Re: Dumb Bob, liberal crybabies and the Constitution

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:06:15 -0700, "John R. Carroll"
<jcarroll@ubu,machiningsolution.com> wrote:

Li RM wrote:

I believe you were looking for this info.

I appreciate you taking the time to find and post this, but it gives
the illusion that I posted it (based on Usenet posting standards which
indicate it was my thread based on the lack of a prefix, indents,
etc.).

I didn't. For the record.

While the information below is useful and interesting it doesn't prove
a thing except that there are people who view wiretaps and the
constitutional rights of Gitmo detainees in very different ways.

Even the Supreme Court ruling last week on the rights of Gitmo
detainees indicated a wide degree of dissent.

That doesn't make actions of the US government or decisions by its
Commander in Chief illegal.

In fact, this particular case illustrates exactly how things are
supposed to work in the US - appeals are brought all the way to USSC
if necessary.

I don't agree with the ruling. I agree completely with Scalia's
dissent. I think it was a shitty ruling and will lead to more
American deaths.

This is a far cry from proving Bush or anyone else committed a crime
or was "above the law" as your title suggests.

Insofar as the wiretaps go, there was a time when Itook what would be
a Libertarian position of insisting on complete privacy and no
monitoring of any form of communication by the government.

9/11 completely changed my stance on this issue.

I do not view the Constitution as a suicide pact that will allow the
bad guys to destroy our country.


Above the law

Bush claims the right to spy on everything -- including attorney-client
conversations. When will Americans have the decency to be shocked?

By Michael Ratner, with Sara Miles

Mar. 31, 2006 | It's hard to remember how shocked Americans used to be when
their presidents broke the law.

In a 55-page letter sent last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the
office of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales brazenly asserted that
President Bush had every right to secretly order the National Security
Agency to engage in warrantless eavesdropping for what it called the
"Terrorist Surveillance Program." On the last page, after he essentially
refused to answer most of Congress' questions about the illegal program,
which had been revealed in December ("It would be inappropriate to discuss
in this setting the existence or nonexistence of specific intelligence
activities"), Gonzales let slip a bombshell. "Although the Program does not
specifically target the communications of attorneys or physicians," his
office wrote, "calls from such sources would not be categorically excluded
from interception."

Sen. Russ Feingold has called for a censure of the president for breaking
the law, and civil rights groups, including the Center for Constitutional
Rights where I work, have called for impeachment.

Yet President Bush seems to be betting -- as he has, successfully, before --
that the public will overlook his crimes and allow him to continue
destroying, as Feingold put it, both "the separation of powers and the rule
of law."

Indeed, Friday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feingold's censure
proposal under chairman Arlen Specter, who has characterized the proposal as
baseless, are expected to be brief.

Thirty years ago, President Nixon's warrantless wiretapping scandalized the
nation and became one of the articles of impeachment against him. And though
Nixon invoked "national security," Congress and the Supreme Court insisted
that the law had to govern all intelligence and counterintelligence
gathering by the government, even when it was undertaken to protect against
terrorism.

After Nixon's disgrace, new laws were written to enable the government to
continue the surveillance of both U.S. citizens and foreigners on
intelligence and national security grounds. In 1978, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FSIA) was established, as the "exclusive
means by which electronic surveillance" could be conducted; a secret court
was empowered to authorize phone taps and, later, e-mail and physical
searches. The FISA court was set up to oversee highly sensitive U.S.
counterintelligence objectives, and government agencies could get approval
to spy if they showed the court their activities were intended to counter
espionage, sabotage, assassinations, and international terrorist activities.
FISA, which provides criminal penalties for unauthorized wiretapping, has
been a virtual rubber stamp for government requests: In the more than 18,000
known cases, there have been only five refusals to authorize surveillance.

And yet, beginning in 2001, the Bush administration sidestepped even the
FISA court in order to conduct its own off-the-radar, entirely uncontrolled
spying, unaccountable to Congress. For more than four years it engaged in
widespread electronic surveillance of Americans and foreigners without
warrants from any court, including FISA magistrates. In CCR v. Bush, a case
I helped file this January on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights
and its lawyers, we argue that since the president may only conduct
electronic surveillance pursuant to FISA, which criminalizes surveillance
outside its terms, President Bush, acting outside those "exclusive means,"
is committing a crime. On Tuesday, five former FISA judges, including one
who apparently resigned in protest over Bush's secret eavesdropping,
testified to Congress; several expressed doubt about the constitutionality
of a president ordering wiretapping on Americans without a court order.

This is, of course, not the first time that Bush has simply ignored
inconvenient provisions of the law and acted unilaterally: This
administration has pushed the boundaries of executive power in ways that
make Richard Nixon's White House look like a model for the system of checks
and balances. Bush has insisted that he can disregard the McCain Amendment's
prohibition barring torture; that Supreme Court rulings on habeas corpus can
be stonewalled; and that he can ignore the congressional oversight
provisions of the Patriot Act.

And now it turns out that Bush's eavesdropping program is not only in
criminal violation of FISA, but an end-run around one of the most basic
pillars of our system of law: the constitutional right to counsel and the
confidentiality of attorney-client conversations necessary to protect that
right.

As an attorney for CCR, which has brought many of the most important legal
challenges to the Bush administration since Sept. 11, I thought, when the
NSA program was revealed, that we could be among the targets of the spying.
We represent hundreds of Guantánamo detainees and high-profile victims of
torture and kidnapping; we were winning cases against the government and
successfully challenging their illegal actions in court. I had ample reason
to believe that our conversations with our clients, witnesses and colleagues
would be overheard, and even our families' phone lines would be tapped. Now,
with the admission by the government that it has not "excluded" listening in
to attorneys' conversations, I feel sure that this once absolute boundary
has been crossed.

The attorney-client privilege is more than a legal nicety. It is central to
the American idea of justice that all clients be able to speak in confidence
with those who represent them. It is fundamental to an honest defense that
attorneys have access to their clients without surveillance. In the past,
when wiretaps picked up attorneys talking with clients, the statutes
required turning off the tap as long as the attorney was on the line. But
these basic rules have apparently been cast aside by the president.

We at CCR believe that if the Bush administration had gone to Congress and
asked for a broader statute, or even to the FISA court for approval, they
would never have been able to get permission for listening to attorneys or
doctors. So they simply wiretapped attorneys on the sly, without
authorization. By spying on me, my colleagues, and other attorneys who
challenge them, the administration can learn our legal strategies, end our
relationship of trust with our clients, and in essence make us into agents
of the government: We ask questions of clients, and the government,
listening in secretly, gets the answers.

We may learn more, as our case against Bush and the NSA proceeds. But we,
like other Americans, may never know the full extent of the surveillance
launched by this administration. Like the secret prisons and torture centers
that shame our nation, and the secret executive orders that overwrite the
Constitution, the secret eavesdropping that undercuts our legal system will
not end until Americans, once again, have the decency to be shocked.

-- By Michael Ratner, with Sara Miles



New light on NSA spying

A former Internet expert for the FCC concludes that a secret AT&T
installation was most likely used for government surveillance.

By Kim Zetter



Jun. 23, 2006 | A federal court in California released a previously sealed
40-page document on Thursday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against AT&T, which bolsters allegations that the telecommunications giant
built secret rooms to allow the National Security Agency to conduct
widespread surveillance of Internet traffic. The document also paints a
detailed scenario of how the NSA may be conducting the top-secret operation,
which closely matches information given to Salon by a former AT&T employee
who worked at the company's network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo.



The document, a statement by J. Scott Marcus, a former senior advisor for
Internet technology to the Federal Communications Commission, was filed
under seal on April 5 on behalf of the EFF to support its class-action suit
against AT&T, which alleges that the company violated a number of federal
laws in aiding the government's domestic spying operation against AT&T
customers. The court sealed the document because it contained proprietary
AT&T information, then ordered AT&T and EFF to work together to produce a
redacted version to place in the public record, which they did on Thursday.



EFF asked Marcus to examine records from a former AT&T technician in
California named Mark Klein that describe how AT&T reconfigured its network
in San Francisco and installed special computer systems in a secret room,
allegedly to divert and collect Internet traffic to help the NSA conduct
warrantless surveillance. Were the records authentic and was it feasible
that they described a government surveillance program, or could the
reconfiguration and systems have been put in place for more innocuous uses?



Marcus concludes in his statement that the documents are authentic and,
after considering a number of possible reasons for the reconfiguration --
such as legitimate network monitoring and maintenance -- writes that the
system AT&T installed in a secret San Francisco room, and likely other
cities, was "exceptionally well suited to a massive, distributed
surveillance activity" and that "no other application provides as good an
explanation for the combination of engineering choices that were made."



He considered that the system might be set up to accommodate lawful traffic
intercepts under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, but
deemed this not a credible scenario, since there are far simpler and less
expensive solutions for meeting CALEA, which required Internet service
providers to make their networks wiretap-ready. He also concludes that given
how cash strapped AT&T was in 2002 and 2003 when the expensive changes and
additions to the system were made, it is "exceedingly unlikely" that AT&T
financed the project on its own. "I therefore conclude that it is highly
probable that funding came from an outside source, and consider the U.S.
Government to be the most likely source," he writes in the document.



Over several pages that are redacted at key points, Marcus discusses
technical details in the Klein documents that have previously been
unavailable. (The Klein documents are under seal, and although some of them
have made it to the Internet, others, judging by details revealed by Marcus,
have never been made public.) According to Marcus, the Klein documents refer
to a "private ... backbone network, which appears to partition from AT&T's
main Internet backbone." This suggests the presence of a private network,
Marcus writes, whose existence is "not consistent with normal AT&T
practice."



"The most plausible inference is that this was a covert network that was
used to ship data of interest to one or more central locations for still
more intensive analysis," Marcus writes.



The most interesting aspect of the Marcus statement is the clear, though
speculative, scenario he provides for how the National Security Agency is
likely conducting its surveillance and data collection through that network.
Marcus, currently a consultant with WIK-Consult GmbH in Bad Honnef, Germany,
was unavailable for comment. But in the statement, he suggests that the
secret San Francisco room is connected to two separate networks -- the
regular commercial network on which e-mail, Web surfing and voice-over
Internet Protocol traffic runs, and the second private, covert network that
is partitioned off from the regular network and is used to divert traffic
that has been copied and sent back to a central collection place. He
suggests that massive amounts of data are collected at 15 to 20 locations
around the country, where it is automatically screened and winnowed down to
only "data of interest" by a special system installed in San Francisco (and
likely elsewhere) before it is shipped off to one or two central collection
points, where it is processed by powerful computers and analyzed by skilled
staff.



This agrees with what several sources told Salon this week. A former AT&T
network technician who is well acquainted with AT&T's common backbone and
asked to remain anonymous, told Salon about a secret, heavily secured room
located in AT&T's Bridgeton facility, where the company runs its technical
command center from which it manages all of its backbone. From that
facility, the company could send commands to any of its 1,500 to 2,000
routers around the country to filter and divert traffic from those
locations. To do that, the technician said, AT&T would need to physically
place network "sniffers" at key points in the company's backbone. "There are
10 or 15 data centers located in major cities around the country," he said.
"So they would need to stick [a sniffer] in each of those data centers to
capture all the information." Then the company could easily send commands
from the Bridgeton room to the routers in those locations. The commands
would indicate what data to collect and where to divert it afterward.



Marcus writes that although the configuration in San Francisco was deployed
in early 2003, given AT&T processes, the planning for it was probably
underway six to 12 months earlier. This coincides with the timing of the
Bridgeton Network Operation Center, which was put in place about eight
months before the San Francisco room was configured and was the place from
which the work order for the secret room in San Francisco originated.



The Bridgeton room, guarded with a high-tech mantrap with retinal and
fingerprint scanners, is restricted to government workers and AT&T employees
with top-secret security clearances and is likely just used for remotely
monitoring and maintaining the secret rooms around the country and sending
commands. Russ Tice, a former NSA officer and senior analyst until last
year, told Salon that the data once collected is probably not sent to
Bridgeton but instead is diverted to an NSA facility where powerful
processing equipment can analyze it.



As for the kind of data collected, Marcus infers from the Klein documents
that the configuration in place in San Francisco would enable surveillance
of "both overseas and purely domestic traffic." But the Klein evidence
suggests that only "off net" traffic was being collected in San Francisco at
the time the documents were written. "Off net" refers to traffic sent
between AT&T customers and customers of other ISPs; "on net" traffic is sent
strictly between one AT&T customer and another AT&T customer.



Still, this amounts to a lot of data, Marcus says. It would mean that any
traffic that passed through AT&T's network from another ISP or network would
be intercepted. He suggests the possibility, however, that authorities could
conceivably weed out domestic traffic to collect only international traffic
exchanged between an AT&T customer and noncustomer, given that software
programs exist that can help distinguish domestic Internet traffic from
traffic that travels from outside the United States. But he writes that even
with such weeding, some purely domestic traffic would likely slip through
the filter.



A hearing on the EFF lawsuit against AT&T is being held in San Francisco
Friday to determine whether the case should be thrown out. The Department of
Justice has interfered in the case, calling on the court to dismiss it on
grounds that national security secrets would be exposed if a trial were to
proceed.





-- By Kim Zetter







In a press conference from the White House this morning -- his third live
televised event in three days -- George W. Bush tried to defend his decision
to engage in warrantless spying on Americans citizens, all the while
condemning those government officials who exposed the controversial program
to public view in the first place.



Bush said it was a "shameful act" for anyone to reveal that he had
authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on telephone calls
without warrants, and he said he assumed that the Justice Department was
taking the steps necessary to begin an investigation into leaks of
classified information. At the same time, he suggested that he would oppose
any congressional investigation into the spying program itself. "The fact
that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy," Bush said.



The president didn't explain -- the president can't explain -- why. The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the executive branch to monitor
telephone calls and other electronic communications so long as it obtains a
warrant for doing so. If al-Qaida is paying as much attention as Bush
suggests, it already knew that much, and it has "adjusted" -- Bush's term --
to that knowledge accordingly. What Bush's program for spying did was remove
the warrant requirement FISA imposes. How does that change anything for
al-Qaida? How would terrorists communicate differently if they knew that the
National Security Agency might be monitoring them without a warrant instead
of with one? There's no good answer to that question, and Bush didn't give
one.



Bush also failed to explain, at least in any way that made sense, why he
needed to evade FISA's requirements. Bush said repeatedly that the war on
terror is a new kind of war that requires fast action by the United States.
"This is a different era, a different war, it's a war where people are
changing phone numbers and phone calls, and they're moving quick," he said.
"We've got to be able to prevent and detect. It requires quick action."



But the FISA process was designed for quick action. And indeed, FISA allows
the executive branch to begin monitoring communications immediately and then
seek a warrant after the fact. How isn't that "fast" or "quick" or "agile"
enough? Bush couldn't say. Instead, he suggested again and again that the
FISA process is for "long-term monitoring" and that, after the attacks of
9/11, he saw the need to "detect." He never explained what he meant by that
or how the FISA process couldn't be used both to "monitor" and to "detect."



It wasn't at all clear that he knew. And if he knew, he certainly wasn't
saying. Bush said he wouldn't get into details about the secret spying
program because doing so would help al-Qaida. Americans would simply have to
trust him, he said, trust that he's doing everything he can to protect them
from attack while respecting their civil liberties.







Gonzales: Bush had "inherent" authority to violate spying law

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has just launched the administration's
legal defense of the president's decision to order warrantless spying on
American citizens.



It's breathtaking, even if it's not unexpected.



While acknowledging that the president's program would be illegal under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Gonzales says that the
president has inherent authority as commander in chief to do what he thinks
needs to be done in the war on terror. Moreover, Gonzales says, Congress
essentially overturned FISA when it authorized the president to use force
against Afghanistan in 2001.



The first of Gonzales' arguments -- familiar to anyone who has heard the
administration defend its views on detainees and torture -- is alarming in
that it knows no limits. If the president's "inherent" authority as
commander in chief allows him to ignore the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act during times of war, what other laws is he free to ignore,
rewrite or violate at his pleasure?



As for Gonzales' second argument? It probably goes without saying -- but the
Washington Post says it anyway -- that the 2001 use-of-force authorization
didn't say anything about electronic surveillance or FISA or spying on
Americans without getting warrants. That legislation authorized Bush to "use
all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations
or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism
against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."



How is listening in on telephone calls without a warrant the use of
"necessary and appropriate force"? Gonzales didn't say, exactly. And the
answer is, it isn't. As Sen. Russ Feingold explained during a television
appearance this morning, "Nobody, nobody, thought when we passed a
resolution to invade Afghanistan and to fight the war on terror, including
myself who voted for it, thought that this was an authorization to allow a
wiretapping against the law of the United States."









Cheney on spying: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11

In an interview that will air on ABC's "Nightline" tonight, *** Cheney
defends the Bush administration's program of spying on Americans by wrapping
it up in 9/11.



It's not the least bit unexpected: Even as it becomes clearer and clearer
and clearer that there never was any operational link between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaida, Cheney continues to justify the war in Iraq by recalling the
attacks of Sept. 11. In his speech at the Al-Asad Air Base Sunday, Cheney
turned to 9/11 repeatedly, invoking it both as a reason for invading Iraq in
2002 and as a reason for staying there now.



So it's no surprise that Cheney will use 9/11 -- and the specter of another
9/11 -- to justify the administration's decision to spy on American
citizens. It's just dishonest.



In his interview with ABC's Terry Moran, Cheney says the president's secret
spying program represents "the kind of capability" that "might have led us
to be able to prevent 9/11" if the administration had had that sort of
capability before 9/11. But the thing is, it did. As we have already noted,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the executive branch to
monitor electronic communications in exactly the way it has been doing for
the past three years -- so long as it gets a warrant from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court along the way. It doesn't even have to get
the warrant first: As we explained earlier, the National Security Agency can
begin eavesdropping the second it wants to do so, as long as it goes to the
intelligence court within 72 hours to get approval after the fact.



Cheney laments that the administration "didn't know" before 9/11 that there
were "two 9/11 terrorists in San Diego prior to the attack in contact with
al-Qaida sources outside the United States." Maybe that's right. But what
Cheney doesn't explain -- what he can't explain -- is how FISA's
none-too-onerous warrant requirement stood in the way of the
administration's obtaining such knowledge. To defend what appears to be a
violation of both federal law and the U.S. Constitution -- and even this
wouldn't be so much of a defense as a justification -- the administration
needs to say, "We needed to be able to engage in spying without a warrant
because ..." If Cheney has a way to finish that sentence, we sure haven't
heard it yet.





Bush, on bended knee but firing back

The papers are filled this morning with talk of the "humble" George W. Bush
who went before the nation Sunday and all but begged Americans to support
his war in Iraq. To be sure, there was some sense of humility in the
president's speech: He said that he understands that the war is
"controversial"; he said that some of his decisions have led to "terrible
loss"; and he said that he needs the patience of the American people. "Do
not give in to despair," he said. "And do not give up on this fight for
freedom."



But even in his moment of something like contrition, the president managed
to make time for minimizing his errors and marginalizing his critics. "We
have learned from our experiences," Bush said, avoiding the word that starts
with "M" and usually follows the phrase, "We have learned from our ..." He
dismissed those who question the war as advocates of "defeatism," which he
said "may have its partisan uses" but is "not justified by the facts." And
when he spoke directly to those who believe that the troops should come home
as soon as possible, he did so in a way that seemed to minimize the breadth
of the doubt he faces. Bush said he wanted to speak "to those of you who did
not support my decision to send troops to Iraq: I have heard your
disagreement, and I know how deeply it is felt." What Bush didn't
acknowledge -- what his words seemed to mask -- is that a lot of people who
did support Bush's decision to send troops to Iraq in 2002 believe that both
the United States and Iraq would be better off if those troops came home
soon.



And then there was *** Cheney. As the president was preparing for his
bended-knee act in the Oval Office, the vice president was making an
unannounced tour of Iraq, where he was trumpeting the usual "everything's
coming up roses" line. When a Marine told Cheney that troops on the ground
"don't see much as far as gains," the vice president set him straight:
"Iraq's looking good," he said. "We've turned the corner. I think when we
look back from 10 years hence, we'll see that the year '05 was in fact a
watershed year here in Iraq."



During a speech at the Al-Asad Air Base, Cheney was all 9/11, all the time.
And in an interview for "Nightline," Cheney made it clear that he wasn't
going to be admitting to any "experiences" that might call for a change of
course in Iraq. Asked by ABC's Terry Moran to explain how or why he "got it
wrong" when he predicted, on the eve of the war, that American troops would
be "greeted as liberators," Cheney shot back: "I don't think I got it wrong.
I think the vast majority of the Iraqi people are grateful for what the U.S.
did. I think they believe overwhelmingly that they're better off today than
they were when Saddam Hussein ruled."







Spying on Americans: Did Bush break the law?

The New York Times reported Friday that, in 2002, George W. Bush authorized
the National Security Agency to begin monitoring -- without warrants --
telephone calls and e-mail messages originating in the United States. After
an initial dodge, the president has now admitted as much.



Two questions follow. Did the president break the law? And why did he do
what he did? The answer to the first question seems self-evident. The answer
to the second does not.



The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 sets out the rules for
monitoring electronic communications. Those rules are clear. Except during
the first 15 days after a declaration of war by Congress, the executive
branch cannot monitor electronic communications that originate in the United
States without obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court.



Members of the Bush administration may have thought FISA's warrant
requirement foolish or even "quaint" in the days after 9/11. They may have
thought -- as they apparently did -- that the warrant requirement
represented a constitutionally impermissible limit on the president's power
as commander in chief. There were ways to address such concerns. The
administration could have gone to Congress to ask that FISA's warrant
requirement be amended. Or the administration could have gone to the courts
to ask that the warrant requirement be overturned.



It did neither. The administration simply ignored the other branches of
government and took it upon itself to do what it wanted to do. It violated
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And in the process, it
obliterated the notion of separated powers built into the U.S. Constitution.
As Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said over the weekend: "Even in a time
of war, you have to follow the process, because that is what a democracy is
all about: a process." Graham said he couldn't think of any legal
justification for making an end run on FISA. Another Republican, Senate
Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, proclaimed Bush's actions
"wrong, clearly and categorically wrong."



Specter said his committee will hold hearings on the spying program early
next year, and that the legality of the president's actions is a matter that
will need to be "examined." As we said at the outset, there's another
question to examine: Why did Bush do it?



In his weekly radio address Saturday, the president said that monitoring
electronic communications is "a vital tool in our war against the
terrorists" and "critical to saving American lives." We don't doubt that,
and neither did Congress in 1978: In adopting the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, it gave the executive branch the power to engage in
electronic surveillance. What the president hasn't explained so far is why
the FISA process isn't good enough. And indeed, it is hard to see how it
isn't.



Maybe the president thought it was too hard to get warrants from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. But as Josh Marshall notes, it wasn't hard:
In more than 25 years, the court has rejected a tiny handful of the
thousands upon thousands of warrants the executive branch has requested. So
maybe the president thought it took too long to get warrants from the court.
But as Knight Ridder notes, the FISA allows the executive branch to begin
eavesdropping immediately so long as it seeks a warrant from the court
within 72 hours afterward.



So what did the president think? Why did he think he needed to go around the
rules set forth by Congress in order to achieve the objective of keeping
Americans safe? It's hard to come up with an answer to that question. And in
fact, it doesn't matter. If the procedures set forth in FISA weren't good
enough for this administration, there were ways to change them. Ignoring
them -- and in the process, the courts, Congress and the Constitution --
wasn't one of them.





The president, on message

For a guy who claims not to read newspapers -- or at least not much --
George W. Bush sure seems to have a strong view about what ought to be in
them. When Bush tried to sidestep questions today about the New York Times'
report on his secret spying program, PBS's Jim Lehrer protested that the
story is on "the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post,
every newspaper in America today, and it's ... it's the main story of the
day." Bush cut him off and said: "It's not the main story of the day ... The
main story of the day is the Iraqi election."



Novak is out at CNN, but questions about him linger

Mediabistro has the news that Robert Novak's tenure at CNN is done as of the
end of the year.



Novak was suspended over the summer after he stormed off the "Inside
Politics" set when questions about his role in the Valerie Plame case were
just about to get too close for comfort. Now, it appears that CNN has
decided not to renew his contract. In a statement, CNN's Jon Klein said
Novak has been a "valued contributor" who has offered "incisive analysis for
much of CNN's programming" over the years, but that he won't work for the
network after Dec. 31. Klein didn't mention Novak's role in the Plame
case -- or his charge this week that George W. Bush knows the truth about
who first leaked Valerie Plame's identity to him.



Speaking of which, as we've noted, Scott McClellan has brushed off Novak's
claim that Bush knows by saying, "I don't know what he's basing that on."
After we wrote about McClellan's nondenial denial Thursday, we remembered
that it was McClellan himself who said, way back in 2003, that "the
president knows" that Karl Rove wasn't involved in outing Plame. Isn't it
fair to ask what McClellan was basing that on?





How long did the Times hold its news?

As we noted earlier today, the New York Times is out with a story in which
it says the Bush administration has been monitoring -- without warrants --
telephone calls and e-mail messages originated in the United States. What we
didn't mention, and should have, is this snippet from the piece: "The White
House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it
could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists
that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration
officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a
year to conduct additional reporting."



Our question: When did the White House make its request, and what does "a
year" mean? The Times is awfully light on details here, leaving itself open
for speculation from the left as to whether the Times sat on the story
through last year's presidential election. At the same time, the right is
free to speculate about the Times' decision to run the story now, just as
the Senate was about to take up and -- as it turns out -- vote down the
reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act.



We put the question of timing to Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James
Risen, whose names appear at the top of the story. Lichtblau's response:
"I'm afraid we're referring all calls to Catherine Mathis in corporate PR."
So we put the question to Mathis' office, which faxed us a long statement
from Times editor Bill Keller in response. It doesn't answer the question of
timing -- Mathis said she'd look into that and get back to us -- but here's
what it does say about the delay in publishing more generally:



"We start with the premise that a newspaper's job is to publish information
that is a matter of public interest. Clearly a secret policy reversal that
gives an American intelligence agency discretion to monitor communications
within the country is a matter of public interest. From the outset, the
question was not why we would publish it, but why we would not.



"A year ago, when this information first became known to Times reporters,
the administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping
program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their
communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the
protection of the country's security. Officials also assured senior editors
of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied
everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions. As we have
done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security
argument, we agreed not to publish at that time.



"We also continued reporting, and in the ensuing months two things happened
that changed our thinking.



"First, we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that
had been expressed during the life of the program. It is not our place to
pass judgment on the legal or civil liberties questions involved in such a
program, but it became clear those questions loomed larger within the
government than we had previously understood.



"Second, in the course of subsequent reporting we satisfied ourselves that
we could write about this program -- withholding a number of technical
details -- in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods
or capabilities that are not already on the public record. The fact that the
government eavesdrops on those suspected of terrorist connections is
well-known. The fact that the NSA can legally monitor communications within
the United States with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court is also public information. What is new is that the N.S.A. has for the
past three years had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans and others
inside the United States without a warrant. It is that expansion of
authority -- not the need for a robust anti-terror intelligence operation --
that prompted debate within the government, and that is the subject of the
article." .



Don't jam the line if you can't do the time

So James Tobin isn't exactly Bill Frist or Tom DeLay, and a conviction on
telephone harassment charges isn't exactly the second coming of Fitzmas. But
still, if you're looking for some sense of justice today, you could do worse
than casting your eyes upon New Hampshire.



That's where a jury has just convicted Tobin on criminal charges related to
a scheme to disrupt a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in 2002. As the
Boston Globe explains, the charges on which Tobin was convicted Thursday
stem from his role in a Republican plot to "bombard Democratic Party offices
in New Hampshire with hang-up calls on Nov. 5, 2002, as the state's
governor, Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, faced off against US Representative
John Sununu, a Republican, for an open Senate seat."



Tobin, a former official with the Republican National Committee, was the New
England chairman for George W. Bush's reelection campaign.



Tobin was acquitted on the most serious charge prosecutors filed -- that of
interfering with voters' rights -- but the charges on which he was convicted
seem plenty serious themselves: They carry a maximum prison sentence of
seven years.



Everyone had the same intelligence on Iraq? Not exactly

When Democrats had George W. Bush on the defensive about prewar intelligence
last month, the White House kept insisting that Congress saw the "same
intelligence" the president saw and made the decision to go to war, too.



We said that it wasn't true then, and now a report from the nonpartisan
Congressional Research Service seems to provide confirmation. At the request
of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the CRS compared the intelligence that is
available to the White House with that which is available to members of
Congress. The conclusion: There's really no comparison.



"The president and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level
officials, including the vice president -- in contrast to members of
Congress -- have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and
to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding
intelligence sources and methods," the CRS says in a report distributed by
Feinstein's office. Unlike members of Congress, the report says, the
president and those who work for him "have the authority to more extensively
task the intelligence community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for
follow-up information. As a result, the president and his most senior
advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the
community's intelligence more accurately than is Congress."



Generally speaking, the report says, the executive branch withholds from
Congress four types of intelligence: the identities of intelligence sources;
the methods used to collect and analyze intelligence; "raw" or "lightly"
evaluated intelligence; and "certain written intelligence products tailored
to the specific needs of the president and other high-level executive branch
policymakers," including the President's Daily Briefing.



In releasing the report, Feinstein said that it puts the lie to the
administration's "we all saw the same intelligence" argument and underscores
the need for completion of the second phase of the Senate Intelligence
Committee's investigation. "When the Senate voted to authorize the use of
force in Iraq in 2002, it was based on a more limited scope of prewar
intelligence than was available to the administration," Feinstein said. "I
believe that Congress and the American people deserve to know what precisely
was known by the president and the administration before the use of force in
Iraq. If the Senate Intelligence Committee is to produce a credible and
useful report for its ongoing 'Phase II' investigation, it must have access
to all the same intelligence as the administration that it was previously
denied, particularly the PDBs."





The president's plan for spying on Americans

When George W. Bush announced Thursday that the White House had struck a
deal with John McCain on antitorture legislation, he said the agreement
would "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and
that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be
here at home or abroad." When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared on
CNN Thursday to push the Senate to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act, he said
the reauthorization bill strikes a careful balance between the needs of law
enforcement and the protection of civil liberties.



Do the words mean anything?



As the Bush administration was paying lip service to the rule of law
Thursday, the New York Times was preparing to publish an extraordinary
report on how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on the
telephone conversations and reading the e-mail messages of hundreds or even
thousands of Americans without first obtaining warrants.



The secret spying began not long after 2002, the Times says, when Bush
signed an order purporting to authorize it. Under Bush's order, the National
Security Agency has been running a "special collection operation" in which
it listens in on international phone calls and reads international e-mail
messages that originate in the United States.



As the Times explains, the NSA's rules previously allowed the agency to
intercept phone calls and e-mail messages transmitted within or between
foreign countries. If calls and e-mails originated in the United States, the
government generally could monitor them only if it obtained a court order
from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first. And it was the FBI,
not the NSA, that usually sought such warrants. The Bush plan was a "sea
change," a former senior official with expertise in the area tells the
Times. It may also be illegal. Some officials familiar with the Bush program
believe that it is "unlawful and possibly unconstitutional," the Times says.



The administration's justification? The attacks of 9/11 were really bad, the
United States needs more information about possible terrorists, and John Yoo
said we could do it.



Yoo is the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote memorandums in which
he opined that the president has virtually limitless power in a time of war
and that an interrogation technique would have to cause suffering akin to
that caused by a major organ failure before it could be considered torture
under U.S. law. The Times says Yoo had a hand in writing memos justifying
the secret spying program as well.



Yoo is teaching at UC-Berkeley now. But perhaps the White House can lure him
back for a return engagement at Justice, where he can interpret away the
words in McCain's torture ban and the PATRIOT Act when the Bush
administration decides that it wants to ignore them.





Bugging the White House about Valerie Plame

As we reported Wednesday, Robert Novak said earlier this week that people
should stop "bugging" him to reveal the name of the senior Bush
administration official who first leaked Valerie Plame's identity to him.
"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak said during a
speech in North Carolina. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't. So I say, 'Don't bug
me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal
who the source is.'"



Cue taken. According to the New York Daily News, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer
has sent a letter to the White House in which he asks Bush to reveal the
identity of Novak's first source. "You are in a position to clear this
matter up quickly," Schumer writes. "Also, unlike Mr. Novak, who can claim
an interest in maintaining the confidentiality of his sources, there is no
similar privilege arguably preventing you from sharing such information."



When the Daily News asked for a comment about Schumer's request, officials
at the White House declined, citing what the Daily News called the White
House's "standard response" that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation remains
active. As we observed earlier today, that "standard response" doesn't seem
to apply all the time: In an interview with Fox's Brit Hume Wednesday, Bush
said that he thinks Tom DeLay is innocent of the criminal charges he's
facing and hopes that he'll be exonerated -- despite the fact that Ronnie
Earle's investigation into DeLay's actions are every bit as "continuing" as
Fitzgerald's investigation is.



Hume didn't ask Bush whether he knew who the original Plame leaker was, but
the subject did come up at the White House press briefing today. Asked about
Novak's charge that Bush knows, Scott McClellan said: "I don't know what
he's basing that on."



Perhaps we can help here, Scott. George W. Bush is the president of the
United States. The "senior administration official" who leaked Plame's name
to Novak works -- or worked -- for him. The way we see it, that pretty much
leaves three options: Either Bush knows or Bush never asked or the "senior
administration official" who leaked to Novak lied to Bush about it
afterward. Which is it, Scott? Oh, wait, we forgot. The White House won't
comment on an ongoing investigation, except when it does.





The coalition of the not-so-willing-anymore

As Iraqis go to the polls, Italians are voting with their feet. According to
the Associated Press, Italy's defense minister said today that the country
will withdraw an additional 300 soldiers from Iraq next month.



Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi initially sent about 3,000 Italian troops
to help in the reconstruction of Iraq. Under pressure from the Italian
electorate, which is even less keen on the war than American voters are,
Berlusconi's administration withdrew about 300 troops in September. Italians
go the polls themselves in April, and Berlusconi's primary opponent promises
a speedy withdrawal of Italian troops if he's elected.



Italy isn't the only source of shrinkage in the "coalition of the willing."
As UPI notes, there used to be 38 countries in the coalition. Now it's down
to 27 -- and it's about to get smaller than that. Ukraine and Bulgaria will
be out by the end of January, South Korea is likely to be gone sometime in
the first half of 2006, Australia is talking about leaving, and Poland has
all but threatened to pull out entirely unless the Bush administration
coughs up some military aid as a quid pro quo.



The withdrawals may be more symbolic than anything else, at least as far as
U.S. soldiers are concerned. The United States currently has about 160,000
troops in Iraq; the troop counts from other coalition countries number in
the three- or four-digit range.



Fermes ta gueule

We've got a question, and it's only a little bit rhetorical. Who, exactly,
is allowed to be critical of the Bush administration these days?



We know it's not the Democrats. As Joe Lieberman said the other day,
Democrats who distrust Geoge W. Bush need to "acknowledge he'll be commander
in chief for three more years" because "we undermine the president's
credibility at our nation's peril."



We know it's not senators who believe that the Bush administration
manipulated prewar intelligence. As *** Cheney explained last month, it's
"irresponsible" for them to speak out about their "dishonest and
reprehensible" views.



We know it's not the United Nations. As John Bolton said the other day in
remarks intended for the U.N.'s high commissioner on human rights, "It is
inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to
second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror with
nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."



We know it's not peace activists or other antiwar groups. As NBC News
reported this week, the Pentagon is monitoring even the smallest gatherings
as "threats" and "suspicious incidents."



And now we know it's not our neighbors to the north, either. As Josh
Marshall notes, the U.S. ambassador to Canada told Canadians this week that
they should tone down their anti-Bush rhetoric -- or else. "It may be smart
election-year politics to thump your chest and constantly criticize your
friend and your No. 1 trading partner," David Wilkins said at the Canada
Club in Ottawa. "But it is a slippery slope, and all of us should hope that
it doesn't have a long-term impact on our relationship."



Wilkins may not know much about Canada -- before he got the ambassadorship,
he'd visited the country only once, on a trip to Niagra Falls. But he
certainly knows a thing or two about the value of long-term relationships.
An old Bush family friend, Wilkins raised more than $200,000 for the
president's 2004 reelection campaign. Which means, apprently, that he's
pretty much free to say whatever he wants.





The right kind of rollover from Ford

First it was Microsoft. Now it's Ford.



Faced with a backlash from gay rights advocates, Ford Motor Co. has reversed
its decision -- made under pressure from the conservative American Family
Association -- to withdraw most of its advertising from publications aimed
at gay and lesbian audiences.



Ford's flip-flop-flip is even more dramatic than the double-reverse
Microsoft pulled on a Washington state gay rights measure earlier this year.
In a letter Wednesday, Ford said that it would not only renew advertisements
for its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in gay-themed magazines but also add
advertisements for its other brands as well. Ford Vice President Joe Laymon
explained: "It is my hope that this will remove any ambiguity about Ford's
desire to advertise to all important audiences and put this particular issue
behind us."



The American Family Association trumpeted Ford's response to a threatened
boycott by the group earlier this month. What does AFA have to say for
itself now? Nothing. According to the New York Times, a spokesman for the
AFA said the group has no comment on Ford's change of heart.
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