Those would be the same pro-war Republicans who now sat on the blue ribbon Presidential Commission charged with investigating Pre-War Intelligence, who desperately sought to shift blame for their own judgment failures onto my shoulders, as the Asset. They looked at Assets as easy scapegoats. If there were fewer of us in number, so much the better. There would be fewer of our voices to shout down.
I was a paradox certainly, on a number of levels. But if they hoped to shout me down, I had no intention of obliging. I believe the people have a right to accountability from our leaders. We have the right to confront them over decisions they make as our representatives. So there might be fewer voices, but mine would be loud.
Mine would roar.
For sure I would see them in Hell before I, a life-long peace activist, would take the blame for this catastrophic war that I worked so hard to prevent.
Can you imagine the absurdity of blaming an Asset like me for faulty pre-war intelligence? After all of my urgent (and correct) forecasting about the horrific consequences of this mistake? All those issue papers sent by blast fax and staff emails throughout Capitol Hill and the U.N? Distributed to every Chief of Staff, every Legislative Director, every Press Secretary and Foreign policy assistant in the House and Senate? Democrat and Republican alike?
I shouted from the rooftops!
And now they imagined that I would take the blame?
I’d see them damned first.
Hell and damnation were exactly what Dick Cheney and John McCain had in mind.
As an Asset for many years, I had counted as an investment. However, by this time, I’d paid all my dividends. Now I was a distinct liability.
I had kicked up a hornet’s nest with my request to testify about my activities.
While I waited, Congressional staff were busy getting subpoenas alright. They were racing to issue subpoenas before a grand jury in New York City, seeking my indictment as an “unregistered Iraqi agent.”
It’s almost funny.
The White House and Justice Department frantically crafted a plan to knock me out of the loop and silence me forever.
Whatever it took, they would stop at nothing to bury the truth.
Later, Andy Card would receive high marks for his cooperation with the grand jury in Manhattan, preparing my indictment.309 There’s just a small problem that somehow he forgot to explain I had worked as a long-time Asset supervised by the CIA and Defense Intelligence. He could hardly plead ignorance. My special history had been explained in progress reports on our back channel talks to resume the weapons inspections. Andy Card was fully knowledgeable that my work in anti-terrorism lasted nine years, starting with my advance warning about the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and encompassed Libya, Lockerbie, Iraq, Egypt, Syria/Hezbollah, Yemen and Malaysia.
Apparently he forgot all that when he addressed the grand jury.310
Perhaps it was “stage fright.” The indictment was political theater, after all.
In truth, there had been 11 progress reports on Iraq before the War.311 Andy Card forgot to mention any of those papers to the grand jury, either. He deliberately concealed his knowledge of my identity and the purpose of our long-term communications, which was entirely legitimate.
In which case, it appears that Andy Card was guilty of perjury before the grand jury, and definitely obstruction of justice.
Ordinary Americans would face prosecution for such a thing. By contrast, Andy Card’s grand jury statement got sealed from view. Despite numerous challenges over the next five years, my attorneys and I were never allowed to examine it —or any of the other grand jury statements. All the while, my federal prosecutor Edward O’Callaghan repeatedly denied in Court before Judge Michael B. Mukasey, and then Judge Loretta Preska, that grand jury testimony had authenticated my role as a U.S. Intelligence Asset.312 The prosecution claimed total ignorance throughout the proceedings.
If that’s true, it can only mean Andy Card lied.
It was a breathtaking lie, of course. And there’s a big question mark next to O’Callaghan’s reliability. However FBI Special Agent Chmiel, in charge of the investigation, sat silently in court next to O’Callaghan, when he said it.
O’Callaghan’s own statements validate my grievance. Worst of all, knowing that White House officials lied to the grand jury, the U.S. Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York protected them by blocking access to evidence of their crimes.
In which case, the Justice Department knowingly shielded White House officials in the commission of criminal acts against private citizens
It wasn’t just Iraq, either.
Notoriously, senior officials at the Justice Department benefited directly from the U.S. Attorney’s deceptions, as well. At that moment, the 9/11 Commission was finishing its report,313 which would bewail the incompetence of the intelligence community for failing to anticipate the attack. The 9/11 Commission would strongly condemn the lack of cooperation at the mid-levels between law enforcement and the intelligence community to stop the hijackings.
Imagine, if at that moment, I went to trial and highly reputable witnesses testified under oath in a federal court of law—1,000 yards from Ground Zero—about my 9/11 warnings and my team’s aggressive requests for inter-agency cooperation at the Justice Department to thwart the attack. The entire premise of the 9/11 Commission report would collapse in embarrassment.314
My warnings in August, 2001 smashed ‘plausible deniability’ for Attorney General Ashcroft’s private staff and the Office of Counter-Terrorism. The 9/11 Commission would have been forced to acknowledge its findings were politically constructed to deflect responsibility from the top levels of government.
That would have been a train wreck for Republican leaders.
In all probability, revelations of that nature would have impacted the outcome of elections for President Bush, in his tight race with John Kerry— not to mention House and Senate races all over Capitol Hill. Educated voters would have demanded hard answers to tough questions about the GOP’s performance on national security overall. Attorney General Ashcroft would have faced criticism, too, for misleading Congress about the command failure before 9/11, feeding the popular frenzy to oust incumbents flourishing across the country.
And so a Cover Up was born.
Oh yes, a lot of powerful Republican leaders and lobbyists on Capitol Hill benefited from keeping me silent. Their strategy for damage control was so Machiavellian, however, that it would have done the old Soviet Union proud in the grand old days of Joseph Stalin and the Gulags.
In my wildest imaginings, I could not have conceived what the Feds were cooking up. I guess I wasn’t paranoid enough.
It started early on the morning of March 11, 2004, about a month after my phone calls to Senator McCain’s and Senator Lott’s offices. I awoke to the shock of FBI agents banging on the front door of my house in Takoma Park, Maryland.315
I was even more astounded to discover that the FBI had come with handcuffs and a warrant for my arrest. They’d come to take me!
Low and behold, I gained a new distinction in my career as an Asset. And it was every bit as dramatic as my advance warnings about the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the 9/11 attack; starting negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libya; and holding preliminary talks to resume weapons inspections with Iraq’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
After Jose Padilla, I was now distinguished as the second non-Arab American to discover the slippery and treacherous legal terrain of the U.S. Patriot Act.
With supreme irony, the indictment categorized me as an “unregistered agent of Iraq,” in “conspiracy with Iraq’s Intelligence Service” for purposes undisclosed.316 That gave me a legal status pretty close to an Enemy Non-Combatant. You’ve got to admit, that’s pretty amazing for a life-long peace activist! The Patriot Act, which Congress rushed to approve in hysteria after 9/11, was first used to punish an American citizen who spent a life-time opposing al
l violence in terrorism or war, and who gave advance warning about the 9/11 attack in precision detail, and sought Arab cooperation with the 9/11 investigation.
At first blush, invoking the Patriot Act contradicted its objectives. However, on closer examination, prosecuting political defendants like me leverages the law to its most logical purpose. The act creates a legal framework to interrupt individual questioning of the government in power. The Patriot Act equates terrorism with any civil disobedience that challenges government policy. Both are cast in the category of Sedition. Using that line of reasoning, the Patriot Act applies the same tools to smash political dissention that Congress intended to interrupt the workings of terrorist cells.
That’s the logical end, though, isn’t it?
Free thinking leads to criticism of government policy. Criticism must be treated as a threat to the functioning of the State, and crushed when necessary to protect the elite.
In short, the Patriot Act lays a road to the Gulags. Most Americans don’t understand— yet— that it creates a judicial framework for fascism, and the beginning of all dictatorship in America.
My case demonstrates how “benevolent” such dictatorship can be.
Like Alice falling through the Looking Glass, I had stumbled into a “Brave New World” at the Justice Department, with frightening similarity to the visions of Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka.
Before it ended, I would discover the Patriot Act has crafted the ideal arsenal for silencing whistleblowers, making it the premiere tool for government cover ups. My legal nightmare would spotlight a number of critical reasons why the Patriot Act should be repealed immediately, in order to safeguard our country and our freedom.
On the morning of my arrest, I did not know that yet.
Inside a tiny holding cage at the federal courthouse in Baltimore, I studied the indictment against me. The cage was approximately 3 ½ X 3 1/2 feet—big enough for a bolted metal desk and stool. My first reading so enraged me that I could have ripped the bars out, like some kind of Super Woman.
I was formally accused me of “acting as an unregistered Iraqi Agent,” on the flimsy grounds that I delivered a letter opposing the war to my second cousin, Andy Card, practicing freedom of speech in my own family circle.
What was in that letter that made Andy’s blood boil? A prescient warning, it turns out. I gave Andy Card a simple history lesson. For thirteen years the U.S. had dropped bombs on Iraq at a constant pace. That bloodshed, plus the extraordinary suffering caused by U.N. sanctions, had stirred a deep abiding hatred for America. In war-time, ordinary Iraqis could lay hands on the source of their misery, and their vengeance would be overwhelming. Thousands upon thousands of jihadis would rise up in Iraq to fight U.S. troops.317
My crimes against the State turned out to be simple accuracy: Forecasting the failure of the Occupation with tragic clarity to the Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush. There was nothing hostile or threatening in the letter. I closed with the promise that I “would pray for Andy” to support peace.
That did not matter under the Patriot Act.
Opposition to Republican war policy qualified as treason to the end degree. It rendered me an “Enemy of the State.” End of discussion.
Machiavelli would have been proud. My indictment allowed Republicans to play it both ways. In grand Washington style, I got indicted for telling Republicans the truth about Iraq and 9/11. Then, once I was “legally indisposed—” and safely removed from the debate, members of Congress marched out to complain on CNN and Fox News that Assets like me never spoke up to correct mistakes in the Congressional debate before the War. Our silence duped Congress into racing off the cliff.
Pretty clever, huh?
Something more sinister was obfuscated in the indictment. The treasonous letter in question was actually delivered to two individuals—Andy Card, and also Secretary of State Colin Powell, who lived next door to my CIA handler.318
In the shadowy world of the Patriot Act, I was never allowed to know which man— Andy Card or Colin Powell— filed the original complaint against me. Under the Patriot Act, the superior power and social standing of both men afforded them additional rights over mine, such as protection from being exposed as my accusers. They could lie and hide, and I still faced punishment, though I demanded my right to confront them in open Court. That sort of consideration, based on the greater political access of one’s accusers, rings ominously similar to the legal system of China or the former Soviet Union. It’s the prerogative of dictators and their collaborators. It is decidedly prohibited by the Constitution of the United States.
One critical safeguard in our judicial system proves that Secretary Powell definitely gave his copies of the Andy Card letters to the FBI. In legal discovery, my attorneys received photocopies of the manila envelope with Powell’s address and my handwritten notes.319 So we know that Secretary Powell participated in the FBI witch hunt leading up to my indictment, though my Defense team was never allowed to view his statements to the FBI or grand jury.
Shockingly enough, in five years of indictment, my legal team was never allowed to read a single one of the FBI witness interviews or grand jury statements.
Under the Patriot Act, we had to take the Justice Department’s word for everything.
The grand jury essentially functioned as a “Star Chamber.” That turned out to be the greatest obscenity of all.
Access to legal discovery supporting my Defense was restricted to documents pulled off my computer; transcripts of phone taps; and captured faxes. Ironically, that in itself was a bonanza for my Defense, since the FBI captured 28,000 phone calls; 8,000 emails, and hundreds of faxes, date and time stamped to prove transmission.320
We had plenty of evidence to slaughter Republican deceptions on Capitol Hill— but not a single grand jury statement or FBI interview of potential witnesses, who might support my defense.
Ironically, my defense was hardly a burden, despite those handicaps. My identity was easy to verify, thanks to my work on the Lockerbie Trial with Dr. Fuisz. That was the caveat to Andy Card’s alleged perjury before the grand jury. Even if the Prosecutor was correct that Andy Card gave false testimony and created temporary confusion over my role as an Asset—and if the FBI failed to grasp the scope of my relationships to the intelligence community before my arrest— they would have figured it out rapidly afterwards. Once the FBI interviewed Dr. Fuisz and Hoven, they would have quickly recognized their mistake. Within the first two weeks after my arrest, the facts surrounding my identity should have emerged with crystal clarity.
If Dr. Fuisz or Hoven made false statements to the FBI, I would demand that they face prosecution for obstruction of justice today. Ordinary Americans have the right to enjoy protection from false indictment and false imprisonment just like powerful and elite Americans.
Interestingly, Dr. Fuisz and Hoven denied participating in the strike against me, or knowing about it in advance. I’m told they learned about my arrest on CNN and Fox News. Both were allegedly floored the FBI would come after me like this. I’m told they considered it a stupid thing to have done.
For one particular reason, I believe them.
It’s sort of “inside baseball.” Within the intelligence community, it’s considered a big mistake to go after an Asset without first consulting that Asset’s handlers. What is the Asset legitimately doing? What could come back to bite everybody else if it got exposed? In my case, it appears the White House and Justice Department wanted so desperately to silence me that they failed to perform the most elementary due diligence within the agencies, a sort of internal background check.
The FBI did not learn before arresting me, therefore, that Dr. Fuisz and Hoven had made a critical decision at the beginning of our relationship, calculated to protect me in any legal setting.
Since I would be working on counter-terrorism, in direct contact with pariah governments in Tripoli and Baghdad, my handlers decided that I should not be required to sign any non-disclosure ag
reements.
And I never did. Not once in nine years. In Court, I could disclose everything.
By the time I approached Libya in 1995, there was already a tradition at the Justice Department of legally harassing anyone who disputed the official story of Libya’s guilt in the Lockerbie bombing, as our team intended to do. They’d gone after Lester Coleman,321 imprisoned as pay back for his book, “Trail of the Octopus,” which exposed the role of heroin trafficking in the Lockerbie conspiracy. Dr Jim Swire, spokesman for British families of the Lockerbie victims, declared: “The gross maltreatment of Coleman by the American authorities appears to fit a pattern of victimizing people who challenge the official story that Libya was solely to blame for Lockerbie.”322
Vince Cannistraro, the CIA’s former Chief of Operations and Director of Intelligence Programs for the National Security Council323 likewise got indicted— and acquitted—as punishment for challenging the official story of Lockerbie.
Clearly this fight carried serious risks. Since our team was part of the same faction that opposed the Lockerbie cover up, too, for my own legal protection, it was agreed that I would retain my rights to total disclosure for all times. If attacked, I would have legal recourse to tell everything in a court of law, as necessary to protect my liberty.
That decision probably saved my life.
It should have stopped the Feds cold from coming after me. If they had known.
Their obvious ignorance suggests Dr. Fuisz and Hoven told the truth that nobody spoke to them before my arrest.
They would have thrown cold water on this thing in a jiffy. Because in fact, if the goal was to silence me, the worst thing you could do would be to shove me into a courtroom with subpoena power. I could conduct my very own oversight investigation live on Court TV. I could whomp everybody. If the White House wanted to silence me, going to Trial would be a very bad way to do it.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 32
