By Scott Shane - The New York Times/msnbc.com
Former vice president told agency to hide it from Congress, 2 sources say
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.
Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day. (Click here to continue reading)
by Robert Reich - Common Dreams
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the V shape.
Unfortunately, V-shapers are looking back at the wrong recessions. Focus on those that started with the bursting of a giant speculative bubble and you see slow recoveries. The reason is asset values at bottom are so low that investor confidence returns only gradually.
That's where the more sober U-shapers come in. They predict a more gradual recovery, as investors slowly tiptoe back into the market.
Personally, I don't buy into either camp. In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery, V or U shaped.
Problem is, consumers won't start spending until they have money in their pockets and feel reasonably secure. But they don't have the money, and it's hard to see where it will come from. They can't borrow. Their homes are worth a fraction of what they were before, so say goodbye to home equity loans and refinancings. One out of ten home owners is under water -- owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Unemployment continues to rise, and number of hours at work continues to drop. Those who can are saving. Those who can't are hunkering down, as they must.
Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can't be built on replacements. Don't expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don't rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.
My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.
The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.
by Jim Hightower - Creators Syndicate/Common Dreams
Have you received your thank-you note? I'm still waiting for mine
More than a year into the Wall Street bailout, I've yet to get any sort of "thank you" from even a single one of the big banks that you and I propped up with $12 trillion in direct giveaways, indirect giveaways, government guarantees and sweetheart loans. You'd think their mommas would've taught them better. But I've begun to think that waiting on a simple gesture of banker gratitude is like waiting on Donald Trump to have a good hair day — ain't gonna happen.
Far from showing appreciation, the largest banking chains are now going out of their way to stiff us. Instead of nice notes, they are quietly slipping new gotchas into our monthly credit card bills and bank statements. In June, for example, Bank of America abruptly raised its fee for a basic checking account by 50 percent. Citibank jacked up the interest rate on some of its cards to 29.99 percent. And JPMorgan Chase more than doubled the required minimum payment on its cards.
Across the board, fees have skyrocketed to their highest levels on record, including assessments for such common occurrences as overdrafts (as high as $39), stop-payment actions ($39 — double what it was 10 years ago), balance transfers (up more than 50 percent in the past year) and ATM use (nearly doubled in 10 years).
To add insult to injury, the banks blame us for their rate increases. Because the economy is such a wreck (massive job losses, falling incomes, millions of home foreclosures and other unpleasantness), industry spokesmen say there is a greater risk that customers will bounce checks or fall behind on their credit-card payments. Thus, claim purse-lipped bankers, they must protect themselves from us by ratcheting up rates and fees. "There is an increased riskiness around repayment because of the recession," spaketh one lobbyist for the financial giants.
Glade doesn't make enough "Spring Lilac" to cover up the stench of this argument.
Come on — it was the greed and incompetence of Mr. Jolly Banker that wrecked our economy, caused the recession and forced the odious bailout on us. They want us to pay for that?
The truth is, they are socking it to their customers for two reasons: 1) they can, and 2) fee hikes are a shifty way to snatch enormous levels of new income for themselves without doing anything to earn it.
These are the geniuses who made an ugly mess of the core business of banking — which is to make good loans. To make up for their huge losses in that business, bankers have essentially been reduced to flim-flam fee-scammers. Last year, assessment of consumer fees became the main business of banks, totaling 53 percent of the industry's income!
That was before the current outbreak of fee frenzy. In the first three months of this year, for example, Bank of America's fee income rose 50 percent above the same period of 2008 — an extra $4 billion in revenue for the bank.
"Fees 'R' Us" is what big banks have become. This is why they are panicked by reforms presently coming out of Washington. Already, President Obama has signed a bill to restrict credit-card gouging, and Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan (which control about 58 percent of the nation's credit-card market) are scrambling to jack up their rates and fees before the new law takes effect next February.
Now, the bankers are lobbying frantically to kill Obama's plan to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would have regulatory power to prohibit a wide range of finance-industry abuses. For the first time, we consumers would have our own seat at the regulatory table — an agency with the independence and clout to counter the Federal Reserve and other agencies that primarily serve big banks.
From the bailout to the explosion in fees, we've seen that Wall Street's financial titans won't control their greed. For the sake of the economy, the well-being of America's majority and the advancement of our nation's democratic values, we must do it for them. For more information, contact Americans for Financial Reform: www.ourfinancialsecurity.org.
By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group/Alternet
Workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
WASHINGTON -- When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don't want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we're starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided -- and pretty scared -- capital, but from within the Obama administration itself. In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession -- an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it's wise to start preparing another stimulus package.
Then President Barack Obama made everything perfectly muddy when he said in an ABC News interview that the seriousness of the downturn and how to attack it is "something we wrestle with constantly." Yet in the next breath, he expressed concern about the burgeoning deficit. But if anyone's looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September, according to the National Employment Law Project. Remember, the recession didn't start last fall when the government bailed out AIG and the financial system froze. It began in December 2007 -- and 6.5 million jobs have been lost since then. Depending on which state and the sort of triggers that apply to benefits, hundreds of thousands of workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department says, the number of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or longer continues to grow, reaching 4.4 million last month. In June, three out of 10 jobless workers had been out of work for at least six months, according to the department's data. The stimulus package the president signed soon after taking office did provide extended benefits, and boosted weekly payments. But even that extension runs out on Dec. 26, and would not apply to all the unemployed. Does anyone really believe that a significant portion of the unemployed will have found new work by then? Hardly. Both private and government economists now predict that unemployment will continue to rise at least through the end of this year.
"We can't ignore this moment when all these folks are running out (of benefits)," says Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project.
"That needs to be a top priority, to help these workers." Let's stop kidding ourselves. In no contemporary economic crisis -- not even those that unfolded on the Republicans' watch -- has Congress left the unemployed completely in the lurch. So some sort of spending package -- call it stimulus, call it stopgap emergency aid, whatever works -- is going to have to be passed.
The unemployment emergency helps feed another crisis Congress is going to be forced to address: the state budget disasters unfolding around the country. So far, 42 states have cut budgets that already had been enacted for fiscal 2009, according to the National Governors Association. More and deeper cuts are expected next year.
Already states have laid off and furloughed workers -- including, in some states, the very workers who process unemployment claims. Generally speaking, states are required to balance their budgets each year, a mandate that forces them to pull money out of the economy through spending reductions and tax hikes, counteracting the federal government's efforts to juice things up. "That is what happened during the Great Depression, we had states working against what the federal government was doing," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. With red states and blue, Republican governors and Democrats, all struggling against the same relentless, recession-driven drops in tax revenue, an almost irresistible political coalition for more aid to states eventually will take shape. And with the fast-approaching September deadline for extending some unemployment benefits, there will likely emerge one of those must-pass measures that may or may not be called another stimulus bill.
Any hot air expended trying to stop it serves no purpose but to fuel political fires. Remember, that is the whole point of those now huffing and puffing most heartily. They don't want to figure a way out of this morass; they just want to figure out a way to unseat those now in office.
Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
REUTERS/Tim Wimborne
Dave Lindorff - BuzzFlash
If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from 9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a state of rebellion, demanding answers.
After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress about such things.
But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; but also it lied about what it was up to.
Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney administration -- that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while asserting that the President didn't even need to notify the courts or the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an "enemy combatant," and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and refused to be put under oath in their "interviews" by the 9-11 Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.
Instead, we get vague expressions of concern, and promises of reform by congressional leaders like Rep. Steny Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and by CIA Director Panetta.
And no explanation of the program in question, even though Panetta claims it was never actually implemented.
Why, we should be asking, would the CIA have lied for eight long years about the existence of a program that it never implemented?
Anyone who believes that nonsense should be a prime target of one of those Nigerian internet scammers. There's a lot of money to be made from such suckers.
My guess is that what is being hidden here was a massive spying campaign by the Agency against Americans and/or a dirty campaign of assassinations conducted on a national and international scale-one which would assuredly have led to many deaths of innocent people.
Given that we have learned, courtesy of the excellent reporting by New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, is that Vice President Cheney personally oversaw the operation of a secret death squad operation, called the Joint Special Operations Command, allegedly led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, now head of US operations in Afghanistan.
Given the timing of this big CIA lying campaign-it began immediately after 9-11, right when Cheney was saying that the US would need to turn to "the dark side"-it doesn't take much imagination to suspect that this is what it is all about.
Take a bunch of power-drunk people in the White House and the Pentagon, and a cowering Congress and an American public being deliberately frightened out of its wits, a new set of laws and executive orders that give the president and his subordinates dictatorial powers that would have made Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin envious, and it's a short step to a black campaign of terror, disappearances and executions.
All of this will eventually come to light, I am sure. But it is unlikely to come to light courtesy of the Congress, which is showing all the assertiveness of a field mouse. Nor is it likely to be exposed by the corporate media, which have long since thrown in the towel on serving as a Fourth Estate. And it sure won't come from the Obama administration, which is even opposing timid calls in Congress for a broader future requirement for notification of Congress about CIA activities and actions. When it comes to exposing the crimes and abuses of the Bush/Cheney years, the Obama administration has decided it likes what it saw, and wants to continue with the new executive powers and secrecy that it inherited.
So we'll have to wait for honest whistleblowers and for the alternative media to find out the real story here.
Jefferson, Madison et all must be cringing in their coffins at the wreckage of their creation.
By Lisa Pease - Consortium News
On TV this week, with a measure of disbelief in their voices, the pundits ask, did the CIA lie to or deliberately mislead Congress? How is that not a rhetorical question?
The Agency has a long history of manipulating Congress and others to support its programs. That this was posed as an actual question reveals the media’s historical illiteracy in this matter.
In fact, when a House select committee investigated the CIA in the 1970s, the CIA convinced the House to suppress its own report, begging the question of who was overseeing whom. Nevertheless, a copy of the House report was leaked, via Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice. The report opened with this disturbing sentence:
“If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmakers’ scrutiny.”
In the wake of revelations that CIA Director Leon Panetta just recently learned of an eight-year CIA operation that had never been revealed to, much less approved by, Congress, Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-California, and Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, echoed similar sentiments.
On Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC Thursday, Eshoo and Holt stated that Panetta’s revelation challenged his earlier statement that the CIA did not mislead Congress.
Eshoo made clear that, contrary to accusations from some Republicans, the charge has nothing to do with protecting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier claimed the CIA lied to and misled Congress regarding its use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.
“This isn’t anything personal,” Eshoo said emphatically. “This is strictly about business, and this is deadly serious business, if I might characterize it that way.
“The issue here is the national security of our nation. There are very few members of Congress that [sic] are chosen to serve on the House Intelligence Committee. And in that role, we are reliant upon the intelligence community to inform us – in fact, they are obligated, under the National Security Act of 1947 – to fully and completely inform the Congress.
“So this is about accountability. If in fact we do not get the proper information, how can we conduct our oversight which we are responsible for in the oath that we take, as well as shaping policy based on that information?”
Rep. Rush Holt focused the key issue for Andrea Mitchell:
“A moment ago, [you] said the relationship between Speaker Pelosi and Director Panetta and who told what [to] whom when is the bigger issue. No, that’s the smaller issue. The bigger issue is, how well-examined are the activities of the CIA? Is the CIA doing things that are not in the best national interest? Who knows, if you don’t have the oversight and the examination? So that’s what this is about.”
As the only full-scale House investigation focused on the CIA – the one led by Rep. Otis Pike in the mid-1970s determined – overseeing the CIA is a challenging task, at best, and one at which government had repeatedly failed.
Painful Knowledge
Author Kathryn Olmstead explored the failure of government to properly oversee the Agency in her book Challenging the Secret Government and found three culprits:
First, the House and Senate were unwilling to challenge the CIA on policy, whether from fear, support, or sheer laziness.
Second, Olmstead believes the press, which seemed hell-bent on exposing the excesses of covert action in the wake of Watergate, pulled back for fear reporters had gone too far in bringing down President Richard Nixon. (Olmstead notes only in passing CIA’s longstanding relationships with the media, so well detailed in Carl Bernstein’s landmark article “The CIA and the Media,” published in Rolling Stone in 1977.)
But Olmstead really hits the mark with her third point, criticism of the American people for turning a blind eye to the excesses of the National Security State.
“[T]he American people, acculturated for years to view their country and their leaders as moral and democratic, were reluctant to acknowledge unpleasant truths about their secret agencies, Olmstead wrote. "[A]s William W. Keller has explained in ‘The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover,’ the liberal state did not like to admit that it had violated its ideology in any way.
“Therefore, the extensive powers of its clandestine agencies were kept secret. This secrecy enabled Americans to assume that the nation’s foreign policy goals were compatible with traditional American ideals.
“But the intelligence investigations brought these secret powers into the open; they forced American to acknowledge that their country had tried to kill foreign leaders, had spied on civil rights leaders, and had tested drugs on innocent people.
“Because this knowledge was very painful, many Americans, including members of Congress, refused to accept it. Secrecy, as journalist Taylor Branch has said, ‘protects the American people from grisly facts at variance with their self-image.’”
Deceiving Congress
If we study history, we’ll find rather quickly that the CIA has repeatedly, systematically, misled Congress.
Miles Copeland, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, talked of the use of “Byzantine intrigues” designed to keep Congress off its back.
Tom Braden noted that CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton used to discuss each morning, in the guise of fishing talk, the “take” from the night before, i.e., intelligence gathered on prominent denizens of Capitol Hill from CIA taps sprinkled throughout the community.
(Braden, who died recently, is famously cited for writing an article titled “Why I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral.” Few commentators note that, in a later article, penned in the wake of disclosures about the Agency’s wrongdoings, Braden advocated the abolition of the CIA.)
Angleton said at one point that if the CIA couldn’t find out its own future from tapping the Hill, it had no business being in intelligence.
It should go without saying that “gossip” could easily become blackmail material, especially where illicit sexual liaisons were involved.
E. Howard Hunt, the notorious figure who at the time of Watergate was on his ostensible third retirement from the CIA, described how, during the 1960s, he penned a series of spy novels to aid the CIA, but “quit” the agency when his pen name became linked to his real name.
After he “quit,” he was instantly rehired as a contract agent, answerable solely to the CIA director’s deputy Thomas Karamessines. In his own words, Hunt explained he did this as a “cautionary” move “in the event some Congressman might raise a question.” In other words, he “quit” to hide a CIA media operation from congressional scrutiny.
Lying about the Castro Plots
And nowhere is the CIA’s deception and independent action more evident than in the Castro assassination plots.
When Congress first got a whiff of these plots thanks to a couple of articles by Jack Anderson and others, what did the CIA tell Congress?
“[W]ith the exception of one case which is under review by the Committee staff, there is no substance to the charges that CIA directed agents to assassinate Castro.” (Letter from Walter Elder to the Staff Director of the Church Committee, dated Aug. 21, 1975.)
As both Elder and the Church Committee later learned, the CIA of course had directed numerous agents to assassinate Castro in a variety of ways. But, the CIA suggested publicly, they were acting under presidential authority.
Privately, however, according to the CIA’s own Inspector General Report, the CIA never informed President John F. Kennedy of the Phase I Castro plots until they had ended, and never informed Kennedy of the ongoing Phase II plots at all.
In its own report, the CIA asks itself, can we claim executive approval for these plots, and answers its own question, “No.” (This report was not declassified until the late 1990s, and should be considered the final word on the subject.)
The legacy of the investigations of the CIA in the 1970s was the perception, though not the reality, that effective CIA oversight had been implemented.
We’re now seeing that, in reality, almost nothing changed. The troubling insights of the committees that investigated the CIA were all but forgotten. No one went to jail for breaking laws or committing perjury.
(In 1977, former CIA Director Richard Helms was convicted of misleading Congress about the Nixon administration’s covert action to oust Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende, who died in a 1973 coup. Helms received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid by friends at the CIA. Until his death in 2002, Helms wore the conviction as a badge of honor, and President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Security Medal in 1983.)
(In the 1980s, CIA Director William J. Casey delighted in mumbling through his congressional testimony making it nearly impossible for the Intelligence Committee members to understand what he was saying or grasp its import. When the deceptions of the Iran-Contra Affair were exposed in 1986, Casey was accused of misleading Congress but died in May 1987 before any legal action could be taken. Three other implicated CIA officers were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.)
While both the Senate and House have intelligence oversight committees, the CIA is always in control of what Congress knows about its operations, as we were reminded again on Thursday. How can that be changed? Who has the political will to demand true openness?
It appears that President Obama has no desire to demand any change in the current system of intelligence community oversight. That’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our Democracy.
How can there be consent of the governed, as our Constitution demands, if the governed, or at least, their representatives, have no knowledge of what they are consenting to?
Should we then demand a new investigation of the intelligence communities? Of course we should, and regularly. But we should also do so with a genuine desire for change.
We shouldn’t spend the time and money unless there’s a determination to get to the truth and follow through on lessons learned. We shouldn’t start unless we have the stomach to face our past with a view towards protecting our future.
We elect our leaders. We have chosen whom we want to entrust with our secrets. How dare the CIA decide our representatives are unworthy of our trust and keep secrets from them? Is this a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? Or do we live under a government run by covert operators for purposes undisclosed?
We can’t know if we don’t ask the hard questions and perform a serious investigation into all that has been kept from us to date.
The pack of riders, including Team Saxo Bank rider Fabian Cancellara of Switzerland (wearing ellow jersey), cycle past sunflowers during the sixth stage of the 96th Tour de France cycling race between Gerona and Barcelona July 9, 2009.
REUTERS/Charles Platiau
By Nancy A. Youssef McClatchy Newspapers
Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil displays documents he says prove he's not a terrorist, despite six years as Detainee 798 at Guantanamo. (Photo by Nancy A. Youssef / MCT)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil spends his days going from one high-level official meeting to another with the swagger of a tribal elder, advocating for the needs of Kunar province, his home region.
Each encounter — with President Hamid Karzai, with Karzai's chief of staff or with one of Afghanistan's other presidential candidates — begins the same: They thank him for his honorable service to the people of Kunar.
Despite those endorsements, the Pentagon says that Wakil is among 74 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who've returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release from the island prison camp.
Wakil scoffs at the suggestion. So do those who know him.
"How could he be a terrorist? He is never far off the government's radar," leading Afghan presidential candidate Mirwise Yaseeni said. "His family is here. I have never known him to do anything criminal."
Pentagon officials didn't respond to a request for comment on why Wakil was included in a report that was leaked in May. The report itself says only that Wakil has "associations with terrorist groups."
The discovery that Wakil, far from being in hiding, operates openly among officials of Afghanistan's U.S.-allied government raises questions about the report's credibility, however. Despite his bravado, Wakil acknowledges that the report has him worried that he'll be detained again.
Never out of his reach are a stack of legal documents, letters signed by scores of high-ranking officials and frayed newspaper clippings that he believes prove that he isn't — and never has been — a terrorist. Documents in hand, he's always prepared to make the case he was never given the opportunity to make at Guantanamo.
"For six years, I was ready to go to court and defend myself. They should show the world their proof against me," Wakil said. "I am ready to answer any question."
Unknown officials leaked the Pentagon report naming Wakil to The New York Times just as debate was peaking over President Barack Obama's plans to shutter Guantanamo. On the same day that The Times published its story, former Vice President Dick Cheney cited the report in a speech blasting the idea of closing Guantanamo; that same day, Obama made his own presentation defending his plans.
In subsequent weeks, Congress rejected Obama's request for $80 million to pay for the closure and restricted his ability to relocate Guantanamo detainees to the United States.
Since then, The New York Times has said that its initial news story made a crucial error, lumping together 27 former detainees who the Pentagon said were confirmed as having returned to terrorism — including several who were dead or in prison — with 47 others, including Wakil, who were suspected terrorists, defined in part as those whose activities were "unverified or single-source but plausible."
Wakil's case adds more questions about just what's meant by "returning to terrorism."
Wakil, who's now 49, represented Kunar province in the grand assembly that helped name Karzai president in June 2002. Wakil met with American officials several times after they descended on Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
At the time he was well-known as an anti-Taliban commander and was considered a potential candidate to serve as Kunar's governor.
Wakil traces his detention to an August 2002 meeting he had with an American commander after U.S. troops shot a resident at a bazaar. Wakil said he went to the U.S. base in hopes of defusing tensions.
"'Don't take any direct action here. Coordinate your actions with the local forces. You don't understand the local security.' This is what I advised him," Wakil said. "I talked to the Americans as an elder of the area. 'If there is anything I can do, please let me know.'"
At the gate, as he was leaving the meeting, he and nearly a dozen others were detained and taken to Bagram air field. Within days, only he and Sabar Lal, his military commander, remained in custody. After seven months, he and Lal were transferred to Guantanamo, where for the next six years the tribal leader was known as detainee 798. Lal was released in October 2007, Wakil in April 2008.
"I told them I am a supporter of this government. Why am I detained?" Wakil said. "I said everyone in my province will fight for my release all the way up to the president. They told me no one will fight for you because you are a bad person."
His uncle had formed Jama'at-ud-Da'wah Pakistan, a Sunni Muslim-based group created in the 1980s to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The State Department considered it a terrorist organization. While Wakil admits that he was a member of the group, he said he was never a fighter, that his group promoted a certain thread of Islam, not terrorism.
According to Defense Department documents from Wakil's Combatant Status Review Board hearing at Guantanamo, the United States charged that Wakil helped members of al Qaida escape from Kunar into neighboring Pakistan. The U.S. also charged that he obtained weapons that were used in a rocket attack on the main military base in Kunar.
The charges, the documents say, were based on a source.
In response, Wakil told the review panel he thought that a political enemy, whom he didn't identify, had set him up. He denied working on behalf of al Qaida; instead, he said he suspected that an al Qaida operative had assassinated his uncle.
Mohammed Roze, who directs the Afghan government's peace and reconciliation commission in Kunar, said he thought that Malik Zarin, who was then the head of the rival Mushwani tribe, had turned Wakil in because the Mushwani tribe opposed a poppy-eradication program that Wakil had begun in Kunar around the time of his arrest. Zarin had built close ties with American forces in Kunar, Roze said. He said that Wakil was never a threat to American troops.
Wakil's reputation in his province eventually helped his case. Fellow residents compiled hundreds of letters on his behalf. Politicians, including some who'd eventually seek his support, also wrote on his behalf.
"To some extent, he might have used his influence" to earn his release, said Mohammed Akram, the administrative director of the national peace and reconciliation commission, which help Kunar's tribal leaders secure Wakil's release.
Upon his release to Afghan authorities, Wakil met with Karzai, who he said apologized for his detention.
"He told me, 'This was beyond my authority. I was very sad but I knew the people were fighting on your behalf,' " Wakil said. He's since met with the defense and interior ministers and with Karzai's chief of staff a half-dozen times.
Karzai's government confirmed Wakil's account. "Whatever Haji Rohullah says about meeting with Karzai and his chief of staff is true. He is an honorable man, so whatever he said happened is correct," Karzai's chief of staff, Omar Daudzai, told McClatchy.
Wakil calmly stroked his beard as he described rough treatment at Bagram and Guantanamo, though he prefers to refer to his treatment by his American captors as "disputes." He said he was now working on behalf of his province and encouraging people to support the government and participate in the national election Aug. 20.
He raised his voice only once, as he described his anger that once again he's facing accusations and no trial.
"Where is the justice? I am still being threatened because of this," Wakil said, his arms flailing. "But I do not want to retaliate. People respect me now more than before because they know I am innocent. It is my job as a tribal elder to suffer on behalf of my people."
(McClatchy special correspondent Hashim Shukoor contributed to this article.)
By DOUG THOMPSON - Capitol Hill Blue
Someone once noted that the only difference between a mistress and a whore was the amount of money involved.
Mistresses, as a general rule, make more -- lots more.
Case in point: Cindy Hampton, the campaign aide nailed by Sen. John Ensign. The not-so-good Senator revealed Thursday that his mommy and daddy paid Hampton about a hundred grand.
That's a lot of walking around money or, in her case, laying around cash. Others say Ensign gave her a $25 grand "severance" package when the affair -- and her job -- ended. Cindy also has a husband and a couple of kids so maybe she needed the money
I worked a lot of campaigns during my time in politics. If I was lucky, I got a "thank you" from the candidate and maybe a trinket as a gift. But then, I didn't screw any of them -- literally or figuratively. But then, none of them were my type.
Sinful Cindy is not the only one to cash in by bedding down an important politician. Monica Lewinsky gave Bill Clinton a blowjob, then got a book deal and a line of handbags named after her.
Rielle Hunter banged North Carolina Senator and presidential wannabe John Edwards and got a $100,000 video contract. Looks like 100 grand is the going rate for political mistress/whores these days.
Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer didn't go the mistress route. He simply shelled out 80 grand over several years for high-priced call girls (translation: expensive whores), including $4,300 for one night with "Kristen — an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches and 105 pounds."
Four grand and change. Wow. She must have been something.
Politicians who think with their balls instead of their brains are nothing new and those who defend their sexual hijinks say that what these bozos go with their own time is nobody else's business.
But let's think about the stupidity of these clowns. These are the same people who make decisions that affect the futures of this nation and all of us.
Can we expect fiscal responsibility from a Presidential candidate who shells out 100 grand for a little on the side? Can we expect maturity from a Nevada Senator who runs to mommy and daddy to help him pay off a lover? Did New Yorkers get their money's worth from a governor who thought a quickie in a hotel room was worth four grand plus?
We elect these folks as leaders and the only place they lead is to the bedroom for some nooky on the side.
No wonder America is in trouble.
ThinkProgress
American International Group (AIG), the insurance giant that has received tens of billions of dollars in government bailouts, “is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.” AIG “has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.”
Thousands of Iranian anti-government protesters commemorating an attack on students at Tehran University in 1999 “were attacked with batons and tear gas by security forces” yesterday as they tried to gather “for the first protests in about two weeks.” Demonstrators are also gearing up to protest “the second-term inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which is expected next month.”
Confidential Pentagon test results reveal that the F-22 requires “more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000.” Despite such shortcomings and Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s stated desire to end the F-22 program, committees in both houses Congress voted to continue funding the program last month after being lobbied by the manufacturer.
CIA Director Leon Panetta “has ordered an internal inquiry into the agency’s handling of a contentious and still highly classified intelligence program that has caused a heated dispute” between the CIA and Congress. The move “appears to be an implicit acknowledgment by the agency that it should have disclosed information about the post-9/11 secret program to Congress much earlier than it did.”
Sen. John Ensign’s (R-NV) lawyer revealed yesterday that Ensign’s parents gave $96,000 to the family of the former staffer with whom he had an affair. The lawyer, Paul Coggins, described the payments as two separate $12,000 gifts to each family member. Under U.S. tax laws, gifts of up to $12,000 are tax-exempt.
A new General Motors emerged from bankruptcy this morning “as lawyers finished an all-night paperwork session transferring the automaker’s good assets to a brand-new company controlled by the U.S. government.”
The Senate has postponed action on clean energy legislation until later this fall. “There are a number of committees that need a little more time,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said. “Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer said Reid’s decision allowed her to push off a self-imposed deadline of passing climate legislation until mid-September. “
The G8 summit pledged $20 billion over three years, $5 billion more than initially expected, to boost agricultural investment and fight hunger. “UN food agencies say more than 1bn people in the world are going hungry. A downward trend over last decades in the proportion of the world’s population suffering from hunger has been reversed, in part because of soaring food prices.”
Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) will reportedly not seek election to the seat that he was appointed to by disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). “Almost two months after his appointment, a Tribune poll found only 37 percent of voters wanted Burris to run. As of the spring, he raised $845 with more than $111,000 in debt, a campaign filing showed.”
And finally: Politico profiles the culinary prowess of John Podesta. “I consult cookbooks for ideas,” the Center for American Progress President and CEO explained. “Cooking is what I do to relax. … It’s much easier to see the fruits of your labor. It’s fun.” As for his specialties, Podesta said, “I make a pretty mean moussaka, pastitsio, baklava and spanakopita,” reeling off Greek dishes that are complicated.
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"FORE...five...six...seven...."
Back foot position is a frequently overlooked part of the golf setup, but this important fundamental can have a surprisingly huge impact on your swing and performance. Here is how to do it right and how it can benefit your golf game:
Your back foot should be perpendicular to your target line and not flared out like your front foot. If your back foot is not squared with the target line, it can create a number of problems:
A back foot that is flared open will promote over rotation of the hips and excessive weight shift. When your weight is over-shifted on your back swing, (outside the back foot), it becomes much more difficult to recover and swing back to the ball without hitting the shot fat or thin.
- Instead, set up with your back foot square to the target-line, and keep your weight on the inside of the back leg as you turn and rotate on the back-swing. This will prevent the hips from over turning and will lead to a more consistent and controled swing.
When your back foot is not perpendicular to the target line, your back leg will have less bracing strength. This will cause you to over-swing, where your leading arm will bend, resulting in a shorter swing arc with less club speed and power.
- Instead, set up with your back foot square to the target-line. This will give your back leg more bracing strength to deliver power into your swing.
Setting your back foot perpendicular to your target line will:
· Strengthen back leg bracing and increase stored up power in the backswing.
· Discourage over rotation of the hips and excess weight shifting.
· Lengthen your swing arc and increase club head speed.
· Generate a more repeatable back swing that will help increase shot consistency.
· Become part of your reliable routine to ensure you and your club are in proper alignment with the target line.
The Eyes Have It
You can improve your putting by proper use of your eyes during each stage of the putt; here’s how...
Eyes during setup: • When you set up to stroke a putt, one of the first things you must do is position your eyes over the golf ball and over your target line. Doing this will give you the best chance to start the ball headed on the target line.
• To help position your eyes over the ball, most putter heads have a top surface split into two separate elevations, with an indicator placed on each elevation. When used correctly, this mechanism ensures your eyes are directly over the ball.
• If your head/eyes drift outside or inside of the ball, the putter’s bi-level alignment indicators will no longer match up to each other, immediately indicating your eyes are not directly over the ball and target line. For example, if your putter has two indicator lines on the upper level and an indicator on the bottom level, you know your eyes are positioned correctly over the ball and target line when the indicator on the lower level appears between the two lines on the upper level.
Eyes during the stroke:
• Keep your eyes on the ball and over the target line during the stroke.
Eyes after contact:
• Keep your eyes over the target line during the stroke. If you have to peek toward the hole, try your best to only swivel your head down the target line rather then lifting your head, as this will change your spine angle and move your head off the target line.
• Try your best to keep your eyes over the target line by holding your focus on the grass that was under the ball, even long after contact. You’re not going to improve the putt by watching it roll, so don’t be in a rush to look up.
The Key to Eliminating Your Slice
Making a proper “full shoulder turn” is one of the most important fundamentals of the golf swing, yet it's one of the most common mistakes made by golfers; and why so many have slice problems. A proper shoulder turn is when you rotate the shoulders so the leading shoulder comes under your chin, without letting your hips turn much at all. Below we explain the ways this eliminates the slice:
• If your shoulder rotation is stopped too early, your arms will tend to continue by fling across the target line and causing an outside-to-inside swing path, resulting in the dreaded banana-ball. A full shoulder turn will help the club fall “on plane”, which greatly reduces the chance of cutting across the target line and slicing the golf ball.
• A full shoulder turn will promote proper weight shift. Remember too keep your lower body from moving laterally. Do not confuse the full shoulder turn as meaning you must get the club back to parallel at the top of the swing. Many great golfers have a compact swing that comes up far short of parallel at the top, but all great golfers take a full shoulder turn when executing a full shot.
• A full shoulder turn will bring you to the top of the swing and assist in getting the hands and arms into proper position.
• Keep your chin up and off your chest so the leading shoulder can rotate and pass under the chin. If the shoulder hits your chin, it will cut the shoulder rotation short and encourage a slice.
• When a golfer does not utilize a full shoulder turn, they tend to rely more on the small muscles (hands and arms) to swing the golf club. This leads to inconsistent ball striking and shots prone to slicing. With a full shoulder turn, you will use more of your big muscles, which are much more consistent, and help you square the club face and avoid a slice. Don’t be in a rush; taking the club back slow will help you to finish the back swing with a full shoulder turn. More body, less arms.
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