not
prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to
connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it
aggressively."

An example: The FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had
numerous contacts on 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more
limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA
had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been
linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had
not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared
this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego
informant told the committees that had he had access to the
intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have
made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an
investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can
never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their
9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the
informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on,
would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the
intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11
plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the
intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance,
unfortunately, never materialized." (The FBI's informant--who is not
named in the report--has denied any advance knowledge of 9/11,
according to the report, but the committees raise questions about his
credibility on this point, and the Bush Administration objected to the
joint inquiry's efforts to interview the informant.)

The CIA was not the only agency to screw up. So did the FBI. In
August 2001, the bureau did become aware that al-Mihdhar and
al-Hazmi were in the United States and tried to locate them. But the
San Diego field office never learned of the search. The FBI agent who
was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm
sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a
few days." And the chiefs of the financial crime units at the FBI and
the Treasury Department told the committees that if their outfits had
been
asked to search for these two terrorists they would have been able to
find them through credit card and bank records. But no one made
such a request.

The final report notes that the CIA and other intelligence
agencies were never able to develop precise intelligence that would
have
allowed a US attack on bin Laden before 9/11. And it reveals that
there were even more warnings than previously indicated that Al Qaeda
was
aiming to strike at the United States directly. In an interim report
released last year, the committees provided a long list of
intelligence reports noting that Al Qaeda was eager to hit the United
States and
that terrorists were interested in using airliners as weapons. The new
material in the report includes the following:

§ A summer 1998 intelligence report that suggested bin Laden was
planning attacks in New York and Washington.

§ In September 1998 Tenet briefed members of Congress and told
them the FBI was following three or four bin Laden operatives in the
United States.

§ In the fall of 1998 intelligence reports noted that bin Laden
was considering a new attack, using biological toxins in food, water
or
ventilation systems for US embassies.

§ In December 1998 an intelligence source reported that an Al
Qaeda member was planning operations against US targets: "Plans
to hijack US aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals...had
successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a NY airport."

§ In December 1999 the CIA's Counter terrorism Center concluded
that bin Laden wanted to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive
panic and score a psychological victory. To do so, it said, he might
seek to attack between five and fifteen targets on the millennium,
including several in the United States.

§ In April 2001 an intelligence report said that Al Qaeda was in
the throes of advanced preparation for a major attack, probably
against an
American or Israeli target.

§ In August 2001 the Counter terrorism Center concluded that for
every bin Laden operative stopped by US intelligence, an estimated
fifty operatives slip through, and that bin Laden was building up a
worldwide infrastructure that would allow him to launch multiple and
simultaneous attacks with little or no warning.

Despite these warnings, the intelligence bureaucracy did not act
as if bin Laden was a serious and pressing threat. A CIA briefing in
September 1999 noted that its unit focusing on bin Laden could not
get the funding it needed. In 2000 Richard Clarke, the national
coordinator for counter terrorism, visited several FBI field offices
and asked what they were doing about Al Qaeda. He told the committees,
"I got sort of blank looks of 'what is al Qaeda?" Lieut. Gen. Michael
Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said that in 2001 he
knew that the NSA had to improve its coverage of Al Qaeda but that he
was unable to obtain intelligence-community support and resources
for that effort.

According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counter
terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior
to
9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counter terrorism
program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not
state
what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning
criticism,
the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis
targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the
collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."

One crucial matter is missing from the report: how the White
House
responded to the intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat. That is because
the Administration will not allow the committees to say what
information reached Bush. The Administration argued, according to a
Congressional source, that to declassify "any description of the
president's knowledge" of intelligence reports--even when the content
of those reports have been declassified--would be a risk to national
security. It is difficult to see the danger to the nation that would
come
from the White House acknowledging whether Bush received any of
the information listed above or the other intelligence previously
described by the committees. (The latter would include a July 2001
report that said bin Laden was looking to pull off a "spectacular"
attack
against the United States or US interests designed to inflict "mass
casualties." It added, "Attack preparations have been made. Attack
will
occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for
a
vulnerability.")

It is unusual--if not absurd--for an administration to claim that
the
state of presidential knowledge is top-secret when the material in
question has been made public. But that's what Bush officials have
done. Consequently, the public does not know whether these
warnings made it to Bush and whether he responded.

The White House also refused to release to the committees the
contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that
contained information on bin Laden. In May 2002 National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed this PDB only included information
about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective
and contained no specific warnings. But the joint inquiry appears to
have managed to find a source in the intelligence community who
informed it that "a closely held intelligence report" for "senior
government officials" in August 2001 (read: the PDB prepared for
Bush) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the
United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here and
that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin
Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with
explosives. This is quite different from Rice's characterization of
the
PDB. Did she mislead the public about it? And presuming that this
"closely held intelligence report" was indeed the PDB, the obvious
question is, how did Bush react? But through its use--or abuse--of the
classification process, the Administration has prevented such
questions from inconveniencing the White House.

The committees tried to gain access to National Security Council
documents that, the report says, "would have been helpful in
determining why certain options and program were or were not
pursued." But, it notes, "access to most information that involved
NSC-level discussions were blocked...by the White House." Bush has
said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of
September the 11th." Just not those details about him and his
National Security Council.

One big chunk of the report that the Administration refused to
declassify concerns foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers. Of these
twenty-seven pages, all but one and a half have been redacted. The
prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the
committees--and it is well founded--is that most of the missing
material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers
received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration
treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither
CIA
nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address
definitively the
extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the
United
States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing
or
inadvertent in nature. Only recently, and at least in part due to the
joint
inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their
efforts to address these issues.... [T]his gap in US intelligence
coverage is unacceptable." At one point in the final report, the
committees reveal that a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's
concerns that persons associated with a foreign government may
have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. "Those
indications
addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report obviously raise
issues with serious national implications," the report notes. But
these
"indications" are not addressed elsewhere in the report. The
Administration would not declassify the material.

The report does include a list of quotes from unnamed US
officials
each of whom says that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to cooperate
with the United States on matters related to bin Laden. "In May 2001,"
according to the report, "the US government became aware that an
individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior al Qaeda
operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming operation." The
following sentences--which likely cover how the United States
responded to this intelligence and what the Saudis did or did not
do--is deleted from the report, thanks to the Bush Administration.

It's a pity that the committees were, on a few matters, rolled by
the
White House, and that Bush has gotten away with concealing from the
public what he knew and when, and what he did (or did not do) about
a serious threat to the nation. But for seven months, the joint
inquiry
has been engaged in trench warfare with the Administration over the
declassification of this report. It is a credit to the joint inquiry
and its
staff director, Eleanor Hill, that the committees squeezed as much out
of the Administration as they did. The joint inquiry has done far
better
in this regard than the average Congressional intelligence committee
investigation.

The report is a good start in establishing the historical record.
It
reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs
were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers
were
within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days
after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined
suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice
said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually,
the
report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms
of
date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism
experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely
these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton
administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less
outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting
them was within the realm of possibility.

The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal
how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's
work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent
commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that
endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions
the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.

Note that the Saudi "Prince Bandar" in this article is the very same
Prince Bandar who conspired in the mid 80's with then-CIA director,
William Casey, to perpetrate the deadly March 8, 1985 car bombing
attack in front of a mosque in Beirut, which killed 80 innocent people
and injured hundreds.

Chris (USA)


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/26/national/26SAUD.html

Classified Section of Sept. 11 Report Faults Saudi Rulers
By David Johnston
New York Times

Saturday 26 July 2003

WASHINGTON, July 25 - Senior officials of Saudi Arabia have
funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable groups and
other
organizations that may have helped finance the September 2001 attacks,
a
still-classified section of a Congressional report on the hijackings
says, according to people who have read it.

The 28-page section of the report was deleted from the nearly
900-page declassified version released on Thursday by a joint
committee of the
House and Senate intelligence committees. The chapter focuses on the
role
foreign governments played in the hijackings, but centers almost
entirely on
Saudi Arabia, the people who saw the section said.

The Bush administration's refusal to allow the committee to
disclose the contents of the chapter has stirred resentment in
Congress, where some lawmakers have said the administration's desire
to protect the ruling
Saudi family had prevented the American public from learning crucial
facts
about the attacks. The report has been denounced by the Saudi
ambassador to
the United States, and some American officials questioned whether the
committee had made a conclusive case linking Saudi funding to the
hijackings.

The public report concluded that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had known
for years that Al Qaeda sought to strike inside the United States, but
focused
their attention on the possibility of attacks overseas.

The declassified section of the report discloses the testimony of
several unidentified officials who criticized the Saudi government for
being
uncooperative in terrorism investigations, but makes no reference to
Riyadh's financing of groups that supported terror.

Some people who have read the classified chapter said it
represented a searing indictment of how Saudi Arabia's ruling elite
have, under the guise of support for Islamic charities, distributed
millions of dollars to
terrorists through an informal network of Saudi nationals, including
some in the
United States.

But other officials said the stricken chapter retraces Saudi
Arabia's well-documented support for Islamic charitable groups and
said the
report asserts without convincing evidence that Saudi officials knew
that
recipient groups used the money to finance terror.

The public version of the report identified Omar al-Bayoumi, a
Saudi student who befriended and helped finance two Saudi men who
later
turned out to be hijackers.

Mr. Bayoumi helped pay the expenses for the men, Khalid Almidhar
and Nawaq Alhazmi. Mr. Bayoumi, the report said, "had access to
seemingly
unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia." The report said Mr. Bayoumi was
employed by the Saudi civil aviation authority and left open his
motivations for supporting the two men.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States has angrily denied that
his country had failed to cooperate with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in
fighting
terrorism and dismissed accusations that it helped finance two of the
hijackers
as "outrageous."

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, said in a
statement after the report was released on Thursday that his country
"has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism, as
the president and
other administration officials have repeatedly and publicly attested."

Prince Bandar dismissed the report's assertions about Saudi
involvement in the hijackings.

"The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even
knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false," Prince Bandar
said.
"There is something wrong with the basic logic of those who spread
these
spurious charges. Al Qaeda is a cult that is seeking to destroy Saudi
Arabia as
well as the United States. By what logic would we support a cult that
is
trying to kill us?"

He added: "In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being
used by some to malign our country and our people. Rumors, innuendos
and
untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the
day."

Asked to comment on the report today, a Saudi Embassy
representative said Prince Bandar was out of town and could not be
reached.

Today, a senior Democratic senator wrote to President Bush asking
for the White House to demand that the Saudis turn over Mr. Bayoumi,
who is
believed to be residing in the kingdom.

"The link between al-Bayoumi and the hijackers is the best
evidence yet that part of official Saudi Arabia might have been
involved in the
attacks," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. "If the Saudi
royal family is as committed to fighting terrorism as it claims, it
will turn this guy
over to U.S. officials immediately so that we can finally get to the
bottom of his role in the attacks and his links to Al Qaeda."

Behind the immediate issue of whether Saudi Arabia played any
role in terrorism are a complex web of political, military and
economic
connections between the two countries. Successive Republican and
Democratic
administrations have aggressively sought to maintain the relationship
with a huge producer of oil and an ally in the Arab world.

One section of the report took issue with Louis J. Freeh, the
former F.B.I. director, who testified to the joint committee that the
bureau "was able to forge an effective working relationship with the
Saudi police and
Interior Ministry."

The report quoted several senior government officials, who were
not identified, expressing contradictory views. One government
official
told the panel "that he believed the U.S. government's hope of
eventually
obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance
to the U.S.
is contrary to Saudi national interests."

Another official said: "For the most part it was a very troubled
relationship where the Saudis were not providing us quickly or very
vigorously with response to it. Sometimes they did, many times they
didn't. It was just very slow in coming."

(TimePixDC) wrote:
Subject: [OT] What Is "Terrorism?"
From: (Chris)
Date: Fri, Jul 25, 2003 8:47 PM
This is what US-"liberated" Iraq looks like nowadays: people being
imprisoned without trial and held incommunicado indefinitely in
appalling conditions.

Heck. That's what the United States looks like under the Bush League.

Good point, TimePix. At least two US citizens are being held
incommunicado without being charged with a crime, without judicial
oversight, without visitors or even the ability to speak with their
lawyers. It is questionable if either of these Americans even
realizes they have lawyers. This is blatantly illegal, of course, and
typifies the contempt the Bush administration has for domestic civil
liberties, as well as for international law. Legal challenges to
these detentions will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where
the nine justices will hopefully have the common decency to declare
the detentions illegal. But the Bush administration's plan appears to
be to have "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II" enacted into law by them.

Under "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II," the government can arbitrarily strip any
American of their citizenship by declaring them a "suspected
terrorist." Once they have been stripped of their citizenship, they
can be treated just like the hundreds of detainees in Guantanamo Bay
and "Camp Cropper" with no habeus corpus rights, no lawyer-client
confidentiality (if they are even allowed lawyers in the first place)
pending an eventual kangaroo court "military tribunal" in which they
are presumed guilty unless they can somehow prove themselves innocent
(a sometimes impossible task even for the genuinely innocent, which is
partly why the Anglo-American tradition of jurisprudence normally
gives the prosecution rather than the defence the burden of proof).
All
decisions by the military tribunal are final and may not be appealed,
with death sentences to be carried out immediately.

The civil liberties which Americans have traditionally enjoyed are
one of the clearest examples of the genuinely good aspects of America,
a country whose history is sadly tainted by genocide, slavery and the
arrogance of empire. How bitterly ironic that the forces on the
domestic political stage most committed to trashing these traditional
civil liberties in all but name are wrapping themselves in the stars
and stripes and using "patriotism" as their cover; as if shredding the
Bill of Rights were a patriotic act and anyone who challenges this
must be "disloyal" and a "terrorist sympathizer."

Of course, those Americans who loudly praise whatever international
military aggression their country is currently pursuing need never
need
to worry about *their*
civil liberties coming under attack. *They* will remain free to sing
God Bless America in the key of their choice, and to engage in lively
debate among themselves about how to best carry out the wise, glorious
and correct proclamations of our Great Leader and Party. This is very
much the same kind of so-called "freedom of speech" which was
guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution and which prevailed in China
under Mao, where civil liberties belonged to everyone except "enemies
of the people." "Enemies of the people," of course, meant anyone who
deviated from the Party Line. Under Mao, Chinese citizens were
imprisoned for years on end without trial, without formal charges,
without being able to confront their accusers, without habeus corpus
rights, etc., simply because the government declared them suspected
"enemies of the people" without the government needing to meet any
minimum standard of evidence in doing so. Sound familiar? It should.


Chris (USA), who recently read "Life and Death in Shanghai," (New
York:
Grove Press, 1987) Nien Cheng's account of her six year imprisonment
without charges during Mao's "cultural revolution," and thinks that
any American who can read it and not get a nervous chill must not be
paying attention to what is going on in their own country as we speak.

Chris wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/...s-patriot.html

ACLU Challenges U.S. Anti-Terrorism Law
Reuters

Wednesday 30 July 2003

DETROIT - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit
against the federal government on Wednesday aimed at
curbing the vastly expanded spy powers won under the
anti-terrorism law passed soon after the Sept. 11 attacks
[]
Mary Rose Oakar, head of the Arab-American
Anti-Discrimination Committee that is one of the six plaintiffs
in the ACLU case, noted that Arabs and Muslim-Americans
have been the primary target of the FBI's counter-terror
measures after Sept. 11.
---------------------------------
To preserve freedom, Islam must be totally destroyed world-wide
and its supporters burned in a big hole, preferably radioactive.
Steve

Chris wrote:

When Saddam's regime didn't like what al-Jazeera reported, it shut
them down and expelled them. When the USA doesn't like what
al-Jazeera reports, it bombs them and kills their reporters. Who is
the bigger "thug" in this case?

Chris (USA)
------------
Simple, Islam is wrong, and secular libertinism is right.
Kill for Islam and you're evil, kill for the truth and you're good.
Steve

"R. Steve Walz" put fingertips to keyboard and tap-
tap-tapped out the following communication:

Thomas Edward Lawrence is dead, and good ****ing riddance.
Now we simply have to rid the world of Islam, and all the
other vicious superstitious sheep-****er religions, like
Baptists and Catholics and Jews.
Steve



Not to mention racistsa and bigots.

Oh, BTW... PLONK!

--
################################################## ##############
'I told the priest, "don't count on any second coming...
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming"'
-- Concrete Blonde
################################################## ##############

"the bogeyman" put fingertips to
keyboard and tap-tap-tapped out the following communication:

Lard Valve = crypto-fascist


More like Blown Valve = poor excuse for a human being.

--
################################################## ##############
'I told the priest, "don't count on any second coming...
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming"'
-- Concrete Blonde
################################################## ##############