USATODAY.com – Prosecutor in terror case controversy sues Ashcroft

A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of ”gross mismanagement” of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington. …

Convertino came under internal investigation last fall after providing information to a Senate committee about his concerns about the war on terror. His testimony came just months after he helped convict some members of an alleged terrorism cell in Detroit.

The government now admits it failed to turn over evidence during the trial that might have assisted the defense, including an allegation from an imprisoned drug gang leader who claimed the government’s key witness made up his story.

Convertino is seeking damages under the First Amendment and Privacy Act, alleging he has been subjected to an internal investigation as retaliation for his cooperation with the Senate and that information from the internal probe was wrongly leaked to news media. …

Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him. [mjh: just like the CIA agent the Bush team outted]

The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and “interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities,” the suit alleges.

Convertino is a federal prosecutor, probably not some wimpy liberal unpatriot. Note the ”Justice” Department broke the law, then attacked one of its own for talking to Congress. Watching Conservatives slit each others throats would be interesting if they weren’t creating American Fascism at the same time. mjh

MEDICAL PRIVACY: Abortion politics has Ashcroft trampling more rights (Detroit Free Press Editorial)

The staunch anti-abortion position of the Bush administration, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, is well established. But attempts by Ashcroft’s Department of Justice to subpoena medical records involving a controversial abortion procedure reveal an even more frightening ideology.

This administration, it seems, doesn’t believe that matters between doctors and patients can be kept confidential.

Your government’s attorneys are trying to make the case that nothing — from common law to the Constitution — protects the privacy of medical records. It will be up to the nation’s judges to uphold this long and well-accepted practice, which actually is written into law in some places. A federal district judge in Chicago has already done so, saying that the medical privacy laws of Illinois protect such records. A New York judge sees it differently. A Philadelphia jurist is still weighing the case.

Ashcroft says the government needs medical records to defend the late-term abortion ban passed by Congress last fall. Doctors who have blocked the ban say it is rarely used and only when medically necessary. Ashcroft intends to disprove their claim by reviewing their records.

But the files he seeks, including some from the University of Michigan Health Systems, go back three years, predating the ban. Those abortions were legal; neither the doctors who performed them nor the women who underwent them broke any law. Even if they had, the government should have to prove a compelling reason to trump the patients’ privacy rights; since they had not, there is no just cause.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock that an administration that doesn’t recognize a woman’s dominion over her own body doesn’t respect the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. But this effort could have a chilling effect on what patients are willing to tell their doctors and hamper medical research. It’s government overreach for political ends. If Ashcroft won’t stop it, the courts ought to make him.

Op-Ed Columnist: The Five Sisters By WILLIAM SAFIRE, NYTimes

If one huge corporation controlled both the production and the dissemination of most of our news and entertainment, couldn’t it rule the world?

Can’t happen here, you say; America is the land of competition that generates new technology to ensure a diversity of voices. But consider how a supine Congress and a feckless majority of the Federal Communications Commission have been failing to protect our access to a variety of news, views and entertainment.

Conservative Safire has been a leader on this issue of media industry consolidation. One can almost forgive him for failing to state the obvious: Republicans control the FCC, the legislature and the White House (and are stacking the judiciary). mjh

mjh’s Dump Bush weBlog: Follow Up on the FCC Giveaway to Fox, et. al.

BILL MOYERS: And so those 24 lines were quietly inserted in last week’s fine print [of the 1,182 page spending bill]. With those lines, the House and Senate agreement was overturned and the new cap was set just high enough to allow Viacom and Murdoch to keep all their TV stations. …

What does it say to you about democracy? That almost a million citizens make themselves heard in support of overturning the FCC ruling. The Senate votes 55 to 40 to overturn those rules. And yet the House can’t vote on it. [because of Hastert and Delay]

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: Why? Because the President supports the FCC rule. This is his Federal Communications Commission.

Inquiry Focuses on Group DeLay Created By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., NYTimes

A political action committee created by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, enjoyed tremendous success here in 2002: all but 3 of 21 Republican candidates the committee backed for state representative won their races, helping the party take control of the Texas House.

Last year, the Republicans used that clout to carve Texas into new Congressional districts under a plan that political analysts say will bring them at least five new seats in Congressional elections this year.

But local prosecutors and a grand jury here have been investigating the committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, including its use of corporate donations in the election, lawyers close to the case said.

Investigators are also examining whether there were violations of a law intended to curb the ability of outside groups to influence the race for House speaker, the lawyers said. The investigation follows a complaint filed with prosecutors last year by Texans for Public Justice, a campaign watchdog group.

mjh’s Weblog Entry – 05/27/2003: Tom Delay: “I am the federal government.”

Washington Talk: Partisan Denunciations Fly Over Secret Strategy Memos By NEIL A. LEWIS, NYTimes

The Senate sergeant-at-arms, who is nearing the end of an investigation into the tampering, told senators last week that the Republican staff members’ activities went on much longer and were far more extensive than previously believed. …

Faced with a difficult-to-defend situation, many Republicans simply withdrew from the field of battle, quietly slipping out of the room. Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joined Mr. Hatch in agreeing that what had happened was terribly wrong. …

The most unrepentant of Republicans was Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership. According to the newspaper Roll Call, Mr. Santorum told reporters that he still believed that “the real potential criminal behavior” was with the Democrats because the content showed their unwholesome ways of colluding with outside interest groups to oppose Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees.

mjh’s Dump Bush weBlog: The GOP is Spying on Everyone

Republicans spy on Democrats (and protestors, and the UN, and everyone) and then get indignant that people are outraged over the content of what they have stolen. These fools have learned nothing from Watergate. mjh

TIME.com: How Well Did He Serve? — Feb. 23, 2004 By MICHAEL DUFFY

Bush said he reported for duty in Alabama, but even with the new documents, the evidence is thin. TIME looks at four key questions

1) How Did Bush Get In the Guard, And What Were His Duties?
2) What Did Bush Have to Do to Fulfill His Guard Commitment?
3) So Did Bush Report for Duty in Alabama or Not?
4) Why Did He Miss The Physical?

It should be no surprise that the Bush administration, which despises the UN and flaunts most international law, would spy on UN members in clear violation of international law. It should be no surprise, while Republican staffers are spying on Democrats in Congress, that the US would spy in the UN. One might say the spies are out of control, but, in fact, they are too much in control of the White House. mjh

The Observer | Special reports | US plan to bug Security Council: the text

[From the full text of the NSA (National Security Agency) memo:]

As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq …. [a] surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters. …

[P]ay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes….

The Observer | Special reports | British spy op wrecked peace move Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Jo Tuckman, The Observer

Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.

The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.

Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. ‘When they [the US] found out, they said, “You should know that we don’t like the idea and we don’t like you to promote it.”‘

The revelations follow claims by Chile’s former ambassador to the UN, Juan Valdes, that he found hard evidence of bugging at his mission in New York last March.

The Observer | Politics | Spying games on the road to war Peter Beaumont and Martin Bright in London and Jo Tuckman, The Observer

The extraordinary story of the diplomacy of those two weeks – which saw the abandonment of any attempt to secure that elusive second resolution, as The Observer can now reveal – was also the story of an intelligence operation that, at every step, attempted to undermine the independent deliberations of the Security Council as it stood on the brink of war.

It would be the spies, not the diplomats, who would carry the day.

For even as Middle Six diplomats sat down in private to draw up a resolution that bridged the gap between France, Germany and Russia on the anti-war side, and the US and UK – a compromise that would set a final deadline to Saddam and delay the outbreak of war – someone was listening in and anticipating their every step. …

On Friday [Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico’s representative to the UN,] gave his fullest version of what he believed was happening in the UN in that fortnight, and in a crucial meeting that history may decide made war against Iraq inevitable. …

What he is absolutely certain of is that the US was bugging the meeting.

‘It was very obvious to the countries involved in the discussion on Iraq that we were being observed and that our communications were probably being tapped. The information was being gathered to benefit the United States.’ …

On Tuesday, … Chile charged publicly for the first time that its UN mission telephones were tapped as the Security Council considered a resolution authorising war against Saddam Hussein. …

What the new revelations suggest is that despite the US agreeing to more time to find a resolution, it secretly used intelligence from spying on those negotiations to kill the last hope of a UN resolution.