May 08 2008

Round One Finds in the Pentagon FOI Document Dump

( – promoted by kestrel9000)

Hat tip to plasticseapolluter

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/mi…

So I’ve been going through the Pentagon Document dump. I have to give it to the Defense Department, they know how to bury stuff. Of course none of this is indexable, being jpgs contained in PDF. Luckily there are orc sorters and what I have found is that a certain obscure PDF has a lot of chunky goodness in it.

Well, not goodness, maybe that last chunk of evil from Time Bandits.

Anywho, I found some interesting items I would like to share.

Below the fold…..

First off, the money shot. I know you are asking, did you find names? Do you know who the list of pundists were on the Pentagon? Yes, and I can do you one better.

I found the roster buried in a 500 page PDF.

Here are your Pentagon All-Stars:

Good lord, where did I find this copy? See, the key to document dumps is to know they are gonna try and hide the most damning tidbits in off-path places. You will never find anything out of protocol in the Generals or their staff’s documents. They know this game and would never be foolish enough to have their stamp below anything incriminating.

That’s what low level employee’s are for. That’ why when I saw the Tara Jones email docs, I knew I had my huckleberry. Jones is just another Goodling, working for the Pentagon instead of the DOJ. I figured she was either to green to filter her communications properly, or was being set up as the scapegoat.

Either way, her doc dump has proven to be the most fruitful so far. So let’s take a look at the propaganda that Jones was peddling:

Oh okay. Now in this document there is a list of talking points and rebuttals. This is from that section, as are the following images.

Now in the first question here, the Administration, or at least the Pentagon, is fully admitting that following the Constitution on American soil would be a “legal complication.” It shows that what they were doing they knew was not within the rules and guidelines of the law of the land.

What risks are being weighed here? Why would a change in their legal status affect the concept of justice? Isn’t that a universal concept? How is justice place dependent?

It’s a rather striking departure from generations of American legal tradition.

The second question is even more quizzical. Presidential Reason to Believe? No longer required? So what, even if Bush doesn’t believe they are guilty, he can still hold these kangaroo courts?

This is a can of worms legal scholars need to get on stat, it makes no sense.

Of course, neither does this:

No that is incorrect, we are still bound by the Geneva Convention, Bush just unsigned the USA being a party to the ICC.  While breaking the Geneva Convention is a war crime, the USA or its personal is not liable to the ICC. It is still a war crime, Bush just moved the goal posts by redefining the “principles”.

See what Bush has done with Yoo is created a new standard on what are Human Rights and what is Torture. By their new standards, they did not torture or violate basic rights. So they can go up and say, “We do not torture.”

But that is by their definition, not the Geneva Convention. This distinction is very important heading into 2009, when this should finally be sorted out by a legitimate Department of Justice.

Speaking or the rule of law:

Oh stay classy Bush and the Pentagon! Well-established offenses? LIke the innocent journalist you tortured for six years? Or that kid you have had lockup since he was 13 for throwing a grenade, which is more than likely from friendly fire?

There is a long list of detainees who “well-established offenses” are open to debate. Yes, there are a couple real bastards in there, but the concept of due process would sort out the innocent. We are denying them this.

Now so you know, the ex post facto law means changing the legal consequences for an act after the transgression has happened. We are protected by Article I, section 9 of the U.S. Constitution and in state law by section 10.

What makes this sad is that it is ex post facto, because before they would have been tried liked the Blind Cleric after the 1993 WTC bombings. Now they are being tortured in secret renditions.

I think that is a severe change in legal consequences, but that is just me.

There are pages and pages of these talking points for the paid military propagandists. I just picked a few that really irked me.

And I thought I would end with this round of the review with a random slide that fills these documents.

Check it out:

4th Generation Warfare! Weeeee!

These reads like a paranoid Alex Jones caller’s worst nightmare.

Actors! Nonlinear battlefields! Psychological warfare!!

To bad the war is on the American people, and not our true enemies.

35 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. What are your thoughts on this one hitting the news circuits:

    BAGHDAD – A former Kuwaiti detainee at the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was one of the bombers in a string of deadly suicide attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last month, the American military said Wednesday.

    snip

    Cmdr. Scott Rye, a spokesman for the American military, identified one of the Mosul bombers as Abdullah Salim Ali al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti man who was originally detained in Afghanistan and spent three years at Guantánamo Bay before being released in 2005. “Al-Ajmi had returned to Kuwait after his release from Guantánamo Bay and traveled to Iraq via Syria,” Commander Rye said, adding that the man’s family had confirmed his death.

    Mr. Ajmi is one of several former Guantánamo detainees believed to have returned to combatant status, said another American military spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon. “Some have subsequently been killed in combat and participated in suicide bomber attacks,” he said.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05…

    I’m thinking…massive justification for keeping Gitmo open being trotted out prior to the November elections?

  2. submit to NY Times for op-ed??? this could be smashing!!!

    this is hot, overwhelmingly important.  great stuff here, needs some work to give the material more weight…  connections, attributions, and references (like Constitution et al) need to be a bit stronger. maybe get an editor for the objective eye and to push you to the next level. this work belongs there.

    great job. and thanks to plasticseapolluter too…

    • DWG on May 8, 2008 at 20:57
    • #

    A bevy of retired military analysts are paid to peddle the Pentagon’s spin and crap to an unsuspected American public. Nice work, PT.

  4. Great investigative work. I like the way you deduced their MO to more easily find the things they are trying to hide. You are blazing with brilliance while they just try & befuddle with bullshit.

    Please keep it up.

  5. He`s working on it also.

    http://www.latimes.com/news/op…

  6. work!

  7. Buhdy’s essay today. The media is not scrounging through these documents like you are…why?

    But I remember 4 years ago when Lisa Meyers spent days going through countless hours of video of Dean at discussion groups until she found one little nugget where he criticized the Iowa caucuses. My contention has always been that is one of the main reasons he lost Iowa and was knocked out of the race.

    So don’t tell me they don’t have the budget for this kind of investigative work.

    Thanks pinche!!

    • TomP on May 9, 2008 at 00:33
    • #

    In solidarity.

  9. pt  – I was thinking of downloading some of these docs too.  I found some of those collections are 80MB PDFs so I gave up before it even loaded a few pages.

    I was expecting TPM to put a team on dissecting these files.  So far I haven’t seen anything there yet, except this post:  Military Analysts Laud The Leader Rumsfeld.  It links to this audio from April 2006.

    A PDF of the transcript is also available.  Here is a choice segment:  it doesn’t say who the questioner is.  

    QUESTION: I’m an old Intel guy and I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is PsyOps.  Now most people may hear that and they think oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash – –

    SECRETARY RUMSFELD: What are you, some kind of a nut?  You don’t believe in the constitution? (Laughter)

    QUESTION: Well, he is. (Laughter)

    QUESTION: Some would characterize me that way.  But I would also disagree with you sir, respectfully. You are absolutely brilliant in front of the camera. And anybody –

    SECRETARY RUMSFELD: But I don’t spend any time – –

    QUESTION:  It doesn’t matter. The point is that you are. And I think most of us would agree with that.  But if the offensive is – –

    Many of us go on every day, we don’t agree with everything the administration does, maybe with some of your decisions, but we get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating and then we take, and we’re all thick skinned or we wouldn’t continue to do this.  But we would love, I would personally love and I think I speak for most of the gentlemen here at the table,  for you to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on we’re forgive me, we’re parroting, but it’s what has to be said. It’s what we believe in or we would not be saying it.  We’d love to be following our leader as in fact you are.  You are the leader. You are our guy.

    Oh my goodness.  That is some serious ass kissing.

    I’m sure there’s lots of interesting tidbits in these emails and transcripts.

    Keep fishing pt.  I’m looking forward to the next report!

  10. but I had a brief email exchange with one of those clowns, one on the second list under “NYT”. He assured me that we had to “win” in Iraq to protect ourselves from an “Islamic Caliphate”.

    I don’t think he’s that stupid or misinformed, but maybe I’m wrong.

    He’s been a spin doctor since the Viet Nam War years.

    • geomoo on May 10, 2008 at 03:05
    • #

    The Green Light by Phillipe Sands traces the legal justification for torture and provides a solid time line showing the treatment both going from the top down and migrating from Guantanamo to abu ghraib.  It is a terrific primer for anyone who, like me, wants to solidify their knowledge of the players, their roles, and the time line.  It is air tight and objective.  It feels like a circling of the international wagons.  Surprisingly, the ending is somewhat promising:


    In a word, the interrogators and their superiors were granted immunity from prosecution. Some of the lawyers who contributed to this legislation were immunizing themselves. The hitch, and it is a big one, is that the immunity is good only within the borders of the United States.

    A Tap on the Shoulder

    snip

    Mohammed al-Qahtani is among the first six detainees scheduled to go on trial for complicity in the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration has announced that it will seek the death penalty. Last month, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the use by the C.I.A. of the techniques set out in the Haynes Memo and used on al-Qahtani. Whatever he may have done, Mohammed al-Qahtani was entitled to the protections afforded by international law, including Geneva and the torture convention. His interrogation violated those conventions. There can be no doubt that he was treated cruelly and degraded, that the standards of Common Article 3 were violated, and that his treatment amounts to a war crime. If he suffered the degree of severe mental distress prohibited by the torture convention, then his treatment crosses the line into outright torture. These acts resulted from a policy decision made right at the top, not simply from ground-level requests in Guantánamo, and they were supported by legal advice from the president’s own circle.

    Those responsible for the interrogation of Detainee 063 face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3.

    It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999-in which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes-and being told by one of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chile’s loss of legal immunity. In my efforts to get to the heart of this story, and its possible consequences, I visited a judge and a prosecutor in a major European city, and guided them through all the materials pertaining to the Guantánamo case. The judge and prosecutor were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. “That is very stupid,” said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country-one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.

    “It’s a matter of time,” the judge observed. “These things take time.” As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, “And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.”

    Philippe Sands is an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London. His latest book is Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan).

Comments have been disabled.