Quote:
Originally Posted by Rekna
Thanks DC, I knew there had to be some part of the department which could check Gonzales without him being able to stop it.
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dc_dux, Rekna.... don't hold your breath...I posted this on 06-16-2005:
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=90768
Prosecutor Misconduct In Two Recent High-Profile Cases:
Why It Happens, and How We Can Better Prevent It
By ELAINE CASSEL
----
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2004
...........What about federal disciplinary options when prosecutors go astray? Sadly, they are also weak.
In 2001, the General Accounting Office wrote a stinging report on the Justice Department's Office of Professional
Responsibility. It found that OPR rarely held prosecutors accountable for misconduct. And if OPR turned over a case over
to the state that licensed an errant prosecutor, OPR rarely followed up....
......Did OPR improve itself? It's hard to tell. OPR is supposed to file an annual report, but the last one I found on its
website was for 2001. It is filled with self-congratulatory reports of how well it is doing its job -- but it is also
lacking in specifics. We should all watch closely to see if the Mellin and the Detroit cell prosecutors -- all of whom
plainly committed misconduct -- are disciplined by OPR or not. If not, that in itself will be a strong sign that OPR is
still not doing its job..........
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Rekna, yours is the last post in this thread, after I posted this on 10-16-2006:
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...51&postcount=6
I'm not going to just walk away from this. The DOJ and it's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) have made no public comment of this travesty of justice conspiracy, apparently committed by high government officials. It cost Edwin O. Wilson, 22 years of his life as a potentially unincarcerated man.
Here is a more recent reference:
<b>What you should know....the DOJ OPR is still 2 years behind in posting it's investigations report on it's website:</b>
http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/reports.htm
....so no disclosure there on what became of the OPR investigation of what Judge Lynn Hughes descibed in 2003 as,
Quote:
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=6
(page 15)
The court has identified about two dozen government lawyers who actively participated in the original non-disclosure to the defense, the false rebuttal testimony, and the refusal to correct it.
Governmental regularity—due process—requires personal and institutional
integrity. CIA attorneys told Assistant U.S. Attorney Ted Greenberg that the Briggs affidavit should not be used as evidence, as then written, and asked him not introduce it. He did.
CIA General Counsel Stanley Sporkin advised that, at minimum,the word
“indirectly” should be removed from paragraph four. Deliberately, knowing the
facts, Greenberg ignored the CIA attorneys' requests and used it. (Wilson Mot. to
Vacate, Ex. 98 ¶¶ 3-5.)
Although it admits that it presented false evidence at Wilson’s trial and
now lists solicitations and services he performed post-termination, the
governmentsaysthat Wilson has not proved that the prosecutors knew that it wasfalse. Persistence in this contention reveals that consistency is valued higher thanfidelity at the Department of Justice.
First, the government says that the prosecutors meant “taskings related to
the gathering of intelligence” where Briggs’s affidavit reads, “asked or requested directly or indirectly to perform or provide services.” (Gov't Answer at 54.)...
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In 2004, Stanley Sporkin was hired by Fannie Mae to conduct an internal investigation:
http://whereisthemoney.org/hotseat/stanley/#FannieMaeQ1
http://whereisthemoney.org/hotseat/stanleysporkin.htm
....and last month, BP hired Sporkin as an "ombudsman"
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/09/05/...its-ombudsman/
<b>Stanely Sporkin, and 9th District Senior Judge Stephen Trotta, et al, are accused of knowingly withholding evidence that could have prevented Edwin Wilson from serving some...or all of 22 years that he spent in prison.....If democrats win control of the house or of the senate, a high priority should be put on finding the status of the OPR investigation, reported by WaPo's Susan Schmidt, nearly three years ago (see image of article in previous post:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingt...+Of+Arms+Deale
The integrity of our justice system was identified by Texas federal judge, Lynn Hughes, 41 months ago as broken, and he referred to "about two dozen government lawyers who actively participated in the original non-disclosure to the defense, the false rebuttal testimony, and the refusal to correct it."
Damn it.....the current DOJ, by 35 months (now...on May 31, 2007, it's 42 months...) of it's OPR's silence, is now implicated in this travesty of justice, and coverup. I want to see subpoenas issued to Sporkin, Trott, et al, and I want to see them give testimony, or take the 5th, in a public, congressional hearing....ASAP....while 77 year old Edwin Wilson is still alive, and before any other current or former CIA operatives, or anyone else prosecuted by DOJ for any offense, is fucked over.
</b>
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Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Lega...tory?id=708779
Conviction of Former CIA Agent Overturned on False Affidavit
April 27, 2005
.....Wilson, at age 54, was sentenced in 1983 to 52 years in prison. He was convicted of selling weapons and 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. He was also convicted of trying to arrange a contract hit on the prosecutors.
Wilson's defense was that he was still working with the CIA and that the agency knew and approved of everything he was doing with Libya, including the shipment of the explosives.
Prosecutor Ted Greenberg said at the time that Wilson was making up his connection to the CIA. "Mr. Wilson did not work for the CIA or any other part of the intelligence community," he said.
In Houston, Wilson's conviction was overturned by a federal judge, Lynn Hughes, who identified about two dozen government lawyers, including Greenberg, who participated in the use of a false CIA affidavit that sent Wilson to prison and the silence about the affidavit after serious questions were raised about its accuracy. And Hughes minced no words in his opinion.
"In the course of American justice, one would have to work hard to conceive of a more fundamentally unfair process," wrote Hughes, "than the fabrication of false data by the government, under oath by a government official, presented knowingly by the prosecutor in the courtroom with the express approval of his superiors in Washington."
Wilson is a free man now......
.......It would take 20 years for Wilson to prove that the affidavit was false. From his cell in Marion, Wilson began to seek government documents using the Freedom of Information Act. It was 14 years later that the government turned over an internal Justice Department memo, buried in a large stack of other documents, in which Justice Department officials acknowledge the CIA affidavit was possibly false and discuss what to do about it.
"Somebody slipped up and never intended for Mr. Wilson to see this document," Adler said. "I think they forgot that if you put someone in solitary confinement, that they don't have a lot to do all day other than to pore through these documents, and I think Mr. Wilson paid a lot more attention to the materials than the people who were responsible for releasing them at the Justice Department."
Since then, Adler, a former CIA officer himself who was at first skeptical when assigned the case, has discovered dozens of Justice Department and CIA documents that prove the key affidavit in the Wilson case was false and that many in the government knew it. He said one document revealed at least 80 instances of contact between Wilson and the CIA. ...
.....After the guilty verdict, the CIA general counsel, Stanley Sporkin, who had told prosecutors prior to introduction of the affidavit in the trail that it should be amended or not used, again raised a red flag, according to one of the documents Adler and Wilson discovered.
"The CIA drafted up a letter that the agency proposed be sent to Wilson's attorneys disclosing the problem with the affidavit," Adler said. "And again the Justice Department rejected the CIA's suggestion that the letter be sent to Mr. Wilson's lawyer, and so it was never disclosed at that juncture either."
D. Lowell Jensen was in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department when the decision was first made. He declined to comment on his role in the Wilson case. Adler said he "found a fair number of memos that were addressed to him, or from him, talking about the problem, talking about the decision to keep quiet about this."
Stephen Trott replaced Jensen as the top Justice Department official at the time. Trott says he recalls a meeting on the Wilson case but none of the details.
The Justice Department has now admitted the affidavit used to convict Wilson was false, an innocent error, its lawyers told Hughes.
As for the CIA, they will only say, "It was Mr. Wilson's decision to sell explosives to Libya, and that's why he was sent to jail."
However, Hughes put it another way. "America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent," he wrote.
Wilson says he lost all he had, his family and his wealth, over the 22 years he was in prison. Now living with his brother in Seattle, he says he simply wants to clear his name.
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To be sure....the OPR has known about this for seven years and has never reported about it:
Quote:
http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2000nn/0004nn/000424nn.htm
(Scroll half way down page to view this article)
Fallout From a CIA Affidavit
Rogue Ex-Agent Seeks to Overturn '83 Conviction
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
<h3>Monday, April 24, 2000; Page A01</h3>
Wilson's court-appointed attorney, former CIA operative David Adler, has filed a motion seeking to have Wilson's conviction overturned on grounds that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony and then failed to disclose it to Wilson's lawyers. <h3>His allegations of prosecutorial misconduct are under review by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.</h3>
"I don't think there's any question I wanted disclosure; that's the way I operate," said Stanley Sporkin, the CIA's general counsel at the time, who retired in January after 14 years as a U.S. district judge in Washington. "I probably went further than anybody would have gone--I took it up to the top of the [Justice Department]. This was a Justice Department issue. They were the lawyers in the courtroom. How much can you insist?"
Sporkin denied knowing that the Briggs affidavit was false at the time. The Justice Department also denies that prosecutors knowingly used a false affidavit. But the department now admits in legal filings: "With the benefit of retrospection and in light of all the information now known to the Department, it appears that the statement was inaccurate."
Nonetheless, Justice lawyers argue that the affidavit's inaccuracy should not invalidate Wilson's conviction without evidence that the CIA authorized him to sell C-4 to Libya. The department also contends that its limited disclosure 16 years ago corrected Briggs's "misstatement."....
.....Wilson's attorney also has filed a motion before U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston asking that 17 current and former CIA and Justice Department officials be held in contempt, including Sporkin; two top Reagan Justice officials, Stephen S. Trott and D. Lowell Jensen, both now federal judges; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark M. Richard, now in his 33rd year with the department; former assistant U.S. attorney E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., now a well-known D.C. defense attorney; and veteran federal prosecutor Theodore Greenberg.
Like Sporkin, Barcella denied knowing that the Briggs affidavit was false at the time. Trott, Jensen, Richard and Greenberg either declined to comment or did not respond to telephone calls.......
.....The Briggs Affidavit: A Crucial Tool for Trial
The Briggs affidavit took shape in Houston on Feb. 3, 1983, three days before Wilson's conviction. This account is based on hundreds of pages of internal government documents introduced in court as part of the motion to overturn Wilson's conviction.
Lead prosecutor Ted Greenberg wanted to shred Wilson's "CIA defense" with an affidavit from Briggs, then the CIA's executive director and now retired. So Briggs and two CIA attorneys, Edmund Cohen and David Pearline, got together to draft it. They agreed at the outset that the Briggs affidavit should state that there were no CIA records authorizing the shipment of C-4 to Libya. They set out to define Wilson's relationship with the CIA as narrowly as possible by using the word "tasking," a specific request for a service.
The three CIA men knew that the agency's own extensive reporting had found that there were many "contacts" with Wilson since his retirement in 1971--social occasions, exchanges of information--but no "tasking." There was one exception in 1972, when the CIA paid Wilson $1,000 for sending an employee to Libya to gather information. The $1,000 payment would be noted in the affidavit.
The three men then decided that a layman might not understand the term "tasking." So the group substituted the word "services." The document now said the CIA never "asked or requested [Wilson] to perform or provide any services for CIA."
Greenberg, seeking to make the affidavit even stronger, rewrote the sentence to read: Edwin P. Wilson was not "asked or requested, directly or indirectly, to perform or provide any services, directly or indirectly, for CIA."
But the tinkering had so expanded the meaning of the sentence that it made the document inaccurate. Wilson alleges that the government lawyers knew they were shading the truth. The Justice Department now concedes only that government lawyers apparently failed to comprehend that they had "stripped the term 'services' of crucial qualifying language connoting an intelligence gathering function."
Shortly after the affidavit was drafted in Houston, CIA general counsel Sporkin, in Langley, told the lawyers that he opposed using it, thinking it confusing and a possible basis for appeal, because Wilson's lawyers would not be able to cross-examine a piece of paper.
But Greenberg disregarded Sporkin's repeated objections, saying he felt the affidavit was essential to winning the case.
Greenberg read the affidavit in court on the final day of trial. The jury retired for the evening after deliberating for four hours.
When jurors reconvened the next morning, they asked the judge to reread the Briggs affidavit. An hour later, they returned a verdict: guilty.
"There were several of us that thought possibly the CIA might have something to do with that, but when they admitted that last affidavit, that convinced me," juror Betty Metzler told United Press International the day Wilson was convicted.
A Debate Over Duty To Disclose Inaccuracy
At the CIA, Mark Tanes wasn't convinced. He worked in the agency's inspector general's office and had been researching Wilson for at least a year to help the prosecutors in Houston.
On Feb. 8, three days after Wilson's conviction, Tanes penned a memo to the CIA's inspector general questioning the accuracy of the Briggs affidavit. Tanes cited several undisclosed CIA requests for services from Wilson.
Within two days, Justice Department attorney Kim Rosenfield sent a memo to her boss, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard, entitled, "Duty to Disclose Possibly False Testimony."
The memo noted that case law required a prosecutor to correct false testimony. A new trial was required if the false testimony could "in any reasonable likelihood have affected the judgment of the jury."
At the top of the memo someone wrote: "Plain meaning of services--the affid. is inaccurate."
Spurred by the memos from Tanes and Rosenfield, Sporkin's office quickly drafted a letter to Wilson's lawyer disclosing problems with the Briggs affidavit.
Sporkin, the CIA's top lawyer, forwarded the draft letter to Richard at the Justice Department. Sporkin pushed to have the matter resolved before Wilson's sentencing, but noted in a memo he placed in his own files that Richard "indicated there was very little sentiment in DOJ to do anything about the Briggs' declaration."
Richard, often described as a pillar of the Criminal Division, then alerted his boss, Assistant Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen, now a senior U.S. district judge in Northern California.
"As for my own views, I think we must make a disclosure--either to the judge or the defense attorney," Richard counseled in a handwritten note to Jensen dated Feb. 22. "A third option is to disclose to both."
In April, the CIA completed its final review of Wilson's services and sent the Justice Department a detailed list of 80 contacts between Wilson and CIA personnel after 1971. Twice, a CIA officer had asked Wilson to provide antitank weapons for a sensitive operation. On another occasion, the CIA had negotiated the sale of two salt-water distillation units to Egypt through Wilson's firm.
The CIA's associate deputy director, Theodore G. Shackley, a legendary operative known as the "Blond Ghost," had asked Wilson for a list of his Libyan contacts. Shackley also had met with Wilson in the late 1970s to see if Wilson could acquire a Soviet surface-to-air missile system.
By midsummer, Richard wrote Jensen that "disclosure is, unfortunately, necessary. I suspect I am in the minority."
In undated handwritten notes by an unidentified participant at a CIA-Justice meeting, Jensen is quoted as saying the government had an "underlying obligation of disclosure to court."
Jensen left the Justice Department and was replaced on Aug. 1, 1983, by Stephen Trott. And the thinking on disclosure shifted.
Another handwritten note from an Aug. 8 meeting states that disclosure, if deemed necessary, should be made only in the government's reply to Wilson's appeal, not to Wilson or his attorney.
This would likely ensure that the appeals court would "treat the issue without much attention," the note says. Such disclosure "at worst" would result in only a "limited remand" to the trial court, not a full reversal of Wilson's conviction.
It is not clear who decided to limit disclosure to the appellate brief. Wilson's lawyer alleges it was Trott.
The eventual disclosure was brief and perfunctory: two instances beyond the Briggs declaration in which "the CIA enlisted Wilson's assistance in business transactions." There was nothing about the list of 80 contacts. The appeals court upheld Wilson's conviction without comment.
The letter drafted to Wilson's attorney was never sent.......
....The Paper Trail
Government documents obtained by lawyers for former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson show the evolution of the government's position, presented in a Houston federal courtroom in 1983, that Wilson was not asked to do work for the agency after his retirement in 1971.
Feb. 3, 1983: Affidavit by CIA official Charles A. Briggs denying Wilson did work for the agency.
Feb. 8, 1983: Memo from CIA employee Mark Tanes showing that Wilson did do work for the agency.
Feb. 10, 1983: Memo from Justice Department attorney on issues raised by the Tanes memo.
Feb. 17, 1983: CIA general counsel Stanley Sporkin seeking a quick resolution.
Feb. 18, 1983: Letter drafted by Justice Department informing Wilson's lawyer of problems with the Briggs affidavit. The letter was never sent.
Feb. 22, 1983: Note from Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard recommending disclosure.
Aug. 8, 1983: Notes of a CIA-Justice meeting in which the benefits of a limited disclosure are discussed.
January 2000: Government's response to Wilson's motion for a new trial.
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Between 1981 and 1983, during the period that the above "paper trail" documents that the Wilson "cover up" was happening, David Addington, now Cheney's COS was CIA general counsel to Stanley Sporkin.... |
