Rep. Issa: 9/11 was ’simply’ a plane crash.

During a hearing Tuesday on an aid bill for sick New Yorkers, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) callously dismissed the 9/11 attacks as “simply” a plane crash. The New York Daily News reports:

The California congressman who called the Sept. 11 attacks “simply” a plane crash ran for cover Wednesday under a barrage of ridicule from fellow Republicans, first responders and victims’ families.

San Diego GOP Rep. Darrell Issa was under siege for suggesting the federal government had already done enough to help New York cope with “a fire” that “simply was an aircraft” hitting the World Trade Center.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) sharply criticized his fellow conservative’s remarks, stating, “New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. It doesn’t have to be attacked by Congress.” In his statement yesterday, Issa tried to insist that he only “asked tough questions about the expenditures” during the hearing.

DOJ investigates whether Goodling forced out gay attorney

NPR reports that the Justice Department Inspector General is investigating whether Monica Goodling, a key administration figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal, dismissed a career DOJ attorney “because of rumors that she is a lesbian“:

Justice Department e-mails obtained by NPR show that Gonzales’s senior counsel Monica Goodling had a particular interest in Hagen’s duties. A few months before Hagen was let go, according to one e-mail, Goodling removed part of Hagen’s job portfolio — the part dealing with child exploitation and abuse.

DOJ officials “said they came away with the impression that the Attorney General’s office decided not to renew Leslie Hagen’s contract because of the talk about her sexual orientation,” despite her receiving strong performance reviews.

Hamdan’s lawyer says advisor is exerting illegal sway for political ends

In a motion to dismiss the case against Bin Laden’s ex-driver, he says his Navy superior is pursuing election-year convictions when he is supposed to be impartial.

MIAMI — The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, on Thursday accused U.S. officials of trying to orchestrate war-crimes convictions for election-year political gain.

In his motion for dismissal of the case against Hamdan, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer accused Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann — legal advisor to the White House official overseeing terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — of exercising “unlawful command influence” over both the prosecution and defense. Lawyers participating in the tribunals are members of the U.S. military, and all are subordinate in rank to Hartmann.

More than a dozen suspected senior Al Qaeda figures are among the 280 prisoners currently at Guantanamo, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

In his 97-page motion, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer cited what he said were inappropriate comments and actions by Hartmann and political appointees in the Guantanamo process — including its top official, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority.

Hartmann “has so closely aligned himself with the prosecutorial function that he cannot continue to provide the requisite impartial advice to the convening authority,” Mizer said.

Hartmann did not return messages seeking comment. But a spokesman for the tribunals, Army Maj. Robert D. Gifford, said the general had not seen the motion and would have nothing to say immediately about its allegations.

“While the Office of Military Commissions receives notice of court filings, we are not aware if such a motion has even been filed with the trial court,” Gifford said. “Regardless, the proper place for the resolution of any legal matter is in the courtroom.”

In the last six years, only one case against a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has reached its conclusion. Crawford, who served as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was Defense secretary, in early 2007 facilitated the plea bargain that freed Australian David Hicks.

The move was seen by many as a favor by the Bush administration to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose failure to free Hicks was hampering his reelection battle — which he eventually lost.

The former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, quit in October after complaining that Hartmann was bringing political pressure to bear on the legal process.

The motion filed Thursday said that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II had effectively ordered Davis to ensure that the terrorism suspects all were found guilty. “We can’t hold these men for six years and have acquittals. We have to have convictions,” Haynes is quoted as saying when Davis mentioned that some defendants at the World War II Nuremberg trials were acquitted.

Hartmann took over as legal advisor in July and immediately began acting as “de facto chief prosecutor,” Mizer wrote in his motion.

Gitmo captive: I was threatened with rape

WASHINGTON — In a fresh document from the Guantánamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground already investigated, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.

But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.

Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, “I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon’s long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with in keeping with military standards.

“In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims,” he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques are published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaeda training manual “teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse.”

The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr’s upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.

Meantime, the Canadian’s Pentagon lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and later in Guantánamo.

The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.

Speer died of his wounds days later at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date.

In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ”Lt. Col. W” wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ”engaged,” leaving open the possibility that he had survived.

Khadr was the only survivor.

The documents are under seal at the Office of Military Commission along with the other defense motions from last week’s case.

Now, the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr’s most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment — an English document crafted with his lawyers, which does not name his guards and interrogators, at least in the portion not blacked out by military censors.

For example, after his capture and regaining consciousness, he said, he was guarded by “a young blond soldier who was about 25 and a Mexican or Puerto Rican soldier.”

The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.

”On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,” he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man, who ”told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.” In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian “to rape me.”

The document also revisits old allegations — such as his description on arriving in Guantánamo, at age 16, and hearing someone in the military say, “Welcome to Israel.”

Or his claim, investigated by the military, that in March 2003 guards splashed his prison camp uniform with Pine Sol and dragged him around an interrogation booth, like a human mop, because he had urinated on himself during a bout of shackled isolation.

Pentagon and Guantánamo spokesmen did not reply Tuesday to queries on what that investigation found or whether anyone was disciplined.

The current prison camps spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, in February declined to address allegations emerging at the military commissions, saying, “It is likely best for all of us to hear what the attorneys have to say during the hearings.”

Cheney may have leaked secret video in Gitmo case

Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr have alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office leaked a secret video of Khadr in Afghanistan to CBS’ 60 Minutes after a judge denied a prosecution request to play the video in court. Former Gitmo chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis told Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler — Khadr’s lawyer — that Cheney’s office may have been involved. Kuebler said that if proven, the leak is a “clear violation of the protective orders that are in place” in the case.

‘High-value detainee’ gets lawyer

Alleged arch-terrorist Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA waterboarded in secret overseas interrogations, has agreed to let a civilian American attorney handle his case, the lawyer said Tuesday.

”I represent him,” Chicago law professor Joseph Margulies said on his arrival in Fort Lauderdale from a weekend visit with the captive at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo.

A second U.S. attorney, Brent Mickum, also took part in the session.

The session is the first known meeting between a defense attorney and the captive — who once ran a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan — since his March 28, 2002, capture in a firefight at an alleged al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

From there, he disappeared into years of secret detention, out of reach of the International Committee of the Red Cross, until President Bush announced his transfer to the U.S. Navy base in September 2006.

Since then, CIA director Michael V. Hayden, an Air Force general, has confirmed that agents used the simulated form of drowning that human rights advocates call ”water torture” to force him to spill secrets to his captors.

Interrogations were videotaped but the tapes have since been destroyed by orders of a senior CIA official to a station chief in Bangkok, Thailand — now the subject of a Justice Department investigation.

Abu Zubaydah is the second ”high-value detainee” to meet with defense lawyers.

Extraordinarily circumspect, Margulies said that ground rules for the meeting permitted him to disclose only that ”a meeting took place,” the captive is held ”in a place called Camp 7” and he had ”no objections” to the Pentagon’s access provided during the Thursday to Monday visit to the base.

Margulies said the client-lawyer meetings covered two days and about 12 hours.

Margulies and Mickum are seeking to challenge Abu Zubaydah’s designation as ”enemy combatant” through a federal appeals court panel under a limited appeals system set up by Congress in 2005 and 2006.

A key stepping stone was securing authority to represent him, which Margulies indicated in his remarks that he got in the weekend trip.

Margulies flatly refused to elaborate any further — to described under what conditions they met and whether he would be able to disclose more after military censors clear notes of the meeting.

He did confirm he would seek to meet with his client in the future but would not directly answer a question on whether he found the circumstances of access “intimidating.”

”I would say that I am keenly aware of the limits placed on me by the protective order,” he replied.

His client’s full name is Zayn Abidin Abu Zubaydah and, according to a White House fact sheet disclosed at the time of his transfer to Guantánamo, he was recruited to terrorism by Osama bin Laden — and had ties to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda of Iraq founder since killed by U.S. forces.

It said he was “not believed to be directly linked to the attacks on 11 September 2001.”

In transcripts of a March 2007 hearing before a military panel at Guantánamo, Abu Zubaydah described himself as not an acolyte of bin Laden but a rival — whose ideological version of Islamic holy war forbade 9/11-style attacks on civilians.

Margulies, who is a professor at Northwestern Law School, is a seasoned Guantánamo defense attorney both in the civilian and military arenas. In January 2005, he helped secure the repatriation to Australia of then Pentagon detainee Mamduh Habib — and accompanied Habib on his flight home.

He also served as an attorney at an earlier Pentagon effort to hold trials by military commissions that were upset by a Supreme Court ruling that the format was unconstitutional.

In 2006 he published a book called Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power.

Mickum, who works for a Washington, D.C., law firm, has likewise represented detainees since freed from Guantánamo, including former British resident Bishar Rawi, who was taken captive in the West African country of Gambia, sent to the remote base in Cuba and ultimately released a year ago after disclosure that he had worked as an informant for the British intelligence agency MI5.

Abu Zubaydah is the second former CIA held ”high-value detainee” among 15 at Camp 7 in Guantánamo to see a defense lawyer.

Earlier, two attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights met with Baltimore area educated captive Majid Khan, and have disclosed through public court filings cleared by intelligence censors that Khan and Abu Zubaydah share a recreation period together in their detention.

Secret draft of Iraq war dossier to be revealed

The secret first draft of the notorious Iraq dossier that helped to take Britain to war is expected to be released tomorrow, in a victory for freedom of information campaigners.

The early version written by John Williams, then director of communications at the Foreign Office, has been the subject of a three-year legal wrangle amid hopes that it could reveal whether the supposedly intelligence-led dossier was actually based on a press officer’s script – and whether it was subsequently ’sexed up’ by Alastair Campbell.

The draft is understood not to contain the infamous claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a strike with ‘weapons of mass destruction’ within 45 minutes, a claim that was central to the final ‘dodgy dossier’.

Yesterday Williams attacked the decision to withhold the document for so long. ‘If the government withholds a piece of paper, it immediately makes it significant; it almost doesn’t matter what it says,’ he argued. ‘That’s what I said at the time: why are we withholding it?’

A former journalist, who left Whitehall in May, Williams said the row was particularly frustrating as he had never wanted the government to produce a dossier. He had argued, he said, that rather than attempting to prove that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, the government should have challenged him to prove he did not: ‘I was against the idea of a dossier because I thought it was wrong.’

The Hutton inquiry into the road to war on Iraq identified the existence of an early draft by Williams, but was told by Campbell that it had become ‘redundant’ when John Scarlett, then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee linking Downing Street to the security services, took charge of the process. However, an information tribunal last month ruled that the Williams draft should be disclosed. Anti-war campaigners regard it as key evidence of who introduced the most contentious material into the final draft, and whether Scarlett was too heavily influenced by aides with an interest in making a case for war.

Williams said that critics of the war were likely to find significant similarities between his draft and Scarlett’s version, but insisted that should not be surprising since both were working with ‘the same assumptions, the same policy, with much of the same material’.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is expected to confirm in a statement to the Commons tomorrow that the government will bow to the information tribunal’s ruling, rather than exercising ministerial powers to veto it or challenge it in court. Ministers had argued that the draft should not be disclosed because it jeopardised the confidentiality – and therefore candour – of advice given to them by civil servants.

The release is in response to pressure by Chris Ames, a former charity worker from Surrey, who began pursuing the document early in 2005.

The government will hope that the publication finally draws a line under the sorry saga of the dossier, which led indirectly to the suicide of scientist David Kelly after he was identified as the apparent source of BBC reports that the dossier had been ‘overspun’ by Campbell.

Lindsey Graham Says He Would Have Voted Against Waterboarding Ban…Yeah Right!

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a member of the Air Force JAG Corp., has repeatedly broken with his party’s ranks in the past, condemning waterboarding as “clearly illegal under domestic and international law.”When the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill — which contained a provision banning waterboarding — to the floor this week, Graham was absent from the vote because he was in Iraq. When contacted by ThinkProgress this week, Graham’s office said the senator would have voted against the anti-waterboarding bill.

Asked to explain Graham’s change of heart, the spokesman said, “He disagrees with applying the Army Field Manual to the CIA. The CIA is a completely different operation.”

In the Congressional Record on Feb. 13, Graham explained his opposition to the bill, claiming the Army Field Manual would limit the CIA’s operations:

I believe in flexibility for the CIA program within the boundaries of current law. The CIA must have the ability to gather intelligence for the war on terror. In this new war, knowledge of the enemy and its plan is vitally important and the Army Field Manual provision will weaken our intelligence gathering operations.

In Oct. 2005, however, Graham was singing the Army Field Manual’s praises when he said it is sufficiently flexible for intelligence gathering:

You can change the Army Field Manual to adapt techniques to the war on terror. There is a classified section of the Army Field Manual. There is nothing about its adoption that limits the ability to aggressively interrogate people to get good intelligence.

It appears that the Graham, as well as Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are willing to ditch their consciences in favor of backing President Bush’s misguided national security priorities.

Poisoned cakes given to Baghdad club

BAGHDAD, Feb. 10 (UPI) — Two Iraqi children died after eating thallium-laced cakes given to an air force club in Baghdad.

The secretary of the club and another official shared the cakes with their families, taking them home, the BBC reported.

Victims of the poisoning were flown to Amman, Jordan, for treatment. Supplies of Prussian blue, an antidote, were being flown from Britain to treat the victims.

Saddam Hussein allegedly used thallium, a heavy metal, to get rid of his enemies. Thallium has no taste, making it easy to mix with food or drink, and the symptoms develop slowly.

Skin exposure to thallium is also dangerous, and the substance is a depilatory. The CIA is supposed to have plotted to put thallium in Cuban President Fidel Castro’s shoes so his hair and beard would fall out.

The club manager told the BBC he thinks the poisoning was done by people with a grudge against the club. He said a former club official brought the cakes to the club.

WTF?…O’Reilly On Waterboarding: ‘The Far Left Is Putting Us All In Danger’

Earlier this week, the Bush administration admitted that it has waterboarded at least three al Qaeda detainees since 9/11. Yesterday, CIA Director Michael Hayden added that the tactic may currently be illegal.

On Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor yesterday, Bill O’Reilly gave a full-throated defense of the torture tactic, claiming that the “far left went wild” after the revelations. The left “literally went crazy,” he said. O’Reilly continued his pro-torture rant:

Why are they so insane about this? It’s not fatal. It doesn’t leave a lasting phyiscal injury? Why are they so crazy? … I think the President has to have the authority…in extraordinary circumstances, as these three were. And the far left is putting us all in danger.

By O’Reilly’s logic, military officers and staunch conservatives are also “crazy.” Just yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Maples said the practice is unnecessary. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and members of the Pentagon’s JAG corps also agree. Intelligence experts say it is “ineffective” because the technique “often produces false information.”

Waterboarding, not progressives, puts America in danger. As Colin Powell noted in 2005 when President Bush wanted to loosely define torture, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”