1. The Guardian reports Al Gore calls on world to burn less wood and fuel to curb ‘black carbon’. Al Gore “backed by government ministers and scientists, said that the soot, also known as “black carbon”, from engines, forest fires and partially burned fuel was collecting in the Arctic where it was creating a haze of pollution that absorbs sunlight and warms the air. It was also being deposited on snow, darkening its surface and reducing the snow’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space.”

   “The principle [climate change] problem is carbon dioxide, but a new understanding is emerging of soot,” said Gore. “Black carbon is settling in the Himalayas. The air pollution levels in the upper Himalayas are now similar to those in Los Angeles.”

   The soot “is accelerating the melting of ice in polar and mountainous regions.”

2. The Washington Post reports Interior Secretary Ken Salazar seeks to vacate Bush-era mountain top removal mining rule. He “instructed the Justice Department yesterday to seek a court order to overturn a Bush administration regulation allowing mining companies to dump their waste near rivers and streams, calling the regulation ‘legally defective.'”

   “The government estimates that 1,600 miles of streams in Appalachia have been wiped out since the mid-1980s… Mining executives did not welcome Salazar’s move, saying they would explore legal options to keep the rule in place.”

3. The Washington Post reports In Ecuador, high stakes in case against Chevron. Chevron is accused of having deliberately fouled a vast area of the northern Ecuadoran rain forest with pits filled with noxious sludge. The law suit against the oil company began in New York in 1993 and is being argued by lawyer and former oil worker, Pablo Fajardo, aand is his first case.”

   f the judge rules against Chevron, the company could face the largest damages award ever handed down in an environmental case…

   A report by a court-appointed team last year concluded that pollution caused mainly by Texaco’s Ecuadoran affiliate, Texaco Petroleum, had led to 1,401 cancer deaths in this stretch of Amazonian jungle. The team’s leader, Ecuadoran geologist Richard Cabrera, reported finding high levels of toxins in soil and water samples near Texaco’s production sites and assessed damages at up to $27.3 billion.

Four at Four continues with torture news below the fold.

1. Newsweek reports How Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, got Abu Zubaydah to talk without torture.

   The arguments at the CIA safe house were loud and intense in the spring of 2002. Inside, a high-value terror suspect, Abu Zubaydah, was handcuffed to a gurney. He had been wounded during his capture in Pakistan and still had bullet fragments in his stomach, leg and groin. Agency operatives were aiming to crack him with rough and unorthodox interrogation tactics-including stripping him nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music. But one impassioned young FBI agent wanted nothing to do with it. He tried to stop them.

   The agent, Ali Soufan, was known as one of the bureau’s top experts on Al Qaeda. He also had a reputation as a shrewd interrogator who could work fluently in both English and Arabic. Soufan yelled at one CIA contractor and told him that what he was doing was wrong, ineffective and an affront to American values. At one point, Soufan discovered a dark wooden “confinement box” that the contractor had built for Abu Zubaydah. It looked, Soufan recalls, “like a coffin.” The mercurial agent erupted in anger, got on a secure phone line and called Pasquale D’Amuro, then the FBI assistant director for counterterrorism. “I swear to God,” he shouted, “I’m going to arrest these guys!“

   D’Amuro and other officials were alarmed at what they heard from Soufan. They fretted about the political consequences of abusive interrogations and the Washington blowback they thought was inevitable, say two high-ranking FBI sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. According to a later Justice Department inspector general’s report, D’Amuro warned FBI Director Bob Mueller that such activities would eventually be investigated. “Someday, people are going to be sitting in front of green felt tables having to testify about all of this,” D’Amuro said, according to one of the sources.

   Soufan wrote an April 23rd op-ed for the NY Times, titled “My Tortured Decision“.

   For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned…

   It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence…

   There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions – all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Four at Four continues with torture, swine flu, Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan, and wave power.

1. The NY Times reports Industry ignored its scientists on climate change. “A document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the “Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming”, “its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.”

   “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

2. The Taliban hold valley in Pakistan as they remove some forces, according to the NY Times.

   On Friday, local political leaders in Buner, home to about one million people, met with Sufi Mohamed, the Taliban leader who negotiated a February truce in Swat, and Mohamed Javed, the commissioner of Malakand, whose authority extends over both Swat and Buner, local residents reported.

   Mr. Javed, who travels with a dual security contingent of police and Taliban, has been criticized in the local Pakistani press for having sympathies with the Taliban and for helping the militants enter Buner.

   After the talks, a convoy of Taliban vehicles left Buner, but Amir Zeb Bacha, the head of the Buner chapter of the Pakistan International Human Rights Organization, called the withdrawal “a tactical show.”

   The militants remained in control, according to a Taliban fighter reached by telephone and local residents. “They will come back when they want,” Mr. Bacha said. “They are in the mountains where they have made bunkers.”

   Meanwhile, the NY Times notes Democrats have qualms over escalating war in Afghanistan. “Congressional Democrats are voicing increased concern about the Obama administration’s plans to escalate military involvement in Afghanistan and to try to stabilize the rapid deterioration in Pakistan”.

   “I’ve got the sinking feeling we are getting sucked into something we will never get out of,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts.

   No kidding!

   Meanwhile, “On Friday, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, told members of a committee in the House of Representatives that the Taliban and other extremists who have set up sanctuaries along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan are eroding security in Afghanistan and threaten ‘Pakistan’s very existence.'”

Four at Four continues with the staying in Iraq forever, Guantanamo Uighurs may be allowed to live in America, the drug wars, and how Obama released the torture memos.

1. The LA Times reports Prosecuting ‘torture memo’ authors called ‘a real stretch’. Prosecuting torture memo authors, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, will be challenging. “First, the lawyers would have to be shown to have deliberately misinterpreted the law against torture.”

   “It would be a real stretch. As long as they thought they were honestly interpreting the [anti-torture] law, they are not criminal conspirators,” said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former prosecutor. “They may be bad lawyers who gave extremely bad advice,” he said, but that is not a crime.

   But we know that’s not the real problem.

   The other problem looms even larger. How could the government prosecute the mid-level lawyers who wrote memos but not the top officials — including former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney — who ultimately authorized the waterboarding of suspected Al Qaeda operatives?

   This is a problem, how? They are likely war criminals and must be held accountable to the fullest extent of U.S. and international law.

   McClatchy reports Cheney and Rice signed off on torture. “The Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation torture techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.”

   The de-classified narrative (pdf) of Department of Justice torture advice is on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s website.

   The LA Times underscores that Torture got the OK early on from senior Bush administration officials. The Senate report states the Bush administration approved using torture in July 2002 “after a series of secret meetings that apparently excluded the State and Defense departments… Bush administration sought to keep details of the CIA program away from high-level officials — particularly former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — who were perceived as potential opponents of the use of harsh interrogation techniques torture.”

   It identified Rice as the official “who advised that the CIA could proceed with its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah” — the first suspected high-level Al Qaeda operative captured by the agency and the first to be subjected to waterboarding and other harsh methods tortures.

   That message was sent on July 17, 2002, according to the document, pinpointing for the first time the date that the Bush administration formally backed the CIA’s aggressive plan.

   “It wasn’t until September 2003 that the CIA briefed Powell and Rumsfeld on the interrogation program, the Senate report said.” And of course, neither man publicly condemned the use of torture and have remained silent on its use to this day.

   Earlier this week, McClatchy reported why the Bush administration used torture. Torture was used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link. Torture was used “as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq”. “In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.”

   A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

   “There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

   Release of CIA torture memos was backed by Defense War Secretary Robert Gates, according to the Washington Post. “He viewed their ultimate disclosure as inevitable.” As a former CIA directory, Gates’ chief concern was protecting CIA officers from prosecution.

   Gates was also concerned the memos would “cause a ‘backlash in the Middle East’ that could adversely affect U.S. forces operating there.”

   Of course, there was no concern on part of the Bush administration of such backlash in the first place. Did those criminals really believe they could conspire to keep the torture secret forever? Apparently so.

Four at Four continues with military reservists to fill civilian jobs in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s weak response to the Taliban, the economy and the rise of China, bombings in Iraq, and dust on Earth and the Moon.

1. ProPublica reports Dozens of prisoners held by the CIA are still missing, their fates unknown. “At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.”

   The newly released Bush administration torture memos “inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison” and tortured.

   “Former officials in the Bush administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, said that the CIA spent weeks during the summer of 2006 — shortly before Bush acknowledged the CIA prisons and suspended the program — transferring prisoners to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jordanian custody.” ProPublica has a full list of the disappeared.

   Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports European nations may investigate Bush officials over prisoner treatment. “European prosecutors are likely to investigate CIA and Bush administration officials on suspicion of violating an international ban on torture if they are not held legally accountable at home, according to U.N. officials and human rights lawyers.”

   “Torture is an international crime irrespective of the place where it is committed. Other countries have an obligation to investigate,” [Martin Scheinin, the U.N. special investigator for human rights and counterterrorism] said in a telephone interview from Cairo. “This may be something that will be haunting CIA officials, or Justice Department officials, or the vice president, for the rest of their lives.”

   In a related story, the NY Times claims the Bush administration did not look at past use when adopting torture. In addition to partially documenting the complicty of Congress, the article also notes:

   Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

   “The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

   Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

Four at Four continues with a look at the U.S. economy, Brazilian style economic stimulus, wind power off the Atlantic coast, and nuclear talks with Iran.

1. As buhdydharma hinted earlier, justice may be forthcoming. The White House has a transcript of President Obama’s joint-press conference with King Abdullah II of Jordan where the president reiterated his view that the CIA torturers should not be prosecuted, however —

   For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.

   With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.

   As a general deal, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations.

   For the first time, Obama opened the possibility that senior Bush administration officials could be prosecuted for approving torture, the NY Times reports. Obama said, “if and when there needs to be a further accounting,” he hopes Congress would investigate independently and “in a bipartisan fashion”.

   The president’s decision last week to release secret memorandums detailing the harsh tactics employed by the C.I.A. under his predecessor provoked a furor that continued to grow as critics on various fronts assailed his position…

   Aides said, Mr. Obama opted to disclose the memos because his lawyers worried that they had a weak case for withholding them and because much of the information had already been made public in The New York Review of Books, in a memoir by George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and even in a 2006 speech by President George W. Bush.

   The decision to promise no prosecution of those who followed the legal advice of the Bush administration lawyers was easier, aides said, because it would be hard to charge someone for doing something the administration had determined was legal. The lawyers, however, are another story.

   But according to the Washington Post, Obama defended his decision to release the torture memos. Obana said the memos “reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings,” adding, “That’s why I’ve discontinued those enhanced interrogation programs.”

Believe it or not, there is other news! Four at Four continues with the accused Somali pirate lands in New York, financial meltdown and bailout, and military rule in Mexico.

1. The LA Times reports Lack of mental damage from CIA torture is disputed. Some doctors and psychologists say the “interrogation techniques” used by the CIA had “significant and undeniable” mental damage.

   “I disagree wholeheartedly with their contention that there are no long-term psychological effects of these treatments,” said Nina K. Thomas, an adjunct clinical associate professor at New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, who has worked with torture victims.

   Interrogation techniques undoubtedly have lasting effects, she said, such as paranoia, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and “the destruction of people’s personalities.”

   Brad Olson, a research professor of psychology at Northwestern University, said the approved methods could be extremely damaging.

   “Even given individual differences in a person’s resilience, over time — using any of those techniques in combination — there’s absolutely no question they are going to lead to permanent mental harm,” Olson said.

   In case you missed it, on Sunday the NY Times reports Waterboarding used 266 times on 2 prisoners. “The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines. A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted.”

   Emptywheel has more and the original coverage of this in her essay, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month“.

Four at Four continues with Sri Lanka gives Tamil Tigers 24 hours to surrender, a pattern of centuries-long drought in sub-Saharan Africa, news out of the Summit of the Americas, South Korean economic blogger wins in court, and the Mars rovers are still going.

1. The Washington Post reports the EPA proposes regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is once again trying to protect the environment. Today, the agency issued a proposal “finding greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare”. Six gases, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluorid, are identified as contributing to global warming.

   Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, said in a statement that “this finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations… This pollution problem has a solution — one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”

   The finding states “in both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem. The greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare within the meaning of the Clean Air Act.”

   The LA Times notes this will allow for “broad emissions limits in all other parts of the economy, including power plants and construction sites”.

2. McClatchy reports Chrysler and GM demand Canadians giveback pensions and benefits because they have state-sponsored health care.

   Chrysler and General Motors are demanding steep givebacks in pensions and other benefits from members of the Canadian Auto Workers union on the grounds that, unlike their American counterparts, they can count on generous government-sponsored health care.

   Autoworkers in Canada have long enjoyed a cost advantage over their American counterparts across the Detroit River because their health care isn’t paid for by their employers, but by all Canadian taxpayers through the government.

   That advantage is now being held against Canadian autoworkers in talks to prevent a GM bankruptcy and to promote a merger of Chrysler and Italian automaker Fiat.

   Tell me this isn’t a race to the bottom.

Four at Four continues with plans to have NSA monitor domestic Internet traffic, Taliban waging class warfare in Pakistan (and winning), and life found on earth that does not need oxygen or, which is simply amazing!

1. All aboard! The NY Times reports President Obama Unveils High-Speed Rail Plan! Obama wants to develop “high-speed passenger rail lines in at least 10 regions, expressing confidence in the future of train travel even as he acknowledged that the American rail network, compared to the rest of the world’s, remains a caboose.” And cabooses haven’t regularly been used on U.S. railroads for more than 20 years.

   “Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination,” Mr. Obama said. “It is happening right now, it’s been happening for decades. The problem is, it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”

   Obama explained the U.S. highways are clogged and airports are congested and the American economy is suffering as a result.

   “What we need, then, is a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century,” he said, “a system that reduces travel times and increases mobility, a system that reduces congestion and boosts productivity, a system that reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs… There’s no reason why we can’t do this.”

   The Obama administration’s highspeed rail plan (pdf) is available from the Department of Transporation.

Four at Four continues with War Secretary Gates warning Israel, piracy, and a suicide bombing in Iraq.

 

The New York Times is reporting the NSA has been systematically spying on Americans without a warrant.

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year…

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

According to the NSA, the “overcollection” has been happening because the agency is unable “at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas”. “One official said that led the agency to inadvertently ‘target’ groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority.”

1. The Washington Post reports Arms-control advocacy groups urge U.S. to update nuclear weapons policy. Instead of just counting warheads and destructive power, a new study examined what nuclear weapons are targeted to destroy.

   “From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence,” a 57-page report released last week by two arms-control advocacy groups, takes a close look at “strike options,” giving their view of the role nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombs play in today’s post-Cold War world.

   Instead of just comparing numbers among the nuclear powers, the authors representing the Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council focus on what the United States is targeting and whether this approach should change.

   The study points out the obvious — that “nuclear weapons are horrific things and nuclear war would be an unimaginable disaster.” But it says current Pentagon plans for using strategic nuclear weapons include “individual strike options that probably range from using just a few weapons to using more than 1,000.”

   The studies advocate keeping the same number of nuclear weapons, but lowering their yields just enough to “remain devastating enough to deter any nation from striking the United States or any of its allies.” Lower yields would result in fewer people killed with “today’s targeting choices”.

   The study’s main purpose is to propose a new nuclear doctrine for the United States, one it defines as “minimal deterrence.” Under that doctrine, the nation would retain enough nuclear weaponry “to deter nuclear use in the first place.” The study creates a new category called “infrastructure targeting,” under which attacks would focus on “electrical, oil and energy nodes” that support war industries. “A minimal nuclear deterrence policy with infrastructure targeting does not require nuclear forces to be on alert or even to react quickly,” according to the study.

   This seriously looks like a utilitarian, ‘first strike’ path to nuclear weapons use.

2. The Guardian reports Iran offers new package to break nuclear weapons deadlock. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran is “preparing a new package. Once it becomes ready, we will present that package. It is a package that constitutes peace and justice throughout the globe and also respects other nations’ rights.”

   Ahmadinejad remarks seem to come in response to suggestions that the Obama administration may drop a Bush-era precondition from the nuclear talks, which had been a sticking point.

Four at Four continues with deflation, banking, and piracy.