The Hayden Charade

In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, General Michael Hayden promised to promote autonomy and objectivity in the CIA if confirmed as its new director. Hayden assured the senators he would provide "hard-edged assessments" and be tolerant of dissenting views on intelligence matters. "When it comes to speaking truth to power," Hayden declared, "I will lead CIA analysts by example. I will … always give our nation's leaders the best analytic judgment."

The evidence, however, suggests precisely the opposite. As head of the National Security Agency, this 4-star general walked in lockstep with his commander in chief, George W. Bush. Hayden helped designed the illegal program of spying on our telephone calls and emails and then repeatedly defended it when interrogated by the senators at his hearing, citing "legal" opinions of Bush's hired guns in the Justice Department.

Rather than providing the White House with a neutral assessment of Iran's nuclear capabilities, we can expect Hayden to give Bush the "intelligence" the president seeks to justify his war on Iran. Things did not run as smoothly as Bush would have wished under the last two CIA directors. He had to dispatch Dick Cheney to the CIA several times to furnish the "intelligence" he needed to rationalize his war on Iraq.

Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked Hayden if he was "comfortable" with under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's personal
intelligence-analysis cell, which hyped a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Hayden said he wasn't comfortable with it and protested that he wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on leading up to the Iraq war.

But when questioned about Colin Powell's use of false WMD information to support his infamous appearance before the United Nations in the run-up the war, Hayden made a telling admission.

In response to Levin's question about the legal standard for declassifying information in the public interest, Hayden said, "We used that in Powell's speech. George [Tenet] had to call me for three tapes." Hayden was right in the middle of the preparation for Powell's disingenuous presentation.

Hayden, who will be the third director of the CIA in two years, will salute and march to Bush's agenda. The nation's chief spook will shape the "intelligence" to fit Bush's policy of regime change in Iran.

Hayden vowed to "reaffirm CIA's proud culture of risk-taking and excellence." Not one of the senators, from either party, interrogated Hayden about the CIA's checkered past.

There was no mention of the CIA's 1953 coup that ousted Iran's democratically-elected president Mohammed Mosadeq and replaced him with the US-friendly tyrant, the Shah Reza Pahlavi. The 1979 Iranian revolution lead to the overthrow of the Shah's regime and the rise of Islamic fascism under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, providing a model of theocracy for much of the Muslim world.

Absent was any reference in the hearing to the CIA's support for Osama bin Laden in his fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The defeat of the USSR there, and the rise of the Mujahedin, enabled the Taliban to come to power. Then, Bin Laden used his CIA training to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

Today we are reaping what the CIA sowed in Iran and Afghanistan.

None of the senators asked Hayden about the CIA's torture manuals, which have been utilized by myriad Latin American dictators to repress their people.

Much of the CIA's risk-taking is nothing to be proud of. There is no indication that Hayden will bring new integrity to the CIA.

Hayden's defense of the NSA's warrantless surveillance program was incredible. When questioned about the Fourth Amendment's standard for searches and seizures, Hayden assured the senators that he had consulted with his relatives who are in law school for legal advice.

The Fourth Amendment says the people shall be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. For more than a century, the Supreme Court has held that in order to be reasonable, a search or seizure must be supported by a search warrant based on probable cause and issued by a judge. Only when certain narrowly-defined exceptions apply can the government dispense with a warrant.

Hayden and his law student relatives have reversed that presumption. He told the senators that only reasonableness, not a warrant, is necessary to intercept our private communications. Hayden said the NSA uses a probable cause standard. But the Supreme Court has consistently declared that a judge must determine whether probable cause exists.

When confronted with USA Today's report that the NSA is collecting data on tens of millions of Americans, monitoring the calls we make and receive, Hayden refused to confirm or deny it.

Two of the long-distance companies named in that article, Verizon Communications and BellSouth, both facing lawsuits for invasion of privacy, have denied giving the government these records. AT&T has refused comment.

Interestingly, Bush issued an executive order on May 5 that allows Director of Intelligence John Negroponte - Michael Hayden's boss - to authorize a company to conceal activities related to "national security." Thus, we cannot trust the denials by Verizon and BellSouth.

Like Bush's warrantless eavesdropping on calls where one party is abroad, the NSA's massive data collection is illegal.

Both of these programs violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which clearly requires a warrant issued by a FISA court judge.

It is illegal for the NSA to collect phone numbers from phone companies unless the FISA court authorizes it.

Telephone records that show what numbers have called a specific telephone are captured by a "trap and trace" device. A "pen register" shows what number a specific telephone has called.

The law on pen registers and trap and trace devices requires that a court order be obtained either under FISA or Title III, the criminal wiretap law.

In order to intercept communications, the NSA would have to demonstrate to the court that the person whose calls are being targeted is an agent of a foreign power or that the information is relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation.

The Patriot Act allows the FBI to use a national security letter - a kind of administrative subpoena - to obtain these records. But Congress specifically withheld this subpoena power from the NSA, which must convince the FISA court that the information is relevant.

There is no evidence that NSA has obtained court orders before obtaining the phone records of millions of Americans.

There is evidence, however, that the FBI is using national security letters to go after journalists critical of the administration. Brian Ross from ABC News told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that the government's methods are changing the way he operates. It makes his work "very, very difficult," he said. "And, you know, you sort of have to start thinking, I guess, like some sort of Mafia capo," Ross noted. "You make your phone calls with bags of quarters at pay phones, if you can find them anymore. It's chilling to say the least." So much for a free press.

Last year, the FBI issued a total of 9,254 national security letters, targeting 3,500 citizens and legal residents.

In October 2002, while serving as NSA director, Hayden misled Congress about the extent of the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Hayden at the hearing, "I now have a difficult time with your credibility."

Earlier this year, Hayden made more misleading statements in an appearance before the National Press Club. He said, "The intrusion into privacy is also limited: only international calls." In fact, the NSA is collecting data on millions of purely domestic calls.

Hayden ducked several questions, deferring his answers to the closed session that followed the public hearing on Thursday. Senators who hear his secret testimony are forbidden to publicize it. Hayden refused to publicly answer seven questions posed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about whether the NSA has sought FISA warrants for pen register and trap and trace devices; whether terror suspects in secret CIA prisons are likely to remain incommunicado until the war on terror ends; whether there is periodic review of what useful intelligence can be gathered by interrogations of terrorists held for years with no contact with Al Qaeda; whether "water boarding," recently classified as torture by the UN, is acceptable; whether the CIA will obey laws and treaties in light of the Detainee Treatment Act; whether Hayden agreed with the CIA inspector general's conclusion that certain interrogation techniques constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment prohibited by the Convention Against Torture; whether Hayden agreed with estimates that Iran is some years away from nuclear weapons capability; and whether the CIA has received new guidance from the Justice Department about acceptable interrogation techniques since the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act.

Although Hayden pledged objectivity in his opening statement, he let slip his real intention under questioning by Levin. Hayden said the war on terror "is fundamentally a war of ideas. And we have to skew our intelligence to support the other elements of national power as well." Hayden admitted he will skew the intelligence to fit Bush's agenda.

During the hearing, Wyden nailed it. He asked Hayden, "Where is the independent check, General, the independent check that can be verified on these programs that the newspapers are reporting on?"

James Madison wrote in 1822: "A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

General Michael Hayden as CIA director will see to it that we continue to be kept in the dark about how our liberties are swiftly vanishing. The future of our democracy is at stake.

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Negroponte: Director of Intelligence Manipulation

With much fanfare, Bush announced on Thursday his nomination of John D. Negroponte as the director of national intelligence. "John's nomination comes in an historic moment for our intelligence services," Bush proclaimed ceremoniously. Intelligence, he said, is now "the first line of defense" in the war on terrorism.

Bush failed to mention that when Negroponte was United States ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, he provided false intelligence to Congress about the Honduran "death squads."

In those days, the Reagan administration was using Honduras as its base for covert military operations against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Negroponte oversaw the buildup of military positions and training of the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels inside the Honduran border.

As a gesture of appreciation for the use of its territory, the U.S. gave Honduras generous military aid. On Negroponte's watch, that aid rose from $4 million to $77.4 million. In order to keep the aid coming, Congress required annual reassurances from the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa that Honduras was respecting the human rights of its people.

Negroponte's embassy provided annual reports to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Those reports sugar-coated Honduras's human rights record, which Negroponte knew to be atrocious.

The 1983 report, for example, said the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature" and reassured the Committee that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras."

In fact, the Honduran government was "disappearing," torturing, and killing hundreds of political opponents.

This was confirmed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the famous Velásquez Rodríguez Case. It concluded that "a practice of disappearances carried out or tolerated by Honduran officials existed between 1981 and 1984." The court found, "The kidnappers blindfolded the victims, took them to secret, unofficial detention centers and moved them from one center to another. They interrogated the victims and subjected them to cruel and humiliating treatment and torture. Some were ultimately murdered and their bodies were buried in clandestine cemeteries."

"It was public and notorious knowledge in Honduras," added the court, "that the kidnappings were carried out by military personnel or the police, or persons acting under their orders."

The Baltimore Sun conducted an 14-month investigation into the Honduran atrocities. The findings were published in a 1995 Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles by Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson. They wrote, "The Honduran press was full of reports about military abuses, including hundreds of newspaper stories in 1982. There were also direct pleas from Honduran officials to U.S. officials, including Negroponte."

"Time and again during his tour of duty in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives," according to the Sun.

Jaime Rosenthal, former vice president of Honduras and owner of the newspaper El Tiempo, said, "There is no way United States officials in Honduras during the early 1980s can deny they knew about the disappearances. There were stories about it in our newspaper and most other newspapers almost every day."

Negroponte's predecessor, Ambassador Jack Binns, had been profoundly troubled by the actions of the Honduran military when he served as U.S. ambassador from 1980-1981. "I reported these abuses repeatedly, and urged that we take action to try and turn it around," Binns said.

Binns warned in a 1981 cable, "I am deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations of political and criminal targets, which clearly indicate [that Honduran government] repression has built up a head of steam much faster than we anticipated."

How was Binns rewarded for his candor? He was summoned to Washington. "I was told to stop human rights reporting except in back channel. The fear was that if it came into the State Department, it will leak," Binns told the Sun. "They wanted to keep assistance flowing. Increased violations by the Honduran military would prejudice that."

Binns was replaced by John Negroponte, to manipulate the flow of information.

What did Negroponte, our newly nominated intelligence czar, do in response to reports of these atrocities in Honduras on his watch? He covered them up, and lied to Congress by sending it false intelligence.

A junior political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa was ordered to delete from the State Department's annual human rights report to Congress substantial evidence of the abuses by the Honduran military in 1982, according to the Sun.

"Under my leadership," Negroponte said disingenuously, "the embassy worked to promote the restoration and consolidation of democracy in Honduras, including the advancement of human rights."

In 1982, former Honduran military intelligence chief Col. Leonidas Torres Arias told reporters at a news conference in Mexico City about a "death squad operating in Honduras led by armed forces chief General Gustavo Alvarez." (Alvarez was trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas.) Negroponte wrote in an Oct. 16, 1982 article, "I have a lot of difficulty taking those kinds of accusations seriously."

United States support of Honduran aid to the Contras violated the 1982 Boland amendment, which prohibited the use of U.S. funds for "military equipment, military training or advice, or other support for military activities, to any group or individual not part of a country's armed forces, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras."

In the now infamous Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran in violation of an embargo on those sales. It also covertly and illegally transferred money, through Honduras, to the Contras in their efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

Not only did Negroponte's embassy reports cover up the human rights violations being committed by the Honduran government; they also falsely stated that the Nicaraguan Sandinista government was committing myriad atrocities, in order to galvanize U.S. public opinion against the Sandinistas.

In fact, it was the U.S.-backed Contras who were wreaking terrorism. Former Contra PR official Edgar Chamorro wrote in a 1986 letter to the New York Times: "During my four years as a 'contra' director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the [Sandinista] government." Chamorro admitted, "Hundreds of civilian murders, tortures and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the contra leaders and their CIA superiors were well aware."

The U.S. government, in the 1980s, supported vicious dictatorships in several Latin American countries which engaged in the disappearances, torture and murder of thousands of people who questioned their policies.

"I think it's extremely important that the State Department be right on human rights," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in an interview with the Sun. "If we told the truth about Honduras and the whole Central American policy, … billions of dollars of American tax dollars would have been saved, a large number of lives would have been saved, and the governments would have moved toward democracy quicker."

When Bush nominated Negroponte for intelligence director, the president noted, "He understands the power centers in Washington." Indeed, Negroponte has been around for 40 years. He was political officer at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam from 1964-1968, during a period of extra-judicial executions and gross human rights abuses, including massacres by the notorious "Tiger Force" of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

After his stint in Honduras, Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, where he shepherded the signing of NAFTA. As a result, one million Mexican farmers have lost their land and livelihoods, and NAFTA has undermined labor and environmental protections in Mexico, the United States and Canada.

From September 2001 during the run-up to the Iraq war, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He avoided a withering interrogation at his confirmation hearing about his record in Honduras, in a Senate stunned by the 9/11 attacks. During his tenure, Negroponte lied to the UN about the justifications for the war, and successfully pressured Mexico and Chile to fire their UN ambassadors for not supporting the war.

Negroponte's last stepping stone to intelligence czar was his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Iraq in June of last year, on the day "sovereignty" was transferred to the Iraqis. The last seven months have seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, as well as continued reports of torture of Iraqis by U.S. forces.

The position Negroponte will hold was created in response to intelligence failures perceived to have enabled the September 11 attacks. Negroponte's sordid past does not inspire confidence in his qualifications for that post. In fact, Negroponte was likely chosen because he will tell Bush & Co. exactly what they want to hear. And that won't make us any safer.

Former CIA official Melvin Goodman summed it up nicely: "I think of the Negroponte of the 1980s covering up human rights abuses, and then I think of the role of intelligence in telling truth to power, and it doesn't fit."

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Chavez Victory: Defeat for Bush Policy

The Bush administration is gritting its collective teeth at the outcome of Sunday’s recall election in Venezuela, which overwhelmingly affirmed President Hugo Chavez’s tenure. If President Jimmy Carter had not lent his enormous credibility to the election results, Bush and his minions would surely be crying foul in unison with the opposition.

Chavez was popularly elected by his countrymen and women in 1998 and 2000. Yet in spite of Bush’s claims to support democracy around the world, his administration has given succor those trying to overthrow Chavez’s government before, during and since the aborted coup in April 2002.

Officials at the Organization of American States affirmed that the Bush administration had sanctioned the coup. Bush’s then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich, met with leaders of the coup for months before it was executed. Elliot Abrams, one of the neoconservative policymakers in Bush’s inner circle, approved the coup, according to the London Observer. And John Negroponte, now our ambassador to Iraq, was in on it, too.

Reich, Abrams and Negroponte comprised the troika that administered the “Reagan doctrine” in the 1980s, which supported vicious dictatorships in Central America, including those in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

As documented in the film, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Chavez was forcibly removed from the presidential palace on April 11, 2002 by forces acting on behalf of Venezuela’s propertied class. Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela’s confederation of business and industry, declared himself president. Within hours, Carmona purported to repeal laws enacted under Chavez that the executives of foreign oil companies opposed.

Forty-eight hours later, after thousands of workers and peasants stormed the palace demanding Chavez’s return to power, the military did an about-face and brought him back. The filmmakers, fortuitously present at the scene, were caught inside the palace and filmed the class struggle that played out with Chavez’s ouster and reinstatement.

Former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen told the Guardian that our navy helped with communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military during the would-be coup. An American plane was present on the island to which Chavez was whisked away. The Bush administration provided financial backing to key participants in the coup attempt, which resulted in the deaths of 19 people.

Chavez incurred the wrath of Team Bush by championing the interests of the working class over the oil-igarchy in Venezuela. The fifth largest oil supplier in the world, Venezuela is a key provider of U.S. petroleum. By using oil profits to help his people instead of the multinational corporations, Chavez created an alternative model to Bush-backed neoliberal globalization.

Hugo Chavez’s plan of Bolivarianism – named after Simon Bolivar, father of Venezuelan independence – focused on a redistribution of the massive wealth generated by his country’s rich oil profits. He passed a law that doubled royalty taxes paid by ExxonMobil and other oil companies on new finds.

Chavez enacted the Ley De Tierras, which provided for unused land to be given to the landless; he instituted free health care and public education to all; he backed a new Constitution that enshrines rights for women and indigenous peoples; and he lowered the inflation rate.

Unlike the U.S.-backed Iraqi interim government, which shut down Al Jazeera for its broadcasts critical of the occupation, Chavez never shut down or censored private media controlled by tycoons trying to unseat him in the months leading up to Sunday’s election.

Nearly 95 percent of the electorate voted in the election, the largest percentage Jimmy Carter has ever seen. Carter and the Organization of American States have independently verified the validity of Sunday’s election results, and have even supported an audit, which Carter calls “infallible,” according to The New York Times. Nevertheless, the opposition refuses to sanction the results of the election or the audit.

Opposition exit polls, which Carter has dismissed as inaccurate and “deliberately distributed … in order to build up, not only the expectation of victory, but also to influence the people still standing in line,” were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

NED, a U.S. government organization purporting to promote democracy, was set up in the early 1980s by Reagan to counter negative revelations about the CIA’s covert operations in the late 1970s. NED successfully manipulated the Nicaraguan elections in 1990 and worked with right-wing groups in the late 1990s to oust Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Just last February, the Bush administration engineered a coup d’etat in Haiti, as I described in my editorial, Coup d’Etat – This Time in Haiti. The U.S. Marines put democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on a plane out of Haiti after officials from the United States threatened him into signing a purported resignation letter. Aristide, like Chavez, fell out of favor with Bush by resisting neoliberalism.

Hugo Chavez is, according to The Wall Street Journal, “Washington’s biggest Latin American headache after the old standby, Cuba.” Indeed, Venezuela is Cuba’s top trading partner, selling it discounted oil, while Cuba has sent thousands of doctors, teachers and engineers to work in Venezuela.

Speaking of Cuba, NED donated a quarter-million dollars in the early 1990s to the Cuban-American National Fund, the terrorist anti-Castro group in Miami. CANF financed Luis Posada Carriles, notorious for his involvement in the blowing up of a Cuba airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people.

Chavez, now trying to reunify his country in the wake of a contentious election, says: “Violence can only be ended if actions are taken so that all human beings have access to the fundamental human rights, including education, housing, work and health.” In a déjà vu from a hot-button issue facing us in the United States, Chavez told journalist Greg Palast: “Our upper classes don’t even like paying taxes. That’s one reason they hate me. We said, ‘You must pay your taxes.’”

Critical of the Bush administration’s covert activity against him and Fidel Castro, Chavez maintains: “They are also manipulating the U.S. people because there is a dictatorship in the United States.”

One would hope our election results in November are as reliable as Venezuela’s. If Bush is elected, we can expect him to go after Chavez again, and Castro as well. This would likely destabilize Latin America in much the same way Bush has destabilized the Middle East with his war on Iraq.

Leaders of countries throughout Latin America congratulated Hugo Chavez on his victory Sunday. Yet the Bush government, although grudgingly accepting the results, did not hail the exercise of democracy in Venezuela.

Bush’s agenda was roundly defeated with Chavez’s triumph. Chavez has opposed U.S. policy in Latin America, including military aid to Colombia and efforts to spread free trade agreements throughout the region. Voters who supported him understood that a vote to recall Hugo Chavez would be a vote for U.S. imperialism.

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Bush's "Humane" Torture Policy Hits a Speed Bump

On February 7, 2002, George W. Bush declared in an executive order that he could suspend the Geneva Conventions, which require that war prisoners receive humane treatment. Myriad news reports during the past month suggest that government interrogators took full advantage of that order to extract information from prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

To read the headlines in The New York Times, though, you would think that order qualified Mr. Bush for a Nobel Peace Prize. The Times credited Bush with setting a "humane tone" in his order. The Times places too much emphasis on self-serving language in the order stating "[a]s a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." When one reads the full text of the order, however, there can be no doubt that Bush intended to authorize U.S. interrogators to use torture to elicit information from its prisoners in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. The Times overlooked Bush's qualifier that "military necessity" trumps humane treatment.

You would hardly recognize the men implicated in the apparent conspiracy to torture prisoners in U.S. custody. Former Assistant Attorney General – now federal court Judge – Jay S. Bybee, is characterized as a "gentle" soul in another New York Times article. Yet he advised Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's White House lawyer, that "certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity" to constitute unlawful torture. In an August 1, 2002 memo, Bybee took 50 pages to methodically explain how U.S. military interrogators could circumvent our laws prohibiting torture. A human being, according to the gentle Bybee, could torture another human being as long as the torturer relied in good faith on legal advice in Bybee's memo.

Bybee's thesis, of course, is preposterous. Following the hue and cry heard 'round the world after release of his legal memo, the Bush administration quickly distanced itself from it. White House spokesmen inform us that the "humane" Mr. Bush never saw it. They now declare it "irrelevant," although it remained in force for two years, and was cited in numerous subsequent memos. We are told that it will be completely rewritten. The slate will be wiped clean.

Bush's spinmeisters first maintained that the heinous torture methods justified in memos recently released by the government were never employed. Those hundreds of pages of carefully worded legalese, according to Gonzales, were merely "exploring the boundaries as an abstract matter" of what was permissible.

But now they contend that the Bybee memo was not intended for use at Guantánamo Bay, only to guide CIA interrogators who question top al-Qaeda leaders. "Current and former government officials" quoted in today's New York Times admit, however, that the memo was used as an after-the-fact legal basis for harsh procedures already in use by the CIA. First the sentence, then the verdict.

Bush's deputies, desperate to quell the firestorm surrounding the burgeoning torture exposé, deny that the commander-in-chief saw many of the memos. "I don't believe the president had access to any legal opinions from the Department of Justice," said his lawyer Gonzales.

We do know, however, that Bush had "extensive discussions" involving the "complex legal questions" of whether the Geneva Conventions apply to the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured by U.S. forces, because his February 7, 2002 order stated precisely that.

In his order, Bush "accept[s] the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva." Gonzales would have us believe Bush accepted the Ashcroft/Justice Department conclusion without even reading any memos.

We are being asked to take it on faith that even though Bush had extensive discussions with lawyers from the Defense and Justice Departments before issuing his February 7, 2002 order, he conveniently wasn't privy to later memos that justified torture. Most significantly, we don't know whether Bush signed any directives on prisoner interrogation after February 7, 2002.

After some of the memos leaked out last month, the administration decided to release more of them in the face of intense public outrage. The original intent was to keep them secret. Bush's Feb. 7, 2002 order was not scheduled for declassification until 2012. Donald Rumsfeld's April 16, 2003 memo, which authorized the use of aggressive interrogation methods at Guantánamo Bay, was to remain classified until 2013.

Senator Patrick Leahy [D-Vt] spearheaded a subpoena for a gaggle of other government memos advising how to torture without risking criminal prosecution. (Last week, on the Senate floor, the genteel Vice President Dick Cheney rewarded Leahy for his efforts to shine light on Halliburton's activities by suggesting to Leahy: "Go fuck yourself.") In a characteristic move to limit transparency – and political damage to Bush – the Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee scuttled Leahy's subpoena. Senator Edward Kennedy thereafter accused the White House of orchestrating "a cover-up."

Of the memos recently made public, The New York Times editorialized: "About the only thing in them worth keeping secret was the degree to which the administration had decided to exempt itself from the Geneva Conventions and then spent months debating whether there was a legalistic way to justify what ordinary people would consider torture of prisoners."

The discussions within the administration about interrogation policy did not occur without dissent, although the communications from the dissenters were conspicuously absent from the documents the government released last week.

A 2002 letter from William H. Taft, the State Department's legal advisor to the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney general, called the Justice Department's approach to handling detainees "seriously flawed," and said its reasoning was "incorrect as well as incomplete."

Senior military leaders concurred. They maintained that the Geneva Conventions should apply to the Taliban militia. Also, pursuant to a requirement of Geneva, flouted by Bush, military lawyers favored holding military tribunals to determine which Geneva provisions would protect individual detainees.

Additional pressure on the Bush administration is coming from the attorneys defending the soldiers charged with criminal conduct at Abu Ghraib. Harvey Volzer, counsel for Army Spc. Megan Ambuhl, said: "Isn't it amazing that hooding, nudity and physical contact short of death and organ failure all are mentioned as techniques, and yet the administration would have us believe that they were not employed when Bush was getting no results from interrogations"?

At the same time Bush's A-team was engaged in damage control on the torture front, his UN-team was scrambling to ram a resolution through the Security Council that would give him and his men immunity from war crimes prosecutions in the International Criminal Court. Similar strong-arm tactics had earned him immunity resolutions in the previous two years. But the revelations of torture were too much for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to bear. Annan urged the Security Council to resist the resolution "given the prisoner abuse in Iraq." He warned, "It would discredit the Council and the United Nations that stands for the rule of law and the primacy of the rule of law."

As a result, Bush was dealt a severe political blow when he was unable to muster enough votes for the resolution. "It also marked the most concrete evidence of a diplomatic backlash against the scandal over abuses of U.S. detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq," according to the Washington Post. The Financial Times called it a "major diplomatic defeat."

No big deal. U.S. Deputy Representative to the U.N., James Cunningham, said we still have the bilateral immunity agreements. The Bush administration secured them by blackmailing 90, primarily small, nations or fragile democracies with weak economies. These countries have pledged not to hand over U.S. nationals to the International Criminal Court, which Bush has denounced. But the three-dozen countries that resisted Bush's bullying suffered the cutoff of military assistance for their obstinacy.

Not to worry. Coalition dictator Paul Bremer extended his order that U.S. military personnel would be immune from prosecution for killing or torturing Iraqis. The only glitch is the handover of "sovereignty" to the Iraqis on June 30. Bremer's decree will be null and void once the occupation ends.

The new Iraqi government would be hard pressed to agree to give Americans immunity for killing and torturing Iraqis. When the Iranian government granted immunity to U.S. troops in the 1960s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used it to galvanize opposition to the Shah. In a 1964 speech, Khomeini said, "Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed." The immunity, according to Khomeini, "reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog."

In another blast from the past, the gentle soul John D. Negroponte was quietly sworn in as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte, who was U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 80s, was instrumental in covering up the torture and summary executions carried out by the Honduran government.

Also sworn in under the radar was the kindly John Danforth as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. As described in my column, "John Danforth - Bad Choice for U.N. Ambassador," Danforth knows almost nothing about the United Nations. He voted against sanctions on apartheid South Africa and for cutting funds for U.N. peacekeeping. But his vote to limit U.S. support for international family planning and his fanatical, albeit dishonest, engineering of Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination landed him the plum nomination for U.N. ambassador.

Bush has compassionately appointed individuals with torturous pasts to high positions in government. The Good Judge Bybee, expert on how to torture without leaving illegal marks, will regularly be called upon to interpret laws against torture which are frequently cited by applicants for political asylum.

Last week, in response to the growing torture scandal, Bush attempted to put us at ease by saying: "Let me make very clear the position of my government, and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture."

Bill Clinton was unsuccessful in putting many at ease when he said, "I am going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Clinton was subsequently impeached for lying to a grand jury about the Monica Lewinsky affair.

It remains to be seen whether the "humane" Mr. Bush's torture denials will hold up. Time will also tell whether Bush, who hired a trial lawyer and was questioned by federal prosecutors for 70 minutes, can escape a felony grand jury indictment for the Valerie Plame affair.

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