C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight

Secrecy, leaks, and the real criminals
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon


Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished. In a Washington Post Op-Ed today, Drake himself explains:

From 2001 through 2008, I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency. Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans that bypassed the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . . .

I followed all the rules for reporting such activity until it conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution. I then made a fateful choice to exercise my fundamental First Amendment rights and went to a journalist with unclassified information about which the public had a right to know.

Rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions, the government made me a target of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal criminal "leak" investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistleblowers that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.

To the government, I was a traitor and enemy of the state. As an American, however, I could not stand by and become an accessory to the willful subversion of our Constitution and our freedoms.

Far more often than anything else, that is the real purpose of government secrecy: to shield ineptitude, corruption, abuse of power and illegality from seeing the light of day, and -- as illustrated by the CIA's efforts to destroy Soufan's critical book while guaranteeing the predominance of Rodriguez's propaganda tract -- to ensure that the government controls what the public hears and what it does not hear.

Ironically, it is that behavior -- abusing secrecy powers to cover-up embarrassing and incriminating evidence -- that is a far more destructive and common crime than unauthorized leaks. As the Supreme Court explained in rejecting Nixon's classified-based censorship efforts of the Pentagon Papers: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information." Indeed, abusing secrecy powers to conceal embarrassing and incriminating information has long been illegal, and is even expressly barred by President Obama's own Executive Order governing classified information:

Abusing government secrecy powers is a vastly more frequent and damaging illegal act than unauthorized leaks, yet the President obsesses on the latter while doing virtually nothing about the former other than continuing its worst manifestations. As the Supreme Court explained, few things are more damaging to a democracy than allowing political leaders to abuse secrecy powers to cover-up wrongdoing and control the flow of information the public hears, i.e., to propagandize the citizenry.

But that's exactly what Washington's secrecy fixation is designed to achieve. And while excessive secrecy has been a problem in the U.S. for decades, the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers makes it much more odious, since now it is about not only keeping vital information from the public and stifling public debate, but also threatening whistleblowers (and investigative reporters) with prolonged imprisonment. That's why they turn what candidate Obama called these "acts of courage and patriotism" (whistleblowing) into crimes, while the real criminals -- political officials who abuse their secrecy powers for corrupted, self-interested ends -- go unpunished.

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.
____________

August 25, 2011

By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times

WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”

She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”

A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.

The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.

If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”

The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.”

A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”

Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.

The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.

“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.

Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.

In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.

Why Cholera?

(Photo source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/11/world/20081212CHOLERA_index.html?ref=world)
According to the WHO the reasons for the cholera outbreak are: lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, weak health services, and health staff strike, mainly by nurses. Health staff are unable to obtain salaries from banks due to the acute shortage of banknotes, making it too burdensome and expensive to travel to work.

The MSF reports: The problems are long-term. The water station does not have the parts to properly repair its pumps. Even if it did, it depends on electricity to pump water from the tower to the city. Electricity depends on a coal mine that has not been paid in over a year and can no longer supply coal. There is no fuel to run the garbage trucks; there is no money to pay salaries for people to collect the garbage. There is no equipment, or supplies, to fix the sewage system, nor money to pay personnel to do it. There are no quick solutions.

________________________________

It is evident that there are very serious problems facing Zimbabwe but it cannot be said that they have simply been caused by the weaknesses of the government of Zimbabwe. Like many other countries, Zimbabwe has attempted to chart its own independent course and escape from the legacy of British colonial rule since gaining independence through armed struggle in 1980. But it has been thwarted in particular by the hostile actions of the governments of Britain and the US, which have meddled in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs and refused to honour their legal responsibilities as required by the Lancaster House agreement of 1979, which brought to an end the armed liberation struggle.


The deterioration of Zimbabwe’s economy, which is still dominated by Anglo-American monopolies, has itself been precipitated by the hostile actions of the World Bank and IMF encouraged by Britain and the US, as well as by economic sanctions especially those imposed by the US under so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act.
But the British and US governments and their allies have also continued to meddle in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe, especially in its elections and political life, directly financing an opposition movement to its government through the Westminster Foundation, the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust and other similar agencies.

In these difficult circumstances, there have been attempts by the African Union and the Southern African Development Community to find a way forward. Discussions were taking place between all the major political parties until recently when the main opposition party, the MDC suddenly withdrew, leading to a renewed political impasse and the conditions were created for Britain, the US and their allies to launch their new offensive.

_____________________________________

Zimbabwe declares national health emergency
4 Dec 2008, 1950 hrs IST, AP


HARARE, Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency over a cholera epidemic and the collapse of its health care system, and is seeking more help to pay for food and drugs, the state-run newspaper said on Thursday.

"Our central hospitals are literally not functioning," minister of health David Parirenyatwa said on Wednesday at a meeting of government and international aid officials, according to The Herald newspaper.

The failure of the health care system is one of the most devastating effects of an economic collapse that has left Zimbabweans struggling to eat and find clean drinking water. Little help is coming from the government, which has been paralyzed since disputed March elections as President Robert Mugabe and the opposition wrangle over a power-sharing deal.

The United Nations said the cholera, blamed on lack of water treatment and broken sewage pipes, has killed more than 500 people across the country since August.

Matthew Cochrane, regional spokesman for the international federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said on Thursday that Zimbabwe was "absolutely" facing a cholera epidemic, and said he hoped the government's declaration of an emergency would result in international aid agencies and donors stepping up their response.

"This is about supporting the people of Zimbabwe," Cochrane said, adding that aid should include water treatment plants and more medical staff. He said the costs could climb into tens of millions of dollars.

The international Red Cross shipped in more supplies Wednesday to fight cholera in Zimbabwe.

The health minister declared the state of emergency at Wednesday's meeting, and appealed for money to pay for food, drugs, hospital equipment and salaries for doctors and nurses.

"Our staff is demotivated and we need your support to ensure that they start coming to work and our health system is revived,'' he was quoted as saying.

High levels of cholera are common in the region, but Cochrane, of the Red Cross, said it was hitting a population in Zimbabwe already weakened by hunger and poverty. The toll could be much higher than the official figures, he said, as many Zimbabweans, particularly in rural areas, were not seeking medical treatment and their deaths were not being recorded.

Cochrane said Red Cross experts were in the countryside on Thursday assessing the crisis.

Without help, the situation could get much worse. Walter Mzembi, the deputy water minister who also attended Wednesday's meeting, said the ministry has only enough chemicals to treat water nationally for 12 more weeks.

UN agencies, embassies and aid groups at the meeting pledged to help, The Herald said.

The European Commission said it would provide more than $12 million for drugs and clean water, and the International Red Cross said it would release more funds to help deal with cholera.

"We need to pool our resources together and see how best we can respond to this emergency," Agostinho Zacarias, the UN development program director in Zimbabwe, was quoted as saying.

Zimbabwe has the world's highest inflation, and Zimbabweans face daily shortages of food and other basics.

Even cash is in short supply. A new 100 million Zimbabwean dollar note went into circulation on Thursday in an attempt to ease the cash crunch. Also Thursday, the amount of cash an individual can withdraw was increased to ZW$100 million a week, enough to buy about 85 pints (40 liters) of clean water. The new bills and withdrawal limits meant long lines at banks Thursday.

In neighbouring South Africa, where increasing numbers of Zimbabweans are seeking cholera treatment, President Kgalema Motlanthe planned a Cabinet meeting to consider ways to work with other countries in the region, donor organizations and aid groups to address the urgent need for food and other humanitarian needs, government spokesman Themba Maseko said on Thursday.

Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe

Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe

by Stephen Gowans

[….]

The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits - to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.

In the West, state officials call for the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it's never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai's ascension to the presidency will make it go away.

The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:

· In the late 90s, Mugabe's government provokes the hostility of the West by:

1. intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain;
2. it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support;
3. it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property - expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals' ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.



In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions "to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution."



The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.

"The US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods."

The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods - not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.

Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase "sanctions of mass destruction." They noted that sanctions had "contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history."

The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted - limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.

The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq's drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe - the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act - that is, sanctions of mass destruction - in place of bombing.

"Sanctions ‘contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.'"

Harare's land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa's ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.

[…]

The Mugabe government's pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West's local errand boys. Owing to the West's attack, Zimbabwe's government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.

"The intention has been to make the target country ungovernable."

The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won't come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.

The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy - to place the country's agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority - will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague - or attempts will be made to ship them off - to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.

-------

See also:

Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe
Economic sanctions undermine Zimbabwe's economy
Sanctions on Zimbabwe: Africa Under Attack