http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/09/sweet_subpoena.html
September 1, 2006
By James Ridgeway
1.Who lost Iraq?
It goes without saying that a congressional investigation--a joint
inquiry by both houses, given the gravity of the matter--should
address the causes, conduct, and effects of the Afghanistan and Iraq
wars, going back to the days immediately after Bush's election when
the plans for invading Iraq were laid.
But beyond that, the conduct of the war on terror has raised myriad
vital questions that, at another time, would have been subjects of
full-fledged inquiries on their own:
the Pentagon's failure to adequately equip troops with armor,
ammunition, radios, and the like;
the use of mercenary forces;
the contracting process;
and the government's efforts to manipulate the press through outside
PR agencies.
Also worthy of scrutiny is the role of oil and gas, including the work
of the secret Cheney energy task force, which points to prewar
discussions with the ceos of major companies about Iraqi oil.
A congressional investigation into the Iraq war must make full use of
subpoena power and must be prepared to forward findings of illegal
acts to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.
Just as important, public hearings could provide an opportunity--and
protection--for would-be whistleblowers:
Recall that Daniel Ellsberg didn't take his trove of documents,
showing the Defense Department's true assessment of the war in
Vietnam, to the New York Times until after he had been rebuffed by
congressional Democrats.
Somewhere inside the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies
today's Pentagon Papers are waiting.
2. Did Rumsfeld order torture (and if not, who did)?
Last year, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) sought to clear up any
confusion over the legality of torture with an amendment to the
Defense Appropriations Bill.
As McCain explained on the Senate floor, the measure was designed to
"restore clarity on a simple and fundamental question: Does America
treat people inhumanely?"
This set off a bitter behind-the-scenes battle between the senator and
Vice President ***** Cheney, who even as the White House was
negotiating with McCain over the exact wording of the bill was
privately cornering senators, arguing that the legislation would harm
the CIA's operations.
The result was a bill that bans torture at U.S. facilities but leaves
open the question of foreign governments mistreating prisoners at the
United States' behest.
President Bush then wrote his own interpretation of the legislation,
after it passed, in the form of a signing statement that said the
White House was free to ignore the measure in the interests of
national security.
In the end, McCain's ban may have accomplished nothing except to give
the administration an occasion to reaffirm its policy of permitting
torture--so long as it involves foreigners being held in prisons that
are not on U.S. soil.
Congress should demand a no-holds-barred public accounting of
"inhumane treatment" since 9/11 by U.S. intelligence services and by
third-country surrogates.
Did Bush know about these practices?
Did Rumsfeld order torture or supervise the chain of command?
How far up the chain did knowledge of, and assent for, the horror at
Abu Ghraib go?
To which countries were prisoners sent for interrogation?
When and how were these prisoners tortured?
What are the CIA's policies on "unorthodox" interrogation techniques?
Such hearings would go a long way toward halting the creeping
normalization of torture--and they would almost certainly produce
prosecutable evidence about the abuses that have already happened.
3. Who blew 9/11?
It's high time to follow up on the startling discoveries of the Senate
and House's joint inquiry, back in December 2002, on pre-9/11
intelligence.
In reconstructing the hijackers' trail, the inquiry's staff discovered
that the FBI had failed to report, and had later balked at making
public, information showing that it knew that a bureau informant in
the San Diego Muslim community had socialized with two of the
hijackers, and that another man who had been investigated by the FBI
had rented an apartment to one of them.
Both of the future hijackers had been closely followed by the CIA as
they made their way from the Middle East to Malaysia;
the agents lost track of the men before they boarded a plane to
California, where they then lived openly, with driver's licenses and a
phone book listing in their own names.
So far, no one has been able to discover how they escaped detection by
the FBI--and why the bureau refused to let Congress find out what
happened.
The joint inquiry also discovered a Saudi spy operating in
California--the same man who had rented an apartment to one of the
hijackers--along with suggestions of a larger network, according to
former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.).
The spy nominally worked for a Saudi government contractor, and the
committee followed a money trail going back to the royal family and
the Saudi government, according to Graham.
This was a tantalizing find.
Congressional sources have suggested that Saudi spooks may have been
sent to California to keep tabs on Saudi students who might be tempted
by democratic ideas;
it has also been speculated that some of these undercover agents could
have become enmeshed with Al Qaeda.
In any event, the White House has adamantly refused to declassify 28
pages of the final committee report that dealt with Saudi Arabia.
When Congress later set up an independent commission to look into
9/11, it pointedly ordered the panel to "build upon the investigations
of other entities" such as the joint inquiry.
Yet the commission's report glossed over many questions involving
Saudi Arabia.
A new select committee could pick up where other probes left off.
4. What did the airlines know, and when did they know it?
The bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988
ought to have been a wake-up call to aviation across the world.
But 13 years later, the FAA was still ignoring warnings from its own
staff about security holes at every airport that inspectors checked
out.
With airlines lobbying against tighter standards and Congress sitting
by, the nation's airline security system was caught flat-footed on
9/11.
As far back as 1993, FAA inspectors showed that people with no
authorization made it through San Francisco's airport security system
60 percent of the time.
At Frankfurt in 1996, the FAA's undercover team broke through security
every time it tried--a 100 percent failure rate.
By way of addressing the problem, the FAA began telling the airlines
when tests were going to be held, and negotiated fines for violations
down to a pittance.
There was idle talk of hardening the cockpit doors, but the airlines
resisted additional security measures because they cost too much.
The airlines ran wild in Washington, hiring top lobbyists such as
Linda Daschle, the wife of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle,
threatening that their industry would face wholesale bankruptcy unless
they got their way.
(Most of them, of course, have since gone Chapter 11 anyway--but not
before their ceos socked away millions more in salaries and bonuses.)
In the months before 9/11, the FAA warned that hijackers could turn a
commercial airliner into a suicide missile and conducted classified
briefings at 19 of the nation's largest airports, including Logan,
Dulles, and Newark--the points of departure for the hijacked
flights--warning of an imminent terrorist attack.
Osama bin Laden's name was repeatedly mentioned.
During the same period, FAA officials received 52 different
intelligence briefings concerning threats from Al Qaeda.
The moment of truth ought to have come a little after 8 a.m. on
September 11, 2001, when Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American
Airlines Flight 11 out of Logan, called AA headquarters and calmly
began to describe the hijacking going on aboard that plane.
She provided a detailed account of what she saw and heard and stayed
on the line until the moment the plane crashed into the first tower.
Did AA officials, as family members later reported based on tapes and
transcripts they were shown by the FBI in closed briefings, respond by
saying, "Don't spread this around," "Keep it close," and "Let's keep
this among ourselves"?
Did that attitude prevent warnings to other pilots--warnings that
could have kept Flight 93 on the ground, and could have helped bring
Flight 77 down safely before it crashed into the Pentagon?
Some member of Congress must have the decency and the guts to ask
those questions--not in some backroom closed session, but in the full
glare of the TV lights.
5. How wide is the domestic surveillance net?
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named after Idaho Democratic
senator Frank Church, put out 14 separate reports that exposed the
intelligence agencies' abuses of law.
The Pike Committee, named after Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.), conducted a
parallel inquiry in the House, focusing mostly on the CIA.
Among other things, the investigations discovered the notorious
COINTELPRO operation to spy on and disrupt left-wing groups.
Thirty years later urgent questions are once again piling up:
Just what is the extent of the agencies' spying inside the United
States?
What are the true motivations and outcomes of this surveillance?
How much money is going into spying programs?
There is much evidence that domestic intelligence gathering is not
limited to the infamous NSA surveillance project.
The ACLU, for one, has obtained numerous files describing FBI
cooperation with local police in joint terrorism task forces that have
targeted groups such as Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, Code
Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
6. Is Big Oil pulling an Enron?
The last serious investigation of the oil industry concluded in 1952
with the Federal Trade Commission's staff report on the International
Petroleum Cartel, published by the monopoly subcommittee of the
Senate.
That study laid out a now-familiar pattern:
A major concern of the oil industry has always been the threat of
surpluses driving down prices.
To prevent surpluses, oil and gas companies have employed means such
as instituting quota systems, closing off reserves from market, and
setting up cartels, or agreements among producers.
Today, while many experts believe oil will soon run out, there is no
actual shortage that could be blamed for driving up gas prices.
The hurricanes of 2005 did not put the supply in any serious jeopardy,
nor was lack of refinery capacity a real factor.
(According to the U.S. Department of Energy, refineries along the Gulf
Coast and elsewhere frequently run below capacity, meaning that there
was some slack in the system.)
There is, however, evidence to suggest practices reminiscent of
Enron's market rigging:
Last year, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a
California-based consumer group, released a series of internal memos
from Chevron, Texaco, and Mobil that laid out the industry's thinking.
A Texaco memo, for example, warned that "supply significantly exceeds
demand year-round.
This results in very poor refinery margins and very poor refinery
financial results.
Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or
increasing the demand for gasoline."
An investigation would subpoena internal company documents and take
testimony from oil executives under oath--not just in an "unsworn"
chitchat like the sideshow put on by the Senate commerce and energy
committees last year--to discover whether the companies conspired to
rig prices or manipulate supply.
7. Who's making money off your retirement?
It's been predicted that at least 1 in 10 retirees in 2020 will teeter
on the edge of financial collapse or plunge into outright poverty.
Social Security is just a small bit of the problem.
The potentially much bigger challenge is the disappearance of
pensions, most of which have been replaced with 401(k)-type accounts
dependent wholly on the securities market.
This is an enormous shift:
Corporations have succeeded, with amazingly little protest from labor,
in transferring the cost--and the risk--of retirement from employer to
employee.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. provides some backup when a company
with a standard pension plan goes under (think United Airlines). With
401(k)s, there is no insurance.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to regulate mutual
funds, which handle most 401(k) money;
the SEC has nowhere near the resources to keep tabs on the $9 trillion
business, so policing is largely left up to the funds themselves.
Before this crisis grows greater, Congress ought to launch a serious
investigation into the retirement system.
We've got to know all the ways companies are bailing on their pension
plans--by converting them into 401(k)s, by filing for bankruptcy, or
simply by quietly not paying into (or "underfunding") them for years
at a time.
We need to understand who controls the money in 401(k)s, what the
hidden costs are, and to what extent these accounts are threatened by
Wall Street conflicts of interest.
For example, thanks to deregulation laws passed during the Clinton
administration, commercial banks can now sell the mutual funds that
their investment-banking arms manage, but investors have no recourse
if their 401(k)s lose value because of bad management.
With Social Security privatization refusing to die, and Wall Street
eager to get its hands on that money, Congress should do some due
diligence.
8. Why is the morning-after pill not at your 7-Eleven?
After numerous clinical trials, thousands of pages of reports, and
supportive resolutions from major medical groups including the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, two Food and Drug
Administration advisory committees in 2003 recommended that the FDA
allow the emergency contraception pill Plan B to be sold over the
counter.
Conservative groups threw a fit, and House Republican leaders,
including then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, urged the FDA to reconsider.
When Democrats fought back, challenging the nomination of Lester
Crawford to head the FDA until they got answers on Plan B, Crawford
assured them that "the science part is generally done. We're just now
down to what the label will look [like]. This is going to be a very
unusual sort of approval."
After promising a decision on Plan B by September 1, 2005, Crawford
instead launched a public comment period.
Not much later, he left the agency amid unrelated conflict-of-interest
allegations.
Now Congress deserves some answers:
Why did Crawford overrule his own scientists?
On what grounds?
And was anyone outside the FDA involved?
What about, for example, the calendar entry for then-FDA head Mark
McClellan on April 21, 2003--just a few days after the agency got the
application for over-the-counter Plan B--for "Conference call w/Jay
Lefkowitz re: Plan B submis"?
Lefkowitz, a White House go-to guy for conservatives, was at the time
the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.
9. Grounds for impeachment?
Congressional investigators digging into the aforementioned questions
cannot ignore the possibility of impeachment proceedings against Vice
President Cheney, who figures prominently in almost every one of the
scandals engulfing the administration.
It was Cheney who ran the government's response to the 9/11 attacks
without constitutional authority, at one point ordering shoot-downs of
commercial planes and what would turn out to be a medevac helicopter;
who led the secret meetings of administration officials and oilmen to
set energy policy;
who allowed Ahmed Chalabi to play the U.S. government like a violin;
who very well may be the origin of the whisper campaign that
culminated in the Plame leak;
and, of course, it was Cheney's former employer (and source of
continuing deferred compeNSAtion paychecks) that benefited enormously
from no-bid contracts in Iraq.
Judicial Watch, the conservative legal outfit in Washington, has
unearthed an email dated March 5, 2003, sent by an Army Corps of
Engineers official whose name had been blacked out, that said of a
pending deal under which Halliburton would rebuild the Iraqi oil
industry, "We anticipate no issue since the action has been
coordinated w VP's office."
There's plenty more where that came from;
whether any of Cheney's actions constitute "high crimes and
misdemeanors" is for Congress, and the nation, to debate
____________________________________________________
I'm certain y'all have other administration actions you'd like to see
investigated by a miraculously transformed Congress.
Harry
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