WASHINGTON D.C. – President Richard Nixon acknowledged that he had given instructions to “do anything short of a Dominican-type action” to keep the democratically elected president of Chile from assuming office, according to a White House audio tape posted by the National Security Archive today. A phone conversation captured by his secret Oval Office taping system reveals Nixon telling his press secretary, Ron Zeigler, that he had given such instructions to then U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry, “but he just failed, the son of a bitch…. He should have kept Allende from getting in.”

A transcript of the president’s comments on March 23, 1972, made after the leak of corporate papers revealing collaboration between ITT and the CIA to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende, was recently published in the National Security Archive book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh; the tape marks the first time Nixon can be heard discussing his orders to undermine Chilean democracy. The conversation took place as Zeigler briefed the President on a State Department press conference to contain the growing ITT/CIA scandal which included one ITT document stating that Korry had been “given the green light to move in the name of President Nixon…to do all possible short of a Dominican Republic-type action to keep Allende from taking power.” Other declassified records show that Nixon secretly ordered maximum CIA covert operations to “prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him” in the fall of 1970 but that Ambassador Korry was deliberately not informed of covert efforts to instigate a military coup.

When the White House-ordered covert operations failed to prevent Allende’s November 3, 1970, inauguration, Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, lobbied vigorously for a hard-line U.S. policy “to prevent [Allende] from consolidating himself now when we know he is weaker than he will ever be and when he obviously fears our pressure and hostility,” according to a previously unknown eight-page briefing paper prepared for the President on November 5, 1970. In the secret/sensitive “memorandum for the president” Kissinger claimed that Allende’s election posed “one of the most serious challenges ever faced in the hemisphere” and that Nixon’s “decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year.” The memorandum reveals that Kissinger forcefully pressed the President to overrule the State Department’s position that there was little Washington could do to oppose the legitimately elected president of Chile and that the risks for U.S. interests of intervening to oppose him were greater than coexisting with him. “If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, the result will be a steady drift toward the modus vivendi approach,” Kissinger informed Nixon.

Kissinger personally requested an hour to brief Nixon on November 5 in preparation for a National Security Council meeting to discuss Chile strategy the next day. The briefing paper records his threat perception of an Allende government as a model for other countries. As Kissinger informed the president: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on-an even precedent value for-other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” According to a transcript of the NSC meeting published in The Pinochet File, Nixon told his aides the next day that “our main concern is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success.”

“This document is the Rosetta stone for deciphering the motivations of Kissinger and Nixon in undermining Chilean democracy,” according to Peter Kornbluh who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. “It reinforces the judgement of history on Kissinger’s role as the primary advocate of overthrowing the Allende government.”

The Archive also posted today a series of declassified transcripts of Kissinger’s staff meetings after he became Secretary of State. The transcripts, dated from the days following the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power through the first several years of his regime’s repression in Chile, record Kissinger’s attitude toward human rights atrocities and mounting Congressional pressure to curtail U.S. economic and military assistance the military regime. They are quoted at length in Kornbluh’s book, The Pinochet File, and recently cited in the New York Times Week in Review section (December 28, 2003).

According to the first transcript dated October 1, 1973, when Kissinger was informed by his assistant secretary of inter-American affairs of initial reports of massacres following the coup he told his staff that the U.S. should not defend what the regime was doing. However, he emphasized: “But I think we should understand our policy–that however unpleasant they act, the [military] government is better for us than Allende was.”

As pressure from human rights advocates mounted for Washington to distance itself from the Pinochet regime, according to the transcripts, Kissinger argued that the Chilean military government was no worse than other Latin American nations and repeatedly voiced concern that the junta would collapse without U.S. support. “I think the consequences could be very serious, if we cut them off from military aid,” Kissinger told his staff during a December 3, 1974, meeting.

The transcripts also capture Kissinger disparaging his own State Department staff for being soft on the human rights issue. In an exchange with Assistant Secretary for Latin America, William Rogers, on December 3, 1974, for example, Kissinger accuses his staff of “egging on” Senator Edward Kennedy who was the leading advocate of cutting assistance to the Pinochet regime on human rights grounds. “How many of our people are really egging Kennedy on,” Kissinger demands to know. At the beginning of a September 1975 meeting with Pinochet’ foreign minister, Adm. Patricio Carvajal, according to another transcript, Kissinger told him:

Well, I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights. The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were no enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.
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l) White House Audio Tape, President Richard M. Nixon and White House press secretary Ron Zeigler, March 23, 1972

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In this White House tape, President Nixon is recorded on March 23, 1972, speaking by phone to his White House press secretary, Ron Zeigler about damage control efforts on the first major covert operations scandal of the 1970s-the ITT papers on Chile. Zeigler reports on a State Department press conference held earlier in the afternoon. He tells the president that the key issue was an ITT memo that stated that in the fall of 1970, U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry had received a “green light” from the White House to “do everything short of a Dominican Republic-type action” to stop Allende. Nixon demands to know how that leaked out, and then emphatically states that Korry “was instructed” to do that. The President then scapegoats the Ambassador for failing to carry out those instructions. Numerous declassified records make it clear that Nixon and Kissinger explicitly ordered the CIA not to inform Ambassador Korry of their efforts to instigate a military coup to keep Allende from assuming office.

2) White House, SECRET/SENSITIVE Memorandum for the President, “Subject: NSC Meeting, November 6-Chile,” November 5, 1970

This briefing paper, found among thousands of NSC papers recently declassified by the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at NARA, reveals Kissinger’s forceful attempts to influence Nixon’s policy toward an Allende government prior to a pivotal National Security Council meeting on Chile. Written two days after Allende’s inauguration, Kissinger emphasizes to Nixon that his election “poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere.” Nixon’s decisions on what to do about it, he informs the President, “may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year.” Kissinger lists the “serious threats” he perceives Allende to pose to U.S. interests in the region and the world, among them $1 billion in investments that could be lost, and the precedent-setting “example of a successful elected Marxist government.” The memo notes that Allende will seek to be: “internationally respectable; move cautiously and pragmatically; avoid immediate confrontations with us.” But Kissinger attributes this to Allende’s “gameplan” to “neutralize” his political opponents in Chile. Nixon’s national security advisor urges him to overrule the State Department position that the U.S. does “not have the capability of preventing Allende from consolidating himself or forcing his failure” and that U.S. influence was best gained by “maintain[ing] our relationship and our presence in Chile.” Instead Kissinger forcefully recommends a hostile policy of pressure and opposition, but implemented “quietly and covertly” for maximum effectiveness. “Contrary to your usual practice of not making a decision at NSC meetings,” the memo concludes, “it is essential that you make it crystal clear where you stand on this issue….If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, the result will be a steady drift toward the modus vivendi approach.”

3) Department of State, SECRET/NODIS, “Secretary’s Staff Meeting, October 1, 1973”

At the first staff meeting following Henry Kissinger’s confirmation as Secretary of State, Chile is a key topic. In this transcript, Assistant Secretary for Latin America, Jack Kubisch, comes to the meeting from Capitol Hill and reports that legislators are peppering him with questions about massive atrocities by the new military regime in Chile. He tells Kissinger that Newsweek magazine has reported 2700 bodies piled up in the central morgue in Santiago. “I’ve been asked: ‘How many people have been killed? Is it true, the rumors we hear,'” Kubisch states. Kissinger responds by making his policy toward the new Pinochet regime clear. He tells his staff: “I agree that we should not knock down stories that later prove to be true, nor should we be in the position of defending what they’re doing in Santiago. But I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act, the government is better for us than Allende was.”

4) Department of State, SECRET/NODIS, “Secretary’s Staff Meeting, October 2, 1973”

In staff meeting the next day, Assistant Secretary Jack Kubisch asks Secretary Kissinger if Pinochet’s new foreign minister should be invited to an upcoming diplomatic luncheon in New York City with other Latin American ministers. “Your behavior with him will be watched very close by the others to see whether or not you are blessing the new regime in Chile, or whether it is just protocol,” Kubisch advises Kissinger. “What will be the test? How will they judge?,” Kissinger asks. “I suppose if you give him warm abrazzos, sitting next to you, and huddling in the corner, that will all be reported back to their governments. [Laughter.],” Kubisch responds.

5) Department of State, SECRET, “The Secretary’s 8:00 a.m. Regional Staff Meeting,” December 3, 1974

At this staff meeting, Secretary Kissinger spends considerable time discussing Congressional efforts, led by Senator Edward Kennedy, to restrict U.S. military assistance to the Pinochet regime. The transcript records Kissinger’s vehement opposition to such legislative initiatives, on the grounds that they are unfair to the Chilean military government, could lead to its collapse, and set a dangerous precedent for cutting assistance to other unsavory governments the Ford Administration is supporting. “Well, am I wrong that this sort of thing is likely to finish off that government?” he demands to know. Later he asks: “Is this government worse than the Allende government? Is human rights more severely threatened by this government than Allende?” According to Kissinger, “the worse crime of this government is that it is pro-American.” In response, Assistant Secretary for Latin America, William Rogers informs the Secretary, “in terms of freedom of association, Allende didn’t close down the opposition party. In terms of freedom of the press, Allende didn’t close down all the newspapers.”

6) Department of State, SECRET, “The Secretary’s Principals and Regionals Staff Meeting,” December 20, 1974

At this staff meeting, the discussion of the State Department’s response to Senator Kennedy’s efforts to curtail assistance continues. Kissinger tells his staff that he won’t tolerate concessions to Congress on human rights and again expresses concern that the Pinochet regime will collapse. “We can’t acquiesce on that, and I have to talk to the President,” he states. “We cannot get into that business while I’m here, of behaving that way, of making a deal with a Senator that we know is against the national interest. You know the only possible outcome of this can be an extreme left wing government in Chile or driving the Chilean Government sort of toward the Arabs.”

7) Department of State, SECRET, “The Secretary’s Regionals and Principals’ Staff Meeting,” December 23, 1974

During this meeting, Kissinger again presses his staff to resist efforts by Congress to encroach on executive branch prerogatives and curtail assistance to the Pinochet regime. He calls cutting military aid to Chile “insane.” His Assistant Secretary, William Rogers, is left to explain the political realities of the human rights movement to him. “It is insane. But, Mr. Secretary, it does reflect an extraordinary strong feeling amongst the Congress, as you well know.” The human rights issue, Rogers reiterates later in the meeting “has caught the imagination up on the Hill, as you well know, Mr. Secretary, and amongst the American people.” Kissinger protests that if Congress is able to curtail assistance to Chile, it will move to cut aid to other countries like South Korea and Turkey. “There isn’t going to be any end to it,” he states, and “we are going to wind up in an unbelievable precarious position, in which no country can afford to tie up with us….” He continues: “It is a problem of the whole foreign policy that is being pulled apart, pulling out thread by thread, under one pretext or another.”

8) Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation, Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Carvajal, September 29, 1975

This transcript records a meeting between Secretary Kissinger and Pinochet’s foreign minister, Patricio Carvajal, following Chile’s decision to cancel a visit by the United Nations Human Rights Commission investigating human rights crimes. Kissinger begins the meeting by disparaging his staff “who have a vocation for the ministry” for focusing on human rights in the briefing papers prepared for the meeting. He tells Carvajal that condemnation of the Pinochet regime’s human rights record is “a total injustice,” but that “somewhat visible” efforts by the regime to alleviate the situation would be useful in changing Congressional attitudes. “Our point of view is if you do something, let us know so we can use it with Congress.” Kissinger, Carvajal, and Assistant Secretary Rogers then discuss U.S. efforts to expedite Ex-Im Bank credits and multilateral loans to Chile as well as cash sales of military equipment. At the end of the meeting, Kissinger voices support for the regime’s idea to host the June 1976 OAS meeting in Santiago as a way of increasing Pinochet’s prestige and improving Chile’s negative image.

KISSINGER SECRETLY LOBBIED PRESIDENT
AGAINST “DRIFT TOWARD MODUS VIVENDI”
WITH ELECTED SOCIALIST PRESIDENT

DECLASSIFIED KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS REVEAL
STRONG SUPPORT FOR PINOCHET FOLLOWING CHILEAN COUP

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 110

February 3 , 2004

For further information Contact
Peter Kornbluh 202 994 7116
pkorn@gwu.edu

Find this story at 3 February 2004

Copyright 1995-2004

In this never-before-published photograph, General Augusto Pinochet (second from left) and President Salvador Allende (in white jacket) are seen on a trip in northern Chile in the months before the 1973 coup that left Allende dead and Pinochet in command of the government. Photograph: Fundacion Salvador Allende
September 11 1973 was a day of terror and bloodshed in Chile. After months of rising tension, army troops stormed the presidential palace, leaving President Salvador Allende dead and thousands prisoners throughout this previously democratic nation.

Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, professors, journalists and citizen activists around the world are continuing to expose the full role of the US government in financing and promoting this bloody coup, which ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.

Thousands of top secret documents which were declassified over the past five years have now been synthesized in a new book, The Pinochet File, by investigative reporter Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives, a Washington-based investigative centre. “The US created a climate of a coup in Chile, a situation of chaos and agitation,” said Kornbluh. “The CIA and state department were worried that the [Chilean] military … were not ready for a coup.”

The top secret documents accumulatively detail the crude workings of Washington during the Cold War. “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup,” reads a CIA document from October 1970. “It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden.”

Two days after this document was written, top CIA officials proposed a terrorist campaign to stun the Chilean people into accepting a military regime.

“Concur giving tear gas cannisters and gas masks … working on obtaining machine guns,” reads a CIA memo dated October 18 1970.

“Use good officers … Some low-level overflights of Santiago and bomb drops in areas not likely to cause casualties could have great psychological effect and might swing balance as they have so many times in past in similar circumstances.”

While conservative Chileans argue that the coup was a home-grown affair, the current Chilean minister of education, Sergio Bitar, says: “That internal crisis was activated by the North American policies against it. We see how they energetically obstructed all types of credit from the World Bank and the InterAmerican Bank … these were decisive actions. This were political and financial pressures that were very relevant [to the ensuing coup.]”

The US effort to destabilise Chile was led by a policy of massively funding and bribing non-leftwing Chilean politicians.

Throughout the 1960s, the US secretly spent millions funding political parties of their choosing – usually the moderate Christian Democrats led by Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the early 1970s, Chilean society had become so leftwing that Washington decided to change tactics. First, President Nixon authorised $10m to be spent “to make the economy scream”.

He also authorised pro-coup initiatives designed to destroy the traditional reluctance of Chilean military men to take over civilian government.

“Pinochet will not be a stumbling block to coup plans”, reads one memo written six months before the coup, in which the American government looks to build a veritable Dream Team of coup plotters. “The navy and air force are ready … the military is getting ready to move.”

As part of a particularly crude effort to remove army officers who supported democratic rule, the CIA organised to kidnap Rene Schneider, a Chilean army general.

That plot was botched; Schneider died, and today his family is suing the US government and Henry Kissinger in particular for playing a role in his murder.

Citing documents declassified in the past few years, the lawsuit alleges that the US government paid $35,000 to the men who plotted the actions against Schneider.

“I don’t want revenge, I want the truth to be established,” said a son of the murdered general, also named Rene, who now lives in Santiago and works for a television station.

Immediately after the coup, US officials worked hard to ease international criticism of the human rights record of the Pinochet regime. Rather than fear Washington¿s reproach, the military regime repeatedly sought help and advice.

Just weeks after the coup, the US ambassador in Chile sent a memo to Henry Kissinger noting that “the military government of Chile requires adviser assistance of a person qualified in establishing a detention centre for the detainees … adviser must have knowledge in the establishment and operation of a detention centre”.

Even when the full extent of the torture and executions in Chile were well known, the US government sought to integrate the Pinochet regime into international business circles.

Probably no figure more personalised the cruelty of the Pinochet regime than the head of its secret DINA police force, Manuel Contreras.

Previously classified documents now confirm that, not only was Contreras on the CIA payroll, but that when he came to Washington during the height of human rights abuses, the US state department had specific tasks for him.

“Contreras was also asked to check in with Anaconda [Copper] and General Motors to encourage them to resume operations in Chile.”

Jonathan Franklin
theguardian.com, Wednesday 10 September 2003 14.07 BST

Find this story at 10 September 2003

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Forty years ago, during Chile’s bloody coup of 11 September 1973, my husband, Charles Horman, stepped into a car driven by “Captain” Ray Davis, the head of the US military group in Chile, for a ride from the coastal resort town of Viña del Mar to the capital of Santiago. That one journey forever changed our family, and placed me on a quest for justice that persists to this day.

Charlie was a journalist, and we both were enthusiastic supporters of the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. When General Augusto Pinochet launched his coup against Allende from the same coastal town Charles was visiting, my husband was surprised to see not only many Chilean tanks and helicopters moving out, but US warships cruising just off the coast, and US military personnel on the ground. He overheard some of those personnel enthusiastically and eagerly taking credit for the success of the coup, implying US military involvement. Charlie dutifully took his notes.

Before he, and our visiting friend from New York, Terry, began their journey with Davis, Charles knew he had come upon dangerous information. The drive past heavy military roadblocks into the heart of Santiago where Pinochet’s forces were on a search-and-destroy mission for Allende supporters, provided the perfect opportunity for Davis to evaluate Charles and his loyalties. This reality did not escape my husband, and he began to fear Captain Davis.

Charles returned to our home in Santiago, and as he recounted his journey and discoveries to me, we resolved to leave the country. On 17 September, we separately embarked on our errands for the day, and kissed each other goodbye. I did not realize at the time that I would never see my husband alive again.

Later that day, Charles was abducted from our home by more than a dozen Chilean soldiers. He was brought to the national stadium, where some of the most brutal of the regime’s crimes were carried out against presumed Allende “sympathizers”. When I returned to find our home in disarray, and Charles missing, I feared the worst.

In the days and weeks that followed, Charles’ father, Ed Horman, and I sought the help of American officials. Rather than aiding our search, however, they inquired about our social circles, and asked if we had been “annoying” the Chileans. Gradually, it dawned on us that our worst fears were well-founded. If it had been made public, the information that Charles had acquired would have risked derailing the recognition of Chile’s junta by the US government. In that context, Charles was transformed from an American citizen who was entitled to protection, to a vulnerable and disposable threat to powerful forces.

A month would pass before it was revealed, through help from the Ford Foundation, that Charles had been executed – his bullet-ridden body buried in a wall in the national stadium. Yet, it was not until after Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London, that an era of renewed pressure for accountability regarding the regime’s crimes would drive the Clinton administration to declassify many previously-redacted texts about that terrible time. According to one document:

US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death. At best, it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC [government of Chile]. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia.

Throughout these 40 years, our family has never relented in our search for truth and accountability around Charles’ death. We filed a case against Henry Kissinger in 1976. In 1981, it was dismissed “without prejudice” – free to re-open when more evidence became available. I personally testified in the House of Commons during Pinochet’s arrest in London. Our December 2000 case in Chile against Pinochet forces is still under investigation.

A year ago, Chile’s supreme court approved investigative Judge Zepeda’s request for extradition of Ray Davis to Chile concerning the deaths of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, another American journalist who was killed during the coup. The US has not yet been served with the extradition request; if and when that happens, it would set an important precedent for a US military officer to be charged by another country for the death of American citizens.

In the 40 intervening years, some wrongs have been revealed and some cases have been tried in Chile, which is, again, a democracy. Pinochet’s arrest certainly served as a lightning rod to broaden the global mechanisms to hold human rights violators accountable. But there is still a long way to go: the United States military continues to lie to the public, and take every opportunity available to cover up their abuses of power. We all have an interest in uncovering the truth about whether Captain Ray Davis played a role in the death of my husband.

In that sense, Charles’ story is just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago, and makes the cases against those responsible just as pressing. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth, often used the refrain, “we will leave no stone unturned.” That, too, is my mission, and should be the goal of all those dedicated to a just world in which no individual is too big, or too powerful, to answer for their crimes

Joyce Horman
theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 September 2013 12.30 BST

Find this story at 11 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

As we continue our look at the 40th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile and the ongoing efforts by the loved ones of its victims to seek justice, we turn to the case of Charles Horman. A 31-year-old American journalist and filmmaker, Horman was in Chile during the coup and wrote about U.S. involvement in overthrowing the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Shortly after, he was abducted by Chilean soldiers and later killed. Horman’s story was told in the 1982 Oscar-nominated film, “Missing,” which follows his father, Edmund Horman, going to Chile to search for his son. We’re joined by Charles Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, who filed a criminal suit against Pinochet for his role in her husband’s death, and established the Charles Horman Truth Project to support ongoing investigations into human rights violations during Pinochet’s regime. We’re also joined by Peter Weiss, vice president of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented the Horman family in their case against Kissinger and others for Charles Horman’s death.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to mark this 40th anniversary this week of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile—it was September 11th, 1973—today, the loved ones of thousands who were killed under General Pinochet’s dictatorship continue to seek justice. We turn now to the case of Charles Horman, 31-year-old American freelance journalist and filmmaker who was in Chile during the coup and wrote about the U.S. involvement in overthrowing Allende. Soon afterward, he was abducted by Chilean soldiers, later killed.

The story of what happened next is told in the 1982 Oscar-nominated film, Missing, which follows his father, Ed Horman, when he goes to Chile amidst the bloodshed of the coup to join his daughter-in-law, who in the film is played by Sissy Spacek, in the search for the son. This is a clip from the film when we see Ed Horman, played by Jack Lemmon, meeting with U.S. officials in Chile as a photo of then-President Richard Nixon hangs on the wall behind them. Horman went to Chile knowing that soldiers had seized Charles, but unaware that he had been shot to death at that point.

U.S. AMBASSADOR: [played by Richard Venture] I hear you’d like to discuss some political questions.

ED HORMAN: [played by Jack Lemmon] What?

U.S. AMBASSADOR: [played by Richard Venture] You suggested that there might be some kind of American police assistance program down here? I’d like you to know that nothing of that sort exists in this country.

ED HORMAN: [played by Jack Lemmon] Mr. Ambassador, I’m not interested in the politics of it, and I brought it up only because I want you to use every resource at your command.

U.S. AMBASSADOR: [played by Richard Venture] I repeat, Mr. Horman, no such operation exists.

CONSUL PHIL PUTNAM: [played by David Clennon] I got the clearance for those hospitals you wanted to visit.

ED HORMAN: [played by Jack Lemmon] What about the National Stadium?

CONSUL PHIL PUTNAM: [played by David Clennon] I’m trying, but it’s kinda touchy.

U.S. AMBASSADOR: [played by Richard Venture] Handle it.

ED HORMAN: [played by Jack Lemmon] What do you mean it’s touchy? Look, gentlemen, I know these are bad times. It’s not fun for you people. It’s certainly not fun for Beth or me—or Charles. I know you’re doing your best. I have to believe that; that’s our only hope. But you have all the machinery on your side. Don’t you see? You have all the connections. I’m a middle-aged businessman from New York City. I don’t speak one word of Spanish. Here I am. My son may have been shot. Maybe he was tortured. Maybe he was—oh, Lord, beaten so badly that they’re keeping him until he’s well enough to be released. I don’t know. I don’t care. Oh, really, I don’t care, because what is done is done. I just want you to reach those people and tell them I will take Charles back in any condition. I’m not going to make a stink. I’m not going to go to the newspapers. You make out any kind of a release form; I will sign it. I will absolve anyone, everyone, of everything. I just want my boy back. He’s the only child I have, sir.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from the 1982 film Missing, about the struggle to discover what happened to journalist Charlie Horman during the 1973 Chilean coup. Jack Lemmon plays Horman’s father, Ed Horman.

Well, today we’re joined by Charlie Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman. She filed a criminal suit against Pinochet for his role in her husband’s death, and established the Charles Horman Truth Project to support ongoing investigations into the human rights violations during Pinochet’s regime. And it’s her foundation that has gathered people from around the world involved in trying to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice, from Chile to London, where he was arrested, to finding the killers of the many people. Thousands of Chileans died under the 17-year reign of Augusto Pinochet. And some of those who have been fighting for justice are gathering tonight for an event to remember what took place 40 years ago.

Joyce Horman, welcome to Democracy Now!

JOYCE HORMAN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Missing certainly made your husband famous throughout the United States, that film by Costa-Gavras, but also showed that Charlie, though, was an American. It was thousands of Chileans who were killed in those years under Pinochet. Talk about the day that your husband was taken. You both were living in Santiago?

JOYCE HORMAN: We were living in Santiago. And he had just managed to get back from Viña del Mar, where he had taken a friend of ours from New York right before the coup and was trapped there for five days. So, he returned on Sunday, and then, Monday, he was going to go and find out about airplane tickets downtown. The curfew had been lifted during the day. So he and our friend, Terry, went down to the center of Santiago to look for tickets or a way out.

AMY GOODMAN: What did he see, where he was?

JOYCE HORMAN: Where he was, well, he saw American battleships off the shore. He saw the launch of the coup in Viña del Mar. They experienced that all the roads had been blocked and the trains had been stopped that night, Monday night before the coup, which is why he knew that was happening. But he also—he also met, in the hotel that they stayed, military—U.S. military people who were taking quite a large credit for the coup and were very excited about the success. And my husband, the journalist, knew that that was not something that anybody in the United States knew about. So, he was aware that it was incredible information at that point.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, he comes back to Santiago, to the capital of Chile. You see each other on the morning of the coup.

JOYCE HORMAN: Yes, I guess I have to start back. He was brought back to Santiago, to the search-and-destroy mission that was Santiago at that time, by the head of the U.S. MILGROUP, Military Group, who had come through blockades to get to Viña del Mar to see his military people in Viña, and then, because they had asked him if he would give a lift to Charles and Terry back to Santiago. His name is Ray, Captain Ray Davis, and he is an extraordinary figure in our story, and the extradition request for him was issued—well, was approved by the Chilean Supreme Court recently. But let me go back. So, he’s the one who went—again, drove through all the roadblocks, because he had all of the connections with the Pinochet forces, and brought them back to Santiago, dropped them in Santiago on Saturday. They came home on Sunday. I’m sorry, I think I lost the line of your original question.

AMY GOODMAN: What you were doing that day, when you last saw him, and then how he was taken—

JOYCE HORMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —how you learned he was taken.

JOYCE HORMAN: OK. We said goodbye as I was leaving to check on some other friends to be sure that they were OK, because there was very little communication for a week, and he was taking our friend Terry downtown to try and get a passage out. I did not get back that night because of the curfew. The buses stopped running. And as the movie Missing portrays, I was in a stairwell for the night.

When I got back to the house the next morning, I found the house completely ransacked. And my neighbors told me to go elsewhere, because the police—or the military people that had taken my husband would probably come back. Only they didn’t say they had taken my husband. They just said they had been there and ransacked the place, so I wasn’t sure that my husband had gotten back that night.

I guess it was the next day, neighbors from our old neighborhood got a call from the military intelligence saying, “Do you know—do you know an extremist gringo with a beard?” And it terrified our neighbors, but it told us that the military actually had Charles. And the next opportunity I had, I went to the consulate and the—the embassy, actually, to announce that he had been taken and that I wanted their help to find him and get him out. They were more interested in what had been taken from the house, the ransacked house. But that was the first contact I had with the U.S. officials at that point.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to jump forward a little bit and go back to the film Missing, and this is where we see, well, your character is called Beth in the film—that’s what you chose; you weren’t sure if this was going to be a film you wanted to be any part of.

JOYCE HORMAN: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: And you are played by Sissy Spacek, to this day who’s very—you are tied to and is very close to this story.

JOYCE HORMAN: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: She and Jack Lemmon, who plays your father-in-law, Charlie’s father Ed, go to the stadium, where they’re allowed to get on the loudspeaker and ask if Charlie is there. Thousands of sympathizers of the ousted Socialist President Salvador Allende were rounded up and taken to the stadium in the days following September 11, 1973, the coup.

BETH HORMAN: [played by Sissy Spacek] Charlie? This is Beth. I’m here with your dad, Charlie, and the American consul. So if you can hear me, please come out so we can take you home.

ED HORMAN: [played by Jack Lemmon] Charles Horman, this is your father, Edmund. I’m here in the hope that you can hear me. Charles? Charles? Do you remember when we took that trip together across country from L.A. to New York? Just the two of us.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing, about Charlie Horman, one of thousands of people, as Augusto Pinochet came to power and over the 17 years of his reign, who went missing and were killed. This is Democracy Now! We’ll continue this discussion after we listen to more of Víctor Jara.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Plegaria [a] un Labrador (Prayer to a Worker)” by Víctor Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter, folk singer, tortured and executed during the Chilean coup of Salvador Allende 40 years ago this week, September 11, 1973, as we honor this 40th anniversary of all those lost. We go—you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see the timeline of all of our coverage over these years.

We continue our coverage of the 40th anniversary as we’re joined by Joyce Horman, Charles Horman’s widow. She established the Charles Horman Truth Project to support ongoing investigations into the human rights violations during Pinochet’s regime.

We’re also joined by Peter Weiss, vice president of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He represented the Horman family in their case against Henry Kissinger and others for the death of Charles Horman. This afternoon and this evening, there will be a major gathering at—in New York City as people gather from around the world to honor those who died during these days 40 years ago. At 583 Park Avenue, there will be a forum and discussion and panels—that is, run by the Charles Horman Truth Foundation.

I want to read part of a declassified transcript of a conversation just one day before Charles Horman was seized between then-President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. When discussing the U.S. role in the Chilean coup, Kissinger said, quote, “The Chilean thing is getting consolidated.” Nixon responded, “Well, we didn’t—as you know—our hand doesn’t show on this one, though.” Kissinger replied, “We didn’t do it. … I mean we helped them. [Omitted word] created the conditions as great as possible.” And Nixon responded, “That is right.” The two then discussed, quote, “this crap from the liberals” in the media about the overthrow of a democratically elected government, and Kissinger noted, “In the Eisenhower period … we would be heroes.” Now, that is taken from a declassified memo that was declassified for the National Security Archive. It appears in the new edition of a new book that has come out by Peter Kornbluh on Pinochet and these years and is also cited in the—in Peter Kornbluh’s latest piece in The Nation magazine.

Peter Weiss, their role of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in Allende coup?

PETER WEISS: Well, they were responsible for the coup, because they decided as soon as Salvador Allende, who was a Socialist, became president of Chile, that he had to go. And Chile was not the only country where the United States then was deciding that people had to go. And Kissinger was eventually put in charge of the 40 Committee, which was given such a nondescript name because one couldn’t say what it was actually about. But it was about preparing the coup. And the coup had two tracks, essentially. It had track one, which was managed by the State Department, more or less overtly. And then it had track two, managed by the CIA, entirely covertly. And Nixon allocated $10 million to the CIA to prepare for the coup, to mobilize, to have a relationship between the corporations that were interested in getting rid of Allende, and it was also supposed to activate the media. And it worked, as you said when you quoted Nixon and Kissinger saying, “We did it, but we didn’t do it.”

AMY GOODMAN: I want to read from a declassified U.S. State Department memo on the Charles Horman case dated August 25th, 1973. It says, quote, “There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death. At best, it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the [government of Chile, or] GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware that GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC [government of Chile] paranoia.”

PETER WEISS: Well, there were actually two ways in which Charles Horman was failed by his government. One was that they helped to orchestrate the coup, and the other was that they didn’t lift a finger to get him out of Chile when they had every reason to believe that he was in great danger. And there is an international law, an obligation, for governments to keep their citizens from being killed in foreign countries. The United States completely failed to do anything about that.

AMY GOODMAN: Kissinger is still alive. President Nixon of course has died. The case was dismissed, Joyce and Peter, against Kissinger. Why? And are there cases now that involve him?

PETER WEISS: I’m not aware of any pending cases now. Maybe Almudena knows of some, but I’m not aware of any pending cases. Our case was dismissed because we couldn’t conduct discovery. When you bring any kind of case, civil or criminal, you have to look for the evidence and produce the evidence to the judge or the jury. And everything that we wanted, we were told, was classified and would not be made available to us. So, eventually, the case had to be dismissed, because we couldn’t establish the causal relationship between Charles’s death and what people like Ray Davis, whom Joyce mentioned, who was the head of the—

JOYCE HORMAN: Military Group.

AMY GOODMAN: MILGROUP.

PETER WEISS: —of the Military Group at the embassy—

AMY GOODMAN: In this last minute, as you mention international law, it’s being invoked a lot these days as we look at the possible strike against Syria. Peter Weiss, you are legendary in your defense of international law. What are the parallels you see?

PETER WEISS: I see two parallels. One is that the Assad regime engaged in multitudinous violations of international law for two-and-a-half years. Right? I mean, they bombed. They sent artillery rockets into civilian areas, which is a cardinal violation of international law. And nobody really mentioned the fact that these were international law violations. And then come the chemical weapons, and everybody is saying, “Oh, my god, you know, now they’ve violated international law.” What were they doing before? Complying with international law? Surely not. So, that’s one thing.

The other thing is that if—

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.

PETER WEISS: —Obama decides to go in there without approval from the international community, he will be guilty of a tremendous violation of international law. And you can’t uphold international law by violating international law.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue the discussion both on Syria as well as on this 40th anniversary of the coup in Chile tomorrow on Democracy Now!

Monday, September 9, 2013

Find this story at 9 September 2013

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

In the wake of the 1973 coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, Charles Horman, a young American journalist, was abducted from his home in Santiago, tortured and executed. His widow Joyce and his father Edmund spent agonizing weeks in Chile looking for him before finally learning of his death. There is reason to believe that Charles Horman’s knowledge of U.S. involvement in the coup was related to his execution. These events became the subject of the Costa-Gavras movie MISSING.

In 1976, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Horman family sued Henry Kissinger and other Nixon Administration officials for the wrongful death of Charles and the family’s pain and suffering caused by the concealment of his death. After years of vigorous attempts to obtain classified State Department and CIA documents, the case was dismissed in 1980 “without prejudice,” recognizing that information was being withheld and thereby enabling the Horman family to reopen the case should additional facts become available.

The arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998, which reinvigorated the global movement to bring human rights violators to justice, rekindled Joyce Horman’s hope of uncovering the truth about her husband’s murder. She joined the Spanish lawsuit that charged Pinochet with crimes against humanity and requested his extradition from the United Kingdom for trial in Spain. That suit led to the landmark decision of the House of Lords granting the Spanish judge’s request (later rendered moot by the British Home Secretary on the grounds of Pinochet’s health, which returned Pinochet to Chile).

At the same time, Horman’s attorneys obtained documents released by the U.S. government as a result of the Chile declassification order issued by President Bill Clinton in February 1999. Several of the documents had originally been released in the late 1970’s pursuant to the Horman’s 1976 lawsuit but were heavily blacked out. The version released in 1999 revealed what had been censored for 20 years: the State Department’s own conclusion that the CIA may have had “an unfortunate part” in Horman’s death.

In the summer of 2000, Chile’s Supreme Court stripped Pinochet of his senatorial immunity, resulting in the filing of more than 300 human rights cases against him. At roughly the same time, the third release of declassified documents in the United States provided little additional information, and the Horman family decided to file their own case in Chile with Judge Juan Guzman against Pinochet and his subordinates. Kissinger and other members of the Nixon Administration State Department were named as witnesses in the case, resulting in the Chilean Supreme Court approving the transmission of official questions to the Bush Administration for answers. It is noteworthy that during the summer of 2001, when the Chilean government allocated more judges to handle human rights cases, Judge Guzman, the highest-ranking judge, retained only six cases, the Horman case among them.

To continue this pursuit of justice in Chile, Joyce Horman has established the Charles Horman Truth Project to support ongoing investigations of the human rights violations that were carried out in Pinochet’s detention centers and efforts to bring him and his subordinates to justice. Research, supported in part by the Ford Foundation, is looking to determine who took part in the repressive structure at Chile’s National Stadium just after the 1973 coup. This work has resulted in new testimony regarding the human rights crimes of that era. On May 15th, 2002 in New York, the Project will commemorate the film MISSING and honor those who made it with the Charles Horman Truth Project 2002 Human Rights Awards.

Find this story at September 2013

More than a quarter century after the execution in Chile of Charles Horman, an American freelance journalist, Washington has released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death.

The Horman case was made famous by the Hollywood movie Missing. Directed by Constantino Costa Gavras, the film dramatized the struggle of Charles Horman’s family to uncover the truth about his murder and the collaboration of US officials with the Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in carrying it out.
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The State Department memo, dated August 25, 1976, was declassified just over two weeks ago (October 8), together with 1,100 other documents released by various US agencies. These papers dealt primarily with the years leading up to the military coup that brought Pinochet to power in September 1973. An initial set of 5,800 previously classified documents, made public last June 30, concerned the first five years of the dictatorship, when tens of thousands of Chilean workers, students and political oppositionists were imprisoned, tortured and executed.

Charles Horman was one of the victims of the Pinochet coup. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into a make-shift concentration camp. There prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman’s body was found in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Terrugi, was killed in the same fashion.

Written by three State Department functionaries—Rudy Fimbres, R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson—and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a high-ranking official in the department’s Latin American division—the August 1976 document described the Horman case as “bothersome,” given reports in the press and Congressional investigations charging that the affair involved “negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman’s death.” The memo was written while Henry Kissinger was still Secretary of State.

The State Department, the memo declared, had the responsibility to “categorically refute such innuendoes in defense of US officials.” It went on, however, to lay out the case that these “innuendoes” were well founded.

The three State Department officials said they had evidence that “The GOC [Government of Chile] sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution. The GOC might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG [US Government].”

The report went on to declare that circumstantial evidence indicated “US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death. At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia.”

What the document does not mention is that the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency had their own reasons not only to feed the Chilean dictatorship’s “paranoia,” but also to take a direct role in sanctioning the execution. Horman spent the day of the military uprising and several days thereafter in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaiso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took careful notes documenting the US role in overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende.

After the release of the State Department memo, Horman’s widow, Joyce, described it as “close to a smoking pistol.”

The same document had been released to the Horman family more than 20 years ago. But the paragraphs cited above were blacked out by the State Department. It took nearly two decades for Washington to reveal what had been hidden in the 28 lines blacked out by government censors.

Still, the Clinton administration’s “Chile Declassification Project,” touted by the president as an effort to “shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and other acts of political violence” under Pinochet, has amounted to an exercise in hypocrisy. Motivated by Washington’s desire to distance itself from its former ally after the ex-dictator’s arrest in London and efforts to extradite him to Spain, the declassification has hidden more than it has revealed.

The Horman document released October 8 came from the State Department, as have the vast bulk of the material that has been declassified. In it, the State Department officials themselves express skepticism about the account given by the CIA of its relations with key Chilean figures involved in Horman’s case.

While this section of the document still has sections deleted for reasons of “national security,” it declares that the agency’s account “needs further illumination no matter CIA disclaimers.” It goes on to declare that the authors find it hard to believe “that the Chileans did not check with [name deleted] regarding two detained Americans … lack of candor with us on other matters only heightens our suspicions.”

But where are the CIA documents, both those shared with the State Department at the time and those whose concealment prompted such suspicions? They remain classified, as do documents from the Pentagon which would have recounted contacts between US military officers and Charles Horman in Viña del Mar.

In the first batch of declassified material, 5,000 of the 5,800 documents came from the State Department, while the CIA released only 500. Out of some 25,000 pages of reports, memos and cables that have been made public thus far, not a single one provides any information on the part played by the CIA, the Pentagon or other US agencies in the Chilean coup itself and the bloody repression which followed.

There is no dispute that these documents exist. Daily cables went back and forth between Washington and Santiago as the CIA and the Nixon government followed the progress of “Track II,” as the planned coup was known in intelligence circles. These documents have been referred to repeatedly in congressional investigations and access to them has been repeatedly denied in various Freedom of Information requests.

One of the recently released State Department documents gives an indication of the scale of US collaboration with Pinochet’s preparations. It establishes that US military aid was raised dramatically between the coming to power of Allende in 1970, when it amounted to $800,000, to $10.9 million in 1972, as the coup plans were elaborated. Even as Nixon and Kissinger vilified the Allende government, they poured vast resources into the instrument they would use to overthrow it, the Chilean military.

Further documents withheld by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies concern the 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister and opponent of the dictatorship, together with his American aide, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, DC. American officials have made the improbable claim that these documents must remain secret because they are material to the investigation of Pinochet’s crimes.

According to Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, the CIA has rejected any review of documents emanating from its Directorate of Operations, the covert arm that earned the agency the nickname Murder Inc., on the grounds that the US government has never officially acknowledged carrying out covert operations in Chile. Similarly, the agency has taken the position that planning and policy documents are not covered by Clinton’s declassification order.

This guarding of Washington’s dirty secrets relating to Chile is motivated in part by the fact that former and present US officials who played a role as criminal as that of Pinochet himself are still alive. They, like the ex-dictator, could conceivably be called to account.

Men like ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA’s former coup master in Latin America, General Vernon Walters, are among them, as are many lesser-known functionaries of US intelligence and the Pentagon.

Even more important, “national security interests” are at stake in keeping these documents secret because, 25 years after the Chilean coup, US imperialism is still prepared to use the methods employed by Pinochet and his American backers in defending the interests of the US banks and multinationals and suppressing the struggles of the working class all over the world.

By Bill Vann
26 October 1999

Find this story at 26 October 1999

Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site

Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls in the church — Denise McNair, age 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years. We hear an address by world-renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On September 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four little girls in the church Denise McNair was 11 years old, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins were all 14. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years.

We turn now to world renowned author, activist, scholar Angela Davis, Professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.

ANGELA DAVIS: And remembering and paying tribute to this tragic event, let us not pretend that we are simultaneously celebrating the end of racist violence, and the triumph of democracy. Let us also not labor under the illusion that this church bombing was an anomaly. We know that Robert Chambliss, who was eventually convicted of carrying out the bombing, along with three others, we know that he had been responsible for bombing black homes and churches over so many years. As a matter of fact, during the eight years prior to the church bombing, there had been 21 bombings in Birmingham. This man’s nickname was “Dynamite Bob”. He was known in white communities, you know, talking about terrorism. And I want to emphasize the importance of understanding how much terrorism, racist terrorism, has shaped the history of this country. And there are lessons we need to learn from that.

But I’ve often pointed out that some of my very earliest childhood memories, are the sounds of dynamite exploding. Homes across the street from where I grew up were bombed when they were purchased by black people who were moving into a neighborhood that had been zoned for whites. So many bombings took place in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we know now that Chambliss was probably responsible. That the neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill”. And of course as you know, the city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham”. In fact on September 4, 1963, less than two weeks before the 16th Street church bombing, the home of the leading civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Arthur Shores was bombed. And that house was right down the street from our house.

You’ve also heard that from Margaret that on the day of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, two other black youth were killed. Johnny Robinson and Virgil Weir. Bombings continued to plague black communities in Birmingham after September 15, and everyone, including the FBI, knew who was behind them. But Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was simply charged with the possession of dynamite. And J Edgar Hoover refused to reveal the evidence that the FBI had gathered against the perpetrators so that there was no trial during that period.

Now I’m not arguing that justice would have necessarily prevailed had Robert Chambliss and the others, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Cherry and Herman Cash had been immediately tried and tried and convicted, although, since that was the only way we had to deal with such transgressions, they should have been tried and convicted. But true justice is about transformation. Justice is about changing the relations that link us together. And as you’ve heard, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project attempts to forge justice in a much deeper sense than is possible within the existing criminal justice system.

A broader way of thinking about justice in the case of the Birmingham bombing would require, first of all, a fuller understanding of the event and its historical context, and would require us to ask questions about the way our lives today bear the historical imprint of that era. What I fear is that many of the 50th anniversary observances, and there are many as Margaret pointed out, many that have taken place, many to come, that many of them are just to close the book on the racist violence of the civil rights era so that we can embalm that violence and transform it into something to be gazed at through the conventional lens of the museum.

Maybe there is something to be learned from the way that Birmingham Civil Rights Institute frames that bombing. As opposed to regular museum exhibit, and if any of you have ever visited the Civil Rights Institute, you know that it is an absolutely incredible museum with amazing exhibits. But for the church bombing, there is simply a window. There is a window through which one can see the church, meditate on its history, and see it as it changes and transforms. Remembering that this was the site of one of the most vicious terror attacks this country has witnessed.

If you have ever visited Birmingham and the museum, you will also know that across 6th Avenue from the museum and kitty corner from the church is the Kelly Ingram Park, where demonstrations that were organized in the 16th Street Baptist Church were staged. It was the home base for the Children’s Crusade. And how many of us remember that it was young children, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, some as young as 9 or 10, who faced police dogs and faced high-power water hoses and went to jail for our sake? And so there is deep symbolism in the fact that these four young girls’ lives were consumed by that bombing. It was children who were urging us to imagine a future that would be a future of equality and justice.

It’s important that we resist the temptation of abstraction. How easy it is to think about four innocent young black girls whose lives were violently taken away by white supremacists. And I’m not suggesting that this did not happen. Of course it did. What I’m saying is that it was a lot more complicated. And if we don’t attempt to understand the complexity of this historical event, then we will certainly not be capable of comprehending that violence, that racist violence, and its connections with sexist violence or homophobic and xenophobic violence, which continues to erupt in our lives today. Resisting the temptation of historical abstraction requires us to realize that this was not an extraordinary event that erupted one Sunday morning 50 years ago in otherwise peaceful city. As I pointed out, violence was very much the norm.

When I was growing up, Bull Connor, Eugene Bull Connor, was the commissioner of public safety. And of course his notoriety is linked to the way in which he used those high-power water hoses and dogs against the children and because of the KKK violence, against the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, and violence, in which the police whom Bull Connor controlled did not intervene. But I remember hearing when I was growing up, I remember growing up hearing when black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, Bull Connor would announce that there would be bloodshed. And indeed, there would be a bombing or a house would be burned.

As much talk as there has been about terrorism over the last decade, I have not heard one official acknowledgment of the terrorism that prevailed in places like Birmingham. Terrorism is a part of our history. It is not something that is alien. And, by the way, no one ever suggested that we plant dynamite in white communities as a response to that terrorism. So I guess I would say, why do we need to respond with devastating violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria?

It is also not widely known that black people arm themselves. This is a story that has been excised from the official record of the “freedom movement”. And interestingly, Condoleezza Rice has described her minister father, this was recently in an interview with Al Sharpton. She described her minister father as being a leader of an armed patrol of black men in her neighborhood. And as she pointed out, no one was ever shot. Guns may have been fired to scare the Klu Klux Klan away, they may, have been, she says they may have been fired in the air, but no one was ever shot. No one was ever hurt. And I wonder why she didn’t learn this lesson about ways to respond to terrorism, you know which she could’ve used during her tenure as Secretary of State. And I should say I was happy to see that this morning Melissa Harris Perry called her out on this after showing clips of her interview with Al Sharpton.

But my father was also a member of an armed patrol in our neighborhood. Black people had guns, but only because we had no other choice. Black people had to arm themselves after the 1877 Hayes Tilden compromise in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes was handed the presidency under the condition, remember, the Republicans were supposed to be the good guys in those days, OK, under the condition that he would draw all federal troops from the south. And so black people were effectively informed that they were on their own from then on, from 1877 on. This is the period that witnessed the emergence of official structures of white supremacy that did not begin to come down until the resistance of the mid-20th century freedom movement.

Just as sediments of slavery are still with us, most dramatically represented by the country’s incarceration practices and by the racism of the death penalty. The vestiges of an era where racist violence was the norm and was condoned by officials from local governments to Washington are still haunting us. We know the names of young black and brown people who have been killed by the police or by vigilantes. We know the names of Trayvon Martin in Florida, of Haditha Pendleton in Chicago who was killed shortly after having participated in the second Obama inauguration. And then of course, here in Oakland, we know the name of Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant. And I can say, that no matter how long an individual perpetrator is sent to prison in any of these cases and any others, no one can say that justice has been done. Because we know that the roots of racist violence, the roots of the violence that claimed their lives are so tightly woven into our country’s social fabric that an eye for an eye will not do it. An eye for an eye will not do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Author, activist, scholar, Angela Davis. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, knew two of the girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing 50 years ago Sunday. She spoke in Oakland Sunday night at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, in Northeastern School of Law.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Find this story at 16 September 2013

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Azerbaijan’s record on freedom of expression, assembly, and association has been on a
steady decline for some years, but it has seen a dramatic deterioration since mid-2012.
Since then the government has been engaged in a concerted effort to curtail opposition
political activity, punish public allegations of corruption and other criticism of government
practices, and exercise greater control over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It has
done so by arresting and imprisoning dozens of political activists on bogus charges,
adopting restrictive legislative amendments, consistently breaking up public
demonstrations in the capital, and failing in its duty to investigate and punish those
responsible for violent attacks and smear campaigns against critical journalists.
The crackdown started in response to youth groups’ attempts to organize protests in Baku
soon after the uprisings broke out in the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011. It
intensified in mid-2012, apparently in anticipation of the October 2013 presidential
elections.
This report, based on more than 100 interviews, documents the cases of 39 individuals
detained, charged, convicted, and/or harassed in the 18 months from February 2012 to
August 2013. The government of Azerbaijan has for many years used bogus charges to
imprison some of its critics and has a long record of dispersing – often violently – peaceful
public protests and arresting protesters. However, the sheer number of arrests, the
adoption of harsher laws, and extensive government efforts to stop and prevent peaceful
public protests indicate a new concerted government effort to curtail political and civic
activism in the country.
Arrest and Imprisonment
Individuals arrested and imprisoned have included several high-ranking members of
opposition political parties, government critics who frequently blog or have large
followings on social media, and people who have been consistently involved in political
protests in Azerbaijan, which have increased since the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East
and North Africa.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 2
Activists in youth wings of political parties and the youth opposition movement NIDA have
been particular targets. NIDA, which means “exclamation mark” in Azeri, was founded in
2010 and campaigns for democratic reforms and the rule of law in Azerbaijan. From March
7 to April 1, 2013, police arrested seven NIDA members, claiming they were involved in an
alleged plan to instigate violence at a peaceful protest. Another NIDA board member and
two other youth activists were arrested on misdemeanor charges and had their heads
forcefully shaven while they served their brief jail terms. All are active Facebook and
Twitter users who frequently posted criticism about alleged government corruption and
human rights abuses.
Others who have been arrested or imprisoned include at least six journalists, two human
rights defenders who had worked on getting assistance to flood victims, one defender who
documented abuse in police custody, and a lawyer who tried to secure adequate
compensation for people forcibly evicted from their homes.
Bogus Charges and Other Due Process Irregularities
The authorities have used a range of misdemeanor and trumped-up criminal charges
against these activists, including narcotics and weapons possession charges, hooliganism,
incitement, and even treason. In many of the cases described in this report, Human Rights
Watch documented numerous irregularities as well as due process and other violations
that have marred the investigations and legal proceedings against the victims. Authorities
have in many cases denied defendants’ access to lawyers of their own choosing whilst in
detention. Courts have ordered defendants to be held on remand despite the absence of
any evidence justifying the need for pretrial detention. In 17 cases documented here, the
authorities did not adequately – if at all – investigate credible allegations of beatings,
threats, and other abuses.
In a vivid example of this, two days after the arrests of the first three NIDA members, nearly
all Azerbaijani television channels, including the state channel and the public broadcaster,
broadcast a police video of two of them allegedly confessing to a plan to use Molotov
cocktails at a street protest. The televised statements had been made while the activists
were in custody without access to their lawyers, and the statements gave the impression of
being coached, raising fears that the activists were coerced or threatened in order to give
3 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
false confessions. Yet the police did not effectively investigate allegations by several of the
detained NIDA activists that they were beaten or otherwise ill-treated in custody.
The Azerbaijani government also has a longstanding practice of pressing bogus drugs
charges against its critics, and it has used this method in the current crackdown. From May
2012 to May 2013 at least six government critics were arrested on charges of possession of
narcotics. In these cases, the defendants’ lawyers were not present during the searches
and could not access their clients for several days following their arrest. Furthermore,
during interrogations several of the men were questioned primarily about their political
activities rather than the allegations of possession of narcotics, further highlighting the
political nature of their prosecution.
Targeting of Journalists and Attacks on Freedom of Expression
State antagonism toward independent and opposition media has been a serious problem
in Azerbaijan for many years. In the past six years dozens of journalists have been
prosecuted and imprisoned or fined on defamation and other charges. Police and
sometimes unidentified assailants physically attacked journalists with impunity. In 2012
the authorities released several journalists who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and
there has been a sharp decline in criminal defamation suits pursued by the authorities.
However, since January 2013 at least six more journalists have been handed prison
sentences on spurious charges in apparent retaliation for doing their job of engaging in
critical and investigative journalism. We documented four cases taking place in February,
March, and April 2013 alone in which threats, smear campaigns, and violent attacks clearly
sought to silence critical journalists and a writer.
Since at least 2011 the Azerbaijani government has committed to decriminalize libel, a
promise for which it has received not insignificant praise. However, in May 2013 the
parliament of Azerbaijan expanded the definition of criminal slander and insult to
specifically include content “publicly expressed in internet resources.”
Targeting of NGOs
The crackdown has also affected NGOs. Azerbaijan has a large and vibrant community of
NGOs devoted to such public policy issues as human rights, corruption, democracy
promotion, revenue transparency, rule of law, ethnic minorities, and religious freedom.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 4
Legislative amendments adopted in February 2013, however, make it impossible for
unregistered groups to legally receive grants and donations. In recent years the authorities’
refusal to register several human rights groups and their closure and harassment of
several others demonstrates the government’s determination to interfere with NGOs in
order to restrict controversial work or criticism of the government.
The amendments also increased by fivefold fines for NGOs that receive funding from a
donor without concluding a grant agreement and registering it with the Ministry of Justice.
The amendments give the government greater latitude to exercise control over registered
groups while at the same time significantly restricting the ability of unregistered groups to
receive donations and grants. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the cumulative effect
of these factors will be to marginalize the activities of organizations that are outspoken,
challenge government policies, and/or work on controversial issues.
Restrictions on Freedom of Assembly
Another manifestation of the government’s crackdown has been severe limitations on
freedom of assembly. The Baku municipal authorities have implemented a blanket ban on
all opposition demonstrations in the city center since early 2006. The authorities have
broken up unsanctioned ones – often with violence – and have arrested and imprisoned
peaceful protestors, organizers, and participants. Our research shows that the
misdemeanor trials of those charged for involvement in unsanctioned protests are
perfunctory. In an effort to further limit the right to assembly, in November 2012 and May
2013 parliament adopted amendments to laws increasing by more than hundredfold the
fines for participating in and organizing unauthorized protests. Other amendments
increased the maximum jail sentence for minor public order offenses often used to
incarcerate protesters from 15 to 60 days.
What Should be Done?
The government of Azerbaijan should take immediate steps to ensure the release of
political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and other civil society activists
held on politically motivated charges and end the use of trumped-up or spurious charges
to prosecute government critics.
5 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
The authorities should conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and effective investigations to
end impunity for violence and threats of violence against journalists. The investigations
should be capable of leading to prosecutions of the assailants, as required under
Azerbaijan’s international obligations.
The government should also abolish criminal defamation laws, allow peaceful assemblies,
and repeal legislative changes establishing harsher penalties for the participants and
organizers of unsanctioned, peaceful protests.
The government should also take immediate steps to end any undue interference with the
freedom of the Azerbaijani people to form associations and revise the NGO law in line with
the recommendations made by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, particularly
ensuring that overly complicated registration requirements do not create undue obstacles
to freedom of association.
Under international law, and as a state party to both the European Convention on Human
Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Azerbaijani
government has specific legal obligations to protect the rights to freedom of expression,
assembly, and association. International human rights law recognizes those freedoms as
fundamental human rights, essential for both the effective functioning of a democratic
society and the protection of individual dignity. Any limitations to those rights must be
narrowly defined to serve a legitimate purpose and must be demonstrably necessary in a
democratic society. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights has consistently
made clear, including through four rulings against the government of Azerbaijan, that the
right “to form a legal entity in order to act collectively in a field of mutual interest is one of
the most important aspects of the right to freedom of association, without which that right
would be deprived of any meaning.”
For many years, and particularly since Azerbaijan became a member of the Council of
Europe in 2001, it has been receiving international assistance from multilateral and
bilateral donors, including the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the United States, to meet its commitments on
freedom of expression, association, and assembly. While Azerbaijan’s international
partners have been critical of Baku’s serious shortcomings in meeting its commitments,
the criticism appears to have had little impact on these actors’ relationships with the
government, perhaps because most actors prioritize the country’s geostrategic importance
and hydrocarbon resources in their relations with it. Azerbaijan’s international partners
should set clear benchmarks for improvements on human rights if the international
community is to succeed in persuading Baku to respect its commitments under freedom of
expression, association, and assembly and should be prepared to impose concrete policy
consequences should those expectations not be met.

Find this story at 9 September 2013

© 2013 Human Rights Watch

Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department has established an intelligence operation that in some ways has been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core is a spying operation targeting Arab- and Muslim-Americans where they live, work and pray. The NYPD’s “Demographics Unit,” as it was known until 2010, has secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations in restaurants, barber shops and gyms, and built a vast database of information. The program was established with help from the CIA, which is barred from domestic spying. Just last month, it emerged the NYPD has labeled at least 50 Muslim organizations, including a dozen mosques, as terrorist groups. This has allowed them to carry out what are called “Terrorism Enterprise Investigations,” sending undercover informants into mosques to spy on worshipers and make secret recordings. We’re joined by the Pulitzer-winning duo who exposed the NYPD’s spy program, Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, co-authors of the new book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We’re also joined by Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, which was among the groups targeted by the NYPD.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Yes, well, it’s been 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, but only now is a full picture emerging of what could be one of its most controversial legacies. In the aftermath of 9/11, the New York City Police Department established an intelligence operation that in some ways has even been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core, a spying operation targeting Muslim Americans, where they live, work, and pray. The NYPD’s demographics unit, as it was known until 2010, has a secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and restaurants, barber shops, and gyms, and built a vast database of information on Muslim Americans. The program was established with help from the CIA, which is barred from spying on Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: Just last month, it emerged that the NYPD has labeled at least 50 Muslim organizations including a dozen mosques as terrorist groups. This has allowed them to carry out what are called terrorism enterprise investigations, sending undercover informants into mosques to spy on worshipers and make secret recordings. That news came just weeks after a group of Muslim Americans filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD’s spy program, alleging what they call unconstitutional religious profiling and suspicionless surveillance. At a news conference, plaintiff Asad Dandia described his run-in with the man who turned out to be a police informant.

ASAD DANDIA: In March of 2012, I was approached by a 19-year-old man. He came to me telling me that he was looking for spirituality, and that he was looking to change his ways. He said he had a very dark past and wanted to be a better practicing Muslim. So, I figured what better way to have him perform his obligations than to join this organization? In October of 2012 he released a public statement saying he was an informant for the NYPD. When I found out, I had a whole mixture of feelings. Number one, I was terrified and I was afraid for my family, especially my younger sisters who were exposed to all of this. I felt betrayed and hurt because someone I took in as a friend and brother was lying to me.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Asad Dandia, one of the plaintiffs in the suit by Muslim Americans against the NYPD for spying. Arguments in the case began last week. While the spy program has been intrusive, it has also been ineffective. The NYPD has even admitted that the demographics unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In a deposition last year, the commanding officer of the intelligence division, assistant NYPD chief, Thomas Galati, said “I could tell you that I have never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report and I’m here since 2006. I don’t recall other ones prior to my arrival.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the NYPD spy program was first exposed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press. Two lead reporters on the story have just come out the new book that expands on their ground breaking reporting. Their book is called, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” Co-authors Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman join us here in New York. They shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Matt, lay it out. Lay out this book for us. In a nutshell, how you got on this story, and what you found.

MATT APPUZO: Sure, well, our book really goes a lot deeper and a lot broader than we were able to do even in all the many stories we wrote for the AP. What we really focused on is how in the aftermath of 9/11, about how the NYPD working hand-in-hand with the CIA, built an intelligence apparatus that focuses on American citizens like no other police department in the country. This active-duty CIA officer and a retired CIA officer built in apparatus by which, you know, a sort of army of informants is out there and we have these demographics officers who their job is just to hang out in neighborhoods and listen for what people are talking about.

Some of what we have seen in these files, it’s a file says, we saw two men speaking at a cafe and they were talking about what they thought about the president’s state of the union address, and here’s what they thought. What do they think about drones, what do they think about foreign policy, what do they think about American policies toward civil liberties, you know, TSA. Are we too discriminatory against Muslims? All the stuff ends up in police files and their justification is, we need to know what the sentiment of these communities are so we can look for hotspots.

AARON MATÉ: Adam, talk to us about how this plays out. So, you have NYPD Commissioner, Ray Kelly, working with David Cohen from the CIA, and they set out to create basically a map of all New York’s ethnic neighborhoods?

ADAM GOLDMAN: Yeah, that’s right, I mean, that is what the demographics unit was doing. They wanted to literally map the human terrain of the five boroughs of New York. And they went beyond too, they went into Newark, they went into other places as well; Newark, New Jersey. So, they had this fear after 9/11, and they looked out into the Queens and Brooklyn and these other places where there were a lot of Muslim Americans and thought, we don’t know much about these communities and they looked, as an example, at people like Mohammed Atta, who was one of the 9/11 hijackers. Mohammed Atta had radicalized, he had grown more religious, and he was — he had given off the signals in front of the community, and they wanted to be in the communities in New York, so if there is anyone like Mohammed Atta, in fact anybody who was radicalizing they would have listening posts. They would have eyes and ears in the community to pick up on that.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things you write about is how the undercover officers would go to the best Arab food restaurants, not coming up with leads, but because the food was good and just “spy” there.

ADAM GOLDMAN: We found a lot that these plainclothes officers working with the demographics unit were gravitating toward the better restaurants. There is a bakery, the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn that serves excellent pastries. There is a kebab house in Flushing, Queens that serves excellent kebab. And what the commanding officer in charge of the demographics unit started to see was there were many reports being filed from similar locations. And how do spend you $40 at the pastry shop? And so, eventually, he determined they were going there, following these reports, simply because the food was good.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Appuzo, talk about the main players here. Talk about Larry Sanchez, talk about David Cohen who’d come from the CIA and went to the NYPD.

MATT APPUZO: Sure, Ray Kelly comes on board as police commissioner after 9/11, and says, look, we can’t rely solely on the federal government. And I think really smartly said, we can’t do business as usual. We need to start developing our own intelligence and have a better sense of what is going on in the city. So, the guy he hired to do that is a man named Dave Cohen, who we profile really deeply in the book, who made his career at the CIA, rose to the level of the deputy director for operations, basically a nation’s top spy.

So, he retired as the head of the clandestine service. And he was basically recruited out of retirement to start what is, basically a mini-CIA at the NYPD. One of Cohen’s first things, is he then calls down to the CIA and says, hey, I need an active-duty guy who can be my right-hand man. George tenet, the director of the CIA, sends Larry Sanchez to New York. And Larry is this very likable guy, skydiver, scuba diver, a guy’s guy, and he’s active duty, so he’s got a blue CIA badge. So, he can start the morning — early morning at the CIA station in New York and then kind of go over to the NYPD and he is directing domestic operations for NYPD and he is telling officers how to do collection or where to focus their efforts. And he really was the architect of the demographics unit. So, this guy, active-duty for the CIA, was really the intellectual father of the demographics unit.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We are speaking with the prize-winning reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who have written the book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We will be back with them in a moment.

[Music]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, reporters for the Associated Press, co-authors of the brand-new book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We are also joined by Linda Sarsour. She is here in New York City, a leading Arab-American activist with the Arab American Association of New York, a national network for Arab American communities. I’m Amy Goodman with Aaron Maté.

AARON MATÉ: Well, before break, we were talking about Larry Sanchez who came to the NYPD from the CIA. Let’s turn to a part of a 2007 hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs that looked at the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts. This is, then Senator, Joe Lieberman questioning New York City Assistant Police Commissioner Larry Sanchez, the analyst who came to the NYPD from the CIA.

JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: I’m paraphrasing, but I think you said that the aim of this investigation and of the NYPD was not just to prevent terrorist attacks, obviously, post-9/11 in New York City, but to try to prevent — understand and then prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorist attacks. So, in the end of it, what are the steps that you come away with that you feel in this very usual area, unremarkable people, not on the screen of law enforcement — how do you begin to try to prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorism?

LARRY SANCHEZ: Let me try to answer this way; the key to it was, first, to understand it, and to start appreciating what most people would say would be noncriminal, would be innocuous, looking at behaviors that could easily be argued in a western democracy, especially in the United States, to be protected by First and Fourth Amendment rights, but not to look at them in a vacuum, but to look across to them as potential precursors to terrorism. New York City, of course, has created its own methods to be able to understand them better, to be able to identify them and to be able to make judgment calls if these are things that we need to worry about.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Larry Sanchez, testifying in 2007. Matt Apuzzo?

MATT APPUZO: Adam and I have watched that clip and read the transcript, I don’t know, dozens of times, and one of our great regrets is that this happened in 2007 and nobody, and including us, said, hey, that guy just got up and said stuff that is protected by the First Amendment shouldn’t be viewed as such and should be viewed as potential precursor to terrorism and that the NYPD has these sort of unspecified methods to decide how to ferret that out. I kind of watch that now, and I remember when that happened, and now I’m kind of like, how the heck did I not — how did the reporter in me not say, geez, well what are these methods? Why the heck did it take four years before…? You know, Adam and I look back now and we’re like, jeez, they told us they were doing this stuff, they told us — they laid it all out there. And why weren’t we as journalists, as a public, more skeptical and why weren’t we willing to ask more questions?

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI, Adam Goldman, and the NYPD were also competing with each other, so much so they were going to sue each other. Can you explain what was happening?

ADAM GOLDMAN: Well, there was enormous friction between the FBI and the NYPD, mainly the NYPD intelligence division. And these two outfits would sometimes not work in harmony. Mainly because Dave Cohen thought that the intelligence division and his detectives should go on their own. He didn’t want to be part of the part of what they called group think. So, they said, look, we’ll go out and we’re going to investigate and if we find something, we’;ll bring it to you. But, the problem with doing that is that, sometimes these investigations were in late stages and the FBI had concerns about how they had developed these cases. And it flared up in the newspaper. And in the end, the FBI felt like, look, you just can’t go out and do your own thing. We’re going to stop this, we got to work as a team and that is how you build — cooperation is how you build stronger cases.

AARON MATÉ: Matt, and the spying of course, also extended beyond the Muslim community. There’s reports in your book about spying on left-wing activists, on bicycle protests?

MATT APPUZO: Yeah, so, everybody remembers the bombing of the Times Square recruiting station. The pipe bomb, thankfully didn’t injure injure anyone, but it was 3:00 in the morning and blew out a window. Well, in the aftermath of that, the NYPD, and we’ve seen this in the files, the NYPD did an investigation were they said, you know, we have identified this blog that posts links to protests, news stories about protests and pictures of protests all around the world, confrontations, anarchist protests, radical protests, people throwing people throwing Molotov cocktails. That’s what this blog does, and they said, boy, that blog had a link up to a Fox news story about the Times Square bombing within three hours. And to the NYPD, the three hours seemed awfully quick. And so, they said, well, maybe that suggests that the guy who runs the blog knew in advance. And it turns out that at one point years earlier, one of the guys who ran the blog, this guy named Dennis Burke, he had ties to Critical Mass, the guys who ride the bikes, and Time’s Up New York, the protest group in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: And friends of Brad Will.

MATT APPUZO: And friends of Brad Will, the group that wants to get to the bottom of the death of American journalists in Mexico. So, they actually open an investigation based on those facts. They open an investigation not only into Burke, but also into his associates in these other groups. And so, they infiltrated the Times Up guys, the Critical Mass guys, the Friends of Brad Will. They actually sent an undercover officer as part of this investigation out to the People’s Summit in New Orleans, which is a group of sort of anti-globalization groups, and the NYPD was there. Because of this investigation into the bombing, they actually put into the files, people who were organized — labor organizing for nannies, people who were talking about the Palestinian conflict with the Israelis, people who are writing newsletters from, sort of, left-wing organizations, this stuff that had no connection — nobody believed there was any connection to the bombing, but it just shows you how this stuff spirals away from its central focus.

AMY GOODMAN: Linda Sarsour, can you talk about, as your with the Arab-American Association of New York, how the investigations that the NYPD was conducting that Adam and Matt are describing, affected you and your community?

LINDA SARSOUR: So, Adam and Matt basically confirmed everything that our community already knew was happening, at least since immediately after 9/11. And the terrorist enterprise investigations that you heard also included, I believe, my organization. And what the NYPD wanted to do to my organization, they clearly lay this out in a secret document, they wanted to recruit a confidential informant to sit on my board. So, not only were they creating listening posts and going into our restaurants, coming to our events, coming — acting as clients in our organization, they wanted to actually have someone who would be a deciding figure on my board, have access donors, have access to information, access to financial information, and I think that we keep learning that the program is just more outrageous. And what it does is it creates psychological warfare in our community.

How am I supposed to know if the NYPD was successful in that endeavor? That’s number one. Number two is, the community, right now, is in a position where, how do we even know the guy next to us that’s praying at the mosque or the guy at the restaurant that’s like trying to open a conversation with us about something that is happening in Egypt, for example, and for those people who know, Arabs, particularly, we love to talk about politics. And a lot of our families came to the United States so we could have a place to practice our religion freely, to have our own political views, and now that we know that the NYPD wants to hear what our sentiment is, people probably don’t want to share their sentiment.

The most disturbing of all is our Muslim student association who are calling us to consult about how political should their events be. Now, when I was in college, I wanted my events to be as political as possible. And if they weren’t, I wanted to figure out how to make them controversial. And the fact that our students feel that they can’t do that because there are going to be NYPD informants, because they can be taken out of context and because they think that something like what happened to Fahad Hashmi is going to happen to them, I think it is a valid concern.

So, I’m a New Yorker and I hope others are outraged to know that the New York Police Department is spying on innocent Americans in their neighborhood. The last point that I want to make is that these terrorist investigations, what happens is, is that if they open one, anyone who comes into that facility that’s under investigation is subject to that investigation. So, if my organization has this terrorist enterprise investigation, that means every client, every staff member, every family member, every vendor that we work with is subject to this investigation by the New York Police Department.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the NYPD Soccer League.

LINDA SARSOUR: A program that the NYPD touts as a community outreach program, and something we that believed as a community we were involved in because we wanted to get kids off the street, we wanted kids to play sports and it was organized sports competition between kids from different boroughs. It was fun. We joined, as the Arab American Association of New York. We had a team, Brooklyn United. In 2009 we beat the Turks from Queens, and it was great, and it was fun, and we have a huge trophy from the New York Police Department. What we learned later learned through secret documents is that the New York Police Department was using a sports league — now imagine that your child is part of this league and is being spied on by the New York Police Department. And what the New York Police Department did is they actually mapped out for you two different documents. One was, where did the South Asians play cricket and watch cricket, and where did the Arabs play soccer and watch soccer? For those of you who know soccer, Arabs are not the only ones that play soccer. Definitely not in New York City anyway.

So, I feel the information just gets more outrageous that even something as simple as sports, as playing soccer, is something that is under the terrain of the New York Police Department, that our kids were subject to intelligence gathering and spying by the New York Police Department when all they wanted to do was beat some people or some other kids in another borough. And I think our kids, right now, you know, their families are like what’s this. How am I supposed to explain to them that I didn’t know, that I was not — that I had no intention of subjecting their children to intelligence gathering by the New York Police Department? And so, I personally get put in a situation that Commissioner Kelly and his people put us in. And actually the Arab officers who worked in the Community Affairs Department, I don’t know if they knew, but if they did know, shame on them for allowing us to be a part of something where they knew had ultimate if reasons.

AARON MATÉ: Now, Linda, hear in New York, there is obviously a lot of public protest against stop-and-frisk. How has it been to organize resistance to this spying on your community? What are you finding in terms of the public’s perception to this program?

LINDA SARSOUR: In New York right now, and I think in the country as a whole, I think that you’ll find it is more likely for people to say, oh, stopping 685,000 blacks and Latino young people, that’s a little racist, you know, that’s kind of a little too much. I think we’re finding more people, and I’m part of the stop-and-frisk movement as a person who is not black or Latino. So, I’ve seen that sentiment. But, with the spying, it has been hard to get people to understand that it is the same thing. They are both discriminatory policies that target communities of color. No matter what way somebody tries to explain it to me.

The problem with our movement is that it’s framed in the sense of personal security, so people are like, well, if you are not doing anything wrong, what’s the problem? What’s the inconvenience of some guy who listens to, like, your conversations. And I think that’s where the fundamental principles of who we are as Americans and what our rights are, right to privacy — I shouldn’t have to worry about working in an organization that — that’s infiltrated by the New York Police Department. I hope no one else has to worry about that. But, it’s been a little difficult for us to organize around this, but continue to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking to MSNBC last month, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly responded to the report by our guests Matt Appuzo and Adam Goldman that the NYPD has labeled mosques as terrorist organizations. Kelly insisted the NYPD’s operations are legal.

RAYMOND KELLY: I haven’t seen the story, but they’re hyping a book coming out next week. Actually, the book is based on a compilation of about 50 articles that two AP reporters did on the department. It’s a reflection of the articles and the book will be a fair amount of fiction, it will be half-truths, it will be lots of quotes from unnamed sources. And our sin is to have the temerity, the chutzpah, to go into the federal government’s territory of counter-terrorism and trying to protect the city by supplementing what the federal government has done.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You do agree that entire mosques should not be labeled terrorist organizations, right?

RAYMOND KELLY: Absolutely, of course, of course. And again, we do according to law, what we are investigating, and how we investigated is now pursuant to a federal judge’s direction.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who is reportedly one of the people being considered to head the Department of Homeland Security. Adam Goldman, there was a lot there, accusations that your reports are fiction and based on unnamed sources. Go ahead.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Well, one of the things we tried to do with this book that the NYPD doesn’t do is we tried to be incredibly transparent. If Ray Kelly gets the chance, he can read the book, he’ll find that many people spoke on record about what the NYPD was doing. Named individuals, including Hector Berdecia who ran the demographics unit. Another thing we tried to do is end note all these secret documents that were leaked to us so the reader themselves can go and look at the end note and then go to our website, enemieswithinbook.com, and read the secret files them self, and come to their own conclusions. So we lay all that out and in an effort to be completely transparent. The book is, as The Wall Street Journal said, assiduously reported. The other point I’d like to make about Ray’s comments is that he won’t engage with us on the book and he’s never engaged with us either on the book or our reporting. And Matt and I went to great lengths in the book to make a good case for why the NYPD felt like they needed these programs in the aftermath of 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the head of the demographics unit who then came to be completely disturbed about what his unit was doing.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Yeah, he was guy, he was a legendary narcotics detective. I mean, he was taking down drug dealers, taking guns off the streets. He was also a military reservist.

AMY GOODMAN: His name?
>> Hector Berdecia. And after 9/11, he spent time in Iraq and he was there post-invasion. And he came back to New York and they offered him this job to run this secretive unit that he was unfamiliar with. And he took this job. And he felt that, you know, hey, there are bad guys in New York, there are bad guys in New York, there’s Al Qaeda in New York, and he believed it. He, himself, had said himself he sort of drank the Kool-Aid. As he went on running this unit, he began to get frustrated and he began to see that he had really talented detectives, right, with really great language skills, right, and they weren’t making any cases. It was just and effective way — it was more about effectiveness, is this an effective way to use resources of talented police investigators? These were guys who are used to putting bad guys in jail, right? Taking drugs off the street, taking guns off the streets. Guns kill people. And he, instead, was writing intelligence reports about what people think of the state of the union address. And eventually, I think he got frustrated and disillusioned with the program.

AARON MATÉ: Matt, can you talk about the issue of oversight? First of all, this raises a lot of civil rights issues. Has there been a response from White House or from the Justice Department? And then also talk about what kind of oversight exists here in the city.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, and what — is this happening now?

MATT APPUZO: Everything that we talk about in the book, with the exception of a few sort of ancillary programs, but the core of the book, to our knowledge, is still happening now. Fascinating the issue of oversight, the NYPD gets money from the City Council every year, obviously, the City Council never held a hearing to actually look into the intelligence division’s programs. They have never been subjected to an audit. The intelligence division gets money from the White House under a drug trafficking grant. The White House says, we don’t have any — we don’t know what the money is used for. You can’t hold us to account with what the NYPD does with our money. Congress has funded these programs. They don’t know, they’re not equipped to know, they don’t ask. Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have spent $1 billion, $2 billion at the NYPD since 9/11. They say they don’t know what goes on, and the way the grants are set up they they don’t have the ability to know.

There is essentially, no outside oversight at the NYPD intelligence division. The programs are opened in house. They don’t have to be approved by a judge, they don’t have to be approved by a prosecutor. Kelly likes to talk about we have all the federal prosecutors and the district attorney, but they don’t actually decide when the Intel division can open the case. So there isn’t the kind of outside review that you would see at the CIA or the FBI. And, you know what, from our standpoint, the lack of transparency, the fact this was all done in secret with no public airing, was really what drove us to write this book, because you can’t — people can’t give their informed consent to a program that they don’t know exists, they don’t know what they’re giving up, they don’t know what they’re getting in exchange.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, as we come to the end of this conversation, Najibullah Zazi, of course, a key figure in your book?

MATT APPUZO: The book, in its essence, is a thriller book, I mean, it’s a chase. This is essentially 48 hours inside New York City as the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States tries to unravel the most serious Al Qaeda plot since 9/11, inside the United States, three young men led by Najibullah Zazi, with a bomb, bearing down on the New York City subways, had this been successful, it would caused hundreds if not thousands of fatalities. And we take a real hard look, a real critical look — or we think a thorough look, at what works and what doesn’t. And what we found is at every opportunity, that Zazi is interacts with these intelligence programs of the NYPD Intelligence Division, the [Unintelligible].

AARON MATÉ: They were in his neighborhood.

MATT APPUZO: They were in his neighborhood, they were in his mosque, they had turned his Imam into a cooporative, they had an undercover in his mosque, they were in his co-conspirator student group, they were in all the restaurants in his neighborhood, they were in the travel agency where he bought tickets to go to Pakistan — the train. This was not a failure of resources and manpower.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened?

MATT APPUZO: Well, they didn’t — they missed him. Well, you have to read the book to find out how they stop him, come on. The subways don’t blow up, so the real rush is good collaboration, good cooperation is what saves the day.

AMY GOODMAN: And Adam, what most surprised you in doing this series of articles? You did scores of articles, and of course, the book is more than the compilation of the articles.

ADAM GOLDMAN: I think what most surprised us is while we were doing the series that led to the Pulitzer, we knew they were in the mosques and we knew they had informants in the mosques, they had under covers in the mosques. And Ray said, well, we’re just following leads, and this is all legal. That’s been Ray’s — that’s Ray’s phrase, it’s all legal. And we didn’t really didn’t understand how is this all legal. How can you just be a mosque?

AMY GOODMAN: People might be surprised that the CIA is involved in local surveillance.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Right, right. Then while we were reporting at the book we obtained documents this is how they were doing it. We learned about the terrorism enterprise investigation. And so, now, holistically, we understood, oh, right, so, they open this investigation on sometimes reed-thin suspicions and they use that to gather their intelligence on these mosques — the leadership of the mosques for years and years and years and years. They never made a terrorism enterprise case. And by designating the mosque a terrorism enterprise, they could send in their informants and undercovers, you now, they send in people with spy gadgets, listening devices in their watches and their [] and that was really extraordinary. I want to make a point —- one last point about Ray, and why we make the -—

AMY GOODMAN: Ray Kelly, the Commissioner.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Ray Kelly, and why we wrote this book. We’re not questioning Ray Kelly’s patriotism, and we’re not questioning his authority as Police Chief to keep this city better. I guess what we’re doing is, and maybe to use one of Ray’s words, is it’s chutzpah. I guess we have the chutzpah to ask questions about what the police department is doing and whether these tactics work.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there, but we will continue to talk to you as you continue to uncover what is taking place. I want to thank you both for being with us, and congratulations on your Pulitzer for your series of articles. The new book is, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman. And thank you so much, Linda Sarsour; Arab American Association of New York and the National Network for Arab American Communities. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look at a terrorist attack that occurred 50 years ago this past Sunday. It was September 15, 1963, and it happened in the Birmingham Baptist Church. Four little girls were the fatalities. We’re going to speak to the fifth who did not die, but lost her eye. We’ll go to Birmingham, Alabama. Stay with us.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 September 2013

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Tunisian newspaper Al Maghreb published a document Saturday that appears to contain details of intelligence obtained by the Ministry of Interior prior to the assassination of opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi. The memo from the ministry’s National Security Administration states that the Foreign Security Administration received a letter from someone in the United States Central Intelligence Agency about a potential threat to Brahmi. More on Mohamed Brahmi:Ministry of Interior Received Warning of Brahmi Threat Prior to AssassinationTunisian Media Ethics Questioned in Coverage of Brahmi AssassinationWho’s Who: Mohamed Brahmi Communication between the two offices included information about the possible targeting of National Constituent Assembly (NCA) member Mohamed Brahmi by “Salafist members” but there were no “further clarifications,” according to the memo. The document obtained by Al Maghreb is signed by the director general of national security Mustapha Ben Amor and dated July 15, ten days before Brahmi’s assassination. Release of the document follows Minister of the Interior Lotfi Ben Jeddou’s Friday announcement that the ministry received information of a threat to Brahmi’s life from an “external” security source. According to the document, Tunisian public security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism administrations were informed of the potential threat “in order to take the necessary procedures.” Brahmi was shot outside his home on July 25, the second assassination of an opposition politician this year. Chokri Belaid was killed in February.

16 September 2013 10:37 am | Alexandra Hartmann |

Find this story at 16 September 2013

The document

© Tunisia Live 2013

Despite assurances from President Obama, the scandal around the National Security Agency continues to grow. The Guardian reports the NSA has routinely passed raw intelligence to Israel about U.S. citizens. “The NSA was sharing what they call raw signals intelligence, which includes things like who you are calling and when you are calling, the content of your phone call, the text of your emails, your text messages, your chat messages,” says Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It sounds like all of that was handed over.” Abdo also discusses the ACLU’s successful fight to force the government to declassify documents that show the NSA wrongly put 16,000 American phone numbers on an “alert list.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday the National Security Agency routinely has passed raw intelligence to Israel without first removing details about U.S. citizens. Documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of a secret intelligence-sharing agreement between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, that shows the U.S. government handed over intercepted communications containing phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

Meanwhile, newly declassified documents show the NSA wrongly put 16,000 phone numbers on an “alert list” so their incoming calls could be monitored in violation of court-ordered privacy protections.

AMY GOODMAN: When the NSA notified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the error, Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wrote, quote, “The court is exceptionally concerned about what appears to be a flagrant violation of its order in this matter.” The documents were declassified after a long fight with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union that filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit two years ago.

In other NSA news, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is facing pressure at home to cancel an upcoming state visit to the White House after documents leaked by Snowden revealed the NSA had hacked into the computer networks of Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras. On Wednesday, President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, met with Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Alberto in an attempt to smooth relations between the countries.

To talk more about all of these latest developments, we’re joined by Alex Abdo. He is staff attorney at the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Alex, let’s take these in order. The information about the NSA, the U.S. intelligence agency, handing over raw data that it’s collected—legally or illegally, I think remains to be determined—to Israel, can you explain what’s taken place?

ALEX ABDO: It’s difficult to explain. And it’s, you know, of course, not surprising that the NSA is sharing foreign intelligence with our intelligence partners, but what’s troubling is that along with the foreign intelligence is information about innocent Americans that hasn’t been taken out of the data that’s being shared with our intelligence partners. And it’s troubling for a couple of reasons, the first of which, we haven’t known about this, and this may have been going on for years, and the second of which, there’s no avenue for Americans, innocent Americans who are swept up into these dragnets and have their information handed over to our intelligence partners, to stop that flow of information, to assert their rights and prevent it. So this has been going on for some time, it seems, and it raises new questions about the NSA’s—the extent to which we should trust the NSA with information, very sensitive, about innocent Americans.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what limitations were placed on the information that was—that was handed over to the Israelis, in terms of what they could do with it or how long they could hold it?

ALEX ABDO: Well, based on the documents that were released, it seems as though we basically had a “trust us” regime in place for the sharing of data with Israel. And that’s cold comfort, I think, to the potentially thousands or millions of Americans who find their way into these international surveillance dragnets of the NSA. But there’s simply no way of knowing right now how many Americans were affected, how the information was used, or what other measures the NSA may have taken or may not have taken to protect our privacy.

AMY GOODMAN: And what the information was that was handed over, is it the actual—is it the metadata of phone calls, who you called, when you called them? Is it the actual phone call?

ALEX ABDO: It sounds as though it was all of that. The NSA was sharing what they call raw signals intelligence, which includes things like who you’re calling and when you’re calling, but also the content of your phone calls, the text of your emails, your text messages, your chat messages. It sounds as though all of that was handed over in what they call this raw intelligence.

AMY GOODMAN: And who was targeted?

ALEX ABDO: It’s hard to say. It sounds as though the information sharing was indiscriminate, that they handed over large amounts of information without actually targeting at the outset, and allowing the Israeli analog to the NSA to then scour this information for what was useful. And like I said, they, you know, apparently had in place a clause asking Israel not to abuse this information, but there really didn’t seem to be any legally enforceable way to prevent Americans’ privacy from being violated in the course of this intelligence sharing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, the documents you have referred to appear between 2006 and 2009, which would be the tail end of the Bush administration, but your battle to get access to the documents occurred during the Obama administration. Can you talk about that battle to be able to get these documents released?

ALEX ABDO: Sure. In 2011, two senators, Senators Wyden and Udall, started raising red flags, warnings to America about a secret interpretation that the government was relying on to collect an extraordinary amount of information about innocent Americans. And on the heels of that discussion, the ACLU and other organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed requests with the government for these secret interpretations of law. And the Obama administration, which had come into power on a promise of a new era of transparency, fought bitterly to keep these documents secret for years. And they were—it’s actually a bit ironic. In the midst of the disclosures, Obama was in the course of defending very vigorously in court extreme secrecy about these very same documents that were released two days ago. So, it’s—the secrecy was troubling. The fact that they’re now public is a good first step toward greater transparency, but this is information that did not come easily out of the Obama administration.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the documents released was a March 2nd, 2009, court order written by Judge Reggie Walton, now the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Walton writes of the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, quote, “To approve such a program, the Court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the Court’s orders. The Court no longer has such confidence.” This is the judge.

ALEX ABDO: This is extremely troubling, and it should be very disturbing. We have trusted for years a secret and one-sided judicial process to safeguard Americans’ right to privacy when it comes to NSA surveillance. And the disclosures over the past few months have confirmed that we shouldn’t trust that system to safeguard our right to privacy. And at the end of the day, the battle is between a system in which the NSA is required to go to court to engage in lawful surveillance versus the system that it has now, where it rarely has to go to court to spy even on innocent Americans. And we shouldn’t have confidence in that system, and now we know that there are even more reasons than we suspected not to have confidence in the system. But at the end of the day, that’s the debate, whether the NSA, when it wants to spy on Americans, should be forced to go to a court to justify that spying. The NSA hasn’t been doing that for years, and we need to change that, to force the NSA to justify its surveillance in court.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Of course, President Obama has been justifying that surveillance. I want to turn to a clip from him speaking last month about the leaks by Edward Snowden.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden’s put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about President Obama’s claim that the checks are in place?

ALEX ABDO: Well, I think it’s quite obvious now that the checks are not in place, that the very authorities that the government says are carefully overseen by the secret court in D.C. and by regulators within the intelligence communities are failing, that there are violations of even these very permissive rules. But at the end—you know, a core problem is not just that there are violations, but that the law authorizes an extraordinary amount of surveillance in the first place. And that underlying authorization is far too broad. It allows the NSA to engage in a form of dragnet surveillance of even Americans’ communications, that’s not tied to a particular investigation. It’s not tied to a particular terrorist plot that the NSA is trying to stop. That, I think, is the most troubling aspect of these revelations, is that these powers are simply too broad, to begin with.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, the Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, responded to critics who have accused Internet companies of working with the NSA. During an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, she was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the NSA was doing.

MARISSA MAYER: We can’t talk about those things.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Why?

MARISSA MAYER: Because they’re classified.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: What is—I mean, why?

MARISSA MAYER: And so—so, I mean—just to—

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Let’s just say, look, right now you were just to tell us the truth about what’s going on, the stuff that’s classified, like what do you think would happen to you?

MARISSA MAYER: I mean, releasing classified information is treason.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: And then what happens?

MARISSA MAYER: Just generally, and you—you know, incarcerated.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Marissa Mayer. She is the head of Yahoo. Alex Abdo?

ALEX ABDO: You know, Ms. Mayer is correct that there are extraordinary limits on what these companies can say, but it’s not correct to say that they can’t be doing more to protect the privacy of their users. There are a number of steps that these companies can take and should take, and Yahoo recently took one of those steps in joining Google and Microsoft in pushing the secret court in D.C. to allow them to say more about the government surveillance. Those companies want to be able to tell the public how many Americans are affected by the government’s surveillance, the numbers of court orders they get to turn over this information, and, very generally, the type of information they’re being asked to turn over. That’s all information that the government should allow these companies to disclose. It would allow Americans to better understand the surveillance that’s taking place in our name, and it would allow us to make a decision for ourselves whether the surveillance is lawful and whether it’s necessary.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Not only that, but I think there is a—as I’ve said before on this show, there is a conflict between the economic needs of these companies, because they’re all global companies, and no matter what happens in the United States, this is going to affect their businesses in other parts of the world as more and more countries decide you can’t trust American technology companies to use their search engines or use their products if they are allowing the government to serveil not only American citizens, but people around the world, so that it seems to me there’s a need to meet the needs of their own shareholders, the business interests of the company, to oppose these kind of government policies.

ALEX ABDO: I think that’s right. We’re putting our American companies at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to their business. They’re being forced to compete with companies outside the U.S. that aren’t receiving these NSA surveillance orders. But it’s important to note, too, that these companies can do more to protect the privacy of their consumers, even when they are not allowed to talk about the surveillance of the NSA. They can put in place technological fixes that allow users to trust their services more. And we’re starting to see that type of a response by the tech industry. They’re starting to compete over privacy. One of Microsoft’s—for example, its new campaigns is “Don’t get Scroogled.” It’s their way of competing against Google’s skimming of our emails for ad tracking. And as Americans, I think, come to appreciate the value of our privacy and the vastness of the information we trust with these companies, they’ll come to demand greater assurances from the Googles and the Microsofts and the Yahoos.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, and just end with what surprised you most by all of these revelations that have come out from Ed Snowden. I mean, the president says this debate has—would have happened anyway. You’re a longtime—and certainly the ACLU has been deeply concerned about civil liberties issues. Would it have happened anyway? And what have you found most shocking in the last few months?

ALEX ABDO: I don’t think this transparency would have happened. This is an involuntary debate that the administration is now welcoming after the fact, and it’s a long overdue one. And one of the things that has shocked me the most, I think, is, in reading these documents, to see how much information is kept secret that should never have been kept secret in the first place. Americans deserve to be a part of this conversation, but they’re being kept out of it by unnecessary overclassification of this information.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much, Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Find this story at 12 September 2013

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The agreement for the US to provide raw intelligence data to Israel was reached in principle in March 2009, the document shows. Photograph: James Emery

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process “minimization”, but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies “pertaining to the protection of US persons”, repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights.

But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive “raw Sigint” – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: “Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

Although the memorandum is explicit in saying the material had to be handled in accordance with US law, and that the Israelis agreed not to deliberately target Americans identified in the data, these rules are not backed up by legal obligations.

“This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law,” the document says.

In a statement to the Guardian, an NSA spokesperson did not deny that personal data about Americans was included in raw intelligence data shared with the Israelis. But the agency insisted that the shared intelligence complied with all rules governing privacy.

“Any US person information that is acquired as a result of NSA’s surveillance activities is handled under procedures that are designed to protect privacy rights,” the spokesperson said.

The NSA declined to answer specific questions about the agreement, including whether permission had been sought from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court for handing over such material.

The memorandum of understanding, which the Guardian is publishing in full, allows Israel to retain “any files containing the identities of US persons” for up to a year. The agreement requests only that the Israelis should consult the NSA’s special liaison adviser when such data is found.

Notably, a much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government”. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

It is not clear whether any communications involving members of US Congress or the federal courts have been included in the raw data provided by the NSA, nor is it clear how or why the NSA would be in possession of such communications. In 2009, however, the New York Times reported on “the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip”.

The NSA is required by law to target only non-US persons without an individual warrant, but it can collect the content and metadata of Americans’ emails and calls without a warrant when such communication is with a foreign target. US persons are defined in surveillance legislation as US citizens, permanent residents and anyone located on US soil at the time of the interception, unless it has been positively established that they are not a citizen or permanent resident.

Moreover, with much of the world’s internet traffic passing through US networks, large numbers of purely domestic communications also get scooped up incidentally by the agency’s surveillance programs.

The document mentions only one check carried out by the NSA on the raw intelligence, saying the agency will “regularly review a sample of files transferred to ISNU to validate the absence of US persons’ identities”. It also requests that the Israelis limit access only to personnel with a “strict need to know”.

Israeli intelligence is allowed “to disseminate foreign intelligence information concerning US persons derived from raw Sigint by NSA” on condition that it does so “in a manner that does not identify the US person”. The agreement also allows Israel to release US person identities to “outside parties, including all INSU customers” with the NSA’s written permission.

Although Israel is one of America’s closest allies, it is not one of the inner core of countries involved in surveillance sharing with the US – Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This group is collectively known as Five Eyes.

The relationship between the US and Israel has been strained at times, both diplomatically and in terms of intelligence. In the top-secret 2013 intelligence community budget request, details of which were disclosed by the Washington Post, Israel is identified alongside Iran and China as a target for US cyberattacks.

While NSA documents tout the mutually beneficial relationship of Sigint sharing, another report, marked top secret and dated September 2007, states that the relationship, while central to US strategy, has become overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of Israel.

“Balancing the Sigint exchange equally between US and Israeli needs has been a constant challenge,” states the report, titled ‘History of the US – Israel Sigint Relationship, Post-1992′. “In the last decade, it arguably tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns. 9/11 came, and went, with NSA’s only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner.”

In another top-secret document seen by the Guardian, dated 2008, a senior NSA official points out that Israel aggressively spies on the US. “On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems,” the official says. “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

Later in the document, the official is quoted as saying: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended.”

The memorandum of understanding also contains hints that there had been tensions in the intelligence-sharing relationship with Israel. At a meeting in March 2009 between the two agencies, according to the document, it was agreed that the sharing of raw data required a new framework and further training for Israeli personnel to protect US person information.

It is not clear whether or not this was because there had been problems up to that point in the handling of intelligence that was found to contain Americans’ data.

However, an earlier US document obtained by Snowden, which discusses co-operating on a military intelligence program, bluntly lists under the cons: “Trust issues which revolve around previous ISR [Israel] operations.”

The Guardian asked the Obama administration how many times US data had been found in the raw intelligence, either by the Israelis or when the NSA reviewed a sample of the files, but officials declined to provide this information. Nor would they disclose how many other countries the NSA shared raw data with, or whether the Fisa court, which is meant to oversee NSA surveillance programs and the procedures to handle US information, had signed off the agreement with Israel.

In its statement, the NSA said: “We are not going to comment on any specific information sharing arrangements, or the authority under which any such information is collected. The fact that intelligence services work together under specific and regulated conditions mutually strengthens the security of both nations.

“NSA cannot, however, use these relationships to circumvent US legal restrictions. Whenever we share intelligence information, we comply with all applicable rules, including the rules to protect US person information.”

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 September 2013 15.40 BST

Find this story at 11 September 2013
Read the NSA and Israel’s ‘memorandum of understanding’

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 9 (UPI) — The Israeli military’s top-secret Unit 8200, the Jewish state’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, has spawned a generation of high-tech start-ups and more technology millionaires than many business schools, and these days the cyber security sector is booming.

Unit 8200 is now the Israeli military’s biggest branch in manpower terms. It has grown swiftly in recent years as cyberwarfare has become one of the major security threats to military organizations and industrialized states whose vital infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattack.

But Unit 8200 remains the most secretive of Israel’s military units. Even the name of its commander is a state secret, as is its annual budget .

It has a major, highly secure base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. But little is known about its work in what’s known as signals intelligence, intercepting and analyzing other forces’ communications and data traffic from mobile phones chatter and emails to flight paths and electronic signals.

Unlike other branches of the Israeli military, virtually all its research and development is conducted in-house by its huge cadre of engineers, programmers and technicians.

Unit 8200 headhunts the brightest students from high schools and colleges, and there seems to be no shortage of volunteers.

So it’s no surprise that many veterans of Unit 8200 — invariably known as “eight-two hundred” — have been behind a host of successful high-tech start-ups in the commercial sector after they leave the service.

These enterprises provide a unique contribution to Israel’s high-tech sector, widely recognized as one of the most advanced in the world.

The country’s high-tech exports total an estimated $25 billion a year, a quarter of Israel’s exports.

The high-tech sector currently boasts 5,000 companies that employ 230,000 people and earn

Recent Israeli success in the field include the Zisapel brothers, Yehuda and Zonhar, who sold and floated a dozen companies for hundreds of millions of dollars; and Yair Cohen, a former brigadier general who once commanded Unit 8200, who heads the intelligence cyberdivision of Elbit Systems, a major defense company.

Then there’s Aharon Zeevi Farkash, another former Unit 8200 chief, founder and chief executive of FST21, which employs a mix of technologies, combining hardware and software to suit specific needs that are in the hands of young men and women hardly out of their teens.

Yossi Vardi, who founded Israel’s first software company in 1969, says “more high-tech millionaires have been created from 8200 than from any business school in the country.”

Israeli tech firms like Nice, Converse and Check Point were all set up by Unit 8200 alumni or based on technology developed by the unit which cyber insiders say is in some cases decades ahead of the U.S. and Europe

A measure of these companies’ success is that many are bought out by the titans of the field.

IBM announced in August that it’s buying Trusteer, a privately owned Israeli cloud-based cybersecurity software provider whose customers include many of the largest banks in the United States and Britain.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. But the Financial Times reported that IBM, which will form a cybersecurity software laboratory in Israel with more than 200 researchers from both companies, is believed to be forking up $800 million-$1 billion for Trusteer.

The Israeli outfit says its equipment can identify security threats that escape more traditional security software.

Trusteer software is designed to help ensure that bank customers can safely transfer funds on mobile devices by detecting malware that can infect a smartphone, allowing the bank to prevent fraudulent transactions taking place.

“The way organizations protect data are quickly evolving,” observed Trusteer’s chief executive, Mickey Boodaei, who founded the firm in 2006.

“As attacks become more sophisticated, traditional approaches to securing enterprise and mobile data are no longer valid.”

Unit 8200’s success as an incubator for Israel’s high-tech venture is likely to grow since under the military’s new strategic plan it’s downsizing conventional land, sea and air forces to meet the challenges of a new era of warfare with more agile, technology-oriented forces.

Farkash says 8200’s alumni are so successful because its organizational ethos encourages out-of-the-box thinking.

“We’re very tolerant of mistakes,” he explains. “It’s impossible to be creative when fear leads you.”

Published: Sept. 9, 2013 at 11:51 AM
TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 9 (UPI) —

Find this story at 9 September 2013

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Ben Zygier war ein Mossad-Agent, der Geheimnisse an Israels Feinde weitergab. Während der Isolationshaft erhängte sich der Spion. Die genauen Umstände seiner Haft will Jerusalem unter keinen Umständen preisgeben – und bezahlt Zygiers Familie für ihr Schweigen.

Tel Aviv – Einer der spektakulärsten Justizfälle der israelischen Geschichte hat ein finanzielles Nachspiel. Israels Regierung will die Familie des sogenannten Häftling X mit vier Millionen Schekel entschädigen – umgerechnet etwa 842.000 Euro.

Das Geld fließt an die Familie des früheren Mossad-Agenten Ben Zygier. Der australisch-israelische Doppelstaatsbürger hatte jahrelang für den Geheimdienst gearbeitet, war dann aber Anfang 2010 verhaftet worden. Nach Erkenntnissen des SPIEGEL hatte Zygier Informationen an die libanesische Hisbollah-Miliz weitergegeben, die zur Verhaftung zweier Mossad-Agenten im Libanon führten.

Zygier wurde in der Hochsicherheitsanstalt Ajalon im israelischen Ramle in Einzelhaft unter Videoüberwachung gehalten. Das Gefängnispersonal kannte weder seinen Namen noch den Grund für seine Haft. Trotz der Überwachung konnte er sich im Dezember 2010 in seiner Zelle erhängen. Eine Untersuchungsrichterin hatte daher im April festgestellt, dass Zygier nicht ausreichend überwacht worden sei. Der Fall wurde erst Jahre später durch australische Medienberichte publik.

“Ihr werdet schweigen, wir werden bezahlen”

Israels Regierung betont, dass die nun getroffene Einigung mit den Hinterbliebenen kein Eingeständnis eines “vorgeblichen Fehlverhaltens” sei. Vielmehr solle vermieden werden, die Angelegenheit vor Gericht zu bringen, weil dann Einzelheiten an die Öffentlichkeit kämen und die nationale Sicherheit ernsten Schaden nehmen können.

Zygiers Familie hat sich zu Stillschweigen verpflichtet. “Ihr werdet schweigen, wir werden bezahlen”, titelte die israelische Tageszeitung “Jedioth Achronoth” am Mittwoch. Die Hinterbliebenen von Häftling X hatten direkt mit dem Büro des Premierministers Benjamin Netanjahu und dem Justizministerium verhandelt.

Jahrelang war die Familie über die Umstände des Todes falsch informiert worden. Den Hinterbliebenen wurde erzählt, dass Zygier als Mossad-Agent hinter feindlichen Linien ums Leben gekommen war.

11. September 2013, 13:06 Uhr

Find this story at 11 September 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Family of Australian-born Mossad agent who died in jail in 2010 while facing treason charges, is offered settlement

Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X, picture in a still from an ABC TV report. Photograph: AAP/ABC TV

Israel is to pay more than $1m to the family of Ben Zygier, an Australian-born Mossad agent who hanged himself in an Israeli prison, in order to avoid damaging disclosures in a court case.

The agreement will see Zygier’s family receive four million shekels, or around $1.19m, in staged payments in return for the state of Israel being absolved of responsibility for the death.

Zygier, who held Australian and Israeli citizenships, hanged himself in the Ayalon Prison in 2010. He was known as Prisoner X due to his secret incarceration, where he was facing a 10-year sentence for treason.

A judicial inquiry found that guards did not properly check his cell and that at least one CCTV camera wasn’t working. Central district court president, Daphna Blatman, said: “Failure by various elements in the Israel prison service caused his death.”

The Israeli government has said that there was not enough evidence to bring charges over Zygier’s death.

Zygier’s parents – who are leading figures in Melbourne’s Jewish
community – threatened to bring a legal case against the state of
Israel, claiming negligence and seeking compensation.

According to a statement from the Israeli justice ministry,
negotiations between the state of Israel and the Zygiers led to the
settlement, “under which the state agreed to pay the family of the
deceased the sum of four million shekels”. The agreement was made
“without admitting claims raised against”, it said.

Israel made the payment in order to avoid court action, which might have
involved the disclosure of information “which could cause real damage
to national security”, the statement added.

Earlier this year, the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program reported that the Israeli government attempted to cover up the story of Zygier’s death, urging editors of Israeli newspapers not to report the incident.

The program claimed that Zygier was imprisoned for sabotaging a Mossad mission to recover the bodies of soldiers killed in action in Lebanon. Israel has refused to comment on the reasons for his incarceration.

Oliver Milman in Sydney and Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 September 2013 09.07 BST

Find this story at 11 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.