Washington Post Corrects Awlaki Story

The Washington Post has corrected its blockbuster Jan. 27 front-page story that reported that three U.S. citizens, including former San Diego imam Anwar Awlaki, were on the CIA’s “kill or capture” list.

Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who lived in San Diego in the 1990s and attended graduate school, is now living in a remote area in Yemen.

U.S. authorities believe he served as a “spiritual advisor” to some of the 9/11 hijackers and he corresponded with Maj. Nidal Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter. There are also reports, which Awlaki has denied, that he directed the attempted Christmas Day jetliner bombing.

Even though he’s apparently not on a CIA list, Awlaki may still be marked for death. The military’s Joint Special Operations Command also maintains a separate list of  high-value targets (HVTs) targeted for kill or capture. The Post is sticking by its original reporting that  “several” Americans are on it.

Still it’s an embarrassing correction. ProPublica’s Stephen Engleberg sympathizes with the Post reporter, Dana Priest, and compares covering the intelligence community like fumbling around in a dark room.

He also notes some of the discrepancies that I pointed out earlier between Priest’s story and a Jan. 31 follow by the LA Times’ Greg Miller.

I still have doubts about this whole assassination story. As a U.S. citizen, Awlaki is protected under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Like it or not, even traitors have rights in our country.

Coughlin Stoia's Money Machine

A move is underway to clamp down on the massive fees earned by plaintiffs lawyers suing behalf of public pension funds.

Florida recently capped the fees its lawyers can earn at $50 million per case. Alabama, Iowa, Mississippi, and Oklahoma have introduced bills that would force states to disclose their contracts for legal services. Several states have already enacted similar measures.

This movement could be bad for business at San Diego’s Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP, a politically-connected firm that has extracted huge settlements in class-action corporate lawsuits.

As I noted last week, Coughlin Stoia is cozy with Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is now leading a congressional inquiry into the causes of the financial crisis.

Byron Georgiou, of counsel to Coughlin Stoia, is a member of the Angelides commission.

For an excellent example of how the firm operates, there are few better examples than Coughlin Stoia’s 2006 lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group on behalf of CalPERS, the giant California pension fund.

The firm — known then as Lerach Coughlin — sued UnitedHealth over the company’s practice of backdating stock options granted to its executives.

A month after filing suit, Coughlin Stoia and its attorneys contributed $107,000 to Angelides’ gubernatorial campaign. Angelides was an influential member of the CalPERS board.

CalPERS became lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and Coughlin Stoia became lead counsel.

CalPERS’ general counsel, Peter Mixon, and Lerach Coughlin negotiated the firm’s compensation a year later.

The deal anticipated a billion-dollar settlement. Lawyers on the case were to receive 11 percent of the first $250 million recovered; 12 percent of the next $250 million; and 13 percent of anything exceeding $750 million.

Sure enough, UnitedHealth Group settled in 2008 for $925 million — the largest settlement ever in a stock options backdating case.

Under its fee arrangement, CalPERS’ attorneys were entitled $110 million, most of which would have gone to Lerach Coughlin.

Judge James S. Rosenbaum wouldn’t allow it. He  cut Lerach Coughlin’s golden egg nearly in half to $65 million.

In his ruling, Judge Rosebaum said that while Lerach Coughlin may have been pursuing in its own interests, CalPERS was not. The judge found no signs that the pension had used its enormous leverage to shop around for another law firm. Nor had it tried to negotiate a lower fee before filing the complaint.

Another problem was that the firm’s lead attorney, William Lerach, hadn’t bothered to tell the judge that he was under federal investigation. Lerach is serving two years in prison for paying kickbacks to his clients.

In fact, Lerach’s firm told Judge Rosenbaum in 2006 that the government “has notified Mr. Lerach that it does not intend to take any action against him.” 

“Had the truth been timely and fully disclosed to the Court, in all likelihood the Court would never have appointed his firm as lead counsel,” Judge Rosenbaum wrote.

It could also be said that had the truth been fully disclosed, Lerach Coughlin/Coughlin Stoia wouldn’t have been able to bill $900 an hour for the services of prisoner Bill Lerach.

Former Rep. Charlie Wilson Dead at 76

First John Murtha. Now former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson has died at 76.

The ethically-challenged Wilson was made famous by the excellent book by the late George Crile (and the movie) Charlie Wilson’s War, which revealed how he secretly supplied the funds for the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

He appears a couple of times in my book, Feasting on the Spoils, most memorably in a a scene at a poker game at the Watergate Hotel. The Watergate was a home away from home for San Diego defense contractor Brent Wilkes and his CIA buddy, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo.

Wilkes and Foggo continued their long-standing tradition of weekly card games in Washington. Foggo would invite along friends from the CIA, and Wilkes would bring the congressmen. One of the congressional guests was Charlie Wilson, who had in 1993 received the CIA’s Honored Colleague Award, the first time it was ever awarded to anyone outside the agency. At one game, Wilson invited along his friend from Texas Joe Murray, a columnist for The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Murray met Wilson in the hotel lobby. “I’m not sure how they chose the Watergate,” Murray wrote in a May 20, 1994 column, a few days after the poker game. “Perhaps because a sense of history. Either that or a sense of humor.”Murray followed Wilson into the suite, which was filled with cigar smoke. Wilson knew a few of the CIA personnel at the game. One was Brant Bassett, a well-regarded officer who spoke fluent Russian, German, and Hungarian. Bassett was known as Nine Fingers after a motorcycle accident had cost him a finger. Wilson brought gifts, a sack full of guns that included a Soviet automatic used by Russian paratroopers. Wilson had a special pen for everyone, one that with a click fired a .32-caliber bullet. Everyone in the room started clicking his pen.

“Boy, I wish I’d had it this afternoon,” someone said.

“If only Aldrich Ames were here.”

Murray and Wilson stayed only a short while, and as they were leaving, one of the agents offered Murry one of his cigars, a Dominican. Murray offered the agent one of his, a Cuban. The agent told him, “You know, of course, this is considered contraband. But you’ve done the right thing as a good citizen. You’ve turned it in to the proper authorities. Be assured that very shortly it will be destroyed by fire.”

Wilson insisted there was no hanky-panky the night he was there. “The only activities that took place there that would be considered illegal and unlawful was cigar smoking on a nonsmoking floor,” Wilson said. Cunningham was the only other congressman who ever attended the poker games, according to Wilkes.

The “hanky-panky” Wilson is referring to were the rumors that flew around Washington that congressmen were supplied with prostitutes at these games. The FBI never found any evidence of this (the government certainly would have used it against Wilkes if they had) but people still think it’s what happened anyway.

After my book came out, Wilkes’ nephew and right-hand man, Joel Combs, testified that Wilkes told his employees to lose to Duke at poker and he yelled at one man who wasn’t losing enough.

Wilkes was sentenced to 12 years for bribing Cunningham; Foggo is serving time in prison for steering CIA contracts to Wilkes.

As for Charlie Wilson, he didn’t remember Wilkes; Foggo, however, he remembered well when I interviewed him in 2006.

When I told Wilson that Foggo had a rather unsavory reputation, Wilson said that the CIA sometimes had need of people like that in the CIA to do the dirty work against the KGB. (Foggo was no James Bond, however; he was a logistics officer.)

Ah, well, I’m sorry Charlie is gone. He made Congress fun.

Al-Jazeera Speaks to Ex-SD Imam

Excerpts of Al-Jazeera interview with Anwar Awlaki on Feb. 2, 2010.  Translated and released by NEFA Foundation.  Awlaki lived in San Diego in the 1990s.

Q. What is the truth about you meeting with Omar Farooq [the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing] or that you announced a Fatwa about the legitimacy of the operation?A. The mujahid brother Omar al-Farooq—may Allah release him—is one of my students; yes, we were in correspondence, but I did not give Omar Farooq a Fatwa in regards to this operation.

Q. You envision him as a mujahid; meaning, do you back him up?

A. I support what Omar Farooq has done after I witnessed my brothers in Palestine for more than 60 years being killed, and in Iraq they are being killed, and in Afghanistan they are being killed, and the American missiles and raids killed 17 women and 23 children in my tribe; thus, don’t ask me whether al-Qaeda killed, or if it bombed an American civil jet after all of that, as three hundred Americans are nothing before the thousands of Muslims they killed.

Q. You supported [alleged Fort Hood shooter] Nidal Hasan and you justified it that the target is military and not civic. In regards to the jet [incident] of Omar Farooq it is a civic jet; meaning, the targets are the American public?

A. If the jet was military or the target was for the American army, it would be better. And, al-Qaeda Organization has its choices, and in regards to the public, the American populace is living within a democratic regime and they hold the responsibility of its policies; the American populace elected the criminal Bush for two presidential runs, and they elected Obama who’s not different from Bush, and one of his first declarations were that he will not abandon Israel despite that there were other candidates in the American elections who oppose the foreign American wars and those only received low percentages of the total votes. The American populace is a participant in all the crimes of their government, but if they weren’t supportive of that then they should change their government; they are the ones who pay taxes that are being spent on the army and they are who send their children to the army; they carry the responsibility.

Q. Do you believe that the Yemeni Government is facilitating your assassination?

A. The Yemeni government sells its own citizens to America in order to eat bloody money it received from the west, with their blood. The Yemeni officials say to the Americans: attack whatever you desire but do not adopt the actions thereof in order to not have people revolt against us, and with total impertinence the Yemeni government adopts it. For example, the Cruise Missiles were seen by the people in the region in Shabwa and Abeen and Arhab, and the some of the Cluster Bombs remained undetonated and people saw them. The state is lying in its claims, and the state adopted the operation in order to refute the accusation of being a cooperative. The American surveillance jets always revolve in the Yemeni sphere; so what is this country that allows its enemy to eavesdrop on its people and invade their privacies, then considers this cooperation accepted?

"King of Pork" John Murtha Dead at 77.

John Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Committee who was considered one of the most corrupt members of Congress, died today.

The Defense Appropriations subcommittee is perhaps the most powerful in the House, funding not just the world’s biggest military, but the U.S. intelligence community as well.

President Obama signed the $636 billion 210 Defense appropriations bill into law in December. In it, Taxpayers for Common Sense counted 1,720 earmarks totalling $4.2 billion.

As chairman, Murtha cleaned up with 23 earmarks worth $76.5 billion.

With so much power and money flowing through it, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has become fertile ground for corruption on both sides of the aisle. One of its more infamous members was another Vietnam war hero like Murtha, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif.

With Murtha gone, the lobbyists and defense contractors who fed at his trough for so many years are in mourning. At the top of that heap is lobbyist Paul Magliochetti, a former Murtha aide whose PMA Group was raided last year.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania will also need to find another sponsor for all the pet projects nurtured for years by Murtha, the representative since 1974. Things like the National Drug Intelligence Center. Or the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. Or the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.

The FBI captured Murtha’s bare-knuckled performance on videotape in 1980 during an undercover sting aimed at exposing corrupt lawmakers. Murtha turned down 50,000 cash from the representative for a phony Arab sheikh, but not before adding, “After we’ve done some business, I might change my mind.”

Murtha was never charged with a crime, and in Congress, Speaker Tip O’Neill protected Murtha, as George Crile revealed in Charlie Wilson’s War. Wilson shut down the House Ethics Committee’s probe before a special prosecutor could move on Murtha.

When Murtha was in the running for majority leader in the fall of 2006, someone leaked a copy of the FBI videotape to The American Spectator. (See here.)