Germany Says U.S. Planning Attack on Iran

German diplomats and intelligence officials are privately warning that the United States is planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities to eliminate the threat of an Iranian nuke.

There have been a recent flurry of published reports in Germany regarding E.U. fears of such a move. A report in German news magazine Der Spiegel gives details:

According to Ulfkotte's report, "western security sources" claim that during CIA Director Porter Goss' Dec. 12 visit to Ankara, he asked Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide support for a possibile 2006 air strike against Iranian nuclear and military facilities. More specifically, Goss is said to have asked Turkey to provide unfettered exchange of intelligence that could help with a mission.

Note: Joseph Cannon's blog "Cannonfire" reported the rumors about Goss' trip to Turkey last week.

DDP also reported that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan have been informed in recent weeks of Washington's military plans. The countries, apparently, were told that air strikes were a "possible option," but they were given no specific timeframe for the operations.

In a report published on Wednesday, the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel also cited NATO intelligence sources claiming that Washington's western allies had been informed that the United States is currently investigating all possibilities of bringing the mullah-led regime into line, including military options. Of course, Bush has publicly stated for months that he would not take the possibility of a military strike off the table. What's new here, however, is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year.

America is already losing one war in the region, Bush might be currently thinking "how much worse can Iran be?"

The generals in the Pentagon cannot be too comfortable with this idea. Even if the plan is only for airstrikes, the Iranians may not take it in the non-violent way we would expect.

The President doesn't listen to criticism. His advisors may be strongly warning against this move, but probably not, the sycophants that they are.

The neo-cons, with their first allegiance to Israel, have been talking up the fact that a large percentage of Iranians were born after the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. The theory is that these young Iranians do not hate the U.S., and would love to make friends with the country that gave the world Hollywood movies and rock 'n roll.

All it takes is for the United States to depose those pesky mullahs.

Does anybody think the young Iranians will greet us with open arms and flowers if we bomb the shit out of them?



Thanks to John Aravosis (AMERICAblog) for pointing out the Der Spiegel article.

Bush's New Approach

Jonathan Schell, in a new piece in The Nation, examines the tactic President Bush is using to deal with the extra-legal NSA spying scandal.

When faced with allegations of wrongdoing in the past, such as the cooking of intelligence on WMD, and torture, he has had a standard response. Denial.

Now Bush has taken the approach of confirming the allegations, but always adding the caveat: it is legal because I am President and we are under threat of terrorism. No regret. No second thoughts. He announced that he even renewed the executive order over 30 times. And the program would continue.

Schell writes:

Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war ("war of choice," in today's euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

Schell slips a bit when he declares that, although nearing some invisible boundary, Bush is not a dictator per se.

That may be true, but can the United States afford to see how much further he is willing to go?

Bush Actually Expects To Recover Politically

Today's Washington Post has an article detailing the administration's attempt to polish the turd that the Bush Presidency has crapped out this year.

The White House is attempting to rally the President's approval ratings in the face of the Iraq debacle and the extra-legal NSA spying program.

The Post article is basically a recap of the year's setbacks for the administration, and the public relations campaign that has been recently launched to salvage the sinking ship.

The cornerstone of the spin meisters is to convince the people that the Iraq war is winnable:

The Iraq push culminated the rockiest political year of this presidency, which included the demise of signature domestic priorities, the indictment of the vice president's top aide, the collapse of a Supreme Court nomination, a fumbled response to a natural disaster and a rising death toll in an increasingly unpopular war. It was not until Bush opened a fresh campaign to reassure the public on Iraq that he regained some traction.

(...)

As Bush focused on Social Security the first half of the year, the cascading suicide bombings in Iraq played out on American television screens. It was summer by the time Bush decided to shift public attention to Iraq. A speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., failed to move the political needle. Bush then escaped to Texas for August -- a vacation shadowed for weeks by a dead soldier's mother named Cindy Sheehan, then brought to an abrupt halt by Hurricane Katrina.

Plans to rebuild public confidence on Iraq were shelved as the president was consumed by the hurricane and the fiasco over Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination. Then after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was charged with perjury in the CIA leak case, Democrats forced an extraordinary closed-door Senate session to demand further investigation of the roots of the Iraq war.

That proved a galvanizing moment at the White House, according to a wide range of GOP strategists in and out of the administration. Rove, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House strategic planning director Peter H. Wehner urged the president to dust off the 2004 election strategy and fight back, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. White House counselor Dan Bartlett and communications director Nicolle Wallace, however, counseled a more textured approach. The same-old Bush was not enough, they said; he needed to be more detailed about his strategy in Iraq and, most of all, more open in admitting mistakes -- something that does not come easily to Bush.

I, for one, do not believe recent poll numbers showing a drastic improvement in Mr. Bush's approval ratings. It simply doesn't make any sense. The Iraqi elections turned out as poorly as expected, despite assertions to the contrary. Plamegate and the NSA scandal are heating up. Clearly, something else is at work here.

One of the most endearing traits of the American people is optimism about the future. The administration knows this and is trying to appeal to this aspect of the American character. The war, the apologists are saying, will turn out successfully if we stay the course. The PR effort relies on the people being more optimistic than realistic.

The American public, however are not the suckers the administration takes them to be.

Ignatius Strikes Again

Washington Post Op-Ed ace David Ignatius polishes the national security state's apple as usual today.

The extra-legal NSA spying program is the topic of his piece.

Ignatius' thesis is that the NSA has developed new tools so fantastically advanced that new laws must be enacted to permit their legal use.

This tool of a writer obscures the fact that most, if not all, of these "advances" are only modifications of techniques that have been around for many years. The legal concepts in play are fully accounted for by existing provisions (and restrictions) of law.

A hint of Ignatius' strategy is glimpsed in the following:

We know only the barest outlines of what the NSA has been doing. The most reliable accounts have appeared in the New York Times, the newspaper that broke the story. Although the headline has been "warrantless wiretapping," the Times accounts suggest the program actually was something closer to a data-mining system that collected and analyzed vast amounts of digitized data in an effort to find patterns that might identify potential terrorists.

Later he admits in writing that "in addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages..."

That ain't data mining, and he knows it. It gets worse:

The legal problems, as Arkin suggests, involve the dots -- what digital information can the government legitimately collect and save for later analysis, and under what legal safeguards? As it trolls the ocean of data, how can the government satisfy legal requirements for warrants that specify at the outset what may only be clear at the end of the search -- namely, specific links to terrorist groups? These and other questions will vex lawyers and politicians in the coming debate, but they aren't a reason for jettisoning these techniques.

The specific reason why the fourth amendment of the Constitution exists is to prevent the kind of wholesale intrusion (such as data mining and questionable eavesdropping) that Ignatius thinks is so peachy.

As Ignatius writes:

America's best intelligence asset is technology. The truth is that America has never been especially good at running spies or plotting covert actions. Our special talent has been the application of technology to complex problems of surveillance.

So, in the opinion of Mr. Ignatius, U.S. ineptitude in HUMINT is good enough reason to throw out important qualities that make (or made) America a free country.

New Legal Challenges Against Spying Program

The chickens are beginning to come home to roost in the NSA spying scandal. Defense lawyers representing a number of suspects in "terrorist" cases are attempting to find out from the government whether any evidence against their clients was illegally obtained from the controversial spying program.

According to today's New York Times, some of these lawyers are thinking seriously about suing President Bush for violating the rights of their clients.

The government failed to notify attorneys of the eavesdropping during the discovery phase of cases that have already been brought before courts. This is not surprising, since the program was secret, but there are provisions within the law for handling classified information in criminal cases. The government couldn't possibly use these means without exposing the existence of the spying program.

The government finds itself between the proverbial rock and hard place. By not revealing the extra-legal program to the defense attorneys and claiming in court that there was "no other surveillance", they have broken the law and jeopardized the "terrorism" cases.

Many of the "terrorism" cases brought by the government so far have been noteworthy for displaying dodgy and questionable tactics on the part of the prosecution.

Future cases will be harder for the government to prove now that defense attorneys will have allegations of illegally gathered evidence to brandish against the government in behalf of their clients.

Washington Post Late Reporting Myanmar Move

The front page of today's Washington Post features a story which is only news to people who don't read this blog.

On November 14, Effwit went with Myanmar Abruptly Moves Government, which detailed the hasty packing up and moving of the entire government of Myanmar (Burma) from Yangon (Rangoon) to the isolated city of Pyinmana, 200 miles to the north.

The story here correctly gave the timing of the move and the possible reasons the repressive regime took this bizarre step.

The Post probably missed the story because, as their headline today shows, they may still be unclear about the fact that Burma officially changed the name of their country to Myanmar.

The name change occurred in 1989.

Update: I know that headline writers are not the same people who write the stories.

Washington Oddly Quiet On NSA Scandal

When Congress is not in session, Washington always seems like a completely different place. Gone are the downtown traffic jams and people say that you can get a table at the swanky restaurants without a reservation (I wouldn't know). The month of August, for example, is notorious for being dead around here.

The holiday season brings it's own distractions to the mix. Even so, one cannot help but notice something odd.

There has been no new revelations in the NSA spying scandal since the little noticed Suzanne Spaulding piece in Sunday's Post.

Reporters should be all over this matter. Some observers, including Drew L have rightfully compared the emerging eavesdropping scandal to Watergate. During Watergate, nearly every day brought important news. One actually looked forward to receiving the morning WaPo to find out yet another outrage the Nixon administration had been caught committing on American citizens.

As of Sunday, it was feeling exactly the same. An energy was building towards what was seeming like the Bush administration's denouement. The gooper apologists were appearing even more pathetic than usual (and that's saying something).

And now, silence. Nothing.

Perhaps the intrepid muckraking reporters are double checking their facts before publication.

Perhaps not. The puppetmasters of the national security state play for big stakes. The whole game rides on them pulling this one off.

They may have to throw Bush to the sharks over the NSA scandal or over an heretofore unknown ramification of Plamegate.

They would then simply install another minion to take over the role.

Like Gerald Ford in 1974.

Architect Of Eavesdropping and Torture Policies Unrepentant

The bogeyman of civil libertarians, John Yoo, stands by his legal advise to the Bush administration approving extra-legal eavesdropping and torture.

The Washington Post interviews Yoo at his office at Boalt Hall, Berkeley, where he is a tenured professor of Law.

This dipshit is actually honored to be called "the Robert Bork of my generation." It gets worse:

"The worst thing you could do, now that people are critical of your views, is to run and hide. I agree with the work I did. I have an obligation to explain it," Yoo said from his Berkeley office. "I'm one of the few people who is willing to defend decisions I made in government."

The other is George W. Bush. A really choice crowd.

The article explains how Yoo, who has never even met Bush or Cheney, maneuvered himself via the conservative legal group the Federalist Society into a position of power. His luck (and the bad fortune of America) was due to a fluke of history:

Despite his resume and connections, Yoo required a particular convergence for his views to become as influential as they did. He needed a well-placed position, a national crisis and a receptive audience. He quickly got all three.

Known for his belief in a strong presidency, he joined the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the attorney general and the White House, in July 2001. Two months later came the terrorist attacks and the rush to respond. Soon, Yoo found his audience in the highest echelons of the White House, where the president and vice president already tended to see the courts, Congress and international conventions as constraints on the conduct of foreign affairs and national security.

This tool took the ball and ran with it:

Two weeks after Sept. 11, Yoo said in a memo for the White House that the Constitution conferred "plenary," or absolute, authority to use force abroad, "especially in response to grave national emergencies created by sudden, unforeseen attacks on the people and territory of the United States."

Other experts disagree:

The majority view among constitutional scholars holds that the Framers purposely imposed checks on the executive branch, even in wartime, not least in reaction to the rule of Britain's King George III. On such issues, Yoo's critics contend, he went too far. "It's largely a misreading of original intent," Cole said. "The Framers, above all, were concerned about a strong executive."

(...)

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, is among those who say Yoo deserves considerable blame. "The issues which have most disturbed Americans about the conduct of the executive branch in fighting terrorism can ultimately be traced to legal theories that he espoused," she said.

Yoo's legal opinion set the stage for the administration's abuse of power. Every criticism against these policies is greeted by the refrain, "we are on solid legal ground."

So is every criminal who has the means to hire a high priced lawyer. This does not assure an automatic victory when the case gets to court. Legal opinions come in many flavors, styles and qualities. The Bush administration is hoping that the American citizens will listen to their apologists and be stupid enough to believe that the issue is cut and dried.

Here's my opinion, the issue is cut and dried, the Bush administration has been breaking laws while conducting their "war on terror."

Bush's Dictatorial Power Grab

A former general counsel for the Senate and House Intelligence committees today discusses Bush's malfeasance in the extra-legal NSA spying scandal.

Suzanne E. Spaulding, writing in today's WaPo Outlook section, points out the inherent dishonesty in the President's insistence that he broke no laws because Congress had been notified of the eavesdropping:

As a former legal counsel for both Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, I'm well aware of the limitations of these "gang of eight" sessions. They are provided only to the leadership of the House and Senate and of the intelligence committees, with no staff present. The eight are prohibited from saying anything about the briefing to anyone, including other intelligence panel members. The leaders for whom I worked never discussed the content of these briefings with me.

It is virtually impossible for individual members of Congress, particularly members of the minority party, to take any effective action if they have concerns about what they have heard in one of these briefings. It is not realistic to expect them, working alone, to sort through complex legal issues, conduct the kind of factual investigation required for true oversight and develop an appropriate legislative response.

Spaulding joins the growing chorus of critics who say that if there are shortcomings in the FISA law, that the President should have gone to the lawmakers for additional authority. She elaborates by stating that Congress has amended FISA several times since it's inception in 1978.

Spaulding demolishes the administration talking point that the joint congressional resolution to use force against Al Qaeda gives implicit authority for warrantless spying on Americans:

FISA specifically provides for warrantless surveillance for up to 15 days after a declaration of war. Why would Congress include that provision if a mere Use of Force resolution could render FISA inapplicable?

That paragraph provides the big news of the day. The apologists have carefully avoided telling the American people of this 15 day provision. It is the statutory smoking gun in this case, showing the illegal overreaching of the administration in the absence of an actual declaration of war.

Hell, you only get 15 days of warrantless surveillance authority in the case of an actual war, Bush is guilty here of four years of unauthorized spying.

Spaulding continues:

The law clearly states that the criminal wiretap statute and FISA are "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted." If these authorities are exclusive, there is no other legal authority that can authorize warrantless surveillance.

Courts generally will not view such a clear statutory statement as having been overruled by a later congressional action unless there is an equally clear indication that Congress intended to do that.

The editorial page of the Post takes note of Spaulding's "15 day" contention, and makes a further cogent point:

But saying the power is "inherent" is different from saying that it's exclusive and immune from congressional regulation. Indeed, presidents of both parties have complied with the terms of FISA and have not questioned its constitutionality. Mr. Bush is going a giant step further than his predecessors, asserting that his inherent authority doesn't merely entitle him to conduct such surveillance in the absence of a statute but to defy a statute once it has been passed.

When the establishment Washington Post implies that the President is a lawbreaker, something big is happening behind the scenes.

Or maybe not. The bigwigs at the Post may just be on holiday.

NSA Using "Backdoor Access" To Telecommunication Switches

Today's installment of the extra-legal NSA spying scandal is a report by the New York Times that the National Security Agency has a relationship with major telecommunications companies to allow U.S. government COMINT, SIGINT, and ELINT activities on U.S. located international switching junctions for telephone and internet communications.

This is not really news. The NSA has had (and used) this capability since the 1960's. This is the reason that the world's internet backbone is located in Northern Virginia. The state of Virginia has the nation's most lax laws regarding the recording of telephone communications. In the age of the high speed internet, the issue of widespread data mining again rears it's ugly head.

The Times article provides some interesting tidbits about this program:

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

I wager that this expert is less concerned with "trade secrets" than with being prosecuted for revealing classified information. The same problem is encountered with this next excerpt:

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

This is not the entire truth, the covert arrangement with "some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies" may have increased since 9-11, but the basics have been in place for decades. In fact, the United States was known to have intercepted every telegram from Western Union for many years. The ostensible reason to have this capability is to facilitate eavesdropping when authorized by a court. "The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined." False too, but here even I am not willing to risk the ramifications of specifying to whom the Times is alluding.

The Times, of course, gives the government a legal loophole:

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The loophole is that it is perfectly legal for NSA to intercept foreign communications. It is when possible interception of American communications (without a warrant) is considered that the government gets onto shaky ground.

Congress Removed Domestic Military Authorization From Sept. 2001 War Resolution

Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle has revealed that the Bush administration attempted to include language allowing domestic activities in the joint resolution for the use of force to defend the nation following the attacks of 9-11.

Congressional negotiators removed the language before passing the resolution on Sept. 14, 2001.

Daschle says that the issue of domestic surveillance itself never came up, but that the reference to domestic military activities having been denied means that the administration's claim that the power was implied by the congressional act is false.

If the power to conduct domestic surveillance was implied, Bush would not have had to expressly add text permitting such actions to the resolution. The fact that the language was disapproved, puts the administration in an even shakier legal position in this matter than had been previously known.

If and when the current Congress gets around to investigating the legality of the NSA domestic eavesdropping flap, Daschle will make a convincing witness:

"I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance."

Daschle goes into detail how the administration tried to put one over on the Congress:

"Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."

People who think they know about politics have an image of Daschle as a wimpy liberal. Some observers know better. Daschle is actually a very tough politician who is perfectly comfortable giving an enemy a shot in the nuts.

"If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11. For that reason, the president should explain the specific legal justification for his authorization of these actions, Congress should fully investigate these actions and the president's justification for them, and the administration should cooperate fully with that investigation."

Should the White House succeed in cajoling, bullying or bribing their way out of responsibility for their crimes, it will be a very bad development to say the least. The citizens of the United States will finally have the unmistakable proof of something that the rest of the world has been aware of for the last four years. The "last, best hope for mankind" will have fallen to the level of a lawless, dangerous and despicable dictatorship.

MSM Resisting Talk Of Impeachment

The corporate mouthpieces who impersonate a free press in this country are showing their true colors.

The fact that President Bush has admitted to an illegal program, the extra-legal NSA domestic spying, should have put these media fools on notice that a big story is brewing. The cretins in the press know this full well. They also know, however, that their job security and relies on them not jumping ship on the national security state.

That's why we are hearing about a "debate" whether the eavesdropping program is legal. If there exists a "debate", there exists room for the mainstream media to sway public opinion in Mr. Bush's direction. That is their job, the protection of the status quo.

American citizens have been sick of the psychopathic policies of the Bush administration even before "our leader" stepped on his dick with the domestic spying flap. The blogosphere is replete with calls for impeachment not only of Bush, but also of Cheney, along with the prosecution of many other government officials.

The "I word", as the too-cute media is terming it, appears now to be another third rail of American discourse, joining 9-11 conspiracy, American blood for oil, electronic vote fraud, etc., as topics the press may not address publicly.

The "I word" was not off limits a few years ago, if I recall correctly.

An article on the fine website of the magazine Editor and Publisher gives details of which media outlets are most blatantly prostituting for the administration on the question of impeachment. The usual suspects are never far from the action:

When chief Washington Post pollster Richard Morin appeared for an online chat, a reader from Naperville, Ill., asked him why the Post hasn't polled on impeachment. "This question makes me mad," Morin replied. When a second participant made the same query, Morin fumed, "Getting madder." A third query brought the response: "Madder still."

Imagine how mad he would be if he were carted off for an interrogation about this at Gitmo.

When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the "I" question in his online chat, he said, "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."

This is the same dickhead who ordered a poll on impeachment conducted within the first week of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Lest any reader think the issue is entirely verboten in the mainstream media, impeachment talk is considered appropriate for ridicule by conservatives:

Conservative stalwart Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online takes the talk seriously enough to bother to poke fun at it, practically begging Bush foes to try to impeach him. "The main reason Bush's poll numbers would skyrocket if he were impeached," Goldberg wrote, "is that at the end of the day the American people will support what he did [with the spy program]."

And the folks at conservative blog RedState.org (say) "the more the Dems mutter 'impeachment' in 2006, the more it helps the GOP, because it just further entrenches the notion that the Dems are out of touch, partisan, and not serious about national security."

It is clear that the media and the conservatives are intentionally misstating the facts of the latest Bush blunder to the overworked, distracted American people. They had better hope their strategy to save the administration works. Failure is not an option available to the MSM here. Circulation of daily newspapers is already on a precipitous decline, and if the media is seen to be co-conspiring with the criminals in the White House, that will be their doom.

Some Purely Domestic Calls Were Intercepted

Now we know why President Bush went out of his way in his Monday press conference to deny that the government was eavesdropping on any calls in which both parties were located in the United States. He was lying.

Any reasonably shrewd person knows that when someone explains something simple by going into a great deal of detail, this wordiness can be a "tell" that the person is not being truthful.

The President, already under fire for the extra-legal NSA spying, kept insisting that all of the intercepted conversations involved one party located outside the confines of the U.S.. When a questioner asked if any purely domestic calls had been captured in this COMINT program, Bush emphatically assured the nation that he would have gone for permission to the FISA court in that eventuality.

Today's New York Times says that contrary to the President's claim, there were U.S./U.S. calls intercepted by NSA without the required secret court order. This puts the matter in an even more sinister light:

Eavesdropping on communications between two people who are both inside the United States is prohibited under Mr. Bush's order allowing some domestic surveillance.

Mr. Bush couldn't even be trusted to adhere to the terms of his illegal order.

The Times, whose behavior in this scandal has been peculiar, insists that the purely domestic calls were few in number and were accidents caused by the advanced technology utilized by NSA. But, if this is true, why would the Times have bothered to publish a story about this aspect of the flap at all?

The Times even gives the government a handy alibi for when (and if) the NSA scandal gets investigated:

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

The Times article shows that the cover story is breaking down somewhere:

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former N.S.A. director who is now the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, was asked at a White House briefing this week whether there had been any "purely domestic" intercepts under the program.

"The authorization given to N.S.A. by the president requires that one end of these communications has to be outside the United States," General Hayden answered. "I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also emphasized that the order only applied to international communications. "People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors," he said. "Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States."

The Times piece ends with a quote by someone whose family is familiar to longtime intelligence community types:

With roaming cellphones, internationally routed e-mail, and voice-over Internet technology, "it's often tough to find out where a call started and ended," said Robert Morris, a former senior scientist at the N.S.A. who is retired. "The N.S.A. is good at it, but it's difficult even for them. Where a call actually came from is often a mystery."

Mr. Morris' son, Robert Jr., a Cornell University grad student, unleashed the very first worm (virus) onto the internet in 1988. Back in the 1980s, 99.7% of Americans had never heard of the internet, and the only access to the network was through the government, military and some universities.

PETA, Greenpeace, ACLU, Others Being Spied Upon

In our continuing coverage of the national security state, today's outrage involves new revelations of FBI spying upon groups including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Greenpeace, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The confirmation that the right of free assembly is swirling down the crapper comes via a release of documents to the ACLU as part of a lawsuit against the government. These papers show that the FBI has been watching demonstrations and other peaceful gatherings since at least the year 2000. Since 9-11, however the Bureau and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) have opened "terrorism" investigations against anti-war, environmental, and civil and human rights groups.

The spying goes beyond the standard overtly intimidating video-taping and photographing of demonstrations and protesters, to include the penetration of some groups by agents and informants.

The FBI claims that it is looking for ties between these groups and other groups that engage in property destruction such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and others. They also stress that evildoers cannot expect to find cover by associating with unpatriotic groups whose activities have not yet been declared illegal, like the ACLU, Greenpeace, etc.:

FBI officials said that the agency is not using the threat of terrorism to suppress domestic dissent and that is has no alternative but to investigate if a group or its members have ties to others that are guilty or suspected of violence* or illegal conduct.

"As a matter of policy, the FBI does not target individuals or organizations for investigation because of any political belief. Somewhere, there has to be a crime attached," FBI spokesman John Miller said. "At the same time, the fact that you have ties to an organization or political beliefs does not make you immune from ending up in FBI files when you go and commit a crime."

(...)

John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, told a Senate panel in May that environmental and animal rights militants posed the biggest terrorist threats in the United States, citing more than 150 pending investigations.

At least Americans can take comfort that the terror fighters have their priorities straight.

*The government attempts to classify property destruction as "violence." The proper term is "vandalism." Their semantic confusion comes not from a lack of brain cells, but from their real job as protectors of the property of their bosses, the corporations.

CIFA Authority Expanding

The authority granted to the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) has grown dramatically in the last couple of years, according to an article today in the WaPo.

Readers of this blog are long familiar with the odious CIFA, which has recently been participating in domestic spying against peace groups. CIFA, whose official size is classified, is believed to have grown from an operation of fewer than one hundred employees to having tasking authority for thousands of investigators. The tasking business is an important distinction, since many U.S. intelligence activities must rely on other community agencies or offices to receive their marching orders. Not so with CIFA.

CIFA has grown from a role of mainly coordination and oversight to an operational entity with nine directorates:

Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States. The DX also provides "on-site, real time . . . support in hostile areas worldwide to protect both U.S. and host nation personnel from a variety of threats," the fact sheet said.

(...)

Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon.

(...)

A third CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion-dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to a government biography of its director, S. Scott Shumate. Shumate was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's counterterrorism center until 2003. His group has also provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees," according to his biography.

The evolution of CIFA appears to be a classic case of mission creep:

A former senior Pentagon intelligence official, familiar with CIFA, said yesterday, "They started with force protection from terrorists, but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything . . . where terrorists get their money, who they see, who they deal with."

He added, noting that there had been no congressional oversight of CIFA, that the Defense Department is "too big, too rich an organization and should not be left unfettered. They rush in where there is a vacuum."

A former senior counterterrorism official, also familiar with CIFA, said, "What you are seeing is the militarization of counterterrorism."

CIFA's authority is still growing. In a new move to centralize all counterterrorism intelligence collection inside the United States, the Defense Department this month gave CIFA authority to task domestic investigations and operations by the counterintelligence units of the military services.

CIFA has had a reputation for a year and a half now for keeping an eye on certain dissident blogs. (Page halfway down the page for the proof.)

Their tradecraft has improved lately.

Cocalero Wins Bolivian Presidential Election

Evo Morales, the leader of Bolivia's coca growers, as expected delivered a facial to U.S. foreign policymakers by winning Sunday's Presidential election. Exit polling showed Morales with 45 percent of the vote, with second-place finisher Jorge Quiroga (Washington's boy) getting 34 percent.

The United States doubtlessly wishes we could have gotten Bolivia to use trusty Diebold machines.

Morales appeared at an election night press conference alongside a Bolivian flag covered with piles of coca leaves. Beautiful.

As mentioned in an earlier article here, with no candidate having finished with more than 50 percent of the vote, the final selection of the President will fall to the Bolivian Congress. My earlier fears of a theft of the Presidency in the Congress may be blunted by the fact that Morales' opponent Quiroga conceded defeat last night.

However, Quiroga's concession speech included his hope that the congressional decision would not lead to widespread unrest in the streets as has been seen in the past. These words sound like a gracious losing candidate's wish for a peaceful transition to MAS (Morales' party) rule. Unless you interpret this as a warning aimed at the supporters of Evo Morales.

That would indicate that Quiroga may know something that the rest of us will find out soon.


Update:

Late Wednesday evening, Dec 21, official returns were in from 93% of the polling places and showed Morales winning by a much larger percentage than had been expected. Morales received 54.3 percent of the vote, thus avoiding the election being sent to the Bolivian Congress for a final decision. Also, voter turnout was more than 85 percent, the highest in recent history.

Congressional Oversight Of Bush Administration Shown To Be Non-Existent

Most people have noticed that there hasn't seemed to be the kind of harassment by Congressional committees of the Bush administration as there was during President Clinton's two terms in office.

That observation seems to be an understatement based on new figures published by the Washington Post:

Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.

Wow. Everyone knew the Republican controlled Congress would be loath to look at this corrupt administration too carefully, but these numbers are simply outrageous.

"I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters this month: "It has basically lost the war-making power.

The Constitution gives the Congress the power to declare war. It is the most important power granted to any of the three branches of government. And it has been hijacked.

Last month, House Democrats tried to pass a measure criticizing the GOP for a "refusal to conduct oversight" of the Iraq war. In the Senate, Democrats forced the chamber into a closed session to embarrass Republicans for foot-dragging on an inquiry into the alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence.

"The House has absolutely zero oversight. They just don't engage in that," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week.

Congress dropped the ball badly. It is looking like they have been more interested in feathering their own nests than carrying out the responsibilities the voters have entrusted to them.

The Bush administration, no strangers to greed, recognized a weakness when it saw one, and took advantage of the avarice of their supposed co-equal branch on Capitol Hill. Of course, the help of the Republican majorities in both chambers was essential:

Specifically, Democrats list 14 areas where the GOP majority has "failed to investigate" the administration, including the role of senior officials in the abuse of detainees; leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the role of Vice President Cheney's office in awarding contracts to Cheney's former employer, Halliburton; the White House's withholding from Congress the cost of a Medicare prescription drug plan; the administration's relationship with Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi; and the influence of corporate interests on energy policy, environmental regulation and tobacco policy.

Meanwhile, the House ethics committee has not opened a new case or launched an investigation in the past 12 months, despite outside investigations involving, among others, Cunningham and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The Rethugs say that there is blame enough to go around:

In most cases, Republicans have said that Democrats are motivated by partisanship rather than fact-finding. After Democrats forced the closed Senate session last month over the slow pace of the inquiry into alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence, Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) railed: "They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. This is a pure stunt."

The nation is relying on Congress to show some independence soon over the recent revelations of illegal NSA warrantless domestic eavesdropping and of military spying on peace groups. A Constitutional crisis is looming.

Bush's Arrogance Bypasses Saddam's

President Bush seems not to understand the deep shit he is in. If he did, he would maintain discreet silence on the extra-legal NSA domestic spying flap.

Like other arrogant criminals, Bush thinks he can talk his way out of legal jeopardy. Bush is also lashing out at the whistle-blower(s) who brought the issue to the New York Times. He is attempting to rally the unwashed masses (his base) to the view that anything goes to "protect" the nation from the terrifying "terrorists."

Today, the President gave a speech in which he actually admitted authorizing the "spying without warrants" program, and dared anybody to say it was illegal.

Mr. Bush, it was illegal! You have headed down the same path as your illustrious Republican predecessor Richard Nixon.

The excuse of "just because I say so it is legal" is not a new argument. Saddam reportedly held similar views. How's that working out for him? Signing an Executive Order (and re-authorizing it over 30 times) may make Bush feel like he is not a lawbreaker, but that will be for the courts to decide. I would feel better about justice being done in this case if the Bush Supreme Court had a better reputation for judging the law, but life is never perfect.

Using 9-11 as an excuse for every imaginable transgression on the part of this administration has long been politically and morally suspect. Now it has been exposed as legally flawed as well. Under the 9-11 rationale, Bush may have decided that it was necessary to our national security to steal the 2004 election by means of the electronic ballot. This has become a serious possibility in the light provided by the unconscionably belated revelation by the New York Times.

What will be the next shoe to drop after the theft of the election?

It will be the U.S. government sanctioned illegal drug business. The operational requirement for large sources of funds to go to the proper security related projects is the real reason that certain drugs are illegal. This is while more dangerous substances are legally dispensed to the drinkers and cigarette smokers of our country.

Mr. Bush is accustomed to assuming he can finesse the elastic boundaries between legal and illegal. The NSA "spying without warrants" case may be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Leader Of Bolivian Coca Growers Expected To Win Presidential Election

Evo Morales, former leader of Bolivia's coca growers federation, is leading in the polls for Sunday's presidential election. This development is causing headaches in Washington, where the leftist politician has no friends in the Bush administration.

Morales is a potent symbol of defiance towards U.S. anti-cocaine strategies in Latin America.

The United States' "War on Drugs" is a scandal which rarely gets the appropriate attention it deserves for being a blatant abuse of the powerless poor. The loathsome program is most lethal outside the borders of our country. In South America, U.S. special forces train compliant military allies while contractors contaminate the countryside by spraying noxious herbicides.

Many Latin American politicians have been on the CIA payroll over the years.

Lately, however, a number of leaders have started to stand up to the "yanquis." Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is the best known. Evo Morales is the next most provocative rebel. Leftists have also recently come to power in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Morales is the indigenous leader of the political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). The name of his party alone gives Washington the shits. His anti-U.S. policy regarding the drug war solidifies U.S. government opposition to his political ambitions.

In the 2002 presidential elections, the U.S. ambassador in La Paz denounced Morales, which caused an understandable rise in the polls for the cocalero. It appears that Morales will not win Sunday's election by a large enough majority to avoid the Bolivian congress' role as tie-breaker.

The United States is hoping that it can rely on a sufficient number of compromised Bolivian congressmen to derail the unwelcome development a Morales presidency would represent to our corrupt drug warriors.

Bush Allowed NSA To Conduct Warrantless Eavesdropping After 9-11

The New York Times tonight broke a story that it had been holding for a year at the request of the White House. President Bush signed an executive order following 9-11 allowing the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans and other parties inside the U.S. without first getting a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as required by law.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) established the secret court, which has been very accommodating to the requests of the intelligence agencies for warrants to spy on people suspected of being connected to foreign powers. This is what makes this revelation so newsworthy.

The Bush administration determined that the exigencies of 9-11 required a very large number of people who would have been ordinarily exempt from domestic spying to come under the watchful eye of the NSA.

The White House is claiming that the President can bypass laws by signing an executive order. Members of the intelligence community and intelligence committees of Congress have been quarreling over this for the last couple of years according to the article.

CIFA Back In The News

The United States "terror-fighters" have proven again to be dangerously clueless.

A COINTELPRO-type program run by the Pentagon to spy on Americans exercising their constitutionally protected rights is again in the news. Several weeks ago, I familiarized readers of this blog with the odious Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). See Major Increase In Surveillance Of Innocent People.

NBC News and Washingtonpost.com contributor William Arkin went public earlier this week with a leaked printout from a CIFA database which detailed reports of such suspicious events as Quaker meetings against the Iraq war and protests against the military-industrial crime cartel.

Today's WaPo has an article by Walter Pincus on this program, codenamed TALON (AMATEUR PROCTOLOGIST was vetoed for being too obvious), which fed the data to the Pentagon's CIFA.

Pincus' article states that in light of the public disclosure of the spying the Pentagon has ordered a "review" to quiet down the not-unreasonable outrage over this issue. It won't work:

To some, the Pentagon's current efforts recall the Vietnam War era, when defense officials spied on anti-war groups and peace activists. Congressional hearings in the 1970s subsequently led to strict limits on the kinds of information that the military can collect about activities and people inside the United States.

The review of the program, ordered by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, will focus on whether officials broke those rules, a Pentagon statement said. The regulations require that any information that is "not validated as threatening must be removed from the TALON system in less than 90 days," it said.

Who is going to be in the position of ruling that something is "not validated as threatening." That is what happened to "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S." Once intelligence is gathered, nobody looking out for their career prospects will want to decide anything "suspicious" is not a threat.

I seriously wonder about the motivation of anyone who allowed the spying on protesters. When the supposed "experts" on threats to national security assume the long-discredited role of the paranoid do-gooders the nation is put at risk. Terrorists are not likely to associate with peace groups. The real goal here is looking less like any real search for terrorists and more like an organized suppression of dissent.

Air Marshals To Be Spread Way Too Thin

The geniuses at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have decided to take some federal air marshals off of airplanes and redeploy them to other mass transit venues such as train stations, subways, etc.

The false-macho selectors of code names for military and security operations have worked overtime on this one. We now have "VIPER" teams, an acronym for "Visible Intermodal Protection and Response". "JOCKSTRAP" must not have been available.

The recent shooting of an innocent man at the Miami airport, and the subsequent fiction about the man's supposed claim of having a bomb makes the timing of this redeployment suspect. See Feds Lie About Dead Miami Airline Passenger for more details on that outrage. A cynic would see the move as a way to spread this post 9-11 risk to whole other categories of travelers.

According to the Washington Post:

(T)he Transportation Security Administration is trying to expand the role of air marshals, who have been eager to conduct surveillance activities beyond the aircraft, and provide a beefed-up law enforcement presence at bus, train and public transit stations over the busy holiday period.

Nice.

Apologists for this poorly conceived move will probably point to the re-enforced cockpit doors mandated following 9-11 as allowing the thinning of airborne security. One only has to notice the nervous looking flight attendant who has to be posted outside the cockpit door whenever one of the pilots has to use the latrine to realize that onboard security is not obsolete.

Of course, the federal air marshals could use a little more restraint when it comes to pulling the trigger while the plane is safely on the ground.

FBI Hounds Whistleblower Into Early Retirement

An FBI Inspector General's internal report says that the Bureau used poor tradecraft, doctored records, and harassed a whistleblower in a 2002 "terrorism" case. The whistleblower, an FBI agent, ended up quitting in 2004 after suffering for exposing wrongdoing in the Tampa, Florida case.

The IG report, a draft copy of which was obtained by Government Executive magazine, details allegations by then-FBI agent Michael German and the subsequent retaliation against him by his supervisors.

The malfeasance in this case looks indicative of wider problems Bureau-wide. German is quoted as writing in response to the report:

"These are important findings that demonstrate a dangerous lack of internal controls within the FBI that calls the integrity of every FBI investigation into question," he wrote. "The administration, Congress and the American public should be gravely concerned about these findings under the current national security threat situation."

German first attempted to get the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility to do their job and investigate his charges of official wrongdoing, but they declined. Among German's charges were the changing of dates in official FBI reports on the case. One would think that something as potentially cut and dried as that would be grist for the investigative mill. Not in this case. Falsifying documents as a law-enforcement tool must be too valuable a tool for the feds to consider proscribing.

I detect a lawsuit against the government coming.

Rumsfeld Bitches About Press Coverage of War

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is complaining that our mainstream media is emphasizing bad news rather than all the progress the United States is making in Iraq.

Rumsfeld believes, like other right-wing kooks--contrary to all available evidence--that the MSM leans to the political left. These fools deceive themselves and others as to the real motivation of the corporate-owned mouthpieces. Money rules the roost. That's why Fox television, the darling of the conservative right, shows the most salacious prime-time offerings of all the networks.

Rumsfeld's new round of complaints is especially galling in light of the military propaganda flap that recently came to light. Also, the military lies about many events as a matter of routine. It is no coincidence that any time the U.S. loses an aircraft in Iraq or Afghanistan, it is always due to bad weather or dust storms, never hostile fire. The truth later emerges, but always after the incident is forgotten by everyone except the families of the dead.

The reflexive lies about the death of Pat Tillman is another example.

The deaths of ten Marines outside Fallujah on December 1 was initially claimed to have been in the course of a patrol operation. The network news broadcasts even featured a simulation of Marines entering a compound and getting surprised by a booby trap.

Well, it turns out now that the Marines were at their base conducting an outdoor promotion ceremony when an explosion claimed the ten Marines and wounded another 11.

Rumsfeld has no business bitching about media coverage of the war when military spokesmen show such a lack of respect for the reporters and their audience--the American people--to flagrantly mislead at every opportunity.

Three Weak Compositions From The Washington Post

Today's Outlook section in the Washington Post has three pro-withdrawal and three pro-"stay the course" opinion pieces under a general section headlined "Iraq & Consequences."

All six pieces are worth reading, but I will deal with the three which state that we should drag out the inevitable. These compositions are examples of muddled mentation, wishful thinking, and several other errors which are hard for a non-psychiatric professional to decipher.

First comes "We Might Prevent a Failed State" by Phebe Marr. The title alone says it all. Ms. Marr (I am presuming this is a woman by the name) works for the Orwellian-named U.S. Institute of Peace.

Marr believes that an Iraq sans U.S. military support would be unable to export its oil. Yes, you read that right. She actually believes that the money-driven oil industry which has no problem operating in every shithole known to man would have problems in a post-war Iraq.

It gets worse. Marr writes:

(N)o Iraqi forces, including the strongest militias (the Kurdish peshmergas and the Badr Brigade, which effectively rules parts of southern Iraq), are yet ready to take on the hard-core Islamic radicals.

This is simply untrue. The Shiite leader of SCIRI, which runs the Badr Brigade, has publicly chastised the U.S. military for restraining his forces from ruthlessly dealing with the Sunni Islamist terrorists.

Enough with Ms. Marr's lightweight essay. Next up is "Civil War Can Be Averted" by Zaki Chehab, a writer and editor based in London.

Chehab is of the opinion that a U.S. pullout would be a victory for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign fighters.

Chehab also cites his informal polling, conducted during his recent visit to Iraq. According to Chehab:

Perhaps more importantly, most Iraqis do not want the United States to pull out. As I traveled through Iraq in recent months, from Irbil and Dahuk to Basra via Mosul, Fallujah and Ramadi, I asked many people whether they really wanted to see American forces leave their country in the near future. Almost invariably, they would be surprised at the question. They know that a premature U.S. departure could fragment Iraq even further, and that they would then face the possibility of the civil war that they have so far succeeded in avoiding.

Under this logic, the United States will have to remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future (perhaps forever) to prevent the longtime Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish adversaries from settling their grievances. That's a non-starter even among Iraq war hawks.

Chehab also points to economic reasons, for the Americans to stay:

A Sunni businessman from Mosul told me that Iraqis want a good relationship with the United States, as they need American technology.

WTF? Money talks, bullshit walks.

We then hear a familiar, though not as hysterical as from Marr, refrain:

As for Iraqi oil, he said, Iraqis can't drink it. They need to sell it, and the United States is one of the countries capable of being a partner in that transaction.

No kidding. Along with the United States there are at least two dozen industrial countries willing to take the other side of that trade. I'm detecting talking points here.

The final pro-war treatise titled "Zarqawi May Be Glad," comes from retired Marine Corps colonel Gary Anderson. The title is completely misleading, Anderson's entire essay details otherwise:

When it comes to considering whether the U.S. military should precipitously pull out troops or stay in Iraq, we should ask ourselves, "What would Zarqawi do?"

I believe that our departure would be his worst case scenario. Zarqawi would then face a serious dilemma. Instead of fighting a non-Arab occupying force made up of "infidels," he would be confronting the imminent breakup of the anti-U.S. insurgent alliance of which his group is the smallest, if most dangerous, component.

(...)

With U.S. troops out of Iraq, the nationalists among the insurgency would then see Zarqawi's group as the only foreign-led element of the insurgency. Their immediate question would be, "Why do we need al Qaeda in Iraq any more?" The largely secular Baathist portion of the insurgency would see the terrorist leader as a threat to the return to some level of respectability in the country where the Baathist once ruled.

Does this sound like "Zarqawi May Be Glad"? In their respective opinion pieces, Anderson and Chehab reach completely different conclusions about Zarqawi.

Besides, the United States should not be making any decisions whatsoever regarding Iraq based on any assumptions about Zarqawi. This is because there is a credible rumor in security circles that Zarqawi himself and his "Al Qaeda in Iraq" may be a fiction, created by U.S. intelligence to influence and infiltrate the Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Middle-East.

You didn't hear it from me.

New U.S. Ambassador To S. Korea Angers The North

The new U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, used some un-diplomatic language last Tuesday to describe North Korea. He mentioned perennial U.S. complaints such as drug trafficking, money-laundering, and counterfeiting allegedly conducted by the North. Vershbow summed up his appraisal with the phrase "this is a criminal regime."

All these statements are doubtlessly true, but it is bad form for a career diplomat (Vershbow is no political appointee) to venture so far from customary protocol unless ordered to do so by one's bosses. This means that the kooks in the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis are still holding the floor in making U.S. policy toward the "difficult" North.

North Korea naturally could not overlook the tongue-lashing. Today they have issued their response. The North termed Vershbow's words "a sort of provocative declaration of a war" and threatened to "mercilessly retaliate against it," according to a news report:

Calling such U.S. allegations "sheer lies," the North's Foreign Ministry said Saturday that "the prospect of the six-party talks' resumption and progress will entirely depend on the U.S. attitude."

The spokesman accused Washington of making "scenarios to deter (North Korea) from going to the six-party talks and lead them to a final collapse," according to KCNA.

(...)

Vershbow's comment also drew criticism from South Korea, which has actively engaged the heavily militarized North since a summit between their leaders in 2000.

"It's not desirable to publicly characterize the other side," Song Min-soon, South Korea's chief negotiator at the six-party talks, told The Associated Press in Malaysia.

Another report suggests what might be Vershbow's fate if North Korea had it's way:

The North Korean committee spokesman said South Koreans should force Vershbow to stand at a central traffic intersection in Seoul, "punish him in the name of the nation and immediately expel him from their land".

Vershbow, of course, will not be quaking in his boots over the North's disapproval, but this incident is yet another sign of the cavalier approach that Cheney and Rumsfeld have been taking towards a very dangerous adversary. It was our Iraq distraction that allowed North Korea to boldly step up their nuclear weapons program.

It would be in no one's interest to allow the paranoid North Koreans to misinterpret a statement which Washington most likely sees as ordinary political posturing. The North holds some serious cards now in east Asia, and we should be trying to keep them at the table, rather than inciting them to pack up their chips and begin another game.

Feds Lie About Dead Miami Airline Passenger

The standard operating procedure for law enforcement personnel involved in shooting incidents has often been to lie about the circumstances. The "throw-down gun", planted at the scene of police shootings, is not just simply legend.

The shooting of a mentally ill man on the jetway at Miami International Airport had a funny smell from the beginning. Before the passengers had been taken off the plane with their hands up, cable network news was reporting that the man had claimed to be carrying a bomb. This information had to have come from Washington.

My suspicions are becoming vindicated with eyewitnesses coming forward to say that the man never made the threat of having a bomb.

The Washington Post apparently had hints of this official malfeasence judging by the peculiar wording (and timing) of an editorial today.

The Post doesn't come right out with everything it knows (it never does), but the editorial comparison with the case of the innocent man shot in the London subway was not a coincidence.

The quick action of the official lie machine is no surprise to any reasonably aware American. By the time of the evening network newscasts, there were politicians and terrorism "experts" blathering on the air about how the Miami incident proves the worth of the federal air marshal program. The apologists for the national security state know no shame. If shooting a mentally ill passenger is so good for airline security, why don't we shoot one or two every day?

Besides the lack of respect for the public shown by the government liars, there is an additional issue. This would be obstruction of justice. As one eyewitness passenger said, the FBI had been told by someone that the man said he had a bomb (the "b-word" in that FBI agent's lingo, nice). The passenger told the FBI that this was untrue, but clearly people were telling untruths to the investigators. As "Plamegate" and the "Martha Stewart case" showed, making up a story to serve one's agenda is frowned upon.

Or is it? If no one tries very hard to get to the bottom of the slanderous claims about the mentally ill man, it will become clear that the lie was sanctioned at a high level of government.

Pinter Blasts U.S. in Nobel Speech

Harold Pinter, this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature, gave a speech predictably hostile to U.S. foreign policy.

Pinter's speech, printed in full in the Guardian, attacks not only the Bush administration's grotesque actions abroad, but the entire post-world war II conduct of U.S. international affairs:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

A discussion of our 1980's activities in Central America includes an anecdote involving a meeting Pinter attended at the time at the U.S. embassy in London that simply must be read for one's self to be adequately appreciated.

Following this, Pinter gets into the flaws of the current crop of psychopaths running our foreign relations:

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return.

(...)

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines.

The speech goes on, and adds literary flourish. I would do readers a disservice by quoting further, it too, needs to be read in it's entirety.

Also, he starts out with an interesting observation about ultimate truth in art, which leads into his political discussion.

It is not easy for Americans to hear harsh denunciation from foreigners. It never sinks in with the public anyway. There are too many Americans lucidly critiquing our failings who are ignored from the get-go. Pinter's prominence will ensure that many people worldwide (though probably not in this country) will pay attention this time.

Ten Questions About 9-11

The anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor seems like a good time to point to a new article about the 9-11 attacks.

There are plenty of people who argue that Pearl Harbor was not exactly a surprise. The same, of course, applies to the events of 9-11. There is practically an entire industry on the internet devoted to this theme.

For my part, I am more knowledgeable about the Kennedy assassination than the conspiracy theories regarding 9-11 (even though I was able to hear the explosion when the Pentagon got hit).

It is clear to me however, that even if the Bush administration had no direct hand in the attacks (I don't know one way or another), they have shamelessly exploited them in order to enact long-time goals of the national security state.

The story as told by our government does not hold water. I have been told that Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania. The debris pattern, spread over many miles, certainly indicates such an action. An amateur radio buff swears that one of the Air Force pilots reported back to Langley AFB that he had shot down the plane.

A new article in the Village Voice details and tries to answer ten questions of a suspicious nature regarding 9-11. These are:

• 1. Where Was the "National Command Authority"?
• 2. Who Gave the Order to Try to Shoot the Planes Down?
• 3. What Exactly Were All Those Firefighters Doing in the Towers?
• 4. Did Anyone Think the Towers Would Collapse?
• 5. Why Was Giuliani's Command Bunker at Ground Zero?
• 6. Why Did 7 WTC Fall?
• 7. How Did the Twin Towers Fall?
• 8. How Dangerous Was - and Is - the Air at Ground Zero?
• 9. What Exactly Did Zacarias Moussaoui Plan to Do?
• 10. What's on Those Blanked-Out Pages?

The article works for both novice and experienced 9-11 investigators.

One Of Secret Contacts Between U.S. and Taliban Missing

One of the contacts in the secret cease-fire negotiations between the U.S. government and leadership of the Taliban is missing and several Pakistani sources claim he has been kidnapped.

The story of the secret negotiations was first reported by this blog on Dec 1; see U.S. Reportedly Seeking Negotiations With Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The missing contact is a former associate of the Pakistani Islamic Fundamentalist group Lashkar-i-Taiba, a businessman named Arif Qasmani. Javed Ibrahim Paracha, the Pakistani politician identified as a main contact between U.S. intelligence and the Taliban announced Mr Qasmani's disappearance. Paracha believes that Qasmani has been abducted by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Paracha is now naming the two other members of the negotiation team that met with American intelligence. They are, besides Paracha and Qasmani, Khalid Khawaja (formerly ISI) and Shah Abdul Aziz, a Pakistani politician from the North-West Frontier Province.

Cunningham Probe Could Reach CIA

Randy "Duke" Cunningham's dirty dealings with several defense contractors may also involve the CIA office in charge of contracting.

A new article by Jason Vest at GovExec.com details concerns within the CIA that Cunningham may have used his position on the House Select Committee on Intelligence in the same manner that he exploited his seat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Vest writes:

According to past and present CIA officials interviewed over the past month, CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo--whose career duties have encompassed letting CIA contracts--has had a long, close personal relationship with two contractors identified (though not explicitly named) in court papers as bribing Cunningham: Brent Wilkes of the Wilkes Corp., whose subsidiaries include defense contractor ADCS; and former ADCS consultant Mitchell Wade, until recently president of defense contractor MZM, Inc. It is a relationship, the CIA officials say (with some putting a particular emphasis on Wilkes), that has increasingly been of concern.

Foggo is currently the third ranking official at the Agency, his earlier career history being:

Foggo belonged to the DA's Management General Services unit, whose personnel, while not case officers who directly recruit and oversee spies, nonetheless received the same training as covert-action oriented Directorate of Operations officers.

MGS officers ran operational support programs in the field, a critical job directly below the agency's station chiefs. MGS officers had unique powers, including sole access to and oversight of a station's funds, as well as handling a station's accounting and contracting.

"The MG guy is the station's contracting authority, and is responsible for acquiring whatever a station needs to function, and to keep it running---the glue the holds it all together and gets anyone anything they need," says a veteran logistics officer.

While most federal government contracts are openly solicited, competitively bid and have their details publicly available, by virtue of its mission the CIA is not subject to the same rules. MG officers in particular have historically had great leeway.

This is a really good article.

Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire has also done great work on the Cunningham corruption story.

Secretary of State Rice Has A Plan

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is leaving today for a five day trip to Europe to try to calm their outrage over reports of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

Human rights activists have been putting pressure on European governments to put a stop to the U.S. practice. Unlike in the Bush-era United States, human rights issues are not merely window-dressing and are actually are taken seriously by European Union authorities.

Our Secretary of State has a plan. Rice will try to turn the tables on our European allies. Rather than apologizing or explaining the prisons, she is planning to not even publicly acknowledge their existence.

State Department sources say that Rice will privately stress the benefits of cooperation with the United States in the "war on terror." State is claiming that a number of actual attacks have been prevented by judicious use of secret detention. The Europeans, still smarting after the Madrid and London subway bombings, presumably know better and will call bullshit on Rice.

The administration also wants our European allies to get their publics back in line with the "what America wants is best for all concerned" program.

The administration claims that the U.S. has been obeying all international statutes that we are required to as signatories of various treaties. The international law community interprets things otherwise.

It is doubtful, however, that the United States will be forced here to do anything it sees as "unhelpful" to our national security. We are the big dog on the block. Even though the combined GNP of the European Union is larger than that of the U.S., we are more willing to throw our weight around.

The days when the U.S. commanded respect due to our moral standing in the world are over. Now it takes fear of what we might do, or of what "terrorists" may do, to ensure our traditional allies will do our bidding.

Expert On Public Opinion Crafted President's Annapolis Speech

President Bush's speech on the new plan to win the war in Iraq delivered last Wednesday at the Naval Academy marked the appearance of a new speechwriter.

Dr. Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at Duke, has previously worked for the National Security Council, but is best known in policy circles for a study he conducted on public opinion and war.

Dr. Feaver had concluded that the American appetite for a war does not automatically wane as the casualties pile up, but that it is the public's perception of the likelihood of an eventual American victory that is the decisive factor in popular support.

Who better to bring in to help decide how much malarky the American people can accept at one sitting than the man from Duke? American tolerance seems capped at 15 uses of the word victory in one speech. This limitation is why the President has to follow the Annapolis speech with at least three more pep talks on our progress in Iraq in the next few weeks.

The possibility of an outcome in Iraq approaching anything a reasonable person would regard as victory is slim. Knowing this, the Bush administration has decided to begin moving the goalposts. The public must be conned into believing that we will win. Winning must also be gradually defined down. At some point, anything short of a hasty evac from the American embassy annex via chopper will qualify as "victory."

U.S. Negotiator Tells Of Impatience With North Korea

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill is telling reporters that he is impatient with the progress of talks to curtail North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Hill, the U.S. chief negotiator in the six-nation talks is acting like he has better things to do.

Or does he just have ADHD?

Hill is quoted as saying "we cant just sit there stalemated session after stalemated session."

Yes, we can, if it means keeping North Korea at the bargaining table, since the stalemate is largely due to the American negotiating position. The problem is that the United States is refusing to offer tangible consideration to the North during these talks, insisting instead that any aid or other assistance would be provided only after North Korea disarms.

This is no way to try to win a deal with anybody, much less the paranoid North Koreans.

Three of the other nations involved in the talks, China, South Korea, and Russia, are losing patience with the U.S. approach.

The stakes here are too high to fuck around any more.

The United States should be prepared to offer at least some carrots to the North to get the process going again. This would not be "giving in to blackmail" except in the eyes of the false macho cretins crafting our disastrous foreign policy.