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Re: Re: CHICAGO: CRIME KIND OF TOWN Fred, Star, Mag, Lucy t, BP
From maggief | 03/15/2010 4:02:18 PM PDT new

Fred, Star, hoosiermama, Lucy t, BP

Not good news.

“the Justice Department team recently added Mr. Fitzgerald”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/15/justice-cia-clash-over-probe-of-interrogator-ids//print/

The Washington Times
Monday, March 15, 2010
Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs

Bill Gertz

The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers’ lives.

The dispute prompted a meeting Tuesday at CIA headquarters between U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and senior CIA counterintelligence officials. It is the latest battle between the agency and the department over detainees and interrogations of terrorists.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. angered many CIA officials and Republicans in Congress by reopening an investigation last August into whether CIA interrogators acted illegally in questioning senior al Qaeda detainees.

According to U.S. officials familiar with the issue, the current dispute involves Justice Department officials who support an effort led by the American Civil Liberties Union to provide legal aid to military lawyers for the Guantanamo inmates. CIA counterintelligence officials oppose the effort and say giving terrorists photographs of interrogators has exposed CIA personnel and their families to possible terrorist attacks.

As part of the disagreement, a senior Justice Department national security official removed himself from the counterintelligence probe last week after opposing CIA security worries.

Donald Vieira, a former Democratic counsel on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who in September became chief of staff at the Justice Department’s National Security Division, recused himself from the counterintelligence investigation into the recent discovery of photographs of CIA interrogators in the possession of defense lawyers at the prison in Cuba.

The investigation has been under way for many months, but was given new urgency after the discovery last month of additional photographs of interrogators at Guantanamo showing CIA officers and contractors who have carried out interrogations of detainees, according to three officials familiar with the investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Findings of the investigation to date produced some signs that the senior al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo gained intelligence on CIA interrogators through their lawyers that could be used in future legal proceedings.

CIA counterintelligence officials have “serious concerns” that the information will leak out and lead to the terrorists targeting the officers and their families, if the identities are disseminated to terrorists or sympathizers still at large, said one official.

“They have put the lives of CIA officers and their families in danger,” said a senior U.S. official about the detainees’ lawyers.

The case is being pressed by the counterspies who only recently were able to alert senior agency, Justice Department and White House officials to their concerns.

Details on Mr. Vieira’s recusal could not be learned, but the Justice Department team recently added Mr. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago who led the controversial 2005 investigation into the public disclosure of the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame.

The recusal is said to be related to Mr. Vieira’s past work on the House intelligence committee on detainee policy before 2009, one official said.

Mr. Vieira could not be reached for comment, and Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler declined to comment.

A CIA spokesman also declined comment, as did Mr. Fitzgerald, through a spokesman.

According to the officials, the dispute centered on discussions for a interagency memorandum that was to be used in briefing President Obama and senior administration officials on the photographs found in Cuba.

Justice officials did not share the CIA’s security concerns about the risks posed to CIA interrogators and opposed language on the matter that was contained in the draft memorandum. The memo was being prepared for White House National Security Council aide John Brennan, who was to use it to brief the president.

The CIA insisted on keeping its language describing the case and wanted the memorandum sent forward in that form.

That resulted in the meeting and ultimately to Mr. Vieira withdrawing from the probe.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, a former chief counsel for the House intelligence committee, at first were unaware of both the scope and seriousness of the case.

However, both officials began addressing the matter after inquiries were made from members of Congress. Since then, Mr. Panetta and Mr. Bash are getting regular updates on the dispute, said the officials.

The legal underpinnings of the counterintelligence probe stem from the 1982 law that makes it illegal to disclose the identity of clandestine CIA and other intelligence officers. The law was passed after CIA defector Philip Agee in the 1970s disclosed the identity of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece, who was assassinated in 1975 after the disclosure.

The law was tested in the Plame case, amid press accusations that senior Bush administration deliberately leaked the name to embarrass her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. However, no one was prosecuted under the statute for the disclosure.

The Pentagon also is involved in the investigation in the photographs compromising CIA officers’ identities at Guantanamo because the military provided the lawyers currently representing some detainees. A Pentagon spokeswoman in charge of detainee affairs had no immediate comment and said she was unaware of the case.

The officials said the photographs of the CIA officers found recently at Guantanamo were obtained by a joint program of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers called the John Adams Project.

The project, according to a Washington Post report in August, hired contractors to photograph CIA officers who were thought to have carried out terrorist interrogations. Those photographs were then to be provided to defense lawyers representing some of the Guantanamo detainees as part of an effort to identify the interrogators, for possible use as witnesses in military or civilian trials.

Joshua Dratel, a lawyer representing the John Adams Project, declined to comment directly on whether his group hired investigators to photograph CIA officers and supply them to military defense lawyers.

However, Mr. Dratel said in an interview that “none of the John Adams Project lawyers have done anything inappropriate or contrary to the protective order or any other rules that apply” to the prisoners.

ACLU spokesman John Kennedy also declined to comment on whether the project obtained photographs of CIA officers. However, he said none of the John Adams Project lawyers disclosed the identities of CIA officers to detainees held at Guantanamo.

Details about the investigation into the photographs remain closely held, but one official said CIA counterintelligence and security officials were alarmed by the discovery at the prison.

“What it says is that somebody is going out and finding these agents, taking their pictures, and taking them back to Gitmo, trying to get these guys at Gitmo to confirm who they are and where they are from,” one U.S. intelligence official said. “CIA is afraid this information will become public and jeopardize the lives of the agents.”

A second source said the probe also has heightened an ongoing political dispute among CIA, Justice and White House officials over the issue of terrorism detainees.

After the Bush administration’s Justice Department closed its investigation into alleged wrongdoing by CIA interrogators, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department team reopened the case into whether they broke the law while questioning terrorism suspects captured in the early 2000s.

The Justice Department, under Mr. Holder, also favors conducting civilian trials for some terrorism suspects, rather than holding military tribunals. It also has sought to treat captured terrorists more like criminal defendants in legal cases, rather than as enemy combatants captured in wartime.

Stolen (It’s the Chicago way) to keep everything together...feel free to add more or just connect a few dots.

FROM:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2483075/posts?page=101

Chicago Law School faculty hated Obama
theblogprof. ^

Posted on Tuesday, March 30, 2010 9:30:01 AM by big black dog

The smartest genius President evah is nothing more than a carboard cutout. A fraud. Doesn’t exist. We don’t even know how he did in school because to this day his transcripts are sealed. Turns out now that when he was an instructor at the Chicago, his colleagues who were actual Professors didn’t like him and didn’t want him. Obama’s position was obtained through political channels.

Is the President’s resume accurate when it comes to his career and qualifications? I can corroborate that Obama’s “teaching career” at Chicago was, to put it kindly, a sham.

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

Consider this: 1. President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a “lawyer”. He surrendered his license back in 2008 possibly to escape charges that he “fibbed” on his bar application. ...

4. A senior lecturer is one thing. A fully ranked law professor is another. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Obama did NOT ‘hold the title’ of a University of Chicago law school professor”. Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago.

5. The University of Chicago released a statement in March, 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “served as a professor” in the law school, but that is a title Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held, a spokesman for the school confirmed in 2008.

6. “He did not hold the title of professor of law,” said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law.

7. The former Constitutional senior lecturer cited the U.S. Constitution recently during his State of the Union Address. Unfortunately, the quote he cited was from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

10. By the way, the promises are not a notion, our founders named them unalienable rights. The document is our Declaration of Independence and it reads: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

11. And this is the same guy who lectured the Supreme Court moments later in the same speech?

When you are a phony it’s hard to keep facts straight.

For a constitutional senior lecturer, it’s also noteworthy that Obama doesn’t know what car insurance covers

UPDATE: Doug Ross updates with this: Most Transparent President Ever Has Bar Records Redacted This Week, Leaving Only Traces of His Existence Some Betamax Videos and a Fraternity Pin

President Obama’s Occidental College transcripts have never been released. His Columbia transcripts are, likewise, AWOL. And his Harvard Law transcripts also haven’t been made public. Finally, it’s reported, he never published any articles while at Harvard, yet somehow served as Editor of Law Review. That would make him unique among editors, according to insiders.

Even John “D Student” Kerry was guilt-tripped into releasing his transcripts.

Curiously, since I relayed a report of Obama’s “teaching career” at Chicago (he was apparently never a law professor, as some have claimed), the Illinois Bar has decided to partially redact what little public information it had available on its website related to the President’s legal status.

UPDATE #2: Another from Doug Ross: Rub a dub dub, how many IDs does one profile need?

An anonymous tipster points out that the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of Illinois has gone through some amazing contortions maintaining a single database record for a retired attorney named Barack Obama.

Obama is only transparent in the sense that his past is invisible.

Keeping together. TY again.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-mxa0322magazineobamapg6mar22,0,4776413.story

Law professor Geoffrey Stone’s best Barack Obama story has gotten better with age, acquiring an extra measure of ironic punch with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s antic tumble from power. Stone was dean of the University of Chicago Law School back in 1992 when its faculty was trying to recruit the sleek and all-around stellar Harvard Law student who had once worked as a community organizer on the city’s South Side. Sniffing out Obama’s plan to return to Chicago after graduation, Stone and Douglas Baird, who was chairman of the faculty appointments committee, cooked up a plan of their own: They created a faculty fellowship slot custom-tailored for Obama and then invited him to apply for it. When Obama visited the campus for his initial interview, he spent a few minutes outside Stone’s office chatting with Stone’s secretary, Charlotte Maffia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/us/politics/30obama.html?pagewanted=2

He positioned himself early on as a protégé of the powerful Democratic leader, Senator Emil Jones, a beneficiary of the Chicago political machine. He courted collaboration with Republicans. He endured hazing from a few black colleagues, played poker with lobbyists, studiously took up golf. (“An awful lot happens on the golf course,” a friend, Jean Rudd, says he told her.)

(snip)
One of the first was campaign finance reform. Illinois had one of the least regulated campaign finance systems in the country and a history of corruption. Paul Simon, the former United States senator, was running a public policy institute at Southern Illinois University and asked each of the four legislative leaders to name a trusted lawmaker to work on a bipartisan ethics bill.

Mr. Jones recalls receiving a call from Abner J. Mikva, a former Chicago congressman, federal judge and friend of Mr. Simon. Judge Mikva, who had once tried to hire Mr. Obama as a law clerk, suggested him for the job. Mr. Jones says he knew that the new senator was hard-working and bright and that few others would want the assignment.

“He caught pure hell,” Mr. Jones said of Mr. Obama. “I actually felt sorry for him at times.”

Early ties and connections:

Betty Lu Saltzmann (... Fenton)
Pritzkers (... Soros)
Jarrett
Ayers
Khalidi
Wright
Emil Jones (... Chicago Machine, ... Simon ... Axelrod, Chicago Trib)
Abner Mikva (... Jackson)

“I had lunch with him at the Quadrangle Club, and we were discussing the different bases he had to touch. I said, ‘You have to talk to the Jackson boys first,’ ” Mr. Mikva recalled, referring to Representative Jackson and his father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Because Jesse Jackson Jr. had his eye on that seat. He said, ‘I know. I’m working on that.’ ”

Mr. Obama soon sat down with the younger Mr. Jackson at the 312 Chicago restaurant. Michelle Obama had attended high school with Mr. Jackson’s sister and been close to the family for years, and the congressman had attended the Obamas’ wedding. “He said, ‘Jesse, if you’re running for the U.S. Senate I’m not going to run,’ ” Mr. Jackson recalled.

But Mr. Jackson had already decided against it, and he gave Mr. Obama his blessing.

A Pivotal Moment

Betty Lu Saltzman, a Democratic doyenne from Chicago’s lakefront liberal crowd, convened a small group of activists, including Ms. Katz, in her living room to organize a rally to protest the United States’ impending invasion of Iraq. It was late September 2002, and Mr. Obama was on the top of Ms. Saltzman’s list of desired speakers.

She first met him when he ran the black voter registration drive in the 1992 election, and was so impressed that she immediately took him under her wing, introducing him to wealthy donors and talking him up to friends like Mr. Axelrod. But with just a few days to go before the rally, Ms. Saltzman was having trouble reaching Mr. Obama. Finally, she said she left word with his wife.

(snip)

In courting families like the Crowns, Mr. Obama was gaining entree into the upper echelon of the city’s corporate boardrooms, a ripe source of campaign money. But he was also seeking to broaden his appeal to Jewish voters, and he was wading more deeply into one of the touchiest issues in American politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11chicago.html?pagewanted=5

http://www.barackbook.com/Profiles/JeanRudd.htm

133 posted on Monday, April 05, 2010 8:43:42 AM by maggief (Not everything is what it seems.)
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Payback???

(no link)

Obama pick may have Chicago link - Supreme Court nominee may share his school ties
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Sunday, May 3, 2009
Author: John McCormick and Jeff Coen, Tribune reporters ; Tribune reporter Ray Gibson also contributed to this report.
Ever since Barack Obama ‘s election as president, there has been anticipation among scholars at the University of Chicago’s Law School that one of their own could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court bench in the next few years.

That anticipation was heightened late last week with news that Obama , who taught constitutional law at the school from 1992 to 2004, soon will be making his first Supreme Court pick.

Almost every short list of possible nominees to succeed Justice David Souter includes three individuals with strong ties to the Hyde Park law school: U.S. Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood, Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan.

Even if Obama does not pick one of the past or present faculty members this year, feelings run strong on campus that he will before he leaves the White House.

“It’s more likely than not that at least one of these three will be nominated within his tenure,” said U. of C. law professor Geoffrey Stone , who was the law school’s dean when Obama was hired.

“There’s definitely extra buzz on campus,” said Douglas Baird, a law professor who recruited Obama to the faculty. “They will be naturally on the short list, but not because he is sentimental about the law school, but because they fit the ticket.”

http://newsmax.com/Newsfront/Obama-Kagan-Stevens-court/2010/04/05/id/354741

Obama Mulls Kagan, 2 Others for Stevens Seat
Monday, 05 Apr 2010 08:51 AM

President Barack Obama is short-listing three candidates to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens, according to a Bloomberg report.

Heading the list is U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan Kagan, the first woman to serve in that post — the federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate. She formerly served as the first female dean of Harvard Law School, where she graduated.

Also reportedly on the list: federal appellate judges Diane Wood and Merrick Garland.