Federal Appeals Court Judge Michael Chertoff’s ties to the financiers of the Sept. 11 attacks may prevent his confirmation as Homeland Security Chief.According to a June 20, 2000 article in the The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, Chertoff defended accused terrorist financier Dr. Magdy Elamir.
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Elamir’s HMO was sued by the State of New Jersey to recoup $16.7 million in losses. At least $5.7 million went “to unknown parties… by means of wire transfers to bank accounts where the beneficial owner of the account is unknown,” according to the article.
Foreign intelligence reports given to then chairman of the House International Relations Committee Ben Gilman (R-New York) in 1998 accused Magdy Elamir of having “had financial ties with Osama bin Laden for years,” according to an Aug. 2, 2002 Dateline NBC broadcast.
In 1999, Magdy Elamir and brother Mohamed were named suspects in Operation Diamondback, an FBI/ATF undercover infiltration of Pakistani arms merchants who sought to arm Osama bin Laden with conventional and nuclear weapons, according to independent researcher and former New Jersey police officer Allan Duncan and taped transcripts with FBI informant Randy Glass.
Mohamed Elamir tried to purchase “small arms and ammunition” in a recorded telephone conversation with Glass, according to Dateline.
Dateline confirmed that Elamir and his corporations had paid at least $5,000 to Egyptian arms dealer Diaa Mohsen, who Elamir referred to on camera as a family friend. Moshen was sentenced to 30 months for his involvement in Operation Diamondback. However, Elamir was never convicted.
Duncan, who was hired by family members of the Sept. 11 victims to research government ties to the attacks, said the reason Magdy Elamir was never convicted was because he was never charged with a crime.
“By the time Operation Diamondback culminated in arrests in the summer of 2001, Michael Chertoff was the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the criminal division and Operation Diamondback would have fallen under his prevue since it was a criminal case and not a counterterrorism case,” Duncan said.
From 1990 to 1994, Chertoff was U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, during the period when the first attack on the World Trade Center took place.
Guerilla News Network article
In fact, Elamir even had strong connections with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.Magdy Elamir was one of the most important financial supporters of the Al Salam mosque. The Al Salam mosque was where Omar Abdel-Rahman preached, the Muslim extremist who was later arrested for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Former New Jersey police officer Allan Duncan said that “The Jersey City area and particularly the Al Salam mosque were allowed to continue as a major hub of terrorist activity in the United States.” During this period, 1990 to 1994, Chertoff was the U.S. Attorney for this area, the District of New Jersey. Amazingly, even after this period, Elamir later became one of Chertoff’s most important clients.
Truth Seeker article
No, that's not all Chertoff's helping the Busch (not a typo) administration with. He helped the CIA determine just what types of torture they could use and avoid prosecution. And he covered up the torture of U.S. citizen John Walker Lindh.[A]t the same time el-Amir was pitching state business he had begun making generous contributions to the governing Republican party, donating nearly $ 18,000 to various GOP candidates in 1996.And a foreign intelligence report made available to the Chairman of the House International Committee alleged that an HMO owned by Dr. el Amir in New Jersey was “funded by Ben Laden,” and that in turn Dr. el Amir was skimming money from the HMO to fund “terrorist activities.”’…
Stuff like that doesn’t happen, does it? In New Jersey?
Barely three years after enrolling its first patient, APPP lay in financial ruins, its network doctors and hospitals were saddled with millions of dollars in unpaid claims, and its founder had retained the services of Michael Chertoff.
Did Chertoff know where the stolen money was going?
"Frankly, we can't differentiate between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing," then-Asst Attorney General Michael Chertoff told the Senate Banking Committee looking into the terrorists’ money trail in the aftermath of 9.11.
“These groups don't hold themselves independently: They work with one another. Terrorists get engaged in drug activity. They have relationships with organized crime," Chertoff said. [Ed: Would that be better? That he's representing organized crime?]
Chertoff was undoubtedly worth every penny Dr. Magdy paid him: though doctors and hospitals calculated they were owed more than $45 million, Dr. ElAmir faced no criminal charges.
When the MadCow Morning News first reported on Mob and terrorist connections to "Magic Dutch Boy” Rudi Dekkers and the covert operations conducted at the Venice Airport, Michael Chertoff was running the official U.S. investigation.
Dekkers remains free.
Magdy el-Amir continues to live and practice in New Jersey.
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“DATELINE has found another reason why federal investigators might want to pay close attention to Dr. el Amir and his family. It’s something we learned when we interviewed Randy Glass, the con man-turned-undercover operative who helped the government break up an illegal weapons ring allegedly tied to terrorist groups. It turns out that one of the people recorded trying to arrange an arms deal with Randy Glass was Dr. el Amir’s own brother, Mohamed, an engineer, also a US citizen now living in Egypt. And just listen to what he was interested in”…
“Mr. GLASS: (From tape) OK. They want to ship things like tanks, correct?”
“Mr. EL AMIR: (From tape) Uh-huh… No, no, no, no, just ammunition, not tanks.”
“Glass says federal agents told him to drop the matter”…
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Why would New Jersey’s Top Attorney Michael Chertoff represent a person of el-Amir’s relatively modest financial position? Though comfortable, el-Amir had failed to reach millionaire status. Not exactly Chertoff’s typical clientele, as reported by The Bergen Record on June 19, 2000:
“New Jersey is home to about 65,000 lawyers, some of whom are quite good at what they do. But if the state had a First Lawyer, or a Lawyer Laureate, it just might be Michael Chertoff”…
“His counsel is sought by public corporations, politicians, government agencies, and high-profile defendants”…
“Columbia/HCA, the health-care consortium… is the ninth-largest employer in the United States… As the lead attorney for Columbia, Chertoff negotiated a partial settlement of the case in May for about $ 745 million”…
“When he entered private practice, Chertoff said he would not represent drug dealers and mobsters, preferring to work for “decent people.”’
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Yes, the soon-to-be Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff represented a known bin Laden operative. Perhaps more troubling, Chertoff also headed the U.S.’s investigation into the September 11th attack.
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More on Chertoff from the New Yorker, November 5, 2001:
“Since the September 11th terrorist attacks, Chertoff’s office has become the funnel for what is probably the most important criminal investigation in American history, as prosecutors and F.B.I. investigators pour in to seek the boss’s approval. What leads can we use from the search of a hijacker’s car in Portland, Maine? Where do the hijackers’ credit-card records lead?… For day-to-day decisions, Chertoff has the last word”…
Mad Cow Morning News article
And in another Federal terrorist case...The nominee for new Homeland Security secretary, back in 2002, worked hard to keep the public from hearing courtroom testimony that would have revealed the Bush government’s new campaign of torture, allowing it to spread from Afghanistan to Guantanamo to Iraq.From an article of mine in the current, Feb. 14 issue of The Nation magazine (www.thenation.org).
Back on Friday, June 12, 2002, the Defense Department had a big problem: Its new policy on torture of captives in the "war on terror" was about to be exposed. John Walker Lindh, the young Californian captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and touted by John Ashcroft as an "American Taliban," was scheduled to take the stand the following Monday in an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed. There he would tell, under oath, about how he signed the document only after being tortured for days by US soldiers. Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had already said he was likely to allow Lindh, at trial, to put on the stand military officers and even Guantánamo detainees who were witnesses to or participants in his alleged abuse.
The Defense Department, which we now know had in late 2001 begun a secret, presidentially approved program of torture of Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations, had made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted the suppression hearing blocked. American torture at that point was still just a troubling rumor, and the Bush Administration clearly wanted to keep it that way.
Accordingly, Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division was overseeing all the department's terrorism prosecutions, had his prosecution team offer a deal. All the serious charges against Lindh--terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc.--would be dropped and he could plead guilty just to the technical charges of "providing assistance" to an "enemy of the U.S." and of "carrying a weapon." Lindh, whose attorneys dreaded his facing trial in one of the most conservative court districts in the country on the first anniversary of 9/11, had to accept a stiff twenty-year sentence, but that was half what he faced if convicted on those two minor charges alone.
But Chertoff went further, according to one of Lindh's attorneys, George Harris. Chertoff (now an appeals court judge in New Jersey) demanded--reportedly at Defense Department insistence, according to what defense attorneys were told--that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. Further, Chertoff attached a "special administrative measure," essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.
ILCA article
[June, 2003]Chertoff argued to the 4th Circuit that the Court could not order the government to produce its star witness against Moussaoui because (are you ready?) he, the witness, is out of the country at an undisclosed location. True, but the witness is in the custody of the federal government! The out-of-the country argument is a sham. This is similar to a ruling recently by the federal court that ruled that Guantanmo Bay prisoners had no access to federal courts for claims that they be charged or release because-they are out of the country!! Of course, in federal custody, but that does not matter.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Michael Chertoff with hardly an argument (though they did conduct an "investigation" into charges that he engaged in some misconduct while at DOJ, which turned up nothing, or so we are told).
Keep your eye on Michael Chertoff. As bad for the law and Constitution as many of Bush's judicial appointees are, Chertoff has been the architect of prosecutions in the "war on terror." And he may have big changes in mind for you, me, the courts, and the Constitution.
Counter Punch article
U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
Title: Nomination Hearing
Date: 2/2/05
Time (EST): 10:00 AM
Place: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rm. 342
Hearing to consider the nomination of Michael Chertoff to be Secretary of Homeland Security.
Committee Membership
Republican
Susan M. Collins Chairman (R-ME)
Ted Stevens (R-AK)
George V. Voinovich (R-OH)
Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Lincoln D. Chafee (R-RI)
Robert F. Bennett (R-UT)
Pete W. Domenici (R-NM)
John W. Warner (R-VA)
Zell Miller Memorial Republican Lite
Joseph I. Lieberman Ranking Minority Member (D-CT)
Democrats
Carl Levin (D-MI)
Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI)
Thomas R. Carper (D-DE)
Mark Dayton (D-MN)
Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Believe it or not, this one might actually be turnable with the right pressure in the right places. Though I don't expect Lieberman to rock any Bush boats, the rest of the Dems could stick together. There are at least two Republicans on the committee that could hypothetically be flipped - Chafee and Bennett. Warner can be a pitbull, but he's still solidly in the Bush camp.If any of these Senators are from your state, ask them to ask the right questions.
All Spin Zone blog post
Asses of Evil
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Update 9:45am:
As he prepares for his upcoming confirmation hearing, Homeland Security Secretary designee Michael Chertoff has denied advising the CIA on using specific torture techniques on terror suspects when he headed the Justice Department's criminal division.
Chertoff is expected to win confirmation easily following his Wednesday hearing, although Democrats said they plan to question him about his role in advising the CIA about torture standards.
Seattle Post Intelligencer article
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