Lockerbie : A 'Conspiracy Theory' Worth Pursuing

Top, Convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, holding release papers, at Glasgow International Airport, after his release Thursday, August 20, 2009. Photo by Danny Lawson / Pool / AP. Below, wreckage of Pan Am 103, Lockerbie, Scotland, Dec. 21, 1988.
Unlocking Lockerbie:
An alternative explanation worth looking at

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / August 20, 2009

Convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel beset Ali Mohamed al Megrahi is being released from prison because he has only a few months to live. He is terminally ill with prostate cancer.

The cable news channels are milking the story for all it is worth, while summarily dismissing as “conspiracy theories” alternative accounts of what happened at Lockerbie.

One of those explanations is worth looking at.

Pan Am 103 crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people from 21 countries. Included in this total were eleven residents of the Scottish town. A bomb had been planted on the plane, probably by Hezbollah. Perhaps the organization was taking revenge for Iran-Air Flight 655 that was shot down six months before by a U.S. fighter jet from the carrier Vincennes.

While the Iranians were considering revenge, Major Charles McKee of the Defense Intelligence Agency and five others were in Lebanon looking into the drug trade and trying to find a way of rescuing nine American hostages there. The team appeared to have little or no information about what two other U.S. intelligence units were doing in Beirut.

Unfortunately, they soon learned that one of those units was dealing in drugs and weapons, presumably as a way of gaining leverage to free American hostages. Somehow they also learned that CIA operatives in a team Wiesbaden named COREA were running what seemed to be a rogue drug operation out of Frankfurt. They boarded 103 with evidence but were never able to present it. Later the military claimed they were flying back to the US in violation of their orders.

At the heart of these drug operations was Monzer al-Kassar. This Syrian drug smuggler had moved Polish arms for Oliver North to the Nicaraguan Contras. He was also closely tied to the brother of the Syrian dictator, Hafez al Assad. According to former Reagan aid Barbara Honegger, Al Kassar earlier worked for Reagan and NATO in laundering weapons for Iran through corrupt Italian intelligence people tied to P-2, the secret fascist lodge.

Some of al-Kassar’s drug profits helped to finance the PLO. Al Kassar was the middle man in paying for the release of two French captives in Beruit and he facilitated communications with respect to the remaining nine American hostages in Lebanon. In return for his services, the U.S. protected his drug pipeline into the U.S.

The DEA was then permitting controlled shipments by Al Kassar out of Frankfurt with a view to using the drugs to entrap dealers in the U.S. The code name for the operation was AKhourah.@ Reporter Will Weinberg learned that the DEA and CIA had asked the BKA, the German internal intelligence agency, to let certain suitcases in Frankfurt through without inspection. Apparently, a suitcase full of Semtex explosives was quietly substituted for one that held drugs.

The problem was that the amount getting through was far larger than necessary. When DEA/DIA agent Lester Coleman, using his diaries, later wrote about this, he encountered all sorts of legal problems. Danny Casorolo, a journalist, interviewed Coleman and was knifed in a West Virginia motel. Unfortunately, his body was immediately embalmed, so a full autopsy would not have been possible.

Coleman had been in Beruit for six years as part of a secret unit called MC10, Middle East Collection 10, and his payment came as travelers checks issued by BCCI. Two of his colleagues had been murdered in the year before the loss of Pan Am 103. In subsequent court testimony, he said that his unit was using PROMIS software, even though the government repeatedly said it never used this software.

Two Sampsonite suitcases of drugs were shipped from Frankfort that day in addition to the “controlled delivery.” They were the same kind of bags as those used by Kassar. One was aboard Pan Am 103 and the other was diverted to another flight which arrived in San Francisco. Some theorize that the CIA team in Frankfurt was running a rogue drug operation and that the plane was permitted to explode to cover their misdeeds.

U.S. and German agencies received at least two warnings that a bomb would be aboard PanAm 103. It has been claimed that Oliver “Buch” Ravell, assistant director of the FBI, was privy to one of those warnings and took it seriously enough to remove his son from that flight. Two books and some litigation address this issue.

Eventually, the State Department claimed that it had not forwarded the warnings to the FBI. Robert Mueller headed the investigation. He had also handled the investigation of the collapse of BCCI. However, Ravell was well connected and it was frequently claimed that he worked with Oliver North in hiding much of the information related to the Iran Contra scandal.

In 1996, Gene Wheaton, formerly with the Army Investigative Command, wrote that Revell was one of several security consultants who proposed forming a “Death Squad” to assassinate people identified as terrorists.

Strong evidence developed that U.S. intelligence knew that a bomb was on the plane but did nothing to remove it. The CIA knew Hezbullah had planted a bomb on the plane and had an opportunity to remove it but chose not to. The accident scene was teeming with Americans, including Oliver North’s assistant.

Scottish police said that American authorities restricted their access to the site for two days while Americans feverishly sifted through the wreckage. They carried away a number of pieces of baggage. Both heroin and cocaine were found there. Bob Woodward later reported in the Post that there were documents aboard that tied Lt. Colonel Oliver North to terrorist Abu Nidal.

COREA was being investigated by the Germans and enough of the story was known that there was open speculation in Time, US News and World Report, Barrons, and The New York Times. Susan Lindauer, a Fox and US News and World Report journalist also worked as a CIA asset and claims she knew that the 1988 bombing was a Hezbollah operation in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian airliner.

She added that the CIA had advanced warning of the plot. She served eleven months of incarceration in 2005-2006 without being charged, perhaps because she had operated as a back channel to Bagdad and tried to warn second cousin Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff, that the Iraqis did not have weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. first blamed Syria and the CIA probably correctly hired some group to plant the bomb. Later the U.S. shifted the blame to Libya when it needed Syria’s backing in the 1991 war with Iraq. The only evidence pointing to the Libyan government was a fragment of a circuit board logged in as evidence four days after the explosion. There is some question of when it was logged in and some say it was found months later in a wooded area far from Lockerby. It was said to be made by a Swiss firm which only sold the part to Libya and the East German Stasi.

Dr Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, medical researcher, and millionaire, claimed that he had solid proof that Lybya was not involved in the bombing and he added that he knew who planned it. Soon thereafter, in October, 1994, a federal court issued a gag order, on the basis of the "military and state secrets privilege.”

Internal U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents surfaced in 1994 suggesting that the British and Americans believed that the real bomber was the Syrian operated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, the diplomacy of the first Gulf War made it useful to blame Libya.

In 2003, a retired CIA officer told Megrahi’s lawyers that the CIA gihad planted the evidence. In 2005, Scotland Sunday reported that a retired police officer “of assistant chief constable rank or higher” has said that the circuit board fragment had been planted by the CIA. George Esson, former Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway, said he knew about the other policeman coming forward. The informant contacted the lawyers for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was imprisoned at Greenock Prison for the crime.

The Edinborough Herald reported that there were documents proving that the CIA offered to pay two key witnesses to testify against the accused Lybians and that it offered witness protection and relocation.

[Sherm, your author, believes that that some of these alternative explanations need to be explored but finds that, while they are often at least as convincing as the official explanations, they lack all the information necessary for conclusive proof. In his book on the Republican Party he followed far more conventional rules because he believed the case he was making was so important. His The New Republican Coalition: Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

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US Torture: Best al Qaeda Recruiting Tool

Major Matthew Alexander
Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11
By Patrick Cockburn / April 26, 2009

The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."

In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?

Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.

A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.

Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.

He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.

In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.

The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.

What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.

In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.

Source / The Independent

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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From Those Who Know : Torture Just Doesn't Work

Artist: Fernando Botero / truthout.
Tortured reasoning: The tactical errors of prisoner abuse.
By David Rose

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn't work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse. This article was originally published by Vanity Fair on Dec. 16, 2008 and was also distributed by truthout.

By the last days of March 2002, more than six months after 9/11, President George W. Bush's promise "to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act" was starting to sound a little hollow. True, Afghanistan had been invaded and the Taliban toppled from power. But Osama bin Laden had vanished from the caves of Tora Bora, and none of his key al-Qaeda lieutenants were in U.S. captivity. Intelligence about what the terrorists might be planning next was almost nonexistent. "The panic in the executive branch was palpable," recalls Mike Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official who set up and ran the agency's Alec Station, the unit devoted to tracking bin Laden.

Early in the morning of March 28, in the moonlit police-barracks yard in Faisalabad, Pakistan, hopes were high that this worrisome intelligence deficit was about to be corrected. Some 300 armed personnel waited in silence: 10 three-man teams of Americans, drawn equally from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., together with much greater numbers from Pakistan's police force and Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). In order to maximize their chances of surprise, they planned to hit 10 addresses simultaneously. One of them, they believed, was a safe house containing a man whose name had been familiar to U.S. analysts for years: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian better known as Abu Zubaydah. "I'd followed him for a decade," Scheuer says. "If there was one guy you could call a 'hub,' he was it."

The plan called for the police to go in first, followed by the Americans and ISI men, whose job would be to gather laptops, documents, and other physical evidence. A few moments before three a.m., the crackle of gunfire erupted. Abu Zubaydah had been shot and wounded, but was alive and in custody. As those who had planned it had hoped, his capture was to prove an epochal event - but in ways they had not envisaged.

Four months after Abu Zubaydah's capture, two lawyers from the Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, delivered their notorious memo on torture, which stated that coercive treatment that fell short of causing suffering equivalent to the pain of organ failure or death was not legally torture, an analysis that - as far as the U.S. government was concerned - sanctioned the abusive treatment of detainees at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay. But, as Jane Mayer writes in her recent book, The Dark Side (Doubleday), Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to coercive interrogation techniques well before that, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in the Global War on Terror to undergo waterboarding.

The case of Abu Zubaydah is a suitable place to begin answering some pressing but little-considered questions. Putting aside all legal and ethical issues (not to mention the P.R. ramifications), does such treatment - categorized unhesitatingly by the International Committee of the Red Cross as torture - actually work, in the sense of providing reliable, actionable intelligence? Is it superior to other interrogation methods, and if they had the choice, free of moral qualms or the fear of prosecution, would interrogators use it freely?

President Bush has said it works extremely well, insisting it has been a vital weapon in America's counterterrorist arsenal. Vice President Dick Cheney and C.I.A. director Michael Hayden have made similar assertions. In fact, time and again, Bush has been given opportunities to distance his administration from the use of coercive methods but has stood steadfastly by their use. His most detailed exposition came in a White House announcement on September 6, 2006, when he said such tactics had led to the capture of top al-Qaeda operatives and had thwarted a number of planned attacks, including plots to strike U.S. Marines in Djibouti, fly planes into office towers in London, and detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb in America. "Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives."

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts - with Abu Zubaydah's case one of the most glaring examples.

Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading "information" that boosted the administration's argument for invading Iraq.

Everything that was to go wrong with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah flowed from a first, fatal misjudgment. Although his name had long been familiar to the C.I.A., that did not make him an operational terrorist planner or, as Bush put it in September 2006, "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden." Instead, Scheuer says, he was "the main cog in the way they organized," a point of contact for Islamists from many parts of the globe seeking combat training in the Afghan camps. However, only a tiny percentage would ever be tapped for recruitment by al-Qaeda.

According to Scheuer, Abu Zubaydah "never swore bayat [al-Qaeda's oath of allegiance] to bin Laden," and the enemy he focused on was Israel, not the U.S. After Abu Zubaydah's capture, Dan Coleman, an F.B.I. counterterrorist veteran, had the job of combing through Abu Zubaydah's journals and other documents seized from his Faisalabad safe house. He confirms Scheuer's assessment. "Abu Zubaydah was like a receptionist, like the guy at the front desk here," says Coleman, gesturing toward the desk clerk in the lobby of the Virginia hotel where we have met. "He takes their papers, he sends them out. It's an important position, but he's not recruiting or planning." It was also significant that he was not well versed in al-Qaeda's tight internal-security methods: "That was why his name had been cropping up for years."

Declassified reports of legal interviews with Abu Zubaydah at his current residence, Guantánamo Bay, suggest that he lacked the capacity to do much more. In the early 1990s, fighting in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, he was injured so badly that he could not speak for almost two years. "I tried to become al-Qaeda," Abu Zubaydah told his lawyer, Brent Mickum, "but they said, 'No, you are illiterate and can't even remember how to shoot.'" Coleman found Abu Zubaydah's diary to be startlingly useless. "There's nothing in there that refers to anything outside his head, not even when he saw something on the news, not about any al-Qaeda attack, not even 9/11," he says. "All it does is reveal someone in torment. Based on what I saw of his personality, he could not be what they say he was."

In May 2008, a report by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general, stated that, as he recovered in the hospital from the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah began to cooperate with two F.B.I. agents. It was a promising start, but "within a few days," wrote Fine, he was handed over to the C.I.A., whose agents soon reported that he was providing only "throw-away information" and that, according to Fine, they "needed to diminish his capacity to resist." His new interrogators continued to question him by very different means at so-called black-site prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe. They were determined to prove he was much more important than the innkeeper of a safe house.

Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah's treatment in his 2006 announcement. "As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures..... The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary." Soon, Bush went on, Abu Zubaydah "began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September 11." Among them, Bush said, were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In K.S.M.'s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25 million reward.

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided "many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans." K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., "90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit." A former Pentagon analyst adds: "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were."

It is, perhaps, a little late, more than six years after detainees began to be interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and at the C.I.A.'s black-site prisons, to be asking whether torture works. Yet according to numerous C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials interviewed for this article, at the time this question really mattered, in the months after 9/11, no one seriously addressed it. Those who advocated a policy that would lead America to deploy methods it had always previously abhorred simply assumed they would be worthwhile. Non-governmental advocates of torture, such as the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, have emphasized the "ticking bomb" scenario: the hypothetical circumstance when only torture will make the captured terrorist reveal where he - or his colleagues - has planted the timed nuclear device. Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency's internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: "Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It's just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality."

Read all of this article here.

Thanks to Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog

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Spies R Us : U.S. Snooped on Tony Blair, Iraqi President

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraq's first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer: Pillow talk. ABC News photo illustration.
'David Murfee Faulk saw and read a file on Blair's "private life" and heard "pillow talk" phone calls of al-Yawer when he worked as an Army Arab linguist.'
By Brian Ross, Vic Walter and Anna Schecter / November 24, 2008

A former communications intercept operator says U.S. intelligence snooped on the private lives of two of America's most important allies in fighting al Qaeda: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraq's first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer.

David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair's "private life" and heard "pillow talk" phone calls of al-Yawer when he worked as an Army Arab linguist assigned to a secret NSA facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia between 2003 and 2007.

Last month, Faulk and another former military intercept operator assigned to the NSA facility triggered calls for an investigation when they revealed U.S. intelligence intercepted the private phone calls of American journalists, aid workers and soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Faulk says his top secret clearance at Ft. Gordon gave him access to an intelligence data base, called "Anchory," where he says he saw the file on then-British prime minister Tony Blair in 2006.

Faulk declined to provide details other than to say it contained information of a personal nature.

A spokesman for Blair, who stepped down as Prime Minister in 2007, said there would be "no comment" on Faulk's allegations.

Collecting information on foreign leaders is a legal and common practice of intelligence agencies around the world but under a long-standing agreement, the U.S. and Britain have pledged "not to collect on each other," according to several former U.S. intelligence officials.

The NSA works extremely closely and shares data with its British counterpart, the GCHQ, Government Communications Headquarters.

"If it is true that we maintained a file on Blair, it would represent a huge breach of the agreement we have with the Brits," said one former CIA official.

In the case of the former Iraqi president, al-Yawer, Faulk says his "pillow talk" phone calls were to his fiancé, whom he later married. Faulk says the calls were intercepted by operators in the NSA facility at Ft. Gordon, Back Hall, and posted on the computer system for others to read about and hear.

Faulk described the al-Yawer calls as "courting, wooing and pillow talk" with an Iraqi woman he would later marry Nasrin Barwari, the minister of public works in the interim government.

Al-Yawer was the first President of Iraq's interim government between 2004 and 2005.

At the same time, U.S. intelligence was monitoring his private calls, al-Yawer was flown to Washington to meet President George Bush in the White House.

"I'm really honored you're here," said President Bush as he greeted al-Yawer in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Al-Yawer, now divorced, could not be reached for comment. His ex-wife told ABC News she did not want to comment on the allegation that her private phone calls with her then fiancé were being intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

The NSA declined to comment on the specifics of Faulk's allegations involving al-Yawer and Blair.

In a statement, a spokesman said the agency follows all laws.

The Inspector General for the NSA is reported to be conducting an investigation into the allegations by Faulk and another former military intercept operator, Adrienne Kinne, about listening to calls between American citizens.

The Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees also are investigating the allegations about calls involving American citizens.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Source / ABC News

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