[BigBison]

I'm sure I'll get around to restoring pt. 1 one of these days. In the meantime, some disturbing developments. The "Unitary Executive" power grab will continue as will torture of detainees, as President Bush has declared the McCain amendment null and void. The CIA continues to be the biggest threat to national security with its insistence on becoming the driving force behind terrorism and its nexus with rogue-state nuclear weapons -- by apparently giving the Iranians the blueprints for the TBA-480 (nuclear bomb) detonator. I'll elaborate later, here are the teaser trailers:

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public arguments. On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.

But it's worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: "Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story...678220,00.html

Crap. Are you freaking kidding me? That is an excerpt from James Risen's new book. He's one of the New York Times reporters who exposed the NSA warrantless-wiretap program the other week. Tip of the iceberg, apparently. Sidney Blumenthal needs no introductions:

Last week, when Bush signed the military appropriations bill containing the amendment forbidding torture that he and Vice President Cheney had fought against, he added his own "signing statement" to it. It amounted to a waiver, authorized by him alone, that he could and would disobey this law whenever he chose. He wrote: "The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, the president, in the name of national security, claiming to protect the country from terrorism, under war powers granted to him by himself, would follow the law to the extent that he decided he would.

Sen. John McCain, the sponsor of the anti-torture legislation, according to sources close to him, says that he has not determined how or when he might respond to Bush's "signing statement." McCain wishes to raise other issues, like ghost detainees, and he may wait to see how the administration responds to the new law. However, with responsibility for oversight moved from the Armed Services Committee to the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by White House tool Pat Roberts, McCain and others have no reliable way of knowing whether the administration is complying. Once again, torture policy enters a shadow land.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blument.../01/05/spying/

There is a fundamental difference between McCain's views on torture and the administration's views. Of course, McCain is the only one who has actually been tortured for years while illegally detained by insurgents, so he's the only one with credibility. What the administration says, is waterboarding doesn't create "severe pain or mental anguish". McCain says he'd rather be beaten all day any day than be subjected to a mock execution, like waterboarding.

I personally believe that if even a hardened terrorist can only withstand the procedure for two minutes, before breaking under fear of imminent death, it qualifies as severe mental anguish. Also, I don't think we use the plastic wrap on detainees like we do in SERE training -- good old-fashioned pour the water directly into the mouth (aka Chinese) water torture is what this is. I still believe that actionable intelligence is not the result.

Evidence gained under duress is not admissible in court. Heck, it can't even be used as the basis for a warrant against anyone -- do the reasons behind bypassing the FISA court become more clear in that light? The purpose of torture has always primarily been the production of propaganda. Ghosting detainees off to secret CIA gulags for the forseeable future and subjecting them to systematic beatings may be vengeance, but it isn't justice.

It is a recruiting tool for terrorists. See how evil the Americans are? Whereas the ultimate insult to a terrorist would be to punish them under our system of laws and lock them up or execute them accordingly. By conflating torture with actionable intelligence, the administration has caused our military, intelligence services, and outsourced Private Military Contractors to run amok and afoul of all established standards of human decency. This madness must stop, as it is actively working against our greater interests in the world, and is detrimental to our national security.

James Risen also relates how Afghanistan has returned to the status of "Narco-State," producer of 87% of the heroin produced in the world, under the indifferent noses of American soldiers and spies. And he explains how the ambiguity over the torture inflicted on certain prisoners of the war against terror was maintained by a watertight "zone of confidentiality" around George W. Bush: the president has never signed anything and has never even been officially "briefed" on the subject. He therefore retains plausible deniability.

http://www.lefigaro.com/internationa...6.FIG0349.html

Oh, and let's not forget the CIA's ongoing complicity in the international heroin trade, despite the fact that it directly finances terrorism... At least the President isn't knowingly lying when he says, "We do not torture." I feel soooooo much better now.

[BigBison]

It's staggering to read how much information our intelligence agencies had gathered which showed that, most likely, Iraq not only didn't have a nuclear-weapons program, but that it lacked any WMD programs. It's sickening to realize how the only "slam dunk" the evidence backed up was for a lack of Iraqi WMDs, which turned out to have been good, accurate intelligence -- which was suppressed.

Startlingly, Risen reports that on the eve of war, the CIA knew the US had no proof of weapons of mass destruction, the casus belli, the justification for preemptive attack. The agency had recruited an Arab-American woman living in Cleveland, Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, as a secret agent to travel to Baghdad to spy on her brother, Saad Tawfiq, an electrical engineer supposedly at the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Once there, she won his trust and he confided there was no program. He urged her to carry the message back to the CIA. Upon her return, she was debriefed and the CIA filed the report in a black hole. It turned out that she was one of some 30 Iraqis who had been recruited to travel to Iraq to contact weapons experts there. Risen writes, "All of them - had said the same thing. They all reported to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned."

Not willing to contradict the administration line, CIA officials withheld this information from the National Intelligence Estimate issued a month after Alhaddad's visit to Baghdad. The NIE stated conclusively that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear program." Risen writes: "From his home in Baghdad in February 2003, Saad Tawfiq watched Secretary of State Colin Powell's televised presentation to the United Nations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As Powell dramatically built the American case for war, Saad sank further and further into frustration and despair. They didn't listen. I told them there were no weapons."

When CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin raised questions about the fabled aluminum tubes that were supposedly a critical element of Saddam's nuclear program, Tenet waved McLaughlin's doubt aside. Skepticism was banished. When David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, discovered there were no WMD, he met with the ever-faithful Tenet, who told him: "I don't care what you say. You will never convince me they didn't have chemical weapons."

After the war, efforts within the CIA to dispel illusion and acknowledge reality in Iraq met with punishment. In November 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad submitted what is internally called an "aardwolf," a formal report on country conditions. "It pulled no punches in detailing how the new insurgency was gaining strength from the political and economic vacuum that the United States had allowed to develop in Baghdad," writes Risen. For his honesty, the station chief was subjected to "inflammatory accusations about his personal behavior, all of which he flatly denied," and "quit the CIA in disgust." The destruction of his career led other CIA officers to hedge their reports, especially on Chalabi. The new station chief, in an "aardwolf" in late 2004, described the lethal conditions on the ground, and as a reward "his political allegiances were quickly questioned by the White House." Reality remained unwelcome.

[BigBison]

By rushing into the Iraq invasion, did we sacrifice Afghanistan to opium-poppy-funded warlords? Is Afghanistan a "narco-state"? Is exporting democracy a panacea for the world's problems, or a pipe dream with dangerous consequences?

The post-Taliban boom in opium production means that drug money now permeates every stratum of Afghanistan's society - from the farmers cultivating poppies in the east to those in the highest levels of the central government of Kabul, according to senior Afghan and European officials working here.

"We are already a narco-state," says Mohammad Nader Nadery at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has studied the growing impunity of former military commanders and drug dealers who now work within the Afghan government. "If the governors in many parts of the country are involved in the drug trade, if a minister is directly or indirectly getting benefits from drug trade, and if a chief of police gets money from drug traffickers, then how else do you define a narco-state?"

Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan's minister of tribal and frontier affairs, says that the government has become so full of drug smugglers that cabinet meetings have become a farce. "Sometimes the people who complain the loudest about theft are thieves themselves," he says.

In the past two years, the UN reports that poppy cultivation increased by two-thirds in 2004 to 51.7 million acres. The US estimate was even higher - at 87.5 million acres. Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world's opium - most of it ends up on the streets of Europe and Russia as heroin. European officials warn that this fledgling democracy is being undermined as Afghan officials make decisions based on what's good for the drug trade, rather than the electorate.

"There is a danger that all the stabilization and reconstruction efforts will be neutralized unless the narcotrafficking problem is addressed," says Ursula Müller, political counselor at the German Embassy in Washington. "We have to fight this corruption ... those guys involved in the drug business [who] are in all levels of Afghanistan's government," adds Ms. Müller, who has been actively involved in rebuilding Afghanistan since the US toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p...html?s=spworld

[BigBison]

IT WAS astounding enough for Washington’s political elite: last month they discovered that the man at the heart of a scandal over the planting of US propaganda in Iraqi newspapers was a dapper but unknown 30-year-old Oxford graduate who had somehow managed to land a $100 million Pentagon contract.

What is even more remarkable however, after an investigation by The Times, is that just ten years ago Christian Bailey, whose US company is under investigation for planting fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers, was a nerdy, socially awkward English school-leaver called Jozefowicz.

The transformation of the geeky but ambitious Christian Jozefowicz, who just a few years ago was growing up in a modest terraced house in Godalming, Surrey, to the charming, baby-faced multimillionaire Christian Bailey now rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful figures in Washington — and who next year will probably face questions on Capitol Hill about his company — is one of the more extraordinary stories to have emerged from the Iraq war.

This month it was revealed that Mr Bailey’s US company, the Lincoln Group, was the recipient of a Pentagon contract to help to fight the information war in Iraq. It then emerged that the company was paying Iraqi journalists to plant optimistic news “stories” in Iraqi papers that had been written by the US military.

Interference with the press touches a raw nerve in America. The fake stories revelation provoked a furore among Republicans and Democrats. President Bush said he was “very troubled” by it. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has promised a Pentagon investigation. Congress plans hearings into the scandal.

The journey from the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, which Mr Bailey left in 1994, to the heart of K Street in Washington, the centre of money and influence in the US capital, has been remarkably rapid. Today he has a reputation in Washington for being a socialite with links to influential Republicans. He is a helicopter and aircraft pilot and his home is in a fashionable area.

Through a Lincoln Group spokesman, Mr Bailey answered questions from The Times to help to explain how, at just 30, he landed the Pentagon as an important client. He was born Christian Martin Jozefowicz on November 28, 1975, in Kingston upon Thames, to Jerzy and Anne Jozefowicz.

...

In his third year at Oxford he hired an assistant to help him to run his first proper company, Linck Ltd, which sold self-help tapes. In 1998, he changed his name to Bailey. “Following his father’s death, Bailey assumed the name for family reasons, something which children commonly do,” a Lincoln Group spokesman said. In the late 1990s he moved to San Francisco to try his hand as a dotcom entrepreneur, and then to New York, where he became treasurer of the Oxonion Society, a club for intellectual Anglophiles. He became co-chairman of a networking group for young Republicans. With his Republican contacts growing, Mr Bailey moved to Washington, where he spotted a golden business opportunity: the looming war in Iraq. He formed a partnership with Paige Craig, a former US Marine who served in Iraq.

In early 2003, just before the invasion, Mr Bailey formed a Lincoln subsidiary, the Lincoln Alliance Corp, offering “tailored intelligence services [for] government clients faced with intelligence challenges”. He also formed another subsidiary, Iraqex, which won a $6 million Pentagon contract to launch “an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the c oalition’s goals and gain their support”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFr...-10889,00.html

[BigBison]

This is written by a former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan:

IT should come as no surprise that an arch-conservative Web site is questioning whether Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved the combat awards he received in Vietnam.

After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.

Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public's appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.

...

During the 2000 primary season, John McCain's life-defining experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam were diminished through whispers that he was too scarred by those years to handle the emotional burdens of the presidency. The wide admiration that Senator Max Cleland gained from building a career despite losing three limbs in Vietnam brought on the smug non sequitur from critics that he had been injured in an accident and not by enemy fire. John Kerry's voluntary combat duty was systematically diminished by the well-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a highly successful effort to insulate a president who avoided having to go to war.

And now comes Jack Murtha. The administration tried a number of times to derail the congressman's criticism of the Iraq war, including a largely ineffective effort to get senior military officials to publicly rebuke him (Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the only one to do the administration's bidding there).

Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received, and that the combat-distinguishing "V" on it was questionable. It then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.

Cybercast News Service is run by David Thibault, who formerly worked as the senior producer for "Rising Tide," the televised weekly news magazine produced by the Republican National Committee. One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh.

The accusations against Mr. Murtha were very old news, principally coming from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are an official letter from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago affirming Mr. Murtha's eligibility for his Purple Hearts - "you are entitled to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for wounds received in action" - and the strict tradition of the Marine Corps regarding awards. While in other services lower-level commanders have frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines Mr. Murtha's Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four different awards boards.

The Bush administration's failure to support those who have served goes beyond the smearing of these political opponents. One of the most regrettable examples comes, oddly enough, from modern-day Vietnam. The government-run War Remnants Museum, a popular tourist site in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, includes an extensive section on "American atrocities." The largest display is devoted to Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator and governor of Nebraska, recipient of the Medal of Honor and member of the 9/11 commission.

In the display, Mr. Kerrey is flatly labeled a war criminal by the Vietnamese government, and the accompanying text gives a thoroughly propagandized version of an incident that resulted in civilian deaths during his time in Vietnam. This display has been up for more than two years. One finds it hard to imagine another example in which a foreign government has been allowed to so characterize the service of a distinguished American with no hint of a diplomatic protest.

The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who thus far have decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/opinion/18webb.html

It's just appalling when a President, any President, responds to critics by mischaracterizing their positions and attacking their reputations. Yes, I blame Bush for this, he's the one who could have set an entirely different tone by handling this in a less petulant fashion. Grown men are allowed to disagree, but they're not supposed to resort to childish name-calling, which is what these smear efforts against Congressman Murtha amount to.

Discredit the message, not the messenger. Instead, the reaction to what Murtha has been saying makes it seem like they're afraid of what he's saying, which (to me) means it's more than likely the truth. I can think of no better way to convince me of the veracity of Mr. Murtha's claims, than by attempting to swiftboat him.

[BigBison]

It's hard to actually be for the use of propaganda when the execution continues to ineptly miss the point. The military will now be providing outsourced "editorial content" to select bloggers:

Word comes from RL that the Army has hired PR firm Hass MS&L of Detroit to offer "exclusive editorial content" to blogs willing to run government propaganda.

"The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out," account executive Charlie Kondek has written to a number of pro-military blogs in a January 6 Email.

"To that end, the Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you’re likely to be interested in," Kondek says. The Email has been mentioned in Black Five, One Hand Clapping and Fuzzilicious Thinking.

...

But the "content" under discussion, an Army public affairs officer tells me, is not the nitty gritty of deployments and living conditions overseas. It is planned to be an official counter to the perceived unwillingness of the mainstream media to report the "good news" from Iraq and the war on terror.

...

I'm tempted to suggest to the Army that if it wants to blog about what going on in Iraq or the war on terror, even the good news, it should just do so itself.

Blogs, however, are the epitome of independence, perspective, and rebellion. For the Army to blog, its bloggers would need to have an opinion, show some emotion, make a joke, make a case. We all know that the moment some public affairs flunkie strayed from the official happy talk and openly engaged in the information fight, he or she would get nuked.

So, our tax dollars are going to get used so the Army can just add to its propaganda machine, shoveling "content" to like-minded bloggers?

It all smacks of just another losing PR effort by a desperate team who seems to think that the only way it is going to get good press is to buy it or plant it. Hass MS&L's claim to fame in the blogging world as far as I can tell is that they maintain the General Motors' corporate blog. Did the Army have to hire the PR firm for a dying corporation as its new agent?

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/01/good_news_the_a.html

[BigBison]

As I mentioned in pt. 1 of this thread, it's been a long time since President Bush has mentioned Osama bin Laden, instead favoring the elevation of Zarqawi from thug status to that of mythical supervillain whom only Batman could hope to oppose, despite the fact that all we really know about him conflicts, like whether he has one leg or two. Maybe if we just ignore Osama and hope he dies...

Granted, he has been rather quiet, and I have my suspicions about the increasing number of "Osama is dead" stories which have appeared in traditional media of late. One suspicion, is that it's propaganda planted by the Bush administration. Remember how once, not long ago, such suspicions would have been dismissed as "crazy"?

The other suspicion I've had, is that if he isn't dead he'll pop up and prove it. Well guess what? I'm not crazy, the CIA confirms the latest tape is indeed from bin Laden and is indeed recent, probably recorded in mid-December. Two other stories about bin Laden have surfaced recently. One is in a book by an ex-CIA officer who was there, relating the tale of how local commanders on the ground knew right where bin Laden was back in the Tora Bora assault but were denied the personnel they requested to get him with.

They said bin Laden was dead then, too. Like Hunter S. Thompson famously said about Nixon, "I won't believe he's dead until I can gnaw on his skull." Fool me twice, shame on me -- there won't be a third time. No more claims of bin Laden's death without some freaking evidence, please!

Given that he's not dead, I am appalled at what appears to be our loss of resolve in giving up the chase. The other story of late, is that the Pakistani government knows exactly where he is but that we won't force them to hand him over as it would destabilize Pakistan. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume here. Perhaps this is why we remote-bombed that house in Pakistan the other day, and perhaps this is why despite the success there in taking out high-ranking al-Qaeda members Pakistan has officially condemned our action.

Typical of the conservative media, the focus is on smearing critics of our failure to apprehend bin Laden, instead of our failure to apprehend bin Laden, or even mention him in the past year except to say he's "probably dead" (Rumsfeld). This is best evidenced by Chris Matthews' comments on Hardball, "...sounds like an over the top Michael Moore..." to which John Kerry had this reply:

You'd think the only focus tonight would be on destroying Osama Bin Laden, not comparing him to an American who opposes the war whether you like him or not. You want a real debate that America needs? Here goes: If the administration had done the job right in Tora Bora we might not be having discussions on Hardball about a new Bin Laden tape. How dare Scott McClellan tell America that this Administration puts terrorists out of business when had they put Osama Bin Laden out of business in Afghanistan when our troops wanted to, we wouldn't have to hear this barbarian's voice on tape. That's what we should be talking about in America.

[BigBison]

Instead, our national security apparatus was tied up with the far more important job of investigating Ma and Pa Kettle with the never-really-discontinued TIA program. That's Total Information Awareness, which caused a huge outcry when the Bushies brought Poindexter out of retirement to create it, and an even larger outcry when he implemented it, from anyone and everyone concerned about allowing the government to trample willy-nilly on civil rights. So the administration said it was shut down, and Poindexter went back into retirement. Yet another lie, as TIA aimed to do exactly this:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for the eavesdropping program, which did not seek court warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but ultimately deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program, which focused on the international communications of some Americans and others in the United States, as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

That last paragraph there is why I've seemingly gone off-topic to talk about the NSA warrantless-wiretapping program. The Bush administration propaganda machine has really ramped up to tell us how vital and necessary this tool is in fighting the terrorists, by churning out statements like Cheney's. When asked to back up those claims, the answer is that such cannot be discussed due to national security and that we should just trust them.

I'm sorry, but I cannot blindly trust anyone who claims that civil liberties are a threat to national security, so I require that evidence. The real reason it can't be disclosed, is probably because it doesn't exist:

But the results of the program looked very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

...

The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch. Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through prisoner interrogations or other means.

...

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming in and out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.

The last paragraph represents TIA in action. Some of you are aware of my keen interest in "social networking", i.e. using the web to perform "six degrees of separation" calculations. Finding connections of interest between seemingly unrelated people takes gobstopping amounts of computing power, but has the potential for tremendous social benefit. Or great evil, like TIA -- especially when coupled with the fact that NSA controls gobstopping-plus amounts of computing power.

As a side note, another government vs. privacy issue in the news these days is what the government is doing with the information they've collected about all those innocent schoolteachers they've investigated. A reading of the law says the government is required to delete such data within three months of determining "case closed".

This administration's policies have never much bothered with the law. Either they're ignoring the Supreme Court's declaration that current environmental policy is unconstitutional and the Court's order to rewrite that policy in accordance with the Clean Water Act, or they're ignoring the Supreme Court's assertion that COPA is unconstitutional and attempting to enforce it anyway.

That Google case sounds like TIA as well (can ya say Big Brother), as it appears the government wants to keep a permanent record of everyone who searches Google for words like "lolita" or "cheerleader". If a neighbor or coworker pisses me off, I know what Google search to perform on their computer when they aren't looking...

So it is no surprise that current policy regarding evidence collected in these investigations is to keep it for future data-mining (TIA) purposes, regardless of what the law says, and without seeking to change the law. Sound like a pattern, yet? Bush picks and chooses which laws to enforce or obey, claiming plenary (unchecked, unlimited, absolute) authority. Wouldn't it be more proper to introduce legislation to replace COPA with something less flawed, instead of demanding records from Google in accordance with a law that's been struck down?

The administration claims its authority to disregard the law is based on the resolution to use force in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I don't see how this applies to their everyday "above the law" activities. What about the provision of government-authored content to selected bloggers? The Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration last fall when requiring attribution on government-produced messages of any kind which are meant for domestic consumption. So the bloggers who post such articles know the source is the U.S. government, but they aren't required to disclose it. Nice end run around the propaganda law, when you think about it.

Wouldn't our law-enforcement resources be better used in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, instead of ignoring him and hoping he dies? Where are your priorities, Mr. President, and what of your oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and laws of this country? Re-interpreting them as seen fit for political convenience should, IMO, be grounds for impeachment of any President.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor, who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs, said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

In response to the F.B.I. complaints, N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

This is exactly the problem with TIA: everybody calls Pizza Hut. Did you call Pizza Hut to come in and pick up a pizza (not all deliver) at about the same time as one of these al Qaeda "suspects"? This just isn't evidence of anything. More disturbingly, it takes the position of "guilty until proven innocent", instead of our traditional "innocent until proven guilty" approach. It is this hallmark, more than any other, which separates democracies from police states.

N.S.A.'s legal authority for collecting the information it passed to the F.B.I. is uncertain. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant for the use of so-called "pen register" equipment that records American phone numbers, even if the contents of the calls are not intercepted. But officials with knowledge of the program said no warrants were sought to collect the numbers, and it is unclear whether the secret executive order signed by President Bush in 2002 to authorize eavesdropping without warrants also covered the collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced "mountains of paperwork" that was often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.

"It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads," the former senior prosecutor said. "A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to."

By the administration's account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a significant role.

By contrast, different officials agree that N.S.A.'s domestic operations played a role was the arrest in Albany of an imam and another man who were taken into custody in August 2004 as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation.

The men, Yassin Aref, 35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html

So there's one case, in Albany, where this NSA program seems to have actually borne fruit. It remains to be seen if the courts agree with the warrantless nature of the wiretapping, so it's one to watch. Regardless, do we place all 150,000,000 Americans under warrantless surveillance for over four years to bust less than a handful of suspects for "crimes" so dubious as to be more pathetic than dangerous? Did these guys in Albany really have the wherewithal to sell missile launchers, or were they just wannabes?

The buzzword here is "overreaching". Even if the NSA program had turned up Faris, we caught someone thinking about commiting a terrorist act (subsequently deciding against it), not planning one, and an unworkable one at that. Do you know how long it would take to cut a suspension bridge cable with a blowtorch? Long enough to be noticed, for sure! So I take umbrage with Mr. Cheney's assertion that this unlawful program "saved thousands of lives" -- that's propaganda.

[BigBison]

Ah, finally a source for the Kerry comments. It seems John Kerry has set up a "diary" on the Daily Kos blog:

President Bush and his defenders continue to claim that Osama Bin Laden didn't escape at Tora Bora. But Gary Bernstein's book Jawbreaker documents what I said early in 2002 and during my debates with George Bush: that because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon didn't use American troops to do the job and instead outsourced the job of killing the world's #1 terrorist to Afghan warlords, this cold blooded killer got away.

So what's the truth? There's a question that the full force of cable television should demand be answered. Press accounts over the last month have raised new concerns about the reliance on Afghan forces at Tora Bora in 2001. One account cited a Department of Defense document said to summarize the case against a suspected al Qaeda militant. The militant was believed to have helped Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora. More recently, August Hanning, the head of German intelligence, has said bin Laden bribed Afghan forces at Tora Bora to make his escape.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/20/175232/080

We sent dirt-poor Afghani irregulars after bin Laden at Tora Bora, so he bribed them. How is it possible that, despite his overall low approval ratings, when asked if they approve of his handling of the war on terror over 60% of Americans say yes? I guess they thought bin Laden was dead, or something...

[BigBison]

Here's a great tongue-in-cheek propaganda site:

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html

[BigBison]

In an overheated old schoolroom in Washington, Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, is doing his best to impose military discipline on 25 pupils as they prepare to attack a mountain of pizza, cupcakes and cookies. It is the year-end party for Macfarland Middle School's Colin L. Powell Leadership Club, a tutoring and mentoring program that Wilkerson oversees as a volunteer. Striding before his charges in smart burgundy suspenders, the colonel - everybody here calls him the colonel - makes a point about duty:

"If you're not attending the meetings, you aren't a member of the club. It's as simple as that." He rebukes a boy who has shown up for the party but otherwise been scarce. "You know how I'll feel if you don't come to subsequent meetings," Wilkerson warns, "and you don't want to get me angry."

Then he drops the bluff demeanor and authorizes the kids to start chowing down. "Try to keep as much as you can off the floor," he says in a Southern accent softened by frequent chuckles. For the next hour he circulates through the room, greeting each student by name - Jamie, Angela, Trevon, Tanya - encouraging them to keep their grades up, prodding them to complete their community-service projects, inquiring about sometimes precarious home lives.

Since 1998, Wilkerson has devoted himself to helping at-risk children at Macfarland in the name of Colin Powell, whom he refers to as "my boss" and "the general." Wilkerson works tirelessly to keep them in the club and to secure scholarships for them at private high schools.

Yet these days he and Powell are estranged: This program represents the last remnant of a long, deep friendship between them. Like ex-spouses in an uneasy detente, "we decided we'd just communicate over the kids," says Wilkerson, sounding pained by the situation.

The split came as both men left the administration - Powell as secretary of state, Wilkerson as his chief of staff - after working side by side for 16 years. Wilkerson, a once-loyal Republican with 31 years of Army service, has emerged in recent months as a merciless critic of President Bush and his top people, accusing them of carrying out a reckless foreign policy and imperiling the future of the U.S. military.

"My wife would probably shoot me if I headed to the ballot box with a Republican vote again," he says. "This is not a Republican administration, not in my view. This is a radical administration."

Wilkerson calls Bush an unsophisticated leader who has been easily swayed by "messianic" neoconservatives and power-hungry, secretive schemers in the administration. In a landmark speech in October, Wilkerson said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

He is particularly appalled by U.S. treatment of enemy detainees, counting at least 100 deaths in custody during the course of the war on terrorism - 27 of them ruled homicides. "Murder is torture," he says. "It's not torture lite."

...

Wilkerson went north to study philosophy and English lit at Bucknell but quit college in his senior year. He was newly married yet determined to go to Vietnam. It was 1966.

"I felt an obligation because my dad had fought," he says, "and I thought that was kind of your duty."

Eventually he got there as an Army officer, spending a year in what he calls the "hottest combat" possible, piloting his OH-6A helicopter close to the jungle canopy, scouting out the enemy on behalf of the infantry.

"We got shot at nearly every day," he says. A brush with death came when a sniper's bullet pierced the helicopter's cockpit plexiglass, but he was never wounded or shot down. "My men used to call me the Teflon guy. . . . I felt like I had some kind of protective coating on me because I think I flew about 1,100 combat hours, which is a lot of hours."

(Predictable aside on hawks like Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz: "None of these guys ever heard a bullet go by their ears in combat.")

...

"He's the most competent Army officer I've ever worked with," says retired Lt. Gen. James W. Crysel, one of Wilkerson's bosses at Pacific Command. "He could run a large corporation."

Retired Rear Adm. Stewart A. Ring, whom Wilkerson served for three years, is similarly effusive: "He is the most principled individual I have ever met and ever worked with. He is a remarkable guy with essentially no ego. He stands up for what he thinks is right - not for Larry Wilkerson, but for what is right."

Such high praise won him an interview with Powell in early 1989, when the general was exiting as national security adviser in the Reagan White House and heading to Army Forces Command in Atlanta. Wilkerson says he was happy where he was, teaching at the Naval War College, and that evidently impressed Powell: "He said he didn't like overly ambitious people, and it was clear that I was content doing what I was doing and I wasn't really politicking for a job with him."

(An aside on Powell's personality: "He can be the most endearing person you'd ever want to meet in your life. The next minute he can be colder than fish.")

...

Wilkerson, as it turned out, became the point man for making the case for preemptive war against Hussein. He put together the task force that, during a week at CIA headquarters, vetted all the intelligence reports used for Powell's famous pro-war presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, where he brandished a vial of fake anthrax, played excerpts of intercepted Iraqi military chatter, and warned of mobile bioweapon "factories" and other doomsday machines, none of which actually existed.

How did it happen?

"Larry thought they had cleaned out the obvious garbage, but it turned out there was more," says James A. Kelly, a former assistant secretary of state who's known Wilkerson for 20 years. "Larry felt that he let down the secretary, but the job was so big in cleaning out the misinformation."

Wilkerson won't say outright that he and Powell were deliberately snowed by intelligence reports tailored to fit a political push for war, but he has edged closer to that view, noting, "I've begun to wonder." It turns out that the administration relied on fabricators' claims about Hussein's illusory WMD programs and, in one case, an al Qaeda suspect whom the CIA turned over to alleged torturers in Egypt.

"I kick myself in the ass," Wilkerson says. "How did we ever get to that place?"

The speech tarnished Powell's gold-plated reputation, but he has never publicly pointed a finger at then-CIA Director George Tenet or the White House.

"Nothing was spun to me," Powell told David Frost in a BBC television interview last month. "What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us."

Why didn't the doubts reach Powell? Perhaps because then he wouldn't have given the speech at all?

"That's right," Wilkerson says, shooting a hard, solemn stare across the restaurant table. "That's right."

He also says, "I am prepared to entertain the idea that they used him."

...

By early 2004, it was clear to Wilkerson that the Pentagon's failure to prepare for the war's aftermath - including dismissal of Army Gen. Eric Shinseki's warnings as well as peacekeeping and nation-building plans - had led to mounting deaths and injuries for U.S. ground troops. Nor was there, in Wilkerson's view, any thought given to future replenishment of the Army and Marine combat troops as the insurgency continued.

"Larry Wilkerson is a man of the Army in the finest sense," says Kelly. "He cares deeply about the U.S. Army . . . and he hates to see this institution badly damaged, and he believes it has been badly damaged."

Revelations about Abu Ghraib and the skirting of the Geneva Conventions added to Wilkerson's anger. He came to see Powell as the administration's lone voice of reason - but Powell was being shut out.

"Combine the detainee abuse issue with the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq, wrap both in this blanket of secretive decision-making . . . and you get the overall reason for my speaking out," Wilkerson says.

...

Wilkerson went so far as to draft a letter of resignation to Bush. He never sent it and now wonders whether he should have come out guns blazing before the 2004 election. But becoming a vocal political defector in Washington can mean lonely exile, a loss of stature and income.

"I know it's very hard to put kids, job security and all that sort of stuff aside. I think that's the answer to why more people don't speak out."

For Wilkerson, there was another reason: It might seem a betrayal of Powell, his hero, the man who signed photos to him with sentiments like, "To LW, You're the greatest!"

Larry and Barbara Wilkerson, married for 39 years, live frugally in a Falls Church townhouse. She works at a Hallmark card shop. Their son is an Air Force navigator who's done duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their daughter, now a homemaker, served in the Army. Departing from government after Bush's second inauguration, Wilkerson had to decide: Would he speak his conscience or remain the quiet man like Powell?

"My wife said to me: 'You have two choices, my man. You can think more about him or you can think more about your country. I suggest you do the latter.' "

...

She and others who know Wilkerson well say he has no intention of cashing in as a Bush critic. He hasn't joined a think tank or become a cable news pundit-for-hire. He has turned down publishers who want him to write a tell-all book for big money.

Wilkerson says he may write an academic text about presidential decision-making. This month he began supplementing his retirement with part-time teaching jobs at George Washington University and the College of William & Mary.

Recently a speakers bureau called Wilkerson to ask what fee he would want for a speech to a corporate audience. "I said I'd speak for the highest fee they'd pay," he recalls.

But there was a condition: The money couldn't go to him. He said he wanted it all donated to scholarships for children in the Colin L. Powell Leadership Club.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011802607.html

[BigBison]

Quoting BigBison:

The buzzword here is "overreaching". Even if the NSA program had turned up Faris, we caught someone thinking about commiting a terrorist act (subsequently deciding against it), not planning one, and an unworkable one at that. Do you know how long it would take to cut a suspension bridge cable with a blowtorch? Long enough to be noticed, for sure! So I take umbrage with Mr. Cheney's assertion that this unlawful program "saved thousands of lives" -- that's propaganda.

Here's your best indicator that the positive spin about the NSA program is propaganda. Look who's making the case for it -- administration insiders. Not one single current or former federal prosecutor. No judges. Only lawyers in the employ of the Executive branch. Here's what Karl Rove had to say about it last Friday:

Let me be as clear as I can: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

Clearly, eh? Name one. Not one single Democrat has claimed that we shouldn't be eavesdropping on al Qaeda's communications. That is not the issue, the issue is doing so without warrants, when it involves American citizens. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm fed up with Bush and his top advisors' constant lies. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree" is a lie, a baldfaced lie, fitting the pattern of avoiding the actual issue by smearing those who disagree. It's propaganda, and I'm sick and tired of having nothing but get spewed out of the White House every day.

[BigBison]

http://www.drmenlo.com/lgfquiz/slideshow1.html

[BigBison]

Bear in mind, we still aren't seeing a defense of the NSA program from any prosecutors or judges or even lawyers who aren't administration appointees:

He said the program fell well within the president's inherent powers under the Constitution to protect the country. Along with Washington's spy program during the Revolutionary War, he cited the interception of telegrams during the Civil War, and orders by Woodrow Wilson during World War I and Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II to intercept communications between foreign countries and the United States. "All these were without warrants," Mr. Gonzales said.

True. Irrelevant, but true. None of those Presidents were subject to the FISA act, which is the essence of the issue here that the spin is trying to avoid -- President Bush bypassed the FISA act, which was created in response to historical overreaching by Presidents who authorized unwarranted surveillance of American citizens. The other Presidents mentioned were never faced with a law declaring such actions illegal.

Also, don't buy this "inherent powers under the Constitution" crap. Gonzalez means unitary executive theory, an extremist philosophy with no established legal foundation (precedent). As such, it is disingenuous to present this power grab as Constitutionally-approved "business as usual".

Justice O'Connor wrote that the even though the resolution did not spell out a right to detain Taliban fighters, the vote had implicitly given Mr. Bush the power to do so because such detentions are "so fundamental and accepted an incident to war."

Mr. Gonzalez argued that by extension, the resolution also permitted military surveillance, in this case of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda, without "cataloguing the actions it would authorize."

On Monday, President Bush also cited the Hamdi case, saying that the ruling showed that the resolution gave him "additional powers."

At least this is a new argument. My first reaction to this (although I'll wait until real legal scholars have debunked it, or even validated it, so I'll withhold judgment) is that it appears to be overreaching. By extension, the President's right to detain foreign combatants allows him to authorize domestic spying without warrants? Sounds like a stretch.

As to the rest of Mr. Hayden and Mr. Gonzalez' arguments, they sound like very valid reasons to change the FISA act (as the Bush administration already did as part of the Patriot Act, even though they were already ignoring even the updated provisions at the time), not bypass it. Despite a Republican Congress and longstanding procedures in place to make these changes without breaching national security, the administration made no effort to operate within the existing legal structure of government.

Had they done so, instead of just ignoring outright a law they didn't like, this would hardly be the controversy it has become.

http://nytimes.com/2006/01/24/politi...d-wiretap.html

[BigBison]

Quoting BigBison:

Bear in mind, we still aren't seeing a defense of the NSA program from any prosecutors or judges or even lawyers who aren't administration appointees:

Ah, but I see they've dredged up Ed Meese to make the case for this in TV land:

Meese became Attorney General in February 1985, holding this office until August, 1988.

Meese's tenure was highly controversial. His involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair as a "counselor" and "friend" to the President, not as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, attracted the most criticism. Chapter 31 of the official Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters reveals his direct involvement: "Meese knew that the 1985 HAWK transaction, in which the National Security Council staff and the Central Intelligence Agency were directly involved without a presidential covert-action Finding authorizing their involvement, raised serious legal questions. The President was potentially exposed to charges of illegal conduct if he was knowledgeable of the shipment and had not reported it to Congress, under the requirements of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and in the absence of a Finding...When Meese got answers in his inquiry that did not support his defense of the President, he apparently ignored them, as he did with Secretary of State George P. Shultz's revelation on November 22 that the President had told him that he had known of the HAWK shipment in advance." .

Meese also became the subject of deep controversy when he gave a speech calling for a "jurisprudence of original intent" in 1985 and criticizing the Supreme Court for straying from the original intention of the U.S. Constitution. Meese's speech was publicly rebuked by sitting Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan and John Paul Stevens in speeches later that year, in a dispute that foreshadowed the contentious Robert Bork hearings of 1987. It has also been alleged that Meese subjected nominees for federal judgeships to a "litmus test" to gauge their fidelity to Reagan Administration judicial policy, including whether the nominee believed that Roe v. Wade had been correctly decided; Meese repeatedly denied this.

Meese also courted controversy when he appointed the "Meese Commission" to investigate pornography in the United States; their report, released in July 1986, was highly critical of pornography and itself became a target of widespread criticism.

Accusations of ethical violations dogged Meese's tenure at Justice. He was the subject of investigations by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel on two occasions; neither of these investigations resulted in charges being presented to a grand jury. Nevertheless, Meese's critics continue to charge corruption.

Meese is now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, and a member of the Four Horsemen:

Warrants... warrants? We don't have no... we don't have to show you no steenking warrants!