Rogue Bush regime: US government is above the law, Karl Rove's White House Murder Inc.
The US government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the US government.
It is now well documented and known all over the world that the US government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the US government has had people kidnapped and “renditioned,” that is, transported to third world countries, such as Egypt, Syria [ where there is a sizable CIA2 station ] to be tortured.
Also documented and well known is the fact that the US Department of Justice provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees. One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green light to the Bush regime’s use of torture is John Yoo, a South Korean immigrant who secured a US Justice Department appointment and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law.
Members of Berkeley’s city council believe that Yoo should be charged with war crimes. The US government has charged lesser offenders than Yoo with war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve the Bush regime’s goal of finding a way around the torture prohibitions of both US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions.
The way around the law that Yoo provided for the sadistic Bush regime was closed down by the US Supreme Court, which voided Yoo’s arguments, and Yoo’s torture memo was rescinded by the Department of Justice. Nevertheless, Yoo’s obvious constitutional incompetence, which in Yoo’s case is total, has not affected his position as professor of constitutional law at Berkeley. Can you imagine the harm Yoo is doing by teaching future cadres of lawyers and government officials that torture is consistent with the Constitution and the law of the land? How many of us will suffer from this ignorant man’s teachings?
Even as the US government was torturing people, the US government was prosecuting the son of Charles Taylor, the former ruler of Liberia, for torturing political opponents of his father’s government. The US government did not employ the Yoo torture memo to justify Liberia’s use of torture against those who wished to overthrow the Liberian government or commit terror against it. The US government’s position is that Liberia’s government had no right to use torture to defend itself. Only an “indispensable nation” such as the US has the right to torture and assassinate people who are imagined to threaten it, while receiving with open arms in USA serial killers like Amine Gemayel, Johnny Abdo, Samir Geagea and Walid Joumblatt, who murdered thousands of innocent people in Lebanon with US/Israeli covert help.
I use the word “imagined” because approximately 99 percent of the detainees tortured by America were totally innocent people picked up at random or sold to the Americans by warlords as “terrorists.” (The US government offered rewards for terrorists, like the bounty offered for outlaws in the “wild west.” The result was that warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan grabbed whoever was not one of them and sold their captives to Americans as “terrorists.”)
According to Carrie Johnson, a Washington Post staff writer, on October 30, 2008, a federal jury in Miami convicted Charles Taylor’s son, Chuckie, of torture. Chuckie will be sentenced by the indispensable Americans in January for torture, conspiracy and firearms violations. He may spend the rest of his life in an American prison.
While Chuckie’s trial was underway, the Bush regime was torturing people.
The Washington Post writes that Chuckie’s conviction is “the first test of an American law that gives prosecutors the power to bring charges for acts of torture committed in foreign lands.” In other words, US law against torture applies to the entire world, to every other country except the United States. The hubris is unimaginable -- no country can torture except the US.
Anyone else who tortures gets life or, in the case of Saddam Hussein, gets hanged by the neck until dead.
Isn’t it great to be an American! Our laws don’t apply to us, only to every other nation. This is what it means to be the moral light of the world, the unipower, the salt of the earth.
Neither Carrie Johnson nor her editors at the Washington Post see the irony or the paradox. Johnson writes in the Washington Post that the US prosecutors “accused Taylor of taking part in atrocities and directing subordinates to torture victims using . . . electrical devices from 1999 to 2002.” That charge practically overlaps in time with Bush’s, or Cheney’s, or Yoo’s, or the DOJ’s, or Rumsfeld's, or whoever’s direction to subordinates to torture people detained by Americans at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in various CIA rendition sites. By now everyone in the world has seen the photograph of the hooded Iraqi with electrical wires attached standing on that box in Abu Ghraib.
If only American laws applied to the American government. Then the criminals who have been in charge for eight years could be prosecuted for their extreme violation of United States laws. But, of course, the great moral American government is far above the law. American law only applies to dispensable nations. America is not answerable to law, not to its own law and not to international law. US attorney general Michael Mukasey affirmed that the US government is above all law when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there would be no investigation or prosecution of those Bush regime officials who authorized torture and those who carried out the sadistic acts.
The American government, the government of the great indispensable nation, has a free pass. The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.
Dawood Ibrahim fits the billing for one of Cheney’s “unsavory” intelligence sources ....
In the days after 9/11, Bush administration officials began telling the press that in the forthcoming “war,” American intelligence would have to work with “unsavory” elements.
Chief among the proponents of such a policy was Vice President Dick Cheney who said the “coming war” would have to be “fought in the shadows” with the “help of unsavory intelligence sources.” Cheney added that intelligence services required “more latitude” to hire and pay informants with “unsavory” backgrounds. Cheney’s pal, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, echoed the comments saying that the United States might have to work with some nasty characters in the war against terrorism. CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jim Pavitt told Newsweek magazine the CIA was reaching out to sometimes unsavory allies in its war against Al Qaeda.
We have learned from Asian intelligence sources that one of the accused masterminds of the gangland assault on Mumbai, the soft-spoken but extremely dangerous exiled Indian mobster and one-time Bombay local street tough, or “dada,” Dawood Ibrahim, was a key “unsavory” ally of the CIA and Cheney in the war against “Al Qaeda.” In fact, Ibrahim’s dalliances with the CIA go back to the Afghan mujahidin war against the Soviets and coincide with the CIA’s alliance, at the time, with Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden, himself, was an “unsavory” CIA ally during the Balkan war when the CIA gave support to the Bosnian Muslim government. The CIA operation with “unsavory” elements brought Ibrahim and Bin Laden into the same big CIA tent, along with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a key Iran-contra figure in George H. W. Bush’s global arms smuggling venture while he served as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. There have been reports that Ibrahim considers Khashoggi to be a hero figure.
When Ibrahim became convinced that certain U.S. government agencies, particularly the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), was working with India and Pakistan’s new government of President Asif Ali Zardari to have him extradited from Pakistan to India, he decided to use his considerable muscle to “teach” Delhi and Washington a lesson. Ibrahim was also not pleased with the U.S. Treasury Department’s freeze order on his financial assets.
The attack on Mumbai had a number of recipients for Ibrahim’s “message” -- India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Mumbai business community, the Tata family -- which owns the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, his former partner-in-crime Chotta Rajan -- who is now tied up with Hindu nationalist gangs vying for control of the Mumbai streets against Ibrahim’s Muslim gangs, the Israeli intelligence and criminal network moving in on Ibrahim’s drug business in India, and last, but not least, the CIA, who he believes was involved in trying to double cross him with the Pakistanis. Ibrahim’s people used the Mumbai attack to take out a number of Hindus associated with his rival Rajan, who has ordered hits on Ibrahim’s associates in Dubai, Kathmandu, and India. When BJP leader L. K. Advani asked then-Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to hand over Ibrahim at the July 2001 Agra Indo-Pakistani summit, Advani said Musharraf became “really upset.” Musharraf knew something the Indian Hindu right-winger did not know. Ibrahim was providing assistance to Musharraf and that assistance would become even greater in a few months after the events of 9/11.
Ibrahim, according to our sources, played an important part in Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s “shadow war” after 9/11. It was Ibrahim, for example, who used his criminal network to track down the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Ibrahim’s men were also used to provide protection for Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai in Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially when the Afghan frequented gay brothels in Pakistan. Ibrahim’s enterprises, called “D-Company,” ensured that U.S. supply ships in the Arabian Sea were protected from attack, that the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was not targeted for terrorist attack, arranged for reasonable port fees to be assessed for U.S. ships in Dubai in support of the Iraq war, that U.S. sailors and contractors in Dubai were protected, and that all the kickbacks for Cheney’s Halliburton and other U.S. contractors were properly laundered through Dubai banks. Ibrahim’s network also ensured that the land route from Karachi to Afghanistan allowed U.S., Indian, and other nations’ goods to move into the landlocked country unimpeded.
It is also clear that Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani who entered the United States and shot several CIA employees, killing three, as they waited in their cars at an entrance gate to the CIA headquarters on January 25, 1993, five days after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, would have never been caught in Pakistan and extradited back to the United States without the help of Ibrahim’s D-Company. Ditto the apprehension in 1995 by U.S. law enforcement in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and the Bojinka plot to blow up U.S.-bound planes from Asia over the Pacific and crash one into the CIA headquarters. Ibrahim, who is a valuable “unsavory” ally for the CIA had the network to find the two terrorists who had planned attacks on the headquarters of Ibrahim’s paymasters in Langley, Virginia. Ibrahim’s network also enabled the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in 2003 for 9/11. Bojinka, World Trade Center 93, and the murder of Pearl. Mohammed is Yousef’s uncle. Mohammed is in Guantanamo while Yousef is in the Colorado Supermax prison. Kansi was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
Ibrahim also saw to it that Afghanistan’s bumper opium crop moved unimpeded through the supply chain through Pakistan and other countries -- something that benefitted Karzai and his family and Rumsfeld’s old colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry.
It is also clear that Hillary Clinton “got the message” from Ibrahim in the attack on the Mumbai. Clinton had personal investments in the Enron Dabhol power plant project near Mumbai and she is seen as a shill for the RAW. Clinton has now indicated that she will name her ally, the Henry Kissinger protégé Richard Holbrooke, as her Special Envoy for South Asia. Clinton is worried that with the attack on India’s business infrastructure and assets of her friends, the Tatas, her and her husband’s investments in India could be in jeopardy. Therefore, she had to roll out Holbrooke to ensure that India is guaranteed full U.S. support in any showdown with Pakistan.
Ibrahim, as a major player in Dubai’s business world, knows where the “skeletons” are buried. He is fully aware of the presence of Bin Laden at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, a few months before the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden, who was reportedly undergoing kidney treatment, was visited by the CIA’s Dubai station chief Larry Mitchell, someone else fully known to Ibrahim. Mitchell reportedly offered Bin Laden a deal to return to Saudi Arabia if he stopped his jihad against the United States. No deal was apparently reached. But it is clear that with all his operatives in Dubai, Ibrahim was well aware of the offer from his “allies” in Langley.
In return for Ibrahim’s assistance, the CIA looked the other way and made sure other U.S. agencies followed suit on D-Company’s involvement in currency and driver’s license counterfeiting, the heroin trade, counterfeit CDs, protection rackets, British and Pakistani-based cricket betting operations, extortion, hawala loans, Pakistani and Indian passport forgery, nuclear black marketing, murder-for-hire, and Moroccan hashish trafficking in a criminal network that stretches from Dubai and Sharjah to Lisbon, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Bangkok that employs thousands of people. It is estimated that Ibrahim controls a third of the tourism infrastructure in Kathmandu -- hotels, guesthouses, casinos, restaurants, and travel agencies. In fact, the Kathmandu network of Ibrahim enabled many of the 1993 Mumbai serial bombing attackers to escape via Nepal back to Pakistan. Ibrahim’s network has also enabled northeast Indian insurgents to meet in Kathmandu with representatives of various non-government organizations (NGOs), some of which are fronts for foreign intelligence agencies, including the CIA and MI-6.
It is just the kind of “shadowy” network the CIA would want to work with to monitor the proliferation of nuclear material. And Ibrahim’s name has come up in relation to a contact of the Swiss Tinner family, suspected of being CIA operatives that monitored the transfer of nuclear technology and, perhaps, tampered with some of the equipment before delivery.
On February 1, 2007, WMR reported: “In May 2005, Der Spiegel magazine reported that Tinner was, in fact, a CIA agent. Germany announced that Tinner would be extradited to Switzerland, something that Der Spiegel reported was the result of a deal’ cut between Germany and the United States. A February 2004 Malaysian police report named both Urs Tinner and his father, Friedrich, as principal engineers in overseeing the machining of uranium-enrichment centrifuge components at a Scomi Precision Engineering (Scope) plant in Malaysia. Friedrich Tinner, owner of a Swiss firm named PhiTec AG, was named in an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report as one of many Swiss individuals involved in shipping nuclear components to Libya and Iran. Swiss authorities had previously cleared Friedrich Tinner of charges that he shipped centrifuges to Iraq. Friedrich Tinner’s other son, Marco, owned a firm called Traco that was also reported as a supplier of equipment and services to Scomi. If the Tinners were working for the CIA, one subject of interest for them was a Sri Lankan businessman named B.S.A. Tahir who arrived in Malaysia via Dubai in the mid-1990s. In a February 2004 speech at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, President Bush stated that Tahir was A. Q. Khan’s ‘chief financial officer and money launderer.’ Investigators discovered that Tahir made several trips to Germany and Turkey, the native country of [Israeli national Asher] Karni’s [Turkish Jewish] spark trigger supplier [Zeki] Bilmen, to meet with suppliers for the [Pakistan A. Q.] Khan network.”
B.S.A. Tahir is Bukhari Sayeed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan citizen of Indian origin, who was identified by the Indian Finance Ministry as a probable associate of Ibrahim’s D-Company. The fact that Ibrahim’s operations connect with those of the CIA’s Tinners, and, quite possibly, the investigations by Valerie Plame Wilson’s Brewster Jennings & Associates network of Israeli and Turkish involvement in nuclear black marketing through the Asher Karni and Zeki Bilmen operations out of Secaucus, New Jersey and South Africa, puts India’s mob boss at the heart of an operation that was eventually disrupted by Cheney’s and his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s revelations about Brewster Jennings and Wilson. Former FBI Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds was also closely monitoring the activities of Bilmen, a Turkish national.
Ibrahim settled scores with a few CIA agents, some Mossad operatives, Rajan’s rival gangsters, the BJP, the RAW, the Tatas, and Mumbai’s business community in his attack on Mumbai. However, with it becoming clearer that Ibrahim was one of the key “unsavory” characters Cheney and Rumsfeld said the United States would have to deal with in the “war on terrorism,” Ibrahim’s score settling may not yet be over. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was careful about what she said in New Delhi. She and her Bush administration colleagues know that with Dawood Ibrahim and “D-Company,” they are walking on egg shells.
