Mission Almost Accomplished: Immunity For Telecoms Is On The Way

Immunity is on the way for our spying-without-a-warrant telecoms, as Eric Lichtblau reports in the New York Times:

After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise. If approved, as appears likely, it would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

The agreement would settle one of the thorniest issues in dispute by providing immunity to the phone companies in the Sept. 11 program as long as a federal district court determines that they received legitimate requests from the government directing their participation in the warrantless wiretapping operation.

With some AT&T and other telecommunications companies now facing some 40 lawsuits over their reported participation in the wiretapping program, Republican leaders described this narrow court review on the immunity question as a mere “formality.”

“The lawsuits will be dismissed,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican in the House, predicted with confidence.

Somehow we won't be surprised. Even the supposedly liberal NYT can't help piling on:

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. “I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get,” said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.

The White House immediately endorsed the proposal, which is likely to be voted on in the House on Friday and in the Senate next week.

While passage seems almost certain in Congress, the plan will nonetheless face opposition from lawmakers on both political wings, with some conservatives asserting that it includes too many checks on government surveillance powers and liberals asserting that it gives legal sanction to a wiretapping program that they contend was illegal in the first place.

It WAS illegal in the first place. And worse than that: The system it was designed to replace was illegal too!

FISA was established to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. The new law is designed to take out the few teeth that remain in FISA. And the passage seems almost certain in Congress, which once again is preparing to give the White House even more than it ever expected to get -- all of which is blatantly illegal.

But the law doesn't matter anymore, and neither does the truth. Not to the White House, and not to the New York Times.

You probably noticed that long ago ... but everybody needs a reminder now and again.

House Republicans Walk Out To Protest Contempt Charges

The (Democratically-controlled) House of Representatives has cited two Bush aides -- Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers -- as being in contempt of Congress for their refusal to fulfill their legal obligations to a Congressional investigation into the hiring and firing of federal prosecutors. Josh Bolten failed to turn over subpoenaed documents; Harriet Miers failed to appear after she was subpoenaed to testify; in both cases, their contempt of Congress has seemed quite clear, and this move to cite them comes as no surprise.

In response, Republican House members, showing their deep respect for the Democrats in particular and the Rule of Law in general, stormed out and staged a photo-opportunity on the steps of the Capitol!

During this photo-op, some Republicans denigrated the Congressional attempt to determine whether (or more properly, to what extent and by whom) the Department of Justice has been transformed into a partisan political weapon.

Instead they suggested in the strongest terms that the Democrats in the House should spend their time kowtowing to the twice-unelected President's demands for a grant of retroactive immunity to all the telecom companies which have broken the law at his behest.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported for the AP; excerpts and additional comments follow:

House Holds Bush Confidants in Contempt

The House voted Thursday to hold two of President Bush's confidants in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether a purge of federal prosecutors was politically motivated.

Angry Republicans boycotted the vote and staged a walkout.

The vote was 223-32 Thursday to hold presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt. The citations charge Miers with failing to testify and accuse her and Bolten of refusing Congress' demands for documents related to the 2006-2007 firings.

Republicans said Democrats should instead be working on extending a law — set to expire Saturday — allowing the government to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails in the United States in cases of suspected terrorist activity.

If the law that's set to expire Saturday allowed the government to eavesdrop only on "those phone calls and e-mails in the United States in cases of suspected terrorist activity", we would have less of a problem. But the law allows the government to eavesdrop at will, without even the pretense of trying to stop suspected terrorist activity. Nobody would ever know who the government had eavesdropped on, or when, or why.

In fact the Congress knows very little about the situation the administration is trying so hard to legalize. It's all so secret, they don't even know what they're voting about. It's enough to make you sick, if you think about it for more than half a second. But it's fine with some of our "representatives".

Meanwhile, the White House is making sure nothing comes of the contempt citations:

The White House said the Justice Department would not ask the U.S. attorney to pursue the House contempt charges.

The White House should be cited for contempt as well, of course. But the AP can't exactly say that.

It is the first time in 25 years that a full chamber of Congress has voted on a contempt of Congress citation.

... except that the chamber wasn't exactly full, because the Republicans decided to show their lack of contempt out on the front steps.

The action, which Democrats had been threatening for months, was the latest wrinkle in a more than yearlong constitutional clash between Congress and the White House.

The administration has said the information being sought is off-limits under executive privilege, and argues that Bolten and Miers are immune from prosecution.

The administration uses the same "logic" to defend the aides and the corporations: "If they had to worry about accountability under the law, they wouldn't help us."

Rather than saying "Good! They shouldn't help you!", Congress has been changing the laws that these people have been breaking.

This has been going on and on; we are looking at only the latest example.

And this is representative government at its finest? This is the greatest democracy ever conceived?

If Congress doesn't act to enforce the subpoenas, said Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, it would "be giving its tacit consent to the dangerous idea of an imperial presidency, above the law and beyond the reach of checks and balances."

I couldn't agree more, and the AP article explains why (in the next few paragraphs). But Congress has already given its explicit consent to "the dangerous idea of an imperial presidency, above the law and beyond the reach of checks and balances" -- and it's done so more than once during this presidency, so although Steny Hoyer is technically correct, there's something very hollow about his words.

A bit of context on the case:

Under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department officials consulted with the White House, fired at least nine federal prosecutors and kindled a political furor over a hiring process that favored Republican loyalists.

Bush's former top political adviser Karl Rove has also been a target of Congress' investigation into the purge of prosecutors, although Thursday's measure was not aimed at him.

Karl Rove's missing about five million emails which were all supposed to be archived. The AP won't mention that, but I might.

Greg Palast, who has obtained some of those emails, says they are extremely incriminating. That's no surprise, of course; it helps to explain both the reluctance of the media to discuss the case in detail, and it helps to explain the administration's refusal to cooperate with the investigation in any meaningful way.

Fred Fielding, the current White House counsel, has offered to make officials and documents available behind closed doors to the congressional committees probing the matter — but off the record and not under oath. Lawmakers demanded a transcript of testimony and the negotiations stalled.

Are we idiots here? Are we supposed to believe that proceedings that occur "off the record and not under oath" have any validity? Are we supposed to believe that honest people with nothing to hide would refuse to cooperate with an investigation unless they could do so "off the record and not under oath"?

It's such a transparent attempt to hide wrongdoing; Fred Fielding is another one who could be cited for contempt, in my view. And so is John Boener.

"We have space on the calendar today for a politically charged fishing expedition but no space for a bill that would protect the American people from terrorists who want to kill us," said Rep. John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, the minority leader.

I keep saying it but none of these idiot politicians will listen:

Go arrest the terrorists who want to kill us -- if they really exist!

If you know who they are and what they're planning then you shouldn't need to dessicate the Bill of Rights any further -- just go arrest them. We will thank you profusely. None of us want to die, you know.

But if you don't know who they are then you can't know what they're planning, and if this is the case then you should go directly to jail for homegrown terrorism.

We're tired of having fear used as a weapon against us. John Boehner is tired of the truth.

"Let's just get up and leave," he told his colleagues, before storming out of the House chamber with scores of Republicans in tow.

Yeah, good idea, John. That'll show the American people there's no contempt involved here. None whatsoever! And the White House can help catapult the propaganda:

"If the House had nothing better to do, this futile partisan act would be a waste of time," said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. "The 'people's House' should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers."

The idea that a White House spokeswoman can be relied upon to "reflect the priorities of the American people" is just so absurd, given the current political situation ... that the standard horse manure from the standard sources seems like comic relief half the time -- except it's not funny.

Neither is it funny how the media keeps trying to make "wiggle room" for the criminal elite:

It's not clear that contempt of Congress citations must be prosecuted. The law says the U.S. attorney "shall" bring the matter to a grand jury.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by the word "shall" doesn't it? The word seems pretty clear to me ...

What "shall" we do? "Shall" we bring the matter before a grand jury? The law says we "shall". What "shall" we do with the matter when we bring it before the grand jury? "Shall" we initiate a prosecution? Or "shall" we just order pizza and beer?

Some historical precedent may be instructive:

The House voted 259-105 in 1982 for a contempt citation against EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, but the Reagan-era Justice Department refused to prosecute the case.

The Justice Department also sued the House of Representatives in that case, but the court threw out the suit and urged negotiation. The Reagan administration eventually agreed to turn over the documents.

But the Bush administration will never agree to turn over anything. They may decide to sue the House of Representatives, and they may decide to turn over a limited subset of carefully screened documents, but they will never satisfy the entire request from Congress. To do so, in their view, would be a bad move on two counts: It could lead to legal penalties; and it would set a precedent under which the White House would be seen as acknowledging its accountability to Congress as specified under the Constitution. And that's why it will never happen.

You may not have heard it here first, but I stand by my prediction.

As for the Republicans in Congress, they stand not only in contempt of Congress, but in contempt of the Rule of Law and of the Constitutional system of American government.

Their motives are clear for all to see. They're not even smart enough to pretend they don't hold our entire system of government in utter contempt.

They're not smart enough to hide this, either: The Rule of Law would impede them if they didn't undermine it -- the same as it impedes all criminals.

But justice isn't really blind; as we all know, the law impedes the rich and powerful much less than it impedes the ordinary working man. And the people -- politicians and their backers -- who are trying to strip the law of its teeth are among the wealthiest and most powerful of all.

One might think they could buy all the freedom from accountability they would ever need. But they have chosen to dismantle the Rule of Law, rather than simply purchase some freedom from it.

This gives you some idea of the magnitude of their crimes.

Tom Toles: Immunity For What?

Shhhh!

Mike McConnell Divulges Sensitive Information For Political Reasons

Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence and America's highest-ranking intelligence official, revealed many previously classified details of an extremely sensitive "terrorist surveillance" program last week in an interview with the El Paso Times, which posted a transcript on its website Wednesday.

McConnell apparently made the revelations deliberately, in an effort to influence public perception of the surveillance program, even while observing that doing so would cost American lives! Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

[Mike McConnell] ... there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing.

[Chris Roberts] Even if it's perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

[Mike McConnell] Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they're using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Chris Roberts] So you're saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

[Mike McConnell] That's what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it's a democratic process and sunshine's a good thing. We need to have the debate. [...]

Can anyone explain why we couldn't have had the debate before the bill was rushed through Congress?
I wasn't supposed to ask about that, was I? Chris Roberts certainly didn't ask.

Can anyone explain why Congress is granted no specific oversight? Why should it only be able to look at process and not detail? That makes no sense to me. But Chris Roberts didn't ask about that either.

There are about a thousand other questions that come to mind and I submit that Chris Roberts couldn't have asked them all; I can't even type them all unless I want my fingers to fall off. But the whole story reeks of heavy spin.

For instance, McConnell talks about the need to recruit intelligence personnel who have expertise in foreign languages and cultures:

Particularly with the current problem of terrorism, we need to have speakers of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic and people from those cultures that understand the issues of tribes and clans and all the things that go with understanding that part of the world. Varying religions and so on. Because it is, it's almost impossible, I've had the chance to live in the Middle East for years, I've studied it for years, it's impossible to understand it without having some feel for the culture and so on.

As C. at Afghanistanica notes, our intelligence community needs such people, but it must not need them very badly:

Why have 12 of 14 applicants from a certain area studies program failed the security clearance process? It’s not just any area studies program. It is one that includes Afghanistan. These students, either with a Master’s or with a PhD in the works, have been told that they are insufficiently loyal to work in any sort of job that requires a security clearance.
...

Out of fourteen applicants that I’m aware of only two have passed the security clearance process.

The students applied to the CIA, NSA, State Department and the US military. The rejections came for a variety of reasons:

1. Participation in a study abroad program in Turkey.
2. Dated a Chinese girl for a few months.
3. Friends with a non-Persian Iranian who has been an American for quite some time.
4. Currently dating a girl from an extremely moderate “Muslim” country.
5. Taught English in Turkey.
6. Studied in Kazakhstan.
7. Dual citizenship with NATO country.
8. Married to a foreigner.
9. Polygraph examiners rejected guy who was too calm.
10. Dated someone from Latin America.
11. Traveled in the Middle East.

I wonder if the answer is hiding in plain sight:

I know these people and I can assure you that if Al Qaeda approached them with a bag full of coke and a roll of cash, they would not be persuaded to betray their country.

What? Decent, loyal Americans? Some days it seems to me that we've got too many of that kind already!

Above all, I can't help fantasizing that national security officers should focus on enhancing our security and that of the people who allegedly protect us, rather than jeopardizing us and them at the same time. So it bothers me when a national security officer endangers the lives of other Americans by speaking freely about a top-secret intelligence program for political reasons.

McConnell would probably dispute my use of the word "political". As he puts it,

I'm an apolitical figure. I'm not a Republican, I'm not a Democrat. I have voted for both. My job is as a professional to try to do this job the best way I can in terms of, from the intelligence community, protect the nation.

But that's not the kind of "political" I meant. I meant this kind of "political":

New intelligence director John “Mike” McConnell, who served as NSA director from 1992-1996, is currently a vice president at Booz Allen, one of the largest consulting and engineering companies in the world.

His work there could represent a potential conflict of interest…

Booz Allen is known for its close ties to the intelligence community - former CIA director James Woolsey is also a VP at the firm. And it’s done extensive work for the Pentagon with more than $3 billion in contracts from 1998-2003.

But what’s most interesting about Booz Allen’s recent activity is getting hired by the CIA to be the “independent” outside auditor of the CIA and Treasury Department’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program [...]

And apart from that, this interview was clearly done for "public diplomacy" reasons, and that's politics whether they admit it or not.

As I was saying, it bothers me when a national security officer endangers the lives of other Americans by speaking freely about a top-secret intelligence program for political reasons -- especially if he admits it while he's doing it!

How Orwellian can it get?

I'm afraid Randy Bachman had the answer to that one:

you ain't seen nothin' yet!
ba-ba-ba-ba-baby you just ain't seen nothin' yet!

Spot A Grain Of Truth In This Story And Win A Popsicle

According to Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, Congress passed a law allowing virtually unlimited surveillance with virtually no oversight, because senior intelligence officials told them that complying with a secret court ruling had cut our intelligence gathering capability by three-quarters, and that complying with the law was so burdensome an "intelligence gap" had developed, in which our protectors were prevented from eavesdropping on known al Q'aeda operatives who were planning attacks on Americans!

Seriously! The "intelligence gap" sounds suspiciously similar to the bogus "missile gap", a concerted lie about alleged Soviet nuclear superiority by which our rapid military buildup during the early Cold War was supposedly justified. Ironically, in 1960, Senator John F. Kennnedy won the presidency over Vice President Richard M. Nixon, partially on the strength of claims that Nixon and Eisenhower had been "soft on communism" because of the "missile gap". The Pentagon had been claiming our hundreds of missiles were not enough, and this lie was turned against Nixon and may have cost him the White House... after which Kennedy was finally briefed on the reality of the situation -- the Soviets had only four missiles! JFK was none too pleased and some believe this set him on the course to an early assassination -- from square one of his presidency.

But I digress, or do I? It seems to me the history is relevant if only because of the similarity in terminology. The Missile Gap was bogus: beware the Intelligence Gap!

And more specifically:

How many known al Q'aeda operatives are there? How many warrants do we need to keep tabs on all of them? Why would they discuss operational details over insecure communication channels? Their tradecraft manual is virtually identical to the CIA version, and CIA would never do such a thing. (Bob Parry argues that al Q'aeda terrorists know they're being spied on and act accordingly, and he makes a good case. He also says all the secrecy surrounding this story is aimed at Americans and not terrorists, and he makes a convincing argument for that, too.)

But even so, under the previous configuration, the FISA court was a virtual rubber stamp, hardly ever turning down a request for a warrant, which could be had within a few days after the surveillance began. So there was never any need to wait for a warrant, which they knew they could get later anyway. How burdensome was that?

Then a secret court ruling says three quarters of what the administration is doing is illegal, and that leads congress to do away with the basis for the ruling, rather than forcing a clearly power-hungry administration to abide by the law for a change, and all this because the administration keeps saying "we need to do this to make America safe" -- and remind me once again who was in power when we were so brutally attacked?

Anyway, while they were closing the "loophole" that led to the "intelligence gap", congress managed to wipe out all meaningful oversight over surveillance on "anyone reasonably believed to be outside the country". And this happens because they can't agree on a more limited version of the law as proposed by the administration. And all because it's recess time. I kid you not!

I cannot even count the layers of spin here:

Reported Drop in Surveillance Spurred a Law

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

I always get nervous when somebody tries to tell me how improbable something was. Especially something involving surveillance or espionage. But maybe that's because I've been reading about national security and the espionage establishment since I was ... well, anyway ... in my slightly frozen opinion:

This story is one in which our director of national intelligence is spinning, the white house is spinning, the republicans in congress are spinning, the democrats in congress are spinning, and the reporters are just laying out all the spinning points and trying to connect them with a narrative that doesn't really make any sense. Nor could it, unless they were willing to say "we think so and so is spinning". Which they are not, for this is the NYT after all, our liberal media at work again.

Here's a tough question:

Find a quote in the article where the person speaking is telling the truth.

Winners, if any, receive their choice of popsicle.

This is not entirely academic; it's a lot more practical than that. Because once lies get published in the New York Times, they get poured back into the national swill as if they were facts. Damned liberal media again!

If you can't get it through the NYT you can read it at my other other blog.

Hungry President Devours Tasty Morsel Without Delay

As expected, our hungry president has wasted no time in devouring the tasty morsel offered up by Congress this weekend. As usual, the feast was garnished with a dollop of Orwellian nonsense.

As reported by the AP via USA Today,

CAMP DAVID, Md. (AP) — President Bush on Sunday signed into law an expansion of the government's power to eavesdrop on foreign terror suspects without the need for warrants.

The law, approved by the Senate and the House just before Congress adjourned for its summer break, was deemed a priority by Bush and his chief intelligence officials.

Bush signed the bill into law on Sunday afternoon at his retreat at Camp David, Md.

The power-feast brings to a close another tidy series of seemingly well-orchestrated events. The House passed the bill late Saturday night, after the Senate passed it on Friday night, after the president and his charming representative, Dana Perrino, threatened to cancel their summer vacation.

Thus are Congressional priorities and motivations revealed. And now for the dollop:

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools also protect the civil liberties of Americans, then we can have the confidence to know that we can preserve our freedoms while making America safer."

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that all this blather is conditional. Hypothetical. When this, When that ...

But listen: When do the same legal tools that authorize warrantless surveillance -- in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment -- protect the civil liberties of Americans?

How could that ever happen?

How can broadening a program that allows secret wiretapping protect anyone's civil liberties?

Other than those of the unitary executive, of course.

Civil liberties groups and many Democrats say it goes too far, possibly enabling the government to wiretap U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties without adequate oversight from courts or Congress.

Possibly? One cannot help but laugh at the weakness of the so-called protests. This law will definitely enable the government to wiretap U.S. residents -- and foreigners -- communicating with anyone at all (or even communicating with nobody -- just sending themselves reminders via email!). And there will be no oversight at all from courts or Congress.

The new law has been sold and passed as a vital tool in the fight against terrorism, but al-Q'aeda terrorists, trained in CIA-style tradecraft, meet in person for critical communications since they know their phone and email channels are insecure. So the new law's anti-terrorist implications will be quite limited.

But law-abiding American citizens are not nearly so circumspect. And aside from its negligible anti-terrorist implications, the new law will allow the government to wiretap any and all political opponents -- or as the administration considers them, "enemies" -- without even leaving a paper trail behind.

It's quite a tasty feast indeed. But as always when feeding the hunger for power, each meal only serves to increase the appetite. Thus, according to the administration, the new law doesn't go far enough, or last long enough, so it will have to be renewed, and expanded, again and again and again ...

Bush wants deeper, permanent changes.

"We must remember that our work is not done," Bush prodded.

And that's exactly right.

There's always an element of truth in the spin, and this is our truth for today:

Their work is not done, and it never will be.

Eliminating the inalienable rights of 300 million people is a big job.

It's hard work.

This is going to be a long war.

Surprises Everywhere

"Hope for the best, but expect the worst," said my mother, the Winter Matriarch. Her advice has come in very handy lately, under the volcano of impending tyranny. My expectations are continually being met -- and quite often exceeded! Thus ...

George Bush says Karl Rove is protected under Executive Privilege and orders him not to testify before Congress, despite -- or maybe because of -- a subpoena he received last week. So Rove's aide shows up and ducks all the questions on his behalf.

The BBC says British troops are stressed out.

More than 1500 "Liberal bloggers" are expected for the second annual YearlyKos Convention. The press and seven of the eight declared Democratic candidates will be there. Joe Biden and I will be elsewhere.

The South African cricketers are getting set for a visit to Pakistan but nervous about security and asking for the list of venues to be reviewed.

"They are not comfortable with Peshawar," PCB [Pakistan Cricket Board] sources said.

Australia's A side are due to visit Pakistan in September. If the South Africans are nervous about security, what must the Australians be thinking? Hint: How many South African troops are involved in the GWOT?

You heard it here first.

Former Secretary of Defense Ronald H. Dumsfeld and some other current and former brass were questioned by a congressional oversight panel which learned nothing of value; the New York Times ran a "news" article (or here) which buried all the key questions in the introduction, like so:

With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?

They're still trying to unravel the coverup, and asking "Who knew what when?" But no attention at all is paid to the central question: What happened to Pat Tillman? This is the standard operating procedure, exactly what the media -- even much of the supposedly dissident media -- have done since Tillman's murder. Damned "Liberal media."

Larisa Alexandrovna reports that the Bush administration has been covertly arming Gulf states since 2004.

The administration has also kept secret a court ruling that its illegal surveillance program is illegal.

Bush has declared a state of emergency based on some unspecified threat to the government of Lebanon and claimed even more anti-Constitutional powers.

A Marine has been convicted of murder in Iraq.

USA Today has yet another appalling human-interest propaganda piece.

When Steve Yelda, a 17-year-old Iraqi high school student, visits the Al-Ameer market, he heads straight for the Pringles display case.

"The taste," Yelda said, "is incredible."

Watch out for all the salt, Steve. In Baghdad there's no running water, or very little; some people have had none for weeks; they have electricity a couple of hours a day if they're lucky; daytime temperatures have been approaching 50C (120F) and the search for ice has become deadly.

In perhaps the biggest surprise of all, Feds Look the Other Way While United Fruit Company Peddles Death and Corruption in Latin America. As Chris Floyd points out, this story "could have been written any time in the last 100 years or more".

This -- all this! -- is the fruit of our hard-earned tax dollars at work, not to mention a broken electoral system, a corrupted congress, a predisposed supreme court, a lapdog media, a touch of transparently false-flag terror and an endless repetition of the emergency phone number "coincidentally" embodied in the date of same; and it's all brought to you by an administration whose nature is becoming increasingly obvious every day, even to those who are, shall we say, less sensitive to such things than others.

But still life goes on, almost as normal.

And all the people trapped in the lies seem like they'll be happy to replicate the fiction forever, or until it consumes them. We all know which will come first.

Meanwhile the people shedding the lies seem like they'll be unhappy forever, or until something else finally comes along and consumes them. We're going to find out more about this soon ... too soon, in my opinion.

Last but certainly not least, signs of serious trouble have been appearing in several crucial nodes of the blogosphere.

Just one surprise after another, as the last vestiges of reality slip away...

Oversight Or Pretense? Democrats Threaten To Subpoena NSA Wiretap Documents From DoJ

What do you make of this? If I tell you what I make of it, will you promise to be surprised?

Democrats May Subpoena N.S.A. Documents

According to James Risen in the June 8, 2007 New York Times:

WASHINGTON, June 7 — Senior House Democrats threatened Thursday to issue subpoenas to obtain secret legal opinions and other documents from the Justice Department related to the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program.

If the Democrats take that step, it would mark the most aggressive action yet by Congress in its oversight of the wiretapping program and could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.

Well that appears to settle it, then. Democrats shy away from Constitutional showdowns. They prefer to cooperate with anti-constitutional legislation.

The subpoena threat came after a senior Justice Department official told a House judiciary subcommittee on Thursday that the department would not turn over the documents because of their confidential nature. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, did not assert executive privilege during the hearing.

The confidential nature of the documents is the very reason they were requested; is it ironic that this is the reason being given for not releasing them? Not in Bushzarro world, where irony -- like truth and justice -- is dead!

The potential confrontation over the documents comes in the wake of gripping Senate testimony last month by a former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey, who described a confrontation in March 2004 between Justice Department and White House officials over the wiretapping program that took place in the hospital room of John Ashcroft, then attorney general. Mr. Comey’s testimony, disclosing the sharp disagreements in the Bush administration over the legality of some N.S.A. activities, has increased Congressional interest in scrutinizing the program.

At the same time, the Bush administration is seeking new legislation to expand its wiretapping powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have argued that they do not want to vote on the issue without first seeing the administration’s legal opinions on the wiretapping program.

For more on this aspect of the story, see Chris Floyd's excellent post, "The Powerful Odor of Mendacity: From Wiretaps to War", from whence I have pinched the photo by James Bovard which you see above.

James Risen continues:

“How can we begin to consider FISA legislation when we don’t know what they are doing?” asked Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, who heads the subcommittee.

Well, you can't, and that's the way [uh huh, uh huh] Bush likes it [uh huh, uh huh]. What else is new?

On May 17, after Mr. Comey’s testimony, Mr. Nadler and Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales requesting copies of Justice Department legal opinions used to support the N.S.A. wiretapping program, as well as later documents written by top Justice Department officials that raised questions about the program’s legality in 2004. The letter also asked Mr. Gonzales to provide his own description of the 2004 confrontation.

Mr. Conyers said he had not received a response from the Justice Department. “We’re going to give him two more weeks, and then, as somebody said, it’s about time process kicks in somewhere around here,” Mr. Conyers said.

The time for "process" to "kick in" is long since past, is it not?

In an interview after the subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Mr. Bradbury said his refusal to provide the documents was not the final word from the Justice Department on the matter.

But Mr. Nadler made it clear that he did not expect the administration to comply and said he thought he would soon have to push for subpoenas.

I don't expect them to comply either, even if the documents are subpoenaed, but then again I don't expect the Democrats to support a push for subpoenas. Too dangerous! Bawk! Bawk! Bawk!

In January, the Bush administration announced that it was placing the program under FISA, meaning that it would no longer conduct domestic wiretapping operations without seeking court approval, and officials said they were ending eavesdropping without warrants.

But nobody believed them then.

Since then, the White House has said that the debate over the program is moot because it has been brought under court supervision, and the Democrats, focused on Iraq war policy, had done little to challenge such assertions. Mr. Bradbury even said Thursday that the N.S.A. program was “no longer operational.”

And nobody believes them now either, except for a few wingnuts.

Meanwhile, are the Democrats simply perfecting their faux-oversight routines, or are they actually going to pretend to do something this time?

You can call me jaded if you like, but if any good comes of any of this, I'll give you a nickel!

Dahr Jamail on The New American Way: Torturing Detainees To Death

Sitting in seventh place, at the moment, on Project Censored's 2007 list of unknown stories, is this piece by Dahr Jamail:

US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released documents of forty-four autopsies held in Afghanistan and Iraq October 25, 2005. Twenty-one of those deaths were listed as homicides. The documents show that detainees died during and after interrogations by Navy SEALs, Military Intelligence, and Other Government Agency (OGA).

“These documents present irrefutable evidence that U.S. operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogation,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “The public has a right to know who authorized the use of torture techniques and why these deaths have been covered up.”

The Department of Defense released the autopsy reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace.

One of forty-four U.S. military autopsy reports reads as follows: “Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen, back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks.

Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq.”

Another report from the ACLU indicates: “a 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and head. The exact cause of death was ‘undetermined’ although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death.”

An overwhelming majority of the so-called “natural deaths” covered in the autopsies were attributed to “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease” (heart attack). Persons under extreme stress and pain may have heart attacks as a result of the circumstances of their detainments.

The Associated Press carried the story of the ACLU charges on their wire service. However, a thorough check of LexisNexis and ProQuest electronic data bases, using the keywords ACLU and autopsy, showed that at least 95 percent of the daily papers in the U.S. did not bother to pick up the story. The Los Angeles Times covered the story on page A4 with a 635-word report headlined “Autopsies Support Abuse Allegations.”

Fewer than a dozen other daily newspapers including: Bangor Daily News, Maine, page 8; Telegraph-Herald, Dubuque, Iowa, page 6; Charleston Gazette, page 5; Advocate, Baton Rouge, page 11; and a half dozen others actually covered the story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Seattle Times buried the story inside general Iraq news articles. USA Today posted the story on their website. MSNBC posted the story to their website, but apparently did not consider it newsworthy enough to air on television.

Janis Karpinski, U.S. Brigadier General Commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, was in charge of seventeen prison facilities in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003. Karpinski testified January 21, 2006 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush administration. Karpinski stated: “General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing a laundry list of harsh techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission.” Karpinski went on to claim that Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been “specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operations,” was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to “work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques.” When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, “The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President.”

Sources:

American Civil Liberties Website, October 24, 2005
Title: “US Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq”

Tom Dispatch.com, March 5, 2006
Title: “Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq”

Author: Dahr Jamail
Faculty Evaluator: Rabi Michael Robinson
Student Researchers: Michael B Januleski Jr. and Jessica Rodas

UPDATE BY DAHR JAMAIL

This story, published in March 2006, was merely a snapshot of the ongoing and worsening policy of the Bush administration regarding torture. And not just time, but places show snapshots of the criminal policy of the current administration—Iraq, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and other “secret” U.S. military detention centers in Eastern European countries are physical examples of an ongoing policy which breaches both international law and our very constitution.

But breaking international and domestic law has not been a concern of an administration led by a “president” who has claimed “authority” to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. In fact, when this same individual does things like signing a secret order in 2002 which authorized the National Security Agency to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by wiretapping the phones of U.S. citizens, and then goes on to allow the secret collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, torture is but one portion of this corrupted picture. This is a critical ongoing story, not just because it violates international and domestic law, but this state-sanctioned brutality, bankrupt of any morality and decency, is already coming back home to haunt Americans. When U.S. soldiers are captured in Iraq or another foreign country, what basis does the U.S. have now to ask for their fair and humane treatment? And with police brutality and draconian “security” measures becoming more real within the U.S. with each passing day, why wouldn’t these policies be visited upon U.S. citizens?

While torture is occasionally glimpsed by mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and Time Magazine, we must continue to rely on groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International who cover the subject thoroughly, persistently, and unlike (of course) any corporate media outlets.

Since I wrote this story, there continues to be a deluge of information and proof of the Bush administration continuing and even widening their policy of torture, as well as their rendering prisoners to countries which have torturing human beings down to a science.

All of this, despite the fact that U.S. laws prohibit torture absolutely, clearly stating that torture is never, ever permitted, even in a time of war.

This might not be news, exactly, but it is still germane, IMVHO. Or as Project Censored says:

To stay current on this critical topic, please visit the following websites regularly:
http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.hrw.org/
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp

A Whole New Form Of Government

Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, wanted to testify in Washington before Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose Commission was "investigating" the JFK assassination. Ruby felt intimidated in Dallas and repeatedly asked Warren to take him to Washington; Warren replied falsely that it was not in his power to do so.

Seeing that his chance had slipped away, that the Warren Commission was about to whitewash the JFK assassination, Ruby sounded a warning: "a whole new form of government is going to take over the country".

Warren thought Ruby was delirious, and many writers have sneered at this comment over the years. But it keeps coming to mind, much more often lately than ever before, and much more powerfully...

Take for instance the following excellent column, from Joe Galloway in the Salt Lake Tribune of May 17, 2007:

Hang in there, America: Only 613 more days of Bush

There are 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.

We HOPE they shuffle off!! ... and by the time you read this the number will be less than 613, but it's still a long, long time.

So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass.

That was all deliberate. Those were promises they never intended to keep.

So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our founding fathers, they never talked about.

Exactly. And this was deliberate too.

There are many here among us who've been saying so all along. We were mocked six or seven years ago; now that everyone can see we were right, is it too late?

Chris Floyd has touched on this point quite recently:

It's not a question of "spin," of "putting the best face on things," or being "clearer than truth," in Dean Acheson's sinister Cold War phrase -- gilding the lily, exaggerating for effect. Nor, conversely, is it a case of self-deception, of "true believers" unable to take off their blinders, of "idealists" unwilling to bend their dreams to mucky reality, or even of fourth-rate dullards too stupid to see the filth and ruin caused by their own cretinous policies. They are not just spinning, they are not deceiving themselves, they are not too stupid to know what's going on.

They are lying -- lying deliberately -- lying brazenly and cynically [...] They are lying because their causes are evil and cannot be spoken of openly: aggressive war for loot and domination; the callous rape and despoiling of their own nation for the profit and power of their wealthy cronies; the construction of a global gulag of secret prisons, eternal captives, carefully refined and officially approved torture; the deliberate, systematic destruction of the Constitutional system of government in favor of arbitrary, militarized tyranny; the deliberate, systematic sowing of division and rancor and hatred and fear among the people, to keep them disunited, weak, scattered, unable to resist the depredations of a small, criminal elite. If these be your gods, then of course you must lie to do them service.

Joe Galloway continues:

The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.

There are those who no longer believe the president ever had such a dream -- that it was all only a public relations strategy. And there are those who never believed it for a moment, even at the beginning. Let's see now, democracy for Iraq, did that come before or after human rights? I know it came after weapons of mass destruction. We've had so many different reasons for liberating these damned ungrateful Iraqis, it's no wonder nobody can keep all the justifications straight.

And yet, those who said so all those years ago were moonbats! Are you with us or against us now?

He's failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.

There are those who say this was intentional, and it's tough to argue with them. in my opinion, it's the vilest protection racket ever developed; Bush knows his war in Iraq makes the US weaker and generates more global terror, but that's fine with him; without more global terror, his chief political advisor would have to learn a new trick.

The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.

Bush's numbers are three times as strong as Cheney's, for all the difference it makes. Cheney still struts around the world, telling America's allies what he expects of them, and his buddy Georgie has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. And yet, somehow, most of America's best dissident writers still have not figured this out. So they write such as:

The war that was never ours to win by military means -- the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push -- is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.

I disagree! In what sense are they toast?

Chris Floyd gets this right, too:

They have taken the measure of the Democratic "opposition" and now realize that no one is going to seriously hinder them in the pursuit of their sinister agenda. Oh, they may have to toss a few bodies overboard -- Gonzales himself is probably being fitted for a winding sheet even as we speak -- but it is now obvious that the leaders of the criminal organization are not going to be held legally accountable for their high crimes. They are not going to be impeached -- although the many causes for impeachment cry out to the heavens. They are not going to be tried; they are not going to be jailed. They are not going to suffer the slightest inconvenience. They can see already that they will retire to lives of staggering wealth and privilege.

Joe Galloway continues:

The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men -- seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing -- succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?

Actually, both the question and the transition itself were easy. And in both cases, the answer is the same: 9/11!

The attacks were false but the reaction was genuine. And they needed the reaction, so they didn't mind that the attacks were bogus -- so long as they were never properly investigated!

And by the way, they're not as incompetent as you might think. It's only a disguise.

They're very good at implementing their private agenda, and utterly incompetent at doing what they said they would do for us! How ironic!

With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can't even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.

But it doesn't matter -- this particular president is the least lame of any duck in presidential history. The electoral system is wrecked -- not worn down and broken, but deliberately smashed! Vandalized for political gain! And the payoff hasn't even started to roll in.

His hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival.

Hang on a minute: Immigration reform was a campaign promise nobody ever intended to fill. And they were hoping to loot Social Security but that hasn't happened -- yet. So apparently you can't have everything, at least not all at once, even if you're a born to wear the chimperial visage, so to speak. But that was all a distraction, anyway. And the ship of crime sailed a long time ago.

The legacies that George W. Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.

But he doesn't care about all that. He will have a retirement of wealth and privilege beyond measure, rather than the justice he deserves. And his extended crime family of despicable drunken evil pricks will roll on untroubled.

The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, dangles in the wind as we learn, day by day, of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.

The AG will be kept on as long as practicable, not a moment longer. When he's gone there will be another to take his place. And another, and another...

It was Gonzalez, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously, if unproductively, employed.

It was Gonzalez, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.

Meantime, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Right!

Helen Thomas explained it perfectly:

Picture this: Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was in intensive care at a local hospital where he is being treated for pancreatitis in March 2004. Comey, then the acting attorney general because of Ashcroft's illness, was in the hospital room with Ashcroft when Gonzales, then Bush's White House counsel, arrived and tried to pressure Ashcroft to approve the legality of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.

Ashcroft refused to do so. But Bush went ahead anyway with the illegal wiretapping, relenting later when Comey and others threatened to resign.

Bush later promoted Gonzales to attorney general.

I'm not making this up.

Helen Thomas rocks!

Joe Galloway continues:

The agencies of government - the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else - use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for suspected terrorists.

Have they found any, using that information? Have they unearthed terror cells with more potential than the ones in Florida and New Jersey that were penetrated and perhaps manipulated by FBI informants?

No! They haven't, and we can strike the "perhaps". "Manipulated" it is! Hooray for Joe Galloway!

That sort of terrorist isn't half so frightening as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Half? A tenth!!

Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier on, attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.

Ahh, but he can, he can!

It's called the Oil Law, and if he can get Congressional Democrats to endorse it as a benchmark (which they seem utterly and spinelessly willing to do) then he's a winner! No matter what Joe Galloway or anyone else says about it:

A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.

The Iraqi government is neither as democratically elected nor as sovereign as one might suppose.

Six-hundred-thirteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible or even bearable.

No possible, not bearable, and everyone knows it.

Major changes are afoot, methinks. Long before we see those nineteen moons, we will see indisputable evidence of what Jack Ruby would call "a new form of government tak[ing] over the country."

All the pieces are in place; they have been for some time now.

As the counter-terror experts keep telling us, it's not a question of "IF".

Imploding In Slow Motion: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rove, Bush -- And A Tumbling House Of Cards

It hasn't been a very good day for blood-soaked warmongers.

Paul Wolfowitz is leaving his post as President of the World Bank -- but he's getting a $400,000 severance package.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are claiming immunity from prosecution over the Plame-Wilson leak, saying that whatever they said amongst themselves and to reporters was part of a "policy dispute".

And George Bush has refused to answer questions about whether he sent his Chief of Staff and his future Attorney General to the bedside of former Attorney General John Ashcroft when Ashcroft was hospitalized, in order to try to persuade him to authorize the warrantless wiretapping program which Ashcroft had previously declared illegal.

So ... it finally looks as though the blood-soaked warmongers are imploding.

It's not free-fall speed ... but I'll take it.

And kudos to my Australian friend Gandhi, without whom I could never keep up with this stuff!

Two FBI Whistleblowers Confirm Illegal Wiretapping of Government Officials and Misuse of FISA

Late being better than never, here's Monday's press release from the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a support group founded by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds.

I've written about Sibel many times here, but I've recently found out that some of what I have written about her was wrong (oops!) ... so if you weren't reading me at the time, Congratulations!

I hope to have more to say about Sibel and her experiences in the National Security hall-of-mirrors, and I hope to have it soon! But in the meantime, you may as well get caught up with Monday's news:

Two FBI Whistleblowers Confirm Illegal Wiretapping of Government Officials and Misuse of FISA

State Secrets Privilege Was Used to Cover Up Corruption and Silence Whistleblowers

The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) has obtained a copy of an official complaint filed by a veteran FBI Special Agent, Gilbert Graham, with the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG). SA Graham’s protected disclosures report the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in conducting electronic surveillance of high-profile U.S. public officials.

Before his retirement in 2002, SA Gilbert Graham worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) Squad NS-24. One of the main areas of Mr. Graham’s counterintelligence investigations involved espionage activities by Turkish officials and agents in the United States. On April 2, 2002, Graham filed with the DOJ-OIG a classified protected disclosure, which provided a detailed account of FISA violations involving misuse of FISA warrants to engage in domestic surveillance. In his unclassified report SA Graham states: “It is the complainant’s reasonable belief that the request for ELSUR [electronic surveillance] coverage was a subterfuge to collect evidentiary information concerning public corruption matters.” Graham blew the whistle on this illegal behavior, but the actions were covered up by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General’s office.

Click here to read the unclassified version of SA Graham’s Official Report.

The report filed by SA Graham bolsters another FBI whistleblower’s case that became public several months after Graham’s official filing with the Justice Department in 2002. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Language Specialist, also worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and her assignments included the translations of Turkish Counterintelligence documents and audiotapes, some of which were part of espionage investigations led by SA Graham. After she filed her complaint with the DOJ-OIG and Congress, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Court proceedings in Edmonds’ case were blocked by the assertion of the State Secrets Privilege by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the Congress gagged and prevented from investigating her case through retroactive re-classification of documents by DOJ. To read the timeline on Edmonds’ case Click here.

Edmonds’ complaint included allegations of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities. In its September 2005 issue, Vanity Fair ran a comprehensive piece on Edmonds’ case by reporter David Rose, in which several former and current congressional and Justice Department officials identified former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as being involved in illegal activities with the Turkish organizations and personnel targeted in FBI investigations. In addition, Rose reported: “…much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.” In January 2005, DOJ-OIG released an unclassified summary of its investigation into Edmonds' termination. The report concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by convincing evidence.

Another Former Veteran FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Specialist at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC also filed similar reports with DOJ-OIG and several congressional offices regarding violations of FISA implementation and the covering up of several espionage cases involving FBI Language Specialists and public corruption cases by the Bureau. The cases reported by this whistleblower corroborate those reported by SA Graham and Sibel Edmonds. In an interview with NSWBC investigators the former FBI Specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, stated: “…you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure. No wonder they invoked the state secrets privilege in Edmonds’ case.”

William Weaver, NSWBC Senior Advisor noted that,”These abuses of power are precisely why we must pay attention to whistleblowers. Preservation of the balance of powers between the branches of government increasingly relies on information provided by whistleblowers, especially in the face of aggressive and expanding executive power. Through illegal surveillance members of Congress and other officials may be controlled by the executive branch, thereby dissolving the matrix of our democracy. The abuse of two powers of secrecy, FISA and the state secrets privilege, are working hand in hand to subvert the Constitution. In an abominably perverse arrangement, the abuse of FISA is being covered up by abuse of the state secrets privilege. Only whistleblowers and the congressional and judicial oversight their revelations spawn can bring our system back into balance.”

Several civil liberties and whistleblowers organizations have joined Edmonds and NSWBC in urging congress to hold public hearing on Edmonds’ case, including the supporting cases of SA Graham and other FBI witnesses, and the erroneous use of state secrets privilege by the executive branch to cover up its own illegal conduct. The petition endorsed by these groups is expected to be released to public in the next few days.

About National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), founded in August 2004, is an independent and nonpartisan alliance of whistleblowers who have come forward to address our nation’s security weaknesses; to inform authorities of security vulnerabilities in our intelligence agencies, at nuclear power plants and weapon facilities, in airports, and at our nation’s borders and ports; to uncover government waste, fraud, abuse, and in some cases criminal conduct. The NSWBC is dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers through a variety of methods, including advocacy of governmental and legal reform, educating the public concerning whistleblowing activity, provision of comfort and fellowship to national security whistleblowers suffering retaliation and other harms, and working with other public interest organizations to affect goals defined in the NSWBC mission statement. For more on NSWBC visit www.nswbc.org.

© Copyright 2006, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Information in this release may be freely distributed and published provided that all such distributions make appropriate attribution to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Israeli Attorney General: Indict President Moshe Katsav For Rape And Abuse Of Power

from The Guardian: Israeli president faces rape charges

The Israeli attorney general today recommended that the country's president, Moshe Katsav, be indicted on charges of rape and abuse of power.

Mr Katsav - who has been defying calls to resign or step aside while the case against him progresses - has been waiting more than three months for Menachem Mazuz's recommendations.

A final decision on an indictment of the 60-year-old can only be made after a hearing at which he will be able to present his case.

The Israeli president - who is the country's ceremonial head of state - has denied the charges, claiming he is the victim of a conspiracy by political enemies.

The charges stem from complaints made by several women who worked for him during his tenure as president and, before that, as a cabinet minister.

In October last year, police said that after months of investigations they had enough evidence to call for Mr Katsav to be charged with rape and sexual assault as well as fraud, illegal wiretapping, bribery and obstruction of justice.

Five women from his office have provided evidence against him, saying that, in some cases, he forced them to have sex. A further five women made complaints of sexual harassment dating back several years.

After the police announcement about the investigation in October, it was left to Mr Mazuz to study the evidence.

Today, his office issued a statement saying it had collected enough evidence to support an indictment against Mr Katsav on charges of rape, harassment, abuse of power and obstruction of justice, among other crimes.

and more...

Judge Calls NSA's Covert Spying Program Unconstitutional, Orders It Stopped Immediately (updated thrice!)

Administration Gets Stay Of Execution, Pending Appeal; Meanwhile They're Trying To Pass A New Law To Make It Legal: But The Tricky Little Question Never Mentioned In Today's News Has Not Escaped This Nearly Frozen Blogger

Today (Thursday), in Detroit, a federal judge ruled that the illegal covert spying program put in place by the Bush administration is unconstitutional and ordered the administration to stop it immediately. But the administration has given every possible indication of its unwillingness to comply.

According to an article by Tom Brune, in Newsday this evening:

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the controversial program violates privacy and free speech rights, the separation of powers, and the law passed to govern domestic surveillance.

Brune also reports:

White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "We couldn't disagree more with this ruling."

If you remember pre-totalitarian America, you'll recall that court rulings were once considered the law of the land, regardless of whether or not the White House agreed. But things are very different now. So different, in fact, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is theoretically in charge of seeing that justice is done in this country, heaped contempt on Judge Taylor's ruling, saying:

"We will continue to utilize the program to ensure that America is safer."

Safer from what? Our Constitutionally-protected freedoms?

According to the decision rendered by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor,

"The public interest is clear, in this matter ... It is the upholding of our Constitution."

Further,

"There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all 'inherent powers' must derive from that Constitution," she wrote.

"It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights."

Ahhh, the Bill of Rights. How quaint. Right, Alberto?

Brune points out that the administration may be able to wiggle out of the ruling by using a very shifty strategy for their appeal.

[S]ome constitutional experts questioned whether Taylor's ruling will survive the government's appeal to the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, Ohio, and possibly to the Supreme Court.

Those courts could simply reject the case by saying the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit, since they cannot prove the government eavesdropped on them because it is a state secret, the experts said.

If they can't get the case dismissed on that technicality, they will most likely be forced to fall back on their favorite time-tested techniques: denial and obfuscation.

According to David Stout in the New York Times,

Mr. Gonzales said he remained confident that the program was constitutional, and that Congress had given the president all the authority he needed when it authorized the use of military force after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Thus covert spying is conflated with the use of military force, allegedly to protect the country.

The dirty little secret in all this has been protected by the mainstream media, but as Abraham Lincoln so correctly said, "You can't fool all the people all the time."

Tom Brune:

The New York Times revealed in December that after the Sept. 11 attacks President George W. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists between contacts here and abroad.

David Stout:

The judge’s ruling is the latest chapter in the continuing debate over the proper balance between national security and personal liberty since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which inspired the eavesdropping program and other surveillance measures that the administration says are necessary and constitutional and its critics say are intrusive.

I've read many other accounts telling essentially the same tale: that the administration initiated this covert illegal spying program after September 11, 2001; that the program is essential to preventing "another 9/11"; and that we might have been able to avoid 9/11 altogether if the program had been in place before then.

But can we be so sure?

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,"' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion."'

Consider the implications: If the secret illegal spying program was in place before 9/11, then it could not have been instituted in response to the attacks of that day. And therefore it can't properly be called part of the War on Terror.

What, then, could be its purpose?

If it's not part of the so-called War on so-called Terror, then what is it part of?

The undeclared War on Political Dissent in America?

I'm just asking!

NOTES: Both Tom Brune's piece in Newsday and David Stout's report in the New York Times have been changed since I first read them.

Unlike what happened to the New York Times article which I quoted in a piece yesterday, these changes are superficial and do not significantly change the meaning of the report. Or do they?

Newsday has changed its headline from "Judge orders halt to Bush's domestic spying" to "Domestic spying declared unconstitutional", and clarified a few phrases. You can find the text of the previous version here.

The NYT piece has the same headline as before, but four paragraphs have been added at the end. Maybe it's an insignificant thing, but the previous version left the last word with Judge Taylor:

“Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this nation apart.”

And the newer version ends on a much different note, from Republican Senator Bill Frist:

“We need to strengthen, not weaken, our ability to foil terrorist plots before they can do us harm,” he said. “I encourage swift appeal by the government and quick reversal of this unfortunate decision."

You can find the original text of that article here.

UPDATE 1: In the interests of full disclosure: This is not the original version of this article. I have removed one passage and changed the wording of another, upon being advised that a source I had quoted was unreliable. I apologize to anyone who read the previous version.

I admire the writers and editors who update their writing in the interests of clarity and/or truth. I think that's what happened to the Newsday article. I know that's what happened to this one.

UPDATE 2: Let's look at the NYT piece again. After their first posting, they added two paragraphs of comments from each side, and they just happened to quote the Republicans last.

Democrats said Judge Taylor saw things the right way. “Today’s district court ruling is a strong rebuke of this administration’s illegal wiretapping program,” said Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin. “The president must return to the Constitution and follow the statutes passed by Congress. We all want our government to monitor suspected terrorists, but there is no reason for it to break the law to do so.”

Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a senior Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the administration should stop “poking holes in the Constitution” and concentrate on “plugging holes in homeland security.”

But Republicans lined up behind the administration. "America cannot stop terrorists while wearing blinders,” said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. “We stop terrorists by watching them, following them, listening in on their plans, and then arresting them before they can strike. Our terrorist surveillance programs are critical to fighting the war on terror and saved the day by foiling the London terror plot.”

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, agreed. “We need to strengthen, not weaken, our ability to foil terrorist plots before they can do us harm,” he said. “I encourage swift appeal by the government and quick reversal of this unfortunate decision."

Two Democrats, then two Republicans.

Does that matter?

The Newsday piece only has one paragraph of comments from each side, but it also quotes the Republican last.

The ruling also touched off partisan political sniping. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate Democratic leader, charged, "The administration's decision to ignore the Constitution and the Congress has come at the expense of the security of the American people."

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman responded in a statement attacking Democrats and the 73-year-old judge, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter: "Liberal judge backs Dem agenda to weaken national security."

What do you think? Do you think that matters?

I can remember reports from the fall of 2004 about "John Kerry for President" rallies where the last paragraph consisted of quotes from Karl Rove.

Does that matter?

When I was debating I always wanted the last word.

Was that stupid?

UPDATE 3: Now that I've been thinking about balance and fairness and so on, I've decided to leave you with two more links -- editorials from USA TODAY:

James S. Robbins, NSA program is vital tool; and

USA TODAY Editors, Wiretap ruling affirms that presidents aren't monarchs.