Americans' Trepidation Over Iran Measurable

Several new polls are showing that the "propaganda industrial complex" has been somewhat successful in whipping up fear of Iran among the over-worked and under-informed citizens of the United States.

As if the U.S. didn't have it's hands full in one American-created shithole, the public appears to believe that we should ratchet up the pressure on our main victim's next-door neighbor.

Seven in 10 Americans would support international economic sanctions as a way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons...

(A)bout 42 percent of Americans said they would support bombing Iran's nuclear development sites, while 54 percent oppose it...

A large majority of the public says Iran is a threat to the United States, albeit not an immediate one, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Do any of these idiots have any idea how preposterous it is to consider Iran a genuine threat to the U.S.?

Even a nuclear armed Iran would be, at most, a threat to Israel, not the United States.

Last week's Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll asked if the public would support military action if "Iran continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons." In that survey, 57 percent backed a military response.

Is a military response the first thing that comes into the heads of these Neanderthals? No wonder our founding fathers decided against allowing the public to vote directly for president, choosing instead one level of abstraction via the Electoral College.

The Bush administration has said military action is not currently an option, but congressional leaders such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have said the threat of a military strike must remain on the table.

Wait a second, when has any administration ever taken the threat of force off the table in any situation. That just ain't done.

This administration is lying about even this to cover for the U.S. special forces who are currently operating in Iran laying the groundwork for whatever is to happen.

Feingold Challenges A.G. on Eavesdropping

In a hopeful sign of things to come, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) is accusing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of trying to put one over on the Senate during his confirmation hearings.

Feingold's staff, displaying foresight that borders on foreknowledge, prepared a question for Gonzales about warrantless surveillance.

In a letter to the attorney general yesterday, Feingold demanded to know why Gonzales dismissed the senator's question about warrantless eavesdropping as a "hypothetical situation" during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January 2005. At the hearing, Feingold asked Gonzales where the president's authority ends and whether Gonzales believed the president could, for example, act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.

Gonzales said that it was impossible to answer such a hypothetical question but that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. He added that he would hope to alert Congress if the president ever chose to authorize warrantless surveillance, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Sounds like Gonzales was "disassembling", to borrow a term from President Bush.

Gonzales was White House counsel at the time the program began and has since acknowledged his role in affirming the president's authority to launch the surveillance effort. Gonzales is scheduled to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program's legal rationale.

The Senate should ream him out for perjury.

The program, publicly revealed in media reports last month, was unknown to Feingold and his staff at the time Feingold questioned Gonzales, according to a staff member. Feingold's aides developed the 2005 questions based on privacy advocates' concerns about broad interpretations of executive power.

This is simply too convenient to be mere "coincidence." Something tells me that the illegal eavesdropping was more widely known than has been yet revealed.

Besides, there is no such thing as coincidence.

Jungian "synchronicity" definitely, but "coincidence"-- never.

Bird Flu Appears in Iraq

The (perhaps unnecessarily) dreaded bird flu has killed it's first victims in Iraq, a nation which is not currently ranked among the best for health care infrastructure.

Iraqi Health Minister Abdul Mutalib Ali Mohammed Salih said Monday that a 14-year-old girl who died almost two weeks ago in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah was found to have been infected with bird flu.

The girl, Tijan Abdel Qadr, died after experiencing severe respiratory symptoms consistent with those present in the disease that has killed more than 80 people, the vast majority in Asia, since it was first diagnosed in 2003. Medical scientists fear that if left unchecked, the disease could spread to broad swaths of the global population.

The security situation cannot be conducive to dealing with an Avian Flu outbreak.

Mohammed Khoshnaw, health minister for the Kurdistan regional government, said doctors suspected at least two more people currently in a local hospital could be infected. A doctor at the Ranya hospital, northwest of Sulaymaniyah, confirmed that two women there presented symptoms of the disease.

The WHO, which is sending a team to Iraq for further investigation, told Reuters it is also testing the infected girl's uncle, who died after experiencing the same symptoms.

Yet another consequence of an unnecessary war.

Cindy Sheehan: Victim of Agent Provocateur?

I suspect that Cindy Sheehan has fallen under the influence of an agent provocateur.

That seems to be the only logical explanation for her to go down to Venezuela and embrace Hugo Chavez:

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela joined Cindy Sheehan, the American antiwar activist, on Sunday to attack President Bush and promised to support her protest against the Iraq war.

Mr. Chavez has become a voice for many opponents of the Bush administration's policies who are drawn to his self-styled socialist revolution and his close alliance with the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

"Enough of imperialist aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire," Mr. Chavez said as he hugged Ms. Sheehan, whose son died in the Iraq war, and the widow of the Puerto Rican independence advocate Filiberto Ojeda Ra­os, who was killed in a gunfight with the police last year.

"We have to bury imperialism this century," Mr. Chavez told her on his Sunday television broadcast. "Cindy, we are with you in your fight."

I personally have nothing against Chavez and his socialistic-nationalistic programs. But Ms. Sheehan has won the sympathies of millions of mainstream Americans and has become a strong symbol of opposition to the Iraq war. She is risking her credibility by associating with Chavez at this point in time.

Her enemies can now smear her as anti-American, a friend of Fidel, etc.

Someone manuevered her down to South America.

I smell a mole.

Propaganda Watch: January 30, 2006

The "opinion-makers" of the Washington Post today continue the "debate" about if, how, and when the United States should pull the trigger on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Jackson Diehl pens an op-ed that soberly tackles the main question: a little more diplomacy (which equals a nuclear-armed Iran) or a war to make the region safe for some indefinable concept?

(T)wo of our more principled senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct: "There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-armed Iran."

Using the word "principled" in the same sentence with the name "Lieberman" is a journalistic abuse of literary license to put it mildly.

A few paragraphs of unconvincing advocacy of diplomacy is followed by the conclusion a "security-minded" reader is supposed to reach.

(I)f McCain is right, then the current diplomatic campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show that the United States has tried them. That's because the timeline for military action is much shorter than that of containment: While it might not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years, according to most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass what Israel calls the "point of no return" far sooner. After that point, when Tehran will have acquired all the means it needs to manufacture a bomb, it would be considerably more difficult to stop the Iranian program by force. So, if military action is preferable to containment, then brinkmanship is called for, while promotion of Iranian democracy, or painstaking cultivation of Russia and China, is a waste of time.

So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to drag on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to nothing to help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of sanctions that, if imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also laying the groundwork for long-term containment. Perhaps the president has decided what course he will choose if Iranian uranium enrichment proceeds in spite of negotiations, U.N. resolutions or even sanctions. If so, his administration's current tactics show no sign of it.

By pretending that it is reasonable to be debating whether to attack a sovereign nation over some bugaboo fears serves to legitimize the war-monger position.

Should Iran develop a nuclear weapon, the proper policy should be one of deterrence. The promise of nuclear annihilation will deter any nation from allowing it's WMDs to be used against the United States.

Preventive war does not pass muster.

Pentagon Steps on State, Can Now Fund Foreign Militaries

The Bush administration's preference for the military over the overly cautious civilians at the State Department has resulted in new authority to be given to the Pentagon.

Congress has granted unusual authority for the Pentagon to spend as much as $200 million of its own budget to aid foreign militaries, a break with the traditional practice of channeling foreign military assistance through the State Department.

The move, included in a little-noticed provision of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act passed last month, marks a legislative victory for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who pushed hard for the new powers to deal with emergency situations.

Rumsfeld often engages in bureaucratic battles for no other reason than to throw his weight around.

But it has drawn warnings from foreign policy specialists inside and outside the government, who say it could lead to growth of a separate military assistance effort not subject to the same constraints applied to foreign aid programs that are administered by the State Department. Such constraints are meant to ensure that aid recipients meet certain standards, including respect for human rights and protection of legitimate civilian authorities.

"It's important that diplomats remain the ones to make the decisions about U.S. foreign assistance," said George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and a former staff member on the House Armed Services Committee. "They can ensure such decisions are taken in the broader context of U.S. foreign policy."

That's the crux of the problem with this "improvement" in our foreign military assistance. The military has its agenda, while State has to look out for the (legitimate) concerns of other countries over U.S. intentions.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also threw her support behind the measure, overruling lower-ranking staff members who had argued that existing laws were sufficient and who had cautioned against granting the Pentagon such flexibility, department officials said. She joined Rumsfeld last summer in a letter to Congress urging passage of the legislation.

Nice of Rice to look out for the institutional imperative of her charges.

The "fear factor" has to be brought into every policy question in Washington these days:

Administration officials complain that attempts to provide such security assistance, especially in crisis situations, have often been hampered by a patchwork of legal restrictions and by a division of responsibilities among U.S. government departments.

Condi's old Stanford mentor, and member of the 9-11 Whitewash Commission, adds his two-cents:

"In the longer run, we need to have our assistance structured in a way that will give us even broader flexibility," said Philip Zelikow, the State Department's counselor. "The president and his advisers must be able to devise a program that can allocate money as needed among whatever agencies have the skill sets to deliver the capabilities, whether State, Defense, Justice or other government agencies."

The Bush administration is all about "broader flexibility."

U.S. Refuses Any Contact With Iran at International Aid Talks

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" opined Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau's landlord at Walden Pond would be appalled at the Bush administration in general, but the "foolish consistency" of the U.S. policy of refusing all diplomatic contacts with Iran is in the news today.

The United States on Friday ruled out any contact with Iranian delegates to an international aid conference that comes just before next week's showdown vote on whether to send Iran to the U.N. Security Council over its disputed nuclear program.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leads a U.S. delegation to the two-day conference in London on international aid for rebuilding Afghanistan.

Is the administration afraid that someone will go off the reservation and negotiate a breakthrough with the freedom-hatin' Iranians?

This would be detrimental to the march to an 2006 election-time war with Iran.

"I do not anticipate, and I'm 100 percent sure about this, any contact between whichever official is sent by the Iranian government and our delegation, including Secretary Rice," said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns.

The no-contact policy holds even if Iran wants to talk about its nuclear program, Burns said. The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

At least he is not aping the propaganda points we have become familiar with recently.

"In an environment where the new Iranian president has called for the destruction of Israel, has denied that the Holocaust happened as a historical fact, has put Iran on a more radical course on its nuclear policy, has continued Iranian support for terrorism, there's not a lot to talk about," Burns said.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

Burns is the department's No. 3 official and has led U.S. efforts to head off Iran's nuclear development or persuade other nations that the Tehran regime must be hauled before the Security Council for possible punishment.

Since when has our print media used Koran-like language? The emphasis upon a people being hauled off for a woeful punishment is a prime example of the lingo used by The Prophet (pbuh).

It is clear that by adhering to the stupid no-contact policy, Washington has pre-ordained the outcome of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and later U.N. Security Council debates on the future of Iran's nuclear program.

An overlooked aspect of the firm "no diplomatic contact" with Iran policy is that the Bush administration has expressly waived the rule in one important case.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has quietly been given authorization to negotiate with Iran to limit any mischief-making in Iraq on their part.

One must have one's priorities straight, I suppose.

Chavez Threatens To Arrest U.S. Spies

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, in a statement obviously aimed at his domestic audience, is threatening to jail any U.S. spies caught gathering intelligence on his military.

Chavez is not as oblivious to the facts of diplomatic immunity as his statement would make it seem. He knows full well that the CIA officers and U.S. military attachés he is watching hold a "get out of jail free" card. He could conceivably capture a NOC or two, but we are not likely to be using vulnerable non-official operatives in the hostile environment of a Venezuela teeming with Cuban and Cuban-trained counter-intelligence personnel.

Chavez's warning came hours after his vice president, Jose Vicente Rangel, accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case involving several Venezuelan naval officers who allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon... He addressed the spying accusations for the first time since the allegations came to light earlier this week.

"We've just discovered a case, one more espionage case," Chavez told the audience of activists who are attending the World Social Forum in Caracas this week.

"I warn the U.S. government: the next time we detect a soldier or civilian official - but above all American soldiers - trying to obtain information about our armed forces, we're going to put them in prison."

By American soldiers, he presumably means military attachés, who have full diplomatic immunity.

In the pot calling the kettle black department, we find the following:

Washington has raised concern about the health of democracy under Chavez and has accused him of destabilizing the region. Chavez has shrugged off the claims, saying his government is democratic and it is the U.S. that is a destabilizing force.

Chavez has clearly been studying up on the United States:

The frequent and vocal critic of U.S. global policy used especially harsh terms to describe the U.S. government, calling it a "perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire."

His words may be "harsh", but that doesn't make them untrue.

Hayden May Have Helms-Type Testimony Problems

Current Deputy Director of National Intelligence, the former head of NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden may be in a bit of hot water, according to Think Progress.

Former national security wonk Morton Halperin has found 2002 testimony in which Gen. Hayden apparently, as Bush would term it, "disassembled."

Hayden misled Congress. In his 10/17/02 testimony, he told a committee investigating the 9/11 attacks that any surveillance of persons in the United States was done consistent with FISA.

At the time of his statements, Hayden was fully aware of the presidential order to conduct warrantless domestic spying issued the previous year. But Hayden didn'’t feel as though he needed to share that with Congress. Apparently, Hayden believed that he had been legally authorized to conduct the surveillance, but told Congress that he had no authority to do exactly what he was doing. The Fraud and False Statements statute (18 U.S.C. 1001) make Hayden'’s misleading statements to Congress illegal.

Hayden's fate lies with the tale of another spymaster, Nixon-era CIA Director Richard Helms.

Testifying under oath before a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973, Richard Helms claimed that CIA was not involved in attempts to overthrow Salvador Allende of Chile:

SEN. SYMINGTON: Did you try in the Central Intelligence agency to overthrow the government of Chile?

MR. HELMS: No, sir.

SEN. SYMINGTON: Did you have any money passed to the opponents of Allende?

MR. HELMS: No, sir.

By the time Helms was called to testify again, CIA activities in Chile had become public knowledge. In 1977, Richard Helms pleaded no contest to charges of lying to Congress and served a suspended sentence.

Helms was also fined. His CIA colleagues paid the fine and cheered him as he exited the courthouse on Judiciary Square.

He lived out the rest of a long life as a hero and role model to people like George Tenet and legions of young CIA officers.

I wonder if Gen. Hayden will be so unrepentant when and if he is ever called to the carpet on his Congressional testimony?

The "Reasonable Basis" Meme

Apologists for the extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping conspiracy have been pointing in recent days to having a "reasonable basis" to suspect terrorist connections of persons ensnared in the program.

These tools have been intentionally conflating the Constitutionally specified requirement for "probable cause" and the invalid standard of "reasonable basis" or "reasonable suspicion."

We now know where they got the idea. Today's Washington Post outlines a scheme put forward in 2002 by a Republican Senator to change the wording in FISA to lower the standard from "probable cause" to "reasonable suspicion."

The administration has a problem. They argued in 2002 that the change in language was not needed.

The Bush administration rejected a 2002 Senate proposal that would have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain surveillance warrants in terrorism cases, concluding that the system was working well and that it would likely be unconstitutional to lower the legal standard. The proposed legislation by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) would have allowed the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants for non-U.S. citizens if they had a "reasonable suspicion" they were connected to terrorism -- a lower standard than the "probable cause" requirement in the statute that governs the warrants.

Now the apologists are talking like the "reasonable basis" change was adopted in fact:

The wiretapping program, ordered by President Bush in 2001, is used when intelligence agents have a "reasonable basis to believe" that a target is tied to al Qaeda or related groups, according to recent statements by administration officials. It can be used on U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, without court oversight...

"It's entirely inconsistent with their current position," said Philip B. Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who teaches law at Harvard University. "The only reason to do what they've been doing is because they wanted a lower standard than 'probable cause.' A member of Congress offered that to them, but they turned it down."

The fools! If they had not tried to be sneaky, and had actually allowed the law to be changed, there would probably be no scandal today.

"The FISA 'probable cause' standard is essentially the same as the 'reasonable basis' standard used in the terrorist surveillance program," said spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos, using the term for the NSA program the White House has adopted. "The 'reasonable suspicion' standard, which is lower than both of these, is not used in either program."

That is a blatant lie. Probable cause for a search warrant requires a signed affidavit by a law enforcement officer that he/she has witnessed lawbreaking on the part of the suspected criminal.

They couldn't possibly have met that standard.

I have been told that the real reason that the administration went around FISA was that they wanted to spy upon so many people that even the compliant FISA court would have balked at both the outrageous number of requests and the lack of supporting evidence required to get the warrants.

So now the administration plays a game of semantics.

President Jonah by Gore Vidal

America's finest essayist, Gore Vidal, has a new piece out about the epic disaster that, like some shape-shifting reptilian entity, appears to us in the form of the Bush administration.

As usual, the master's prose is impeccable. The politics clear-eyed.

He begins with a biblical analogy that simply must be read in it's entirety to be fully appreciated. It begins thusly:

As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and-Lo!-the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.

Vidal turns what would be anyone else's run-of-the-mill book review of an obscure academic work into a historical tour de force:

When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.

The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.

I have left out probably the best parts of this essay in the hopes that readers will go to the website via the link above to read the whole piece.

Anyone who wishes to read more from this great American writer is encouraged to visit his/her local public library to sample the goods (they often have a good selection of his books). I have always preferred his non-fiction works, but I know people who say that his novels are equally good or better.

Hysterical Ninnies Are Idiots

Some liberal bloggers (I won't name names) are up in arms over the alleged creation by the PATRIOT Act of the "United States Secret Service Uniformed Division."

Apparently, none of these fuckwits have ever been to Washington D.C.

Or ever saw the movie "Fahrenheit 911."

The Uniformed Division of the Secret Service has been here for many years. It's main duty is to guard the embassies of foreign countries that are ubiquitous in the nice parts of D.C.

They were featured in Michael Moore's movie when he stood across the street from the Saudi Embassy talking about how important Saudi money is to the U.S. economy. The camera showed an officer in his marked cruiser speak into his radio. Next, several other units pulled up and a senior officer questioned Moore about what he was doing.

The Uniformed Division of the Secret Service also routinely catches purse-snatchers and other street criminals in the vicinity of embassies.

Some of the aforementioned bloggers are also beside themselves with outrage about wording in the PATRIOT Act that supposedly allows this "American Gestapo" to prosecute "crimes against the United States."

Give me a break. "Crimes against the United States" does not refer to being a critic of administration policies. That is the boilerplate wording used on indictments in federal courts.

Hysterical ninnies of the liberal persuasion give a bad name to actual radicals who are fighting the system.

There is much to be critical about in the PATRIOT Act, but the "United States Secret Service Uniformed Division", to the best of my knowledge, is not one of the players that people should be concerned about.

Another "Temporary" Renewal of PATRIOT Act Likely

The Senate Democrats (joined by a few Republicans) who refused to roll over and make permanent the USA PATRIOT Act are being pressured to drop their objections to some of the worst privacy abuses inherent in the current law.

To their credit, the Democrats are not yielding to the pressure.

This means that we are likely to see additional extension(s) of the original legislation while the arm-twisting can continue.

The negotiations over modifying the PATRIOT Act are being conducted under the auspices of House/Senate bargaining to bring both chambers' language together so that a workable bill can be passed.

The problem is being blamed on the House side:

The chief House negotiator -- Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) -- has said his chamber is finished with talks, dimming hopes for a breakthrough...

"I can tell you, after talking to Chairman Sensenbrenner, that the House feels that they've gone as far as they can go on compromises on the act," (Sen. Arlen) Specter told colleagues. "And I think the reality may be that we're looking at either the current act extended [beyond Feb. 3], or the conference report," which continues to draw opposition from most Senate Democrats and four Republicans...

The main disagreements center on provisions that allow FBI agents to obtain records on terrorism suspects, who have very limited options for challenging such searches. Specter has said the law allows adequate "judicial review" of proposed searches. But Sununu (one of the dissidents) and his allies say the law makes it virtually impossible for targeted people to prevail, even if they have no ties to terrorism.

If the Democrats manage continue to drag out the process of making this vile law permanent, there could be an additional upside.

The chronic civil rights abusers of the Bush administration will remain on the receiving end of all sorts of bad publicity based on the scandals we currently know about.

If the nation gets lucky, maybe the biggest scandals of all will break before the PATRIOT Act is made permanent.

At some point not even the corrupt lawmakers in Washington will be able to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears. Or the will of their constituents.

Effwit Right, Ignatius Wrong

In a piece on this blog back on Dec. 28 entitled Ignatius Strikes Again, I disputed the WaPo ace op-ed man's thesis (i.e. propaganda) about why Bush violated FISA.

Ignatius was claiming that the NSA had developed such whiz-bang tools that the now antiquated laws no longer applied. I explained otherwise:

(M)ost, 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.

Well, lo and behold, Kevin Drum, writing in Washington Monthly quotes no less an authority than former NSA Director Michael Hayden in a speech yesterday making my exact point:

Here's another point related to General Hayden's admission today that the NSA's domestic spying program isn't some kind of dazzling high tech black op, but merely garden variety wiretapping that was done outside normal FISA channels because NSA couldn't meet the "probable cause" standard normally needed to get a warrant issued.

Administration apologists have argued that the White House couldn't seek congressional approval for this program because it utilized super advanced technology that we couldn't risk exposing to al-Qaeda. Even in secret session, they've suggested, Congress is a sieve and the bad guys would have found out what we were up to.

But now we know that's not true. This was just ordinary call monitoring, according to General Hayden, and the only problem was that both FISA and the attorney general required a standard of evidence they couldn't meet before issuing a warrant. In other words, the only change necessary to make this program legal was an amendment to FISA modifying the circumstances necessary to issue certain kinds of warrants. This would have tipped off terrorists to nothing.

Ignatius' agenda of promoting the national security state was old 15-20 years ago.

But that doesn't make it any less sweet to slap him down whenever possible

Moqtada al-Sadr Pledges Support to Iran

Today's installment of freedom hatin' Muslim watch features a threat by Moqtada al-Sadr to turn the (up to now) compliant Shiite militias against "coalition" forces in the event of an attack upon Iran by the defenders of freedom (sic).

If the Shiites turn against the occupation it will be "game over" for the American folly in Iraq.

The commitment, made Sunday in Tehran during a visit by Sadr, came in response to a senior Iranian official's query about what the cleric would do in the event of an attack on Iran. It marked the first open indication that Iraq's Shiite neighbor is preparing for a military response if attacked in a showdown with the West over its nuclear program.

The pledge was also one of the strongest signs yet that Iraq could become a battleground in any Western conflict with Iran, raising the specter of Iraqi Shiite militias -- or perhaps even the U.S.-trained Shiite-dominated military -- taking on American troops here in sympathy with Iran.

The Bush administration cannot later claim that no one "anticipated problems" with an Iran attack:

"If there was an attack on Iran, even a limited military strike, this would provoke anger through the entire Muslim world. It would certainly jeopardize the already fragile position of the United States in Iraq," said Joseph Cirincione, an Iraq and nuclear weapons expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"Whether that would mean an uprising, direct military clashes or simply demands that the United States would leave Iraq, we don't know," Cirincione said in a telephone interview. "But it won't be good."

Meanwhile, the propaganda program to stimulate the peace lovin' (sic) Americans into gratifying their urges on the playing field of Persia continues:

U.S. and British diplomats and commanders accuse Iran of allowing -- or encouraging -- transport of arms and fighters into Iraq to stage attacks.

Diplomats make no public statements of this type without express approval from their capital cities.

On Monday, a senior U.S. military intelligence official said the British government had issued a formal protest to Tehran after sophisticated bombs began appearing in southeastern Iraq. The devices used the same kind of electronic triggers found in bombs made by the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, the official said.

"Our belief is that the machining is done somewhere in Iran," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Only someone who habitually pleasures himself to Tom Clancy novels would be capable of such a categorical statement. The statement ignores the fact that the "coalition" does not have the country of Iraq pacified to an extent to enable anyone to rule out local manufacture.

Not to mention all the missing munitions from Saddam's old stockpiles. Or the fact that the know-how necessary to build these "electronic triggers" could be learned by Iraqi insurgents from whatever source, including Iranian.

In other words, the propagandists' case is not nearly as cut and dried as they would like the public to believe.

As Bush would say: "It's hard work" to conduct all the propaganda campaigns the administration is currently juggling. There are simultaneous justifications for: the Iraq war, the coming conflict with Iran, and last but perhaps most important, trying to con the American public into believing that the extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping is not a criminal offense.

Pakistani PM Calls BS on Claim of Al Qaeda Casualties in Predator Strike

The U.S. propaganda story that came out last week to justify the ill-fated Predator strike in Pakistan was ridiculed on Sunday by that nation's Prime Minister as "bizarre."

U.S. officials orchestrated a disinformation program claiming that "four to eight senior Al Qaeda leaders" were killed in the January 13 CIA attack. The questionable assertion was made to try to quiet world outrage over the approximately 13 to 18 civilians that were killed in the small Pakistani border village of Damadola.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said "There is no evidence, as of half an hour ago, that there were any other people there."

"The area does see movement of people from across the border. But we have not found one body or one shred of evidence that these people were there."

Aziz said Sunday, "If you just reflect on what happened, first -- we heard that there was a dinner meeting with all the seniors -- I think that's a bizarre thought, because these people don't get together for dinner in a terrain or environment like that.

"Second, we heard that al-Zawahiri was there," Aziz said. "Now we are hearing about this person who's a chemicals weapons expert. We don't know who was there. We don't know when they came, if at all. But, if they were there, we will find out because our people are investigating, they are going through all the evidence available, and once we find out we'll share it with the world."

Aziz also disputed a report in Sunday editions of The New York Times that said al Qaeda supporters, foreign fighters and Taliban remnants control the remote region.

About 80,000 Pakistani troops in the area have captured around 600 al Qaeda members there, including senior leaders, Aziz said. "The reason we've done that is because this is a porous border. It's a very tough terrain. And we want to restrict movement of people who are undesirable to our security."

Aziz said none of the forces searching for bin Laden knows where he might be. "We and the rest of the world has no clue where he or his associates are," Aziz said. "He could be anywhere."

Today's Washington Post carries two articles relating to this topic. One, an AP account of Aziz's words, conveniently omits the Prime Minister's doubt about any actual Al Qaeda involvement at Damadola.

Nice.

The other piece discusses the failed strike's damage to the wider "War on Terror."

As a matter of fact, this article repeats the propaganda about terrorists at Damadola:

The missiles killed at least 13 others. After the attack, local officials said that only villagers were killed, among them women and children, who were buried nearby. But Pakistani intelligence sources have since asserted, without offering proof, that a handful of foreign al Qaeda militants also died, possibly including its chief explosives expert, a son-in-law of Zawahiri and an operational leader in Pakistan and Afghanistan...

Events along the ever-volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border this month have exposed deep fault lines in the anti-terrorism alliance among the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and officials on all sides say their joint efforts against militants in the region are now highly precarious.

The heightened tension comes as militant extremists and the United States have both become more aggressive in their tactics, with the Pakistani government caught in between...

Meanwhile, along the border, tensions continue to rise.

"We have a lot of grief in our hearts," said Abdul Hakim Jan, an Afghan tribal leader who helped organize a protest beside a border crossing Wednesday following the deadliest suicide bombing in Afghanistan in the four years since the fall of Taliban rule. "All the terrorists and the enemies of Afghanistan are because of Pakistan. They are receiving their training there and they are being sent to Afghanistan for attacks."

Pakistani tribal leaders, for their part, look a few miles west for the source of their troubles: the American military presence in Afghanistan. Throughout the past week and continuing Sunday, tens of thousands of Pakistanis have participated in boisterous rallies at which protesters burned effigies of President Bush, chanted "Long live Osama!" and denounced the Pakistani government for cooperating with the United States.

"People are so angry that this could become a major movement against the American slaves who are ruling Pakistan these days," said Liaquat Baluch, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest Islamic party.

As usual, American foreign policy analysts know the truth of the matter:

U.S. officials, however, say Pakistan's objections amount to posturing. According to American military and intelligence sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, Pakistan had signed off on this month's strike beforehand and had even assisted with gathering pre-attack intelligence.


I don't doubt that some lackey of the United States was down with the plan.

This doesn't mean the will of the people was respected.

But, U.S. officials have little respect for the will of the American people. Why should anyone think we care about the feelings of freedom hatin' Muslims?

Report: CIA Detainees Hastily Relocated to Morocco

Back in November, when the Washington Post reported on secret CIA prisons for "terrorists" in Eastern Europe, the Company knew it had to act quickly to move these unofficial detainees to new locations.

A report in a Moroccan newsweekly says that the CIA moved at least some of these prisoners to that country, which has had long ties to U.S. intelligence dating from World War II.

A Moroccan weekly, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, reported Saturday that two private planes had landed at the Sale military base near the capital, Rabat, in late December and early January, carrying suspected al-Qaida members sent by the U.S. intelligence agency.

"We categorically deny this information," Interior Minister Mustapha Sahel said, according to the official MAP news agency. He said he was "indignant about this type of irresponsible information aimed at sowing trouble."

(...)

The report in Le Journal Hebdomadaire said the planes' "deliveries" to Morocco were then transferred to a detention center run by the Moroccan security agency, known by its French acronym DST, in Temara, just outside the capital.

An Amnesty International report in 2004 accused Moroccan investigators of "systematic" torture and mistreatment of inmates at the Temara detention center.

Inauguration Day For Morales

This blog's favorite politician (at least in the Western Hemisphere), Evo Morales, will be sworn today as Bolivia's first Indian president.

To many Bolivians, the former coca farmer who will officially be sworn into office Sunday represents the overdue ascension of a long-oppressed indigenous majority. To some South American neighbors, he symbolizes a new, unified generation of leaders emphasizing regional independence from the United States. And in Washington, some view him as a threat to regional stability and a potential roadblock to U.S. interests, including anti-drug programs and efforts to institute a hemispheric trade pact.

Morales will now have to walk a tightrope without a net:

Morales' words have generally been measured and non-inflammatory since the election: On coca eradication, he recently suggested a willingness to accept current production limits pending a study on the market for legal coca, which can be chewed as a stimulant and is used in traditional medicines. He has continued to call for the nationalization of the nation's oil and natural gas reserves, but he soothed concerns of international investors by promising not to seize foreign assets. On trade, he suggested to reporters this week that he doesn't completely rule out the idea of free trade agreement between the United States and the Andean region.

When you start talking about "expropriating the expropriators", that's when things start getting dicey. The royal "we" at Effwit wishes only good things for this brave soul.

Strategy To Protect Rove

The defense team of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby is planning to subpoena a number of reporters, which will have the additional side-benefit of distracting prosecutors who are trying to decide on possible charges against Karl Rove.

The plan for defending I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is likely to substantially delay his trial and create another round of tense First Amendment battles over whether a court can compel reporters to turn over information about the confidential sources in Libby's criminal case...

The court filings also make clear what several sources close to the case have been saying for weeks: that Fitzgerald has been occupied with the Libby case and has not had much time to focus on a decision regarding possible charges against the other administration official embroiled in the investigation: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

For the past two months, the special counsel's office has been busy providing classified and declassified documents to Libby's defense attorneys and trying to iron out pretrial disputes over whether the prosecutor is holding back information to which the defense is entitled.

Why the fuck hasn't Fitzgerald gone back to Justice to request more Assistant U.S. Attorneys? If this were a routine (say, drug smuggling) case, I can guarantee that he would have asked for more help.

(D)efense attorneys are expected to delve into whether other administration officials mentioned Plame to reporters before Libby did, which would allow them to cast doubt on the prosecutor's assertions. Defense lawyers have said that Bob Woodward, a reporter and assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, helped their case when he revealed in November that another administration source, not Libby, told him about Plame's CIA role before Libby is believed to have first mentioned her to a reporter.

The dictionary definition of the word "irrelevent" needs to be expanded to include the logic behind this previous paragraph.

A quite thinly-veiled quote from Rove's lawyer follows:

But a person close to Rove said Fitzgerald so far this year has not indicated any change in Rove's status. Rove expects to hear a final decision from Fitzgerald soon and has told friends he is optimistic that he will be cleared.

Now we hear from "turdblossom" himself:

Still, another person close to Rove said it was not a good sign that Fitzgerald has not already cleared President Bush's chief political adviser. Rove, this person said, has worked under the assumption that Fitzgerald is largely finished with his investigation and, because the prosecutor is sensitive to the political liability of a possible indictment hanging over the head of Rove, would publicly clear him quickly if he did not have enough evidence to charge him.

The dead giveaway that the anonymous informant knows squat about the legal system is the hopefulness of "publicly clear him." No one is ever cleared publicly of anything in our system of "justice."

The whole strategy of delaying Fitzgerald could work out in the long run.

Bush may no longer be in office when the time comes to give the life-saving presidential pardons.

More Anti-Iran Propaganda

The propaganda machine pushing for the U.S. to "do something" about the freedom-hatin' Iranians kicks it up a bit today, with not merely one--but two op-ed pieces in the Washington Post.

The first, by the odious Anne Applebaum, is about a web site that catalogs thousands of political victims of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Applebaum's writing can only be justified to any literate person as being an affirmative action program on the part of the Post. 'Nuff said.

The second, is from the pen of our old friend, the ace op-ed man David Ignatius. I stopped sending him copies of my "appreciations" of some of his work, when he didn't have the courtesy to respond with even the briefest GFY to one of my classic pieces.

Ignatius is his usual moderate self today, restraining himself from the all-out call for war that his "people" may have wished him to craft.

How should the United States think about Iran? What explains the fanaticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and what can America and its allies do to change it?

These baseline questions are at the heart of an informal review of Iran policy that's taking place at the highest levels of the Bush administration. The discussions, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley, are an effort to anchor America's opposition to the Iranian nuclear program in a broader strategy. The goal is not simply to stop the Iranians from making a bomb but to change the character of a regime that under Ahmadinejad has swerved onto a new and dangerous track.

Why is it our duty to change the Iranian leader's fanaticism?

Rice and Hadley recognize that the United States carries a lot of baggage in its dealings with Iran. They want to avoid, if possible, a situation that appears to be a Bush vs. Iran confrontation. The administration decided last year to work the nuclear problem through the European Union countries negotiating with Iran -- Britain, France and Germany -- in part to avoid making America the issue.

The master of the understatement shows his hand.

Now to the whole reason for his piece:

A key question for U.S. officials is how to assess Ahmadinejad's radicalism.

National security types are often uncomfortable with anything harsher than Joe Lieberman style whining.

Now the geo-political hat comes on:

An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who is an expert on revolutions. He argued that Iran wasn't conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton's famous study, "The Anatomy of Revolution," which argued that initial upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. Instead, Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called "the return of the radicals." Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the Russian and Chinese revolutions -- with Stalin's purges in the late 1930s and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict.

The gist of Goldstone's analysis gradually percolated up to Rice, Hadley and others. What has intrigued policymakers is the argument that Ahmadinejad's extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction -- much as the Cultural Revolution in China led to the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. Officials see signs that some Iranian officials -- certainly former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and perhaps also the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- are worried by Ahmadinejad's fulminations. Unless the Iranian president moderates his line, wider splits in the regime are almost inevitable, officials believe. They also predict that his extremism will be increasingly unpopular with the Iranian people, who want to be more connected with the rest of the world rather than more isolated.

The above would be fine if the policy recommendation was to simply sit back and let what's going to happen naturally occur. That's never the plan with the architects of the national security state. The minimum involvement would have to involve CIA covert action, because doing nothing (the way of Tao) would be un-American.

Getting Iran policy right is the biggest foreign policy challenge of the new year. Ahmadinejad's wild statements have had the beneficial effect of concentrating the minds of policymakers, who in the past have often differed over Iran and have had trouble framing a formal policy. Officials don't yet have a clear strategy that could bend Iranian radicalism back toward an acceptable norm, but they're assessing the tools that might work. This time they are looking carefully -- and thinking seriously -- before they leap.

That's what all the propaganda buzz is about. Part of the "assessing the tools that might work."

NSA Whistleblower Claims To Have Additional "Explosive" Revelations

An ex-NSA employee wants to testify to Congress on the extra-legal warrantless eavesdropping program, according to GovExec.com.

For more than 18 years, Russ Tice worked on some of the most secretive, covert intelligence programs operated by the U.S. government.

Now the 43-year-old former intelligence officer says he wants to "spill [his] guts" to Congress about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" he believes occurred when he worked for the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Tice means business:

Tice sent a letter Dec. 16 to the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees saying he wants to report suspected illegal activity. "These acts involve the director of the National Security Agency, the deputy chiefs of staff for air and space operations and the U.S. secretary of defense," he said.

You have to admire his use of metaphor:

Tice said he did not work on the program referenced in the Times article, but that his allegations are equally explosive.

"That was Hiroshima and this is Nagasaki," he said. "I want to talk about Nagasaki, which nobody's heard about yet."

Tice clearly is no Daniel Ellsberg, though:

He declined to discuss any details of his allegations, saying that doing so would disclose classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he wants to meet in a classified setting with lawmakers or congressional staff.

"If it's done, it's all going to be done in closed session," Tice said. "It's all going to be classified. I'm doing everything I can to make sure you never know what these programs are."

His insistence on playing it by the book may result in his allegations going nowhere:

Complicating matters further, NSA sent Tice a letter Jan. 9 telling him that he has to notify the Defense Department inspectors general or NSA of his complaint, and of the information he intends to share with Congress. The letter added that Tice has to receive direction on how to proceed from the secretary of defense or NSA director - two of the people he alleges were involved in illegal or unconstitutional activity.

Hopefully, Congress arranges for this man to tell his story in whatever forum that will do the most good.

Problem. Congress almost never does the right thing. Especially when dealing with politically "explosive" matters.

Feds Seek Google Search Records

In an obscene case of government overreaching, the feds have issued a subpoena to Google for a wide range of company records, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

To it's credit the online search giant is refusing to comply with the Justice Department order:

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

A million random fucking web addresses?

And records of all Google searches for a one-week period?

This would mean a whole lot of people who had nothing to do with online pornography (the ostensible reason for the subpoena) would be snared in the government net.

The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's effort "vigorously.''...

The case worries privacy advocates, given the vast amount of information Google and other search engines know about their users.

"This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,'' said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. "The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.''

Everett-Church, who has consulted with Internet companies facing subpoenas, said Google could argue that releasing the information causes undue harm to its users' privacy.

"The government can't even claim that it's for national security,'' Everett-Church said. "They're just using it to get the search engines to do their research for them in a way that compromises the civil liberties of other people.''

This is a god damn outrage.

Other search engine owning companies haven't shown the balls of Google:

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

Those other companies are showing an all too typical American ass-kissing deference to authority these days.

Update: The Washington Post identifies the three other companies who at least partially complied with the overreaching demand for user data.

They are: AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Propaganda For War With Iran: Iranian Ships Attack Iraqi Coast Guard Vessels

In an ominous development, the propaganda effort to lead the U.S. into war with Iran is ramping up with a report on a skirmish between the Iranian Navy and the Iraqi Coast Guard.

Buried at the end of a WaPo story today on the kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll, we find the following:

Mutlak said he had spoken to most of the parties making up the main Shiite religious coalition and had been encouraged, but said he was troubled by Hakim's comments on the constitution.

"For me, this is outside interference," Mutlak said, voicing a suspicion common among Sunnis that neighboring Iran, a Shiite theocracy, was using Iraq's Shiite religious parties as proxies for its own ends.

Adding to such fears was another incident reported Tuesday, in which the Iraqi government asserted that an Iranian ship had attacked Iraqi coast guard vessels in the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway near the Persian Gulf. The Iraqis had been chasing a merchant ship suspected of smuggling oil when the ship raised an Iranian flag and called for help from nearby Iranian navy ships, the governor of Basra province, Mohammed Waeli, said in an interview.

The Iranians fired at the two Iraqi patrol boats, then boarded them, arresting eight Iraqi sailors and injuring one, Waeli said.

Iranian diplomats at first denied that the incident had taken place, but later acknowledged that it was "under investigation," according to the Reuters news service.

A spokesman for Iraq's Foreign Ministry, Omar Baytay, said that the foreign minister had met with an Iranian envoy in Baghdad, but that he did not know the results of their discussion.

The demonization of the new Iranian president, and the constant harping about the Iranian nuclear program has apparently not been sufficiently frightening to the war-weary American public. The clear and present military danger from the freedom hatin' Iranians is next on the menu.

The administration will hopefully learn that the American people have lost their appetite for any more "chef's surprises" from this kitchen.

New Evidence of Uranium Lies By Administration

The Bush administration lies about the fictional Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger is again in the news. Today's New York Times has details of a heretofore unknown product from the most highly regarded intelligence shop in Washington.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) issued a classified study in early 2002 that concluded that no such attempt was made. The administration knew about the truth of the matter a year before Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union speech in which he declared that Iraq was actively attempting to obtain uranium in Africa.

The report said that the purchase "was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles."

Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border...

A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.

But the intelligence assessment itself - including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim - was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.

The existance of such early doubts casts a new light upon the administration's interlocking webs of scandal, including the unjustified invasion of Iraq and the Valerie Plame case. The distribution of the study to the highest levels of government indicates that the leadership was lying and not simply uninformed about one of the central allegations that they used to con the nation into going along with their war of profit.

The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

A Bush administration official, who requested anonymity because the issue involved partly classified documents, would not say whether President Bush had seen the State Department's memo before his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003.

The apologists are out in full form:

But the official added: "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering operation. The president based his remarks in the State of the Union address on the intelligence that was presented to him by the intelligence community and cleared by the intelligence community. The president has said the intelligence was wrong, and we have reorganized our intelligence agencies so we can do better in the future."

It doesn't sound to me like the intelligence was wrong.

NSA Program Swamped FBI With Bad Leads

The extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program produced thousands of bad terrorism leads a month, according to today's New York Times.

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

When you have devolved into a national security state, what else can you expect?

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

The poor schoolteacher will have a FBI file for the rest of his/her life. Case Closed? Hardly.

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

Nice.

Some F.B.I. officials said they were uncomfortable with the expanded domestic role played by the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, saying most intelligence officers lacked the training needed to safeguard Americans' privacy and civil rights. They said some protections had to be waived temporarily in the months after Sept. 11 to detect a feared second wave of attacks, but they questioned whether emergency procedures like the eavesdropping should become permanent.

That discomfort may explain why some F.B.I. officials may seek to minimize the benefits of the N.S.A. program or distance themselves from the agency. "This wasn't our program," an F.B.I. official said. "It's not our mess, and we're not going to clean it up."

Why did "some protections had to be waived temporarily in the months after Sept. 11 to detect a feared second wave of attacks"? Legal experts are mostly saying that legal surveillance could have been ramped up under FISA.

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

These fuckers are in real legal trouble, however much the apologists try to steer the debate.

Two Civil Rights Groups Suing Administration Over NSA Spying

Two major civil rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), are filing lawsuits today against the Bush administration over the extra-legal warrantless NSA eavesdropping.

Today's New York Times describes the rationale of the suits, which are completely separate cases:

(T)o determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East...

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably vigorously oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

It can be safely assumed that actual court cases will be a better tool to uncover details about the program than the congressional (whitewashes) investigations that are currently planned.

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and 70's?

"There's almost a feeling of deja vu with this program," said James Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications.

Several of the plaintiffs have fairly strong causes of action or standing to seek relief from the court:

The lawsuit to be filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights has as plaintiffs four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and overseas, which often involves international e-mail messages and phone calls. Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other advocacy groups.

"We don't have any direct evidence" that the plaintiffs were monitored by the security agency, said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U. "But the plaintiffs have a well-founded belief that they may have been monitored, and there's a real chilling effect in the fear that they can no longer have confidential discussions with clients or sources without the possibility that the N.S.A. is listening."

One of the plantiffs seems so unlikely that I had to blink my eyes to make sure I was reading the name right:

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit (is) the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Will wonders never cease? Or does the devious Hitchens have another agenda?

Or maybe he has decided to become a leftist again. Such a move would be much more meritorious than carrying water for the administration.

U.S. Seeks Alternative To Musharraf

Amid the flap of the "intelligence failure" in Pakistan which resulted in the death by predator of 17 people, but not the intended target, there is a report that the U.S. has tired of Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, a well connected Pakistani journalist, writes in Asia Times Online of the change of heart towards Musharraf, who was until now considered to be our man in Islamabad.

According to sources close to the power corridors in Washington who spoke to Asia Times Online, the administration of US President George W Bush is now convinced that a weaker Pakistani army is as necessary now as a powerful one was when Islamabad did a U-turn on its support for the Taliban soon after September 11, 2001.

This realization has taken root over the past few months, and developments since last November have been enough to set alarm bells ringing among the military leadership of Pakistan...

According to a contact who spoke to Asia Times Online, a person close to the US Central Intelligence Agency paid a low-profile visit to New Delhi in the third week of December and briefed strategic planners on Washington's plan to try to curtail the role of the Pakistani army, while at the same time renewing support for democratic forces in Pakistan...

The same person then visited Islamabad and held high-level meetings with political personalities. On his return to the US he stopped over in Dubai in the UAE and held detailed meetings with former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto, who lives there.

A sudden upsurge in the activities in Pakistan of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy - which Bhutto supports - followed.

This does kind of make sense. The U.S. is usually quite comfortable with corrupt politicians.

On the domestic front, the Musharraf administration in essence facilitated the formation of the the six-party alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which made impressive political gains in the general elections of 2002.

The aim was to scare the Americans by pointing to the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism in order to garner US support for Musharraf's uniform.

Similarly, the sweeping defeat of the MMA in local elections late last year amid widespread claims of fraud was to show the Americans that Musharraf had the ability to outwit fundamentalism. In this game, Musharraf's split vision does not allow him to visualize what kind of a message he is really passing on to Washington.

According to Asia Times Online information, Washington has now decided that the best outcome would be for a new man to replace Musharraf, 64, as chief of army staff, and at the same time to encourage liberal democratic forces to take over parliament.

I don't see Washington throwing Musharraf to the wolves quite yet. U.S./Pakistani relations have taken a turn for the worse in the last couple of days, and having our military strongman in charge at least for the short run seems to be our only option.

A Good Way To Endanger Genuine Journalists

In an opinion piece in today's Outlook section of the WaPo, a security "expert" (I am using that term loosely) tells us that American propaganda operations in Iraq do not go far enough in the direction of total information control.

The piece is authored by Michael Schrage, a former reporter who now is an senior advisor to MIT's Security Studies Program. I will leave it to the reader's imagination how a journalism background may qualify someone for instructing military and intelligence prospects.

Schrage defends the Lincoln Group activities in Iraq without addressing the cogent point that when reporters in a war zone are considered to be possible spies or propagandists, this makes all journalists targets for retaliation by insurgents.

Our MIT boy has a model in mind for U.S. propaganda operations in Iraq:

Shortly after V-E Day, for example, the U.S. Army's "Psychological Warfare Division" became the "Information Control Division" under Major Gen. Robert McClure. McClure effectively oversaw the denazification and reorganization of West Germany's entire media infrastructure.

In 1946, he exulted to a Time magazine friend: "We now control 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation, 3 magazines, run the Associated Press of Germany (DANA), and operate 20 library centers."

Times have changed. Iraq has no McClure, though perhaps its painful transition to democracy might have proceeded more smoothly and safely if it had. But the notion that "pay for placement" somehow represents a breach of military protocol or practice is nonsense.

Isn't having the entire American media in the United States under McClure-type command good enough for Schrage?

While force protection issues alone justify the military's active involvement in hostile information environments, strategy and circumstances should dictate the appropriate information intervention levels. Just as with post-war Germany and Japan, the more stable, open and prosperous a society Iraq becomes, the more the need for a military role in local media will evaporate.

At that point, we turn over propaganda duties to our client's intelligence service.

The military exit strategy is the media exit strategy. The goal of a successful counterinsurgency, after all, is to facilitate a vibrantly self-sustaining and self-governing society. We should hope that a decade hence, the Iraqis will be complaining about their own "fair and balanced" media in much the way that Americans, Britons, Europeans and Japanese complain about theirs. That's success.

Either Schrage has no idea about how politically-aware Americans view the "fair and balanced" presentation by the co-opted media, or he is being slyly ironic.

But if the U.S. military's involvement in the information environment leaves Iraqis with a healthy skepticism of what they read in the papers or see on TV, well, one could argue that would be another positive contribution to their civil society.

Verdict: He wasn't slipping in a joke. Schrage is clueless.

Schrage is attempting to burnish his "security" cred. Let me suggest an old special forces exercise that would really prove his mettle.

Schrage should volunteer to be choppered 20 miles out into a hostile environment, clad only in a jockstrap, and navigate his way back to base by the power of sheer ingenuity.

Only then should anyone pay attention to anything he has to say. And if he writes blather like today's piece, at least he will have a talent to fall back upon.

German Agents Helped With Bombing Targeting for U.S. at Start of Iraq War

Despite government objections to the U.S.-led Iraq war, there are reports that German intelligence operatives in Baghdad helped the United States with targeting requirements during the launch of the conflict in 2003.

Today's Boston Globe reports that opposition politicians in Germany are pressing a Parliamentary investigation into these allegations.

Officials of the intelligence service and other ministries confirmed that the Schroder government authorized exchanges of intelligence information with the United States about installations in Baghdad despite its public opposition to the invasion. The officials insisted, however, that German agents on the ground in Baghdad only provided the United States with information intended to prevent accidental attacks against civilian installations, such as precise coordinates for schools, hospitals, and diplomatic compounds.

This seems like a humanitarian effort, if true. But it is doubtful whether the cooperation was limited to such noble deeds.

Far more controversial, however, are reports that the German intelligence agents also provided coordinates for targets of US attacks, including a failed effort by the United States to kill former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

According to the German news reports, US military intelligence received information on April 7, 2003, that high-ranking officials of the regime were assembled in a restaurant in Baghdad's posh Mansour district. Americans believed Hussein might be present at the gathering. The need for fast information was critical. According to the media reports, the German intelligence agents, acting on a US request, quickly scouted the scene and confirmed the presence of armored vehicles and black Mercedes limousines.

The site was vaporized by four satellite-guided, 2,000-pound bombs delivered by an American B1 bomber, according to statements by the US military soon after the attack.

Hussein was not at the gathering or had departed in the nick of time. The huge blast killed more than a dozen Iraqis, according to news reports filed by journalists who remained in Baghdad during the war. It was never clear whether the victims were officials of the regime or unlucky civilians.

Of course, the German government has its own official apologists.

''It would be Quixotic to assume that the fight against terrorism or international dangers and challenges would be possible without an information exchange between friendly services," main government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters.

But a German newspaper and public television, quoting an unidentified ''Pentagon official" and other sources, reported this week that intelligence agents in Baghdad also helped the United States identify bombing targets -- allegations that triggered outrage in Parliament.

The "unidentified Pentagon official" doubtlessly thought he was helping new German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is coincidentally visiting Washington this week.

Brilliant move there.

''This accusation about the involvement of German authorities in the Iraq war is a monstrous accusation," said Renate Kuenast, leader of the Greens, a left-leaning political party that shared power with Schroder's Social Democratic Party during the time in question.

''If you don't take part in a war, you can't help with the selection of targets," she told German reporters, urging a formal parliamentary inquiry that could require intelligence officials and other government figures to testify under oath.

It is the conventional wisdom in the U.S. intelligence community that Germany is not nearly as helpful to our "special activities" as is Great Britain and Italy.

There are exceptions:

According to the public television report, one of the German agents received a medal from the United States for his service in the war.

He must be one of those rare "freedom-lovin" Germans.

Bremer on Iraq Mistakes, Rumsfeld Responds

L. Paul Bremer, the former senior U.S. official in occupied Iraq, pens an op-ed in today's New York Times in which he discusses ways things could have gone better for the Americans in that unfortunate land.

He starts off with a weak argument. Bremer has been long blamed for the de-Baathification of the puppet Iraqi government and the related dissolving of Iraq's Army. He claims now that he only wanted to ban one percent of the hard core Saddamists, but that the Iraqis themselves were too overzealous when implementing his plan.

No sale.

Bremer next whines about the cumbersome U.S. contracting rules, which he says, prevented necessary utilities from being repaired. Funny, it didn't stop millions (or billions) of dollars from being stolen from the reconstruction funds.

After the not-too-deft use of the misdirect, Bremer gets to the heart of the matter.

Bremer has recently insisted that he requested many more troops to administer the defeated country, but was rebuffed by Rumsfeld at Defense. In this op-ed, he candy-coats the issue into being a polite disagreement between honorable men.

Again, no sale.

At this stage in Bremer's piece, he veers off into fantasyland:

Despite the missteps and setbacks, there is little question that, thanks to efforts by the American-led coalition, enormous political and economic progress is being made in Iraq today.

Two years ago, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, told his followers there that there would be no place for them in a democratic Iraq. One year later, Iraqis voted in the country's first genuine elections. Then they wrote and approved a new Constitution. And last month 70 percent of voters turned out to elect a new Parliament. Now that body should modify the Constitution to address legitimate concerns of the Sunnis.

In one short paragraph, Bremer has managed to adopt the Bushian conflation of Zarqawi's group and Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, and misrepresents the prospects for the new Iraqi Parliament and Constitution.

As for Iraq's economy, at liberation it was flat on its back: the World Bank estimated that in 2003 the economy contracted by 41 percent. Now Iraq benefits from an independent central bank, and a new currency whose stability is a remarkable indicator of confidence. The economy is open to foreign investment and commercial laws have been modernized. The International Monetary Fund reports that per-capita income has doubled in the last two years and predicts that Iraq's economy will grow 17 percent this year. No wonder registration of new businesses has jumped 67 percent in the last six months.

If the above were true, major American corporations would be jumping over themselves to get into the Iraqi market. Needless to say, this has not materialized.

Bremer finishes with a knowing misrepresentation of the current situation in Iraq:

Despite these enormous stakes, some Americans have called for setting a timetable for our withdrawal or even pulling out now. This would be a historic mistake: a betrayal of the sacrifices Americans and Iraqis have made; a victory of the terrorists everywhere; and step toward a more dangerous world.

Putting forward his side of the story, yesterday Donald Rumsfeld insisted that he actually considered Bremer's request for more troops but was swayed by the persuasive arguments of the uniformed military commanders who were doing just fine with fewer troops.

Bremer's memo, dated May 18, 2004, urged Rumsfeld to dispatch as many as two additional divisions -- or about 30,000 troops -- to Iraq, to meet myriad demands, including fighting insurgents, border control and securing convoy routes. The request, disclosed in Bremer's new book on his year-long tenure in Iraq, reflected what he said was his fear that the United States was becoming "the worst of all things -- an ineffective occupier."...

"We did a very thorough analysis of that recommendation, and when we got done, all the chiefs agreed with the commanders in the field that the numbers of troops in the field then, as now, was appropriate to what we were fighting," Pace said.

Rumsfeld said he then showed the response from the Joint Chiefs to President Bush. "The president, as he has consistently, said that he preferred to go with the judgments of the military commanders on the ground," Rumsfeld said.

In any battle of bullies in Washington, the smart money will always be on Rumsfeld.

Suspect Arrested In Rosenbaum Murder

Following the area-wide broadcast of surveillance video of a man allegedly using the credit card of slain New York Times reporter David E. Rosenbaum, a man walked into a police substation in the worst part of town and asked a peculiar question.

Michael C. Hamlin was arrested shortly after 6 p.m. when he walked into the 7th District police station in the 2400 block of Alabama Avenue SE, which is in the block where he lives, and asked why "my face is on TV," police said.

Criminals are famously stupid, but this is either a whole new category of dumbshit, or there is more to the story than is being reported.

If a crook had found and used a credit card conveniently left in a bad part of town, I could see him walking into a police station to try to talk his way out of trouble.

A murderer, however, would not seem a likely candidate to try such an approach.

Even dumbasses have watched "NYPD Blue" and other police propaganda shows and would probably not want to go in for the full treatment.

Food for thought.


Update: A second suspect has been arrested. He walked into the police station, too. Everyone can get back to working on their taxes now.