Iraq Insurgents Stepping Up Pace Of Attacks

A new Pentagon report indicates that the Iraqi insurgency is not exactly in it's "last throes."

The Pentagon reported yesterday that the frequency of insurgent attacks against troops and civilians is at its highest level since American commanders began tracking such figures two years ago, an ominous sign that, despite three years of combat, the US-led coalition forces haven't significantly weakened the Iraq insurgency...

The vast majority of the attacks -- from crude bombing attempts and shootings to more sophisticated, military-style assaults and suicide attacks -- were targeted at US-led coalition military forces, but the majority of deaths have been of civilians, who are far more vulnerable to insurgent tactics.

"Overall, average weekly attacks during this 'Government Transition' period were higher than any of the previous periods," the report states. "Reasons for the high level of attacks may include terrorist and insurgent attempts to exploit a perceived inability of the Iraqi government to constitute itself effectively, the rise of ethno sectarian attacks . . . and enemy efforts to derail the political process leading to a new government."

Listen to this attempt to polish a turd:

The Pentagon report, made public yesterday, contained some positive news, including an opinion poll that indicates most Iraqis don't like the insurgents' use of violence as a political tool.

This is considered to be progress?

The report says that the attacks have mainly killed civilians, and we celebrate when the civilians tell pollsters that a majority of them do not favor the tactic of violent attacks by the insurgents?

Despite military crackdowns on insurgents and the installation of the new Iraq government, the Pentagon wasn't optimistic about quelling the violence in the near future. Officials who briefed reporters on the Iraq assessment cautioned that violence against troops and Iraqi civilians probably won't slow until at least 2007 -- if the unity government exerts more of its own authority and, according to the report, "addresses key sectarian and political concerns" that fuel the bloodshed.

At least the Pentagon is being honest with the American political leadership about this.

Do not expect such honesty to be publicly articulated by the administration.

Shakeup At NSA

The Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, who helped oversee the warrantless surveillance program and who allegedly helped grease the skids in obtaining NSA contracts for his former employer, is being replaced in a broader shakeup at the SIGINT agency.

The National Security Agency's second-highest official is being forced out by the agency's director, who is moving to install his own leadership team nine months into his tenure, current and former government officials said yesterday.

Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the NSA's director, announced in a memo to agency employees last week that Deputy Director William B. Black Jr. would be taking a new position in mid-August as the NSA's liaison officer to its British intelligence counterpart, the officials said.

The change is essentially a swap because Black's successor, John C. "Chris" Inglis, is now the agency's British liaison, a position often considered a final stop before retirement...

Alexander has been looking to replace Black since taking over in August but decided that it was smarter to delay the decision, said a former government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of personnel decisions.

"He has chosen this way of axing" Black, the former official said...

Inside the agency, Black was controversial because of his management style and because of the ties he forged between his former employer, Science Applications International Corp., and the NSA, former intelligence officials said. Black had served at the NSA for nearly four decades before taking a management job at Science Applications in 1997.

The company won a number of large contracts with the NSA after Black returned to the spy agency, including a $280 million contract to oversee the NSA's Trailblazer program, which sought to overhaul the way the NSA sifts and analyzes data. Trailblazer ultimately proved a flop and has been abandoned.

Black insisted that he make all major decisions on Trailblazer, and that approach was typical of his management style, which circumvented other senior NSA managers, a former senior intelligence official said.

Iran Conducting Info-Op Of Their Own

The Iranian government is conducting an information operation to convince the West that an invasion of the Islamic Republic would not be easy going.

Iran, apparently anticipating an American invasion, has quietly been restructuring its military and testing a new military doctrine that calls for a decentralized, Iraqi-style guerrilla campaign against an invading force...

"It's probably a smart policy for the Iranian leadership to get this out in order to convince the U.S. military that they are ready for guerrilla resistance from the get-go," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

"They know they can't repulse our air strikes -- we can strike from a long distance making it hard to shoot us down -- so the only thing they can do in that case is move assets to secret locations," he said.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies dismissed the reports of the Iranian military acquiring new capabilities, saying it has been training in asymmetric tactics for years.

Iranian war planners expect that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy the oil-rich Khuzestan region, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply.

Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army say that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating U.S. armed forces with conventional military doctrine...

The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant U.S. military campaign has been followed by three years of slow, indecisive struggle with insurgent and terrorist forces.

UAV Footage Could Play Role In Haditha Inquiries

Defense lawyers likely to represent Marines implicated in the killing of civilians in Haditha are beginning their public relations offensive by releasing some details that may be helpful to their cases should any courts-martial ensue from the events of that day.

Military investigators piecing together what happened in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19 -- when Marines allegedly killed two dozen civilians -- have access to video shot by an unmanned drone aircraft that was circling overhead for at least part of that day, military defense lawyers familiar with the case said in interviews.

It is unclear whether the video obtained from that day's flight captured the violence, said the lawyers, who have consulted with Marines who were there. One lawyer said investigators have reviewed surveillance footage taken hours after the shootings, which showed the Marines returning to the town to remove the bodies of the Iraqis...

In addition to video from the drone, investigators have records of radio message traffic between the Marines and a command center, said military defense lawyers who have discussed the investigation with Marines who were at Haditha but who have not yet been formally retained by them.

"There's a ton of information that isn't out there yet," said one lawyer, who, like the others, would speak only on the condition of anonymity because a potential client has not been charged. The radio message traffic, he said, will provide a different view of the incident than has been presented by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and other members of Congress. For example, he said, contrary to Murtha's account, it will show that the Marines came under small-arms fire after the roadside explosion...

The presence of the drone is potentially significant because such surveillance craft are in high demand in Iraq and their use is supervised by senior officers -- which could indicate there was interest among higher officers about what was occurring in Haditha.

No one should blame the defense lawyers for trying to obtain fair trials for the Marines involved. The cover-up and a determination of how high up the chain of command it went may turn out to be the more important inquiry to be conducted.

That is, if the top brass and the civilian bosses at DOD allow the investigations to follow where they may.

U.S. Intelligence "Trolling" Through Iranian Financial Holdings Abroad

Economic warfare, in the form of sanctions that may drive up the cost of oil worldwide, are being put into place against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

U.S. intelligence agencies have spent months trolling through the personal accounts of Iranian leaders in foreign banks, analyzing Iranian financial systems and transactions and assessing how the government does its banking. They have calculated the amount of foreign investment at stake and even which charities have connections to the Tehran government...

The plan is designed to curtail the financial freedom of every Iranian official, individual and entity the Bush administration considers connected not only to nuclear enrichment efforts but to terrorism, government corruption, suppression of religious or democratic freedom, and violence in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories. It would restrict the Tehran government's access to foreign currency and global markets, shut its overseas accounts and freeze assets held in Europe and Asia.

The United States, which has imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran for nearly three decades, would shoulder few of the costs of its ambitious new proposal. But internal U.S. assessments suggest that the sanctions could not hurt Tehran without causing significant economic pain for Washington's friends. That calculation has made the plan a difficult sell, especially in capitals such as Rome and Tokyo, which import significant quantities of Iranian oil.

In an effort to minimize financial risks, the plan does not include oil or trade embargoes. But, according to a Treasury Department assessment, it could jolt world oil prices nonetheless if Iran responds by limiting exports. The internal assessment also predicts additional economic repercussions for Western allies, such as trade loss, and adverse effects for the Iranian people as their government is squeezed out of global markets and foreign banks stop taking their business...

(T)he impact on U.S. allies could be steep as well. A Treasury Department memo recently predicted that Britain, which does not import Iranian oil, faces a low level of financial risk if it agrees to implement the sanctions plan. Germany, which imports 1 percent of its oil from Iran, and France, which gets 6 percent, are deemed at medium financial risk, whereas Italy and Japan would be taking the largest risks. The assessment is considered internally "an initial -- first blush -- estimate based on each country's overall volume of exports to Iran, dependence on Iranian oil and degree of investment in Iran oil projects," according to the Treasury memo.

The tendency of U.S. punitive initiatives abroad to backfire on the American people is unrecognized only by the administration in Washington.

If (more likely, when) the Iran economic and military gambit blows up in the face of U.S. interests, Bush and his enablers will stand there with a straight face and tell everyone that nobody thought [enter ensuing catastrophe] could happen.

Haditha War Crimes Coverup Alleged

A Congressman who is known to be among the lawmakers closest to the military alleged yesterday that there was a concerted coverup in the case of the unprovoked murders by Marines in Haditha.

A powerful member of Congress alleged yesterday that there has been a conscious effort by Marine commanders to cover up the facts of a November incident in which rampaging Marines allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians.

"There has to have been a coverup of this thing," Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, charged in an interview on ABC's "This Week." "No question about it."

John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also raised the issue of whether the military chain of command reacted properly and legally.

"There is this serious question . . . of what happened and when it happened, and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," he said on the same program. He added, "That is seriously a question that is going to be examined."...

Murtha, who like Warner is a former Marine, said that there was a preliminary investigation by the military but that "it was stifled."...

Murtha said he understands the stress being put on Marines fighting in western Iraq's turbulent Anbar province: "The pressure builds every time they go out," with roadside bombs exploding "every day they go out."

But, he said, "I will not excuse murder, and this is what has happened," adding that there is "no question in my mind about it." He reiterated a previous statement that shootings of women and children occurred "in cold blood" and that there was no firefight in which civilians were killed in a crossfire, as some Marines asserted after the event.

"This is worse than Abu Ghraib," he said, referring to the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at a prison west of Baghdad that, when revealed in spring 2004, became a major setback for the U.S. effort in Iraq.

Murtha was most emphatic in discussing his belief that senior Marine officers acted to prevent the facts of the case from emerging. "The problem is, who covered up? And why did they cover it up?" he asked...

"We don't know how far it goes," Murtha said of the alleged coverup. "The Marines knew about it all this time. Somebody in the chain of command decided not to allow this to happen. How far up it went, I don't know."

Payments from the U.S. military to the families of the innocent victims in Haditha are under scrutiny in the investigations according to "a United States defense official, who declined to be identified because details of the investigation are not supposed to be revealed," the New York Times is reporting today.

The United States defense official said the payments were also a focus of investigators trying to determine whether the killings were improperly covered up. On "This Week," Representative Murtha suggested that the decision to make payments was strong evidence that Marine officers up the chain of command had knowledge of the events. "That doesn't happen at the lowest level," he said. "That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families."

Iraq Standing Up -- For Iran

The United States has wanted an independent Iraqi government to make it's own decisions about the future.

Somehow, I don't think this is what we had in mind.

Iraq's foreign minister said Friday that Iran had the right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses but that he hoped for a diplomatic solution to a crisis that has strained Iran's relations with the United States.

"We think there is a principle, which is that the Islamic Republic of Iran and other countries have the right to possess nuclear technology if it is for peaceful purposes," Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, said at a televised news conference in Baghdad with his visiting Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki.

At the same news conference, Mottaki said Iran had changed its stance on holding direct talks with the United States on the Iraq situation. "The American side tried to use this decision as propaganda, and they raised some other issues," he said. "They tried to create a negative atmosphere, and that's why the decision which was taken is suspended for the time being."

While trying to assuage fears that the United States and Iran are headed for war, Mottaki renewed Iranian vows that force would be met with force.

"The risk of a confrontation is minimal," Mottaki said, "but in the event that Americans attack Iran from anywhere, Iran will respond by attacking them in the place that we were attacked from."

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad declined to comment on the foreign ministers' statements...

Zebari's statement was a surprising show of independence from the United States, the main backer of the newly formed Iraqi government. The United States has roughly 133,000 troops in Iraq and has poured more than $20 billion into reconstruction of the country's decrepit infrastructure.

Two Investigations Find Grave Misconduct in Haditha Killings

Two separate investigations, one NCIS and one by an Army General, have turned up evidence of war crimes committed by a small number of Marines in the Iraqi city of Haditha and subsequent attempts to cover up the misconduct, according to U.S. officials.

A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines' defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.

Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.

Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.

That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature."

Attempts to mislead superior officers about the events in Haditha are being treated, as usual for the military, extremely seriously by commanders on the ground in Iraq, and now by higher ups in Washington.

The first official report from the military, issued on Nov. 20, said that "a U.S. marine and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb" and that "immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire

Military investigators have since uncovered a far different set of facts from what was first reported, partly aided by marines who are cooperating with the inquiry and partly guided by reports filed by a separate unit that arrived to gather intelligence and document the attack; those reports contradicted the original version of the marines, Pentagon officials said.

One senior Defense Department official who has been briefed on the initial findings, when asked how many of the 24 dead Iraqis were killed by the improvised bomb as initially reported, paused and said, "Zero."...

Three Marine officers--the battalion commander and two company commanders in Haditha at the time--have been relieved of duty, although official statements have declined to link that action to the investigation.

Meanwhile, the Senate panel that has oversight responsibilities for the military received another briefing yesterday on the incident.

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were briefed on allegations that Marines had purposely killed as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians in November.

The two developments were indications of the growing seriousness of two investigations into the incident in Haditha that has led to charges from a congressman that Marines killed civilians "in cold blood."

"When these investigations come out, there's going to be a firestorm," said retired Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms, formerly a top lawyer for the Marine Corps. "It will be worse than Abu Ghraib -- nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib."

An Army lawyer who has heard some accounts of the investigation said, "It's a lot more serious than people thought at the beginning...

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was briefed Wednesday by Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the Marine commandant, and again yesterday by Brig. Gen. John Kelly, the legislative liaison for the Corps. Warner described the case as consisting of "very, very serious allegations" that resulted in "a significant loss of life, civilian."

Gonzales Grasps At Legal Straws Again

The latest example of the dodgy lawyering upon which the Bush administration bases its most questionable policies is being disputed by experts in jurisprudence.

Civil liberties lawyers yesterday questioned the legal basis that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used Tuesday to justify the constitutionality of collecting domestic telephone records as part of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism program.

While not confirming a USA Today report May 11 saying the National Security Agency has been collecting phone-call records of millions of Americans, Gonzales said such an activity would not require a court warrant under a 1979 Supreme Court ruling because it involved obtaining "business records." Under the 27-year-old court ruling in Smith v. Maryland , "those kinds of records do not enjoy Fourth Amendment protection," Gonzales said. "There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in those kinds of records," he added.

Noting that Congress in 1986 passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in reaction to the Smith v. Maryland ruling to require court orders before turning over call records to the government, G. Jack King Jr. of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said Gonzales is correct in saying "the administration isn't violating the Fourth Amendment" but "he's failing to acknowledge that it is breaking" the 1986 law, which requires a court order "with a few very narrow exceptions."

If there is any reason for someone who claims to be a lawyer--and who is the nation's top law enforcement officer--to cite a law that is being violated as being the legal justification for the lawfulness of anything, such logic is beyond ordinary comprehension.

King noted that the USA Patriot Act modified the law to permit counterintelligence access "to telephone toll and transactional records" to allow specific targeting of "a person or entity" by the FBI if the director certifies in writing to the service provider that a customer's information is relevant to an "authorized" terrorism or counterintelligence investigation.

Gonzales must consider the American people to be an "entity" under the provisions of this legislation. Fair enough.

The bit about this "entity" being "relevant to an authorized terrorism or counterintelligence investigation" is where he will not find himself on solid legal ground.

Iran The Big Topic Of Israeli PM's Visit

The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Washington is focusing on the issue of how Israel would best like the United States to deal with their enemy, Iran.

The fact that U.S. interests in the broader Middle-East will be irreparably damaged by an American military attack on Iran is not really a concern of Israel and it's neo-con facilitators in Washington.

David Landau , editor in chief of the Israeli daily Haaretz, said Monday that Israel hoped to link its need for a stronger defense against the Iranian nuclear threat to its stated willingness to pull out of more occupied Palestinian land.

The agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's official visit this week was dominated by Iran and the controversy over its nuclear potential, Landau told Washington Post columnists and reporters. Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, which it does not openly acknowledge.

Iran's nuclear ambition "is hanging over this visit like a black cloud," he said. But he added, "Maybe this black cloud could have a silver lining."

The silver lining would be a package linking Iran's nuclear threat and Israel's defense needs to the sea change in Israelis' attitudes toward occupation, which could spell further unilateral withdrawals from Palestinian lands after last year's pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Unlike his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, Olmert will not be able to "soft-pedal the Iranian issue," given the anxiety over the rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in recent months, said Landau, who arrived Sunday evening from Israel...

"Israel cannot countenance a nuclear Iran. It crosses . . . even the dovish fringe of the Israeli spectrum," Landau added.

Having no military credentials, Olmert would be politically vulnerable if he told his countrymen the Iranian issue should remain on the back burner, he said.

Nice, so they have the chickenhawk phenomenon in Israel too.

He said bringing Israel under America's nuclear defense umbrella, with early warning systems and diplomatic and economic pressure, was necessary in a situation in which "a balance of terror" alone was insufficient, "because Israel is so small and close to Iran."

Maybe Landeau should get a refresher course on international security. "Balance of Terror" and "Mutual Assured Destruction" strategies do not bother overmuch with irrelevancies such as geographical size and proximity. The only operative factors are the size of a country's nuclear arsenal and their willingness to use them.

Despite what the wingnut right insists, Iran will not launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack upon Israel. The guarantee that Israel would strike a retaliatory death blow will force any aggressor--including Iran--to hold their fire.

Nuclear strategy has been thoroughly studied for decades. Scenarios have been wargamed by computer since the invention of the IBM mainframe in the 1950's. The experts know that a "rational actor" will not initiate nuclear war against an enemy with a superiority in nuclear weapons.

That's why those who are pushing for war with Iran are stressing the "crazy" leader of Iran, and claiming untruthfully that he has stated an intention to "wipe Israel off the map."

Without the "irrational actor" premise, a first strike against Iran cannot be justified by the facts.

No matter what the bedwetters say.

Iraq Too Dangerous For VOA To Operate

The Voice of America, the official international radio broadcasting arm of the U.S. government, has not had a functioning bureau in Baghdad for the past six months as security has deteriorated in the Iraqi capital.

The Voice of America's bureau in Baghdad has been closed for the past six months, ever since the government-funded agency withdrew its only reporter in Iraq after she was fired upon in an ambush and her security guard was later killed.

All Western news organizations have struggled with the dangerous conditions in Iraq, which have led to such high-profile incidents as the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll and the wounding of ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff. But for a federally funded information service to pull out of Baghdad for such a prolonged period raises questions about the Bush administration's insistence that conditions there are gradually improving.

VOA reporter Alisha Ryu said yesterday that she told her bosses in December that "it would really be impossible for me to do any kind of work" in Iraq. "I couldn't live with the idea that someone else could have died who was working with me. . . . For all journalists, it's really become impossible to move around."

Asked why VOA has not sent another reporter to Iraq, Ryu said, "They didn't have any volunteers to replace me."...

Administration officials have complained on numerous occasions that journalists in Iraq are focusing too heavily on the daily violence and attacks, and are neglecting signs of progress there. Many editors and reporters have responded that the security situation makes it difficult for correspondents to move around the country unless they are embedded with military units.

Maybe some of the gung ho wing-nuts will be willing to volunteer for the vacant positions with the VOA in Iraq. They constantly carry on about how much better things are getting over there. And they would be in a perfect position to report all the "good news" that is currently being overlooked by the press corps.

U.S. Military Exercise Planned With Turkey

The U.S. will be using the time-tested tactic of holding a military exercise in the immediate region of an adversary to ratchet up the pressure on Iran.

The United States will hold a joint military exercise using naval, army and air forces with Turkey next week aimed at demonstrating a determination to stop missile and nuclear technology from reaching Iran and other countries, Bush administration officials said Sunday...

The officials said the exercise was part of a three-year effort known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, under which the United States and cooperating countries carry out military and naval exercises to interdict nuclear materials and contraband...

About 20 such exercises have taken place in the last three years, beginning with naval exercises off Japan that have angered the government of North Korea, which has accused the United States of using intimidation tactics. The United States is trying to persuade friendly countries near the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean to join in the exercises, but has met with limited success, administration officials say.

Also, the U.S. is using pressure against large European banking interests in order to get them on board with the anti-Iran program.

Prodded by the United States with threats of fines and lost business, four of the biggest European banks have started curbing their activities in Iran, even in the absence of a Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions on Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Top Treasury and State Department officials have intensified their efforts to limit Iran-related activities of major banks in Europe, the United States and the Middle East in the past six months, invoking antiterrorism and banking laws. They have also traveled to Europe and the Middle East to drive home the risky nature of dealing with a country that has repeatedly rebuffed Western demands over suspending uranium enrichment, and to urge European countries to take similar steps.

Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said: "We are seeing banks and other institutions reassessing their ties to Iran. They are asking themselves if they really want to be handling business for entities owned by a government engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism."

The four European banks--the UBS and Credit Suisse banks of Switzerland, ABN Amro of the Netherlands, and HSBC, based in London--have made varying levels of disclosure about the limits on their activities in Iran in the past six months. Almost all large European banks have branches or bureaus in the United States, units that are subject to American laws.

American officials said the United States had informed its European allies about the new pressure exerted on the banks, and indeed had asked these countries to join the effort. At the same time, the Americans have not publicized the new pressure, partly out of concern it could complicate efforts by European negotiators, who were still talking with Iran about a package of incentives to suspend uranium enrichment.

If the U.S. had a legitimate case against Iran, they could wait until a U.N. vote to approve sanctions to start the economic warfare against the Islamic Republic.

The unilateral action is de facto proof that Washington knows that the anti-Iran program wont fly with the other members of the international community.

Democrats Ask For Updated NIE On Iran

The current National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which was ordered in January 2005, showed that Iran was ten years or so away from being able to produce enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb.

And more importantly stated that, while Iran is conducting clandestine research, that there is no direct evidence of a nuclear weapons program. It did, however, say that the community consensus is that Iran is determined to build nukes.

Vice President Cheney and other prominent neo-cons such as John Bolton have been far more certain about the imminence of the danger posed by Iran.

Now, a little more than a year since the delivery of the last NIE , Democrats in Congress are asking that the intelligence community draft a new estimate on Iran.

Senate Democrats, saying they want to "avoid repeating mistakes made in the run-up to the conflict in Iraq," wrote President Bush yesterday urging him to direct U.S. agencies to prepare an updated National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

"We must have objective intelligence untainted by political considerations or policy preferences and a comprehensive debate in the Congress about the best short and long-term approaches to resolving the international community's differences with Iran," the letter said...

"An Iranian nuclear weapons program would be a significant threat to international peace and security," they wrote. "Iran's refusal to conclusively explain or halt its uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities and its acquisition of ballistic missiles, coupled with the troubling rhetoric of its president, presents serious challenges to security in the Middle East and requires the United States to energetically pursue a diplomatic solution.

"The international community must not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, and Iran must know that it ultimately will not succeed in undermining international peace and stability," the letter said. It was signed by Harry M. Reid (Nev.), the Senate minority leader; Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), assistant minority leader; John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), vice chairman of the intelligence committee; Carl M. Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

It sounds like the Democratic leaders suspect that the administration is trying again to pull a fast one on the nation on a critical matter of national security.

Whether the Democrats will have the nerve to do anything about it will likely depend upon the results of the midterm elections.

Unless the attack on Iran comes first.

New Italian PM Criticizes Iraq War

With the odious Silvio Berlusconi gone from the helm as Prime Minister, his successor is attempting to regain the respect of the rest of the world.

Italy's new prime minister declared Thursday that the war in Iraq was a "grave error" that risked igniting conflict in the entire Middle East region. He said Italy would stick with plans to bring home its 2,700 troops stationed there but gave no timetable for their return.

Making his first policy address as head of government, Romano Prodi formally abandoned the unequivocal support that his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, gave to U.S. policy in Iraq...

Prodi was addressing the Senate, where he and his coalition have a meager margin of votes, on the eve of a vote of confidence. His camp hopes the vote will be the final confirmation of power for his coalition, which includes eight parties, among them socialists, former Communists, environmentalists and former Christian Democrats.

The group has in the past supported Italian military missions abroad -- in the Balkans, for example. But Prodi said Thursday that "we didn't agree to the war in Iraq and the Italian participation. We consider the war in Iraq and the occupation of that country a grave error."

Prodi also spoke of a truth, the consequences of which the Bush administration and it's apologists will be long blamed:

The war "did not resolve, but rather has complicated, the problem of security," he said. "Terrorism has found in Iraq a new base and new pretexts for terrorist actions that are inside and outside the Iraqi conflict."

The "Coalition of the Well-Wishers" keeps shrinking:

He said his government intended to bring home the 2,700 Italian troops left in southern Iraq "within the time technically necessary" and after consultation with "all the interested parties."...

With Berlusconi's electoral defeat in April, President Bush lost another faithful ally in Europe. In 2004, Spanish troops pulled out almost immediately after another Bush ally, Jose Maria Aznar, lost an election.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has kept thousands of troops in Iraq, took a blow recently with his Labor Party's poor showing in municipal elections.

Poland has more than halved its force, to about 1,000, and Ukraine pulled out all of its soldiers after a change of government. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, often cited by Bush in stump speeches as one of his best friends abroad, plans to step down in September.

Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic had forces in Iraq but withdrew them.

Twenty-six countries, including Australia, Japan and South Korea, have troops there.

Berlusconi had already yielded to Italian public opinion and had started the full withdrawal of his troops from Iraq.

Prodi is trying to score points domestically and abroad by saying the right thing.

The Government's All-Purpose Defense Against Court Cases

The United States is wielding it's trump card--national security--to quash lawsuits against the government more and more often in recent years.

Yesterday, the all-purpose defense again worked it's wonders.

A federal judge yesterday threw out the case of a German citizen who says he was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA, ruling that Khaled al-Masri's lawsuit poses a "grave risk" of damage to national security by exposing government secrets.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria acknowledged that Masri "has suffered injuries" if his allegations are true and that he "deserves a remedy." Sources have said Masri was held by the CIA for five months in Afghanistan because of mistaken identity. Masri says he was beaten, sodomized and repeatedly questioned about alleged terrorist ties.

But Ellis said the remedy cannot be found in the courts. Masri's "private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets,'' the judge wrote in dismissing the lawsuit filed last year against former CIA director George J. Tenet and 10 unnamed CIA officials...

The ruling was a victory for Justice Department prosecutors, who had invoked the once rarely cited state-secrets privilege to argue for dismissal. Created in the 1950s, it allows the government to urge courts to dismiss cases on the grounds of damage to foreign policy or national security. The privilege has been used far more frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Judges have usually acceded to the government's request. Last year, for example, the government won dismissal of a lawsuit by a Canadian citizen who claimed that he was taken to Syria by U.S. officials for detention and was tortured.

When defense attorneys in criminal cases attempt to use "graymail" by demanding access to classified documents in the discovery phase of a trial, the government vigorously objects.

When the government does the same thing by invoking the "national security" clause, judges just bend over and toss the case.

Dispute Over Documents On NSA Domestic Program

The Justice Department is well on it's way to getting a lawsuit dismissed against AT&T for allegedly assisting the NSA's extra-legal warrantless domestic spying program.

A federal judge yesterday rejected a privacy group's request to release documents that it claims show AT&T Inc. helped the National Security Agency spy on Americans by providing access to customers' phone calls.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker said at a hearing in San Francisco that the documents may contain AT&T trade secrets. The judge also ruled against an AT&T request to have the privacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, return the documents to the company on the grounds that they were stolen...

The documents at issue in the case came from Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, who said in April that cables and equipment installed at an AT&T office in San Francisco in 2003 for the NSA "were tapping into" circuits carrying customers' dial-in services. He supplied documents to EFF to support his assertions, which were filed under seal.

The deck is certainly stacked against the Electronic Frontier Foundation in this case:

The Justice Department has asked Walker to dismiss the case because it could compromise national security. Such requests are rarely rejected, said William Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and author of a book about law and presidential secrecy.

"The case is going away. Courts almost never challenge the government on this," Weaver said. "It is the most deferred-to principle in law and a judge will not touch it."

In the separate matter of the data-mining by the NSA of the transactional data from most Americans phone calls, both Bell South and Verizon have now denied participating in the program.

However, their pleas of innocence must be taken with a grain of salt because President Bush has now signed a Presidential Memorandum allowing companies to bypass SEC regulations requiring full and truthful public statements when "national security" concerns are involved.

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But a presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))

The New York Times is reporting this morning that cell phone calls may have been included in the wide net cast by the SIGINT agency.

The long-distance networks are sizable data pipes that sit in the middle of most telephone calls that leave local and sometimes regional call areas. The information yielded by long-distance call records can be vast, said Lisa Pierce, a telecommunications analyst with Forrester Research. "Any call that transits a long-distance network, regardless of whether it's an international or domestic, wireless or wire line, will have a call detail record," she said.

Ms. Pierce said that the network infrastructure was known as Signaling System 7 and that it created an automatic record of such things as the two numbers that are connected, and the time and duration of a call. This architecture also creates a record when a call is delivered onto a domestic long-distance network from overseas or from a cellphone. In some instances, when a cellphone caller places a long-distance call, the transmission originates on a cell network, then is delivered to a long-distance network that carries it across the country, where it might be connected to another cell network.

Anyone wishing to delve deeper into the labyrinth of the CATCH ALL program is well advised to refer to the reports by M1 on SMC, which have been scooping the entire rest of the media on this story for months.

China Identified As Biggest Counterintelligence Worry

U.S. counterintelligence officials are saying that China is ramping up it's attempts at acquiring defense-related technology inside the United States.

China is running aggressive and wide-ranging espionage operations aimed at stealing U.S. weapons technology that could be useful against U.S. forces, according to the nation's top spy-catchers.

U.S. counterintelligence officials have also detected an expansion of spy networks run by Russia, Cuba and Iran targeting the U.S. government and, in the case of Iran, U.S. military technology, according to Timothy Bereznay, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

China, however, has emerged as the leading espionage threat, Bereznay and Stephen Bogni, a senior investigator for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in separate interviews.

China has "put out a shopping list" of weapons and components it is seeking to arms dealers and middlemen, Bogni said. These middlemen, often ethnic Chinese, operate out of shell companies in the USA, he said. The list includes night-vision gear, radar-evading and radar- and communications-jamming equipment, missile-guidance systems and torpedoes.

On Wednesday, one accused Chinese spy, Taiwanese businessman Ko-Suen "Bill" Moo, pleaded guilty to charges he tried to buy military parts and weapons, including an F-16 fighter jet engine and cruise missiles...

The FBI has arrested 25 Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans in cases involving the targeting of U.S. technology in the past two years, an unprecedented level of espionage compared to prior years, Guerin said. Most of the cases involve alleged theft of sensitive technology. ICE has initiated more than 400 investigations since 2000 involving illicit export of U.S. arms and strategic technology to China, according to agency statistics.

Cell Phone Users Movements Possibly Being Tracked By NSA Program

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, is scheduled to speak today with members and staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee about what he is claiming are "illegalities" undertaken by the SIGINT agency that have not yet been made public.

Washington national security cognoscenti have been saying for days that Tice's new revelation involves space-based capabilities of the NSA.

The new scuttlebutt in Washington is that Mr. Tice is going to reveal to the committee a most Big Brother-ish scenario.

According to the speculation, the NSA data-mining program is not limited to pattern analysis of who is calling who. The space-related skullduggery is believed to include the tracking of the movements of everyone who carries a cell phone.

Of course, administration apologists will insist that this is okay. After all, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you care if the government tracks you around everywhere you go?

NSA Whistleblower Tice To Meet With Senate Armed Services Committee

A former NSA officer will be alleging that heretofore publicly unknown illegal activities, possibly involving the use of satellite-based platforms, has been conducted by the NSA and that nominee for CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden was told personally that such operations were forbidden under U.S. law.

An article in GovExec has the details:

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said he plans to tell Senate staffers (this) week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens.

Russell Tice, who worked on what are known as "special access programs," has wanted to meet in a closed session with members of Congress and their staff since President Bush announced in December that he had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order. In an interview late Thursday, Tice said the Senate Armed Services Committee finally asked him to meet (this) week in a secure facility on Capitol Hill...

He said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden, who has been nominated to become director of the CIA. Tice said one of his co-workers personally informed Hayden that illegal and unconstitutional activity was occurring...

"I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It's pretty hard to believe," Tice said. "I hope that they'll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn't exist right now."

Tice originally asked to meet with the Senate and House Intelligence committees, but they did not respond to his request. The NSA did not reply to written questions seeking comment for this story.

The NSA fired Tice for what it claimed were psychological problems, including paranoia. A number of NSA employees have been terminated under such pretexts in recent years, corresponding with the extra-legal endeavors of the SIGINT agency following 9-11.

Branding dissidents as being mentally ill is an old Soviet tactic to discredit one's opponents and discourage others from becoming whistleblowers. It is yet another dickless "get tough" approach from the discredited U.S. government.

Cheney--Not Intelligence Pros--Wanted NSA CATCH ALL Program

The extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping was not conceived by U.S. intelligence experts but by Vice President Dick Cheney, today's New York Times reports.

As a matter of fact, the intelligence professionals opposed the idea for reasons that included the illegality of the operation.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001...

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said...

Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because of the significant national security and civil liberty issues involved and because they thought it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Mr. Cheney's office and the N.S.A.

This is precisely what we have been discussing all along about the over-reaching measures advocated by Cheney, Addington, and the administration in the "war on terror."

The chickenhawks in the White House (and on the internet) constantly push positions that professional military and intelligence officers--who have spent their careers dealing with such issues--know are counterproductive.

Another case in point--the Iraq War.

Some Operational Pitfalls Of Relying On Data Mining

One of the founders of Wired Magazine--techie extraordinaire--Simson L. Garfinkel of Harvard looks at the latest revelation coming from the broader extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, the data mining of the call records of nearly all Americans in the name of keeping us "safe" from "terror."

Garfinkel shows how the effort can be a wild goose chase of an extremely wasteful kind.

Some cogent points:

(T)he real danger of this kind of unrestricted data mining isn't "false positives" -- that is, associations that don't really exist -- but meaningless positives. Investigating all of these positives takes time and money. And if the investigations are not done correctly, innocent lives can be ruined in the process. A principle of American jurisprudence is that it is better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be imprisoned. How will our society react to a system that requires many people to be investigated because only one of them might be a terrorist?...

Ultimately, (this) may be the greatest dilemma for those involved in collecting and mining data: What information does one not need to collect, and when is it safe to throw away a piece of data? It's human nature to hold on to information as long as possible -- once you eliminate it, you can't always get it back. And even if you could keep everything forever, would you want to? The cost of storing and protecting data is high. The more information you have, the more difficult it is to search and cross-reference it, which means you must spend more on computer systems. And perhaps the most insidious side effect of all: After spending all the money and effort to collect, keep and protect data, it is hard not to develop that nagging feeling that you really should be putting it to use.

Treasury To Take Lead In Sanctions Against Iran

Veteran Washington Post reporter (now op-ed columnist) Jim Hoagland--an "international type" of the old school--today gives a glimpse of the U.S. plan for sanctions against Iran:

The Treasury Department, not the Pentagon, holds the key to the next steps if the United Nations does not mandate action against Iran. The asymmetric weapon of choice is Treasury's ability to deny foreign banks and firms access to the lucrative U.S. market if they cooperate with an international outlaw. The market-access threat recently helped blunt North Korea's counterfeiting of U.S. currency and would be devastating to the investment flows Iran needs to rebuild its deteriorating oil industry.

But Washington must act as if it has gone to the limits of its ability to consult and compromise with its partners before taking actions that will affect French, Russian and other international enterprises. And acting as if a deal is possible with Iran is the only way to get Moscow and Beijing to support the effort...

"We are in a who-blinks-first game," Bush said of Iran to a recent White House visitor. It is in fact a who-thinks-first, and best, game.

Feds Are Getting Even With Qwest CEO

Joseph P. Nacchio, the then-CEO of telcom company Qwest who refused to participate in the NSA data mining operation because "a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," is now facing federal charges stemming from the time of his leadership of the company, according to today's New York Times.

Qwest was apparently alone among the four major telephone companies to have resisted the requests to cooperate with the government effort. A statement issued on behalf of Mr. Nacchio yesterday by his lawyer, Herbert J. Stern, said that after the government's first approach in the fall of 2001, "Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request."

"When he learned that no such authority had been granted, and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," Mr. Nacchio concluded that the requests violated federal privacy requirements "and issued instructions to refuse to comply."

The statement said the requests continued until Mr. Nacchio left in June 2002. His departure came amid accusations of fraud at the company, and he now faces federal charges of insider trading.

The question of the legality of telecom participation is--despite administration apologists--still not clear:

The law governing the release of phone company data has been modified repeatedly to grapple with changing computer and communications technologies that have increasingly bedeviled law enforcement agencies. The laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.

Wiretapping--actually listening to phone calls--has been tightly regulated by these laws. But in general, the laws have set a lower legal standard required by the government to obtain what has traditionally been called pen register or trap-and-trace information--calling records obtained when intelligence and police agencies attached a specialized device to subscribers' telephone lines.

Those restrictions still hold, said a range of legal scholars, in the face of new computer databases with decades' worth of calling records. AT&T created such technology during the 1990's for use in fraud detection and has previously made such information available to law enforcement with proper warrants.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000 "that's 10 billion."...

Legal experts said the companies faced the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the program, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers...

The New Jersey lawyers who filed the federal suit against Verizon in Manhattan yesterday, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T in other jurisdictions.

"This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any U.S. administration," Mr. Afran said. "Americans expect their phone records to be private. That's our bedrock governing principle of our phone system." In addition to damages, the suit seeks an injunction against the security agency to stop the collection of phone numbers.

Of course, there is the other side of the argument:

Several legal experts cited ambiguities in the laws that may be used by the government and the phone companies to defend the National Security Agency program.

"There's a loophole," said Mark Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. "Records of phones that have called each other without identifying information are not covered by any of these laws."

Not so fast, smart guy:

Civil liberties lawyers were quick to dispute that claim.

"This is an incredible red herring," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group that has sued AT&T over its cooperation with the government, including access to calling records. "There is no legal process that contemplates getting entire databases of data."

The group sued AT&T in late January, contending that the company was violating the law by giving the government access to its customer call record data and permitting the agency to tap its Internet network. The suit followed reports in The New York Times in December that telecommunications companies had cooperated with such government requests without warrants.

One has to wonder if Qwest's Nacchio defied the government because he is a miscreant--or as is much more likely--he was targeted by federal prosecutors because of his stance on the warrantless NSA program.

Telecom Companies May Have Violated Laws

The debate is on in Washington about what laws, if any, were broken--and by whom--in the course of conducting the NSA CATCH ALL part of the extra-legal warrantless eavesdropping program.

Some are saying the government may be off the hook constitutionally, while leaving the telecom companies exposed to criminal liability:

The U.S. government's secret collection of Americans' phone records may not breach the Fourth Amendment's privacy guarantee, legal analysts said Thursday, but it could violate federal surveillance and telecommunication laws...

A communication act dating to 1934 and more recent electronic privacy laws generally require phone companies to protect the confidentiality of customers' communication. "There really isn't any precedent for this kind of thing," said Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T after the NSA's eavesdropping program was revealed in December. The suit accuses AT&T of helping the NSA spy on phone users.

In order to have legal cover, the telecom companies had better have something in writing, like the NSA does allegedly does with a United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) signed by the president authorizing their participation in the program.

The bypassing of FISA is once again an issue:

Lawyers who specialize in national security and communications, in and out of government, said it is difficult to assess the legality of the program because some of its features remain unknown. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted in 1978, requires a court order before the government can eavesdrop on the content of domestic calls or keep live track of the phone numbers dialed by a U.S. telephone. But it does not cover wholesale acquisition of call records after the fact.

Privacy laws restrict distribution of customer records to third parties, including the government, but there are exceptions. With a court order, a subpoena or a "national security letter" from the FBI, a telephone company may be compelled to hand over records of specified individuals. In other circumstances, the law may be murkier...

"The statutes weren't drafted with the dragnet approach in mind," said Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department lawyer. "And if this happened, who committed the violation? Is it the government or is it the phone company? It's really not clear."

One government lawyer who has participated in negotiations with telecommunications providers said the Bush administration has argued that a company can turn over its entire database of customer records -- and even the stored content of calls and e-mails -- because customers "have consented to that" when they establish accounts. The fine print of many telephone and Internet service contracts includes catchall provisions, the lawyer said, authorizing the company to disclose such records to protect public safety or national security, or in compliance with a lawful government request.

No one should expect the lawmakers on Capitol Hill to do much about the new revelations--despite assertions of a desire to reach the truth of the matter.

A report on extensive government collection of Americans' telephone data roiled Congress yesterday, with many Republicans rallying to the president's defense while one key GOP chairman and many Democrats called for hearings, new restrictions and the possible subpoenaing of telephone company executives...

"The first move by the committee will be to ask the [phone] companies to come in," Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told his colleagues yesterday. "I am prepared to consider subpoenas" if executives do not appear voluntarily. Specter, who is Congress's most outspoken GOP critic of warrantless wiretaps of Americans, also said he would like to bring Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales back to his panel for questions, "if it would do any good."

I wonder if Specter can be convinced to swear in the witnesses this time, unlike his gladhandling of Alberto Gonzales when the AG was called before the Judiciary Committee on this issue earlier this year.

Specter faces an uphill battle in any case:

Specter appeared to be on a collision course with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who strongly defended President Bush's surveillance policies. "We'll discuss whether or not hearings are necessary," Frist told reporters. But Specter spokesman Bill Reynolds said the chairman ultimately decides which hearings are held...

But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Congress is adequately briefed and "calls for further oversight are unnecessary."

"To suggest that there's some sort of coverup is not correct, and the motivation of those who would suggest otherwise is obvious," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said at yesterday's Judiciary Committee hearing where Feinstein and others spoke. "We need to be conscious of what's at stake: the security and safety of the American people."

Specter is still angry about Justice Department stonewalling of his investigation of how they handled the legal issues in the warrantless eavesdropping that was already revealed:

Some members of Congress also reacted angrily to the news that the ethics office at the Justice Department had been refused the security clearances necessary to conduct a planned investigation of department lawyers who approved N.S.A.'s eavesdropping.

Mr. Specter called the denial of clearances to the department's own investigators "incomprehensible" and said he and other senators would ask that the clearances be granted to employees of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

The extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program opens a whole bunch of questions about how the U.S. evolved in a short period of time into a national security state.

The upcoming confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden to be the director of the CIA will, in theory, provide a perfect forum for addressing the pertinent issues. However, it can be guaranteed that Gen. Hayden will refuse to respond to such questions, citing national security.

Why Else Would We Have Secret Prisons?

The main reason that the U.S. is maintaining secret prisons for "terrorist" suspects is so to facilitate keeping such prisoners in a state of extra-legal limbo--away from international do-gooders and others who do not understand the calculus of the "war on terror."

The United States has again refused the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to terrorism suspects held in secret detention centers, the humanitarian agency said on Friday.

The overnight statement was issued after talks in Washington between ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger and senior officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

"Mr. Kellenberger deplored the fact that the U.S. authorities had not moved closer to granting the ICRC access to persons held in undisclosed locations," the Geneva-based agency said.

Kellenberger said: "No matter how legitimate the grounds for detention, there exists no right to conceal a person's whereabouts or to deny that he or she is being detained."

The former senior Swiss diplomat said that the ICRC would continue to seek access to such people as a matter of priority...

Antonella Notari, chief ICRC spokeswoman, noted that Kellenberger had first raised the issue with former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, then National Security Adviser, in January 2004.

"We have just received a negative response again," Notari said on Friday.

The United Nations torture investigator, Manfred Nowak, told a European Union parliamentary committee probing the allegations there was evidence of secret detention centers outside the United States, but no definite proof they had existed in Europe.

EU Foreign Minister Javier Solana made the same questionable claim last week.

It all depends on one's definition of "definite proof." If they are waiting for a signed affidavit from the head of the CIA admitting that we had such facilities in Eastern Europe before hastily closing up shop and relocating the prisons elsewhere, the international community will never be able to say they have anything resembling "proof."

By this problematical standard, any number of dubious activities can be conducted in secret and the rest of the civilized world can guiltlessly turn a blind eye.

CATCH ALL Program Confirmed

The scope of the NSA's extra-legal warrantless wiretapping program is wider than anyone except SMC has publicly indicated, according to today's USA Today.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans--most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

Looks like M1 nailed that one spot on.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made--across town or across the country--to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others...

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop--without warrants--on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records--those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders--were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information...

(Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary said) that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."

The White House is so sure that the program is legal because of the rumored existence of a classified United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) which permits several practices that have previously been illegal.

The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together...

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

President Bush's divorce from reality became official today when commenting on the new revelation that all phone calls made and received by Americans (except Qwest customers) were being examined by the NSA:

"We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of Americans," Bush said. "Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates."

In that brief statement Bush affirmed that he considers all Americans to have links to al-Qaeda or "known affiliates" thereof.

Ahmadinejad's Letter To President Bush

The full text of yesterday's 18-page letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush is not easy for Americans to find on websites of U.S. media outlets. The U.S. media briefly described some of the contents, but left some revealing passages unreported.

I was able to find a United Nations' translation of the full text of the letter on the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online.

Ahmadinejad begins by questioning Bush's actions in light of his oft-stated belief in Christianity. Mentioning things like starting wars that kill innocents, and holding prisoners without trial.

He brings up U.S. support for Israel, asks why that regime is being supported.

Then points out U.S. opposition of democratically elected governments in Latin America, and mentions the looting of natural resources from Africa.

The Iranian leader gives Bush a list of complaints about U.S. treatment of Iran itself:

The brave and faithful people of Iran too have many questions and grievances, including: the coup d'etat of 1953 and the subsequent toppling of the legal government of the day, opposition to the Islamic revolution [of 1979], transformation of an embassy into a headquarters supporting the activities of those opposing the Islamic Republic (many thousands of pages of documents corroborates this claim), support for Saddam in the war waged against Iran, the shooting down of the Iranian passenger plane, freezing the assets of the Iranian nation, increasing threats, anger and displeasure vis-a-vis the scientific and nuclear progress of the Iranian nation (just when all Iranians are jubilant and collaborating with their country's progress), and many other grievances that I will not refer to in this letter.

Then the Iranian leader gets to the part which I find very intriguing. He condemns the 9-11 attacks, then adds:

All governments have a duty to protect the lives, property and good standing of their citizens. Reportedly your government employs extensive security, protection and intelligence systems - and even hunts its opponents abroad. September 11 was not a simple operation. Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services--or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess. Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret? Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities? And, why aren't those responsible and the guilty parties identified and put on trial?

Ahmadinejad is clearly referring to the key to the 9-11 attacks--how the hijackers were able to know ahead of time that the U.S. military was to be conducting hijacking exercises, the perfect cover for real hijackings--on the morning of Sept 11, 2001. The proof that inside help was given to the hijack plotters is the simultaneity of the hijack exercises and the real hijackings. Although this does not point to the specific malefactors, circumstantial evidence of lesser quality has been used to successfully identify countless people suspected of crimes.

The Iranian president accurately points to the information operations since 9-11 that have swayed the American people to support the most questionable foreign policy objectives in decades:

All governments have a duty to provide security and peace of mind for their citizens. For some years now, the people of your country and neighbors of world trouble spots do not have peace of mind. After 9-11, instead of healing and tending to the emotional wounds of the survivors and the American people--who had been immensely traumatized by the attacks--some Western media only intensified the climates of fear and insecurity--some constantly talked about the possibility of new terror attacks and kept the people in fear. Is that service to the American people? Is it possible to calculate the damages incurred from fear and panic?

American citizens lived in constant fear of fresh attacks that could come at any moment and in any place. They felt insecure in the streets, in their place of work and at home. Who would be happy with this situation? Why was the media, instead of conveying a feeling of security and providing peace of mind, giving rise to a feeling of insecurity?

Some believe that the hype paved the way--and was the justification--for an attack on Afghanistan. Again I need to refer to the role of media. In media charters, correct dissemination of information and honest reporting of a story are established tenets. I express my deep regret about the disregard shown by certain Western media for these principles. The main pretext for an attack on Iraq was the existence of WMDs. This was repeated incessantly - for the public to, finally, believe - and the ground set for an attack on Iraq.

Will the truth not be lost in a contrive and deceptive climate? Again, if the truth is allowed to be lost, how can that be reconciled with the earlier mentioned values?

Ahmadinejad is clearly aware of, and is objecting to the current anti-Iran info-op which we have been covering here for many months. He knows the goals of the campaign and is issuing his protestation before the bombs start dropping.

The Iranian leader ends his letter to President Bush by trying to stress the commonality of Christian and Islamic prophets and teachings, and tries to reach a common ground between the two men.

Do you not think that if all of us come to believe in and abide by these principles, that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of man, belief in the Last Day, we can overcome the present problems of the world--that are the result of disobedience to the Almighty and the teachings of prophets--and improve our performance?

Ahmadinejad's approach might curry some favor with a truly religious man. Unfortunately, Bush's actions mark him as far from a believer in the teachings of his avowed saviour. That's why the Iranian president's effort to reach out to the American president will fall on deaf ears.

The U.S. media's reluctance to fully report on the letter--understandable in light of the allegations made by Ahmadinejad about media propagandizing--is the reason most Americans won't learn of the full details of this communication between leaders.

Boodle Boys' Geronimo Skullduggery

This one can be filed under "Deep Politics":

A Yale University historian has uncovered a 1918 letter that seems to lend validity to the lore that Yale University's ultra-secret Skull and Bones society swiped the skull of American Indian leader Geronimo.

The letter, written by one member of Skull and Bones to another, purports that the skull and some of the Indian leader's remains were spirited from his burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb in New Haven that serves as the club's headquarters.

According to Skull and Bones legend, members--including President Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush--dug up Geronimo's grave when a group of Army volunteers from Yale were stationed at the fort during World War I. Geronimo died in 1909.

"The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club... is now safe inside the (Tomb) together with his well worn femurs, bit and saddle horn," according to the letter, written by Winter Mead...

Only 15 Yale seniors are asked to join Skull and Bones each year. Alumni include Sen. John Kerry, President William Howard Taft, numerous members of Congress, media leaders, Wall Street financiers, the scions of wealthy families and agents [sic] (should read officers) in the CIA.

Members swear an oath of secrecy about the group and its strange rituals, which are said to include an initiation rite in which would-be members kiss a skull.

A portion of the letter and an accompanying story were posted Monday on the Yale Alumni Magazine's Web site.

The Geronimo rumor first came to wide public attention in 1986. At the time, Ned Anderson, then chair of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, was campaigning to have Geronimo's remains moved from Fort Sill -- where he died a prisoner of war in 1909 -- to Apache land in Arizona. Anderson received an anonymous letter from someone who claimed to be a member of Skull and Bones, alleging that the society had Geronimo's skull. The writer included a photograph of a skull in a display case and a copy of what is apparently a centennial history of Skull and Bones, written by the literary critic F. O. Matthiessen '23, a Skull and Bones member. In Matthiessen's account, which quotes a Skull and Bones log book from 1919, the skull had been unearthed by six Bonesmen -- identified by their Bones nicknames, including "Hellbender," who apparently was Haffner. Matthiessen mentions the real names of three of the robbers, all of whom were at Fort Sill in early 1918: Ellery James '17, Henry Neil Mallon '17, and Prescott Bush '17, the father and grandfather of the U.S. presidents...

Skull and Bones and other Yale societies have a reputation for stealing, often from each other or from campus buildings. Society members reportedly call the practice "crooking" and strive to outdo each other's "crooks." And the club is also thought to use human remains in its rituals. In 2001, journalist Ron Rosenbaum '68 reported capturing on videotape what appeared to be an initiation ceremony in the society's courtyard, in which Bonesmen carried skulls and "femur-sized bones."...

Mead's letter, written from one Bonesman to another just after the incident would have occurred, suggests that society members had robbed a grave and had a skull they believed was Geronimo's. It does not speak to whether Skull and Bones may still have such a skull today. Many have speculated that they do, but there is no direct evidence. Alexandra Robbins '98, who wrote the 2002 Bones expose Secrets of the Tomb, says she persuaded a number of Bones alumni to talk to her for her book. "Many talked about a skull in a glass case by the front door that they call Geronimo," Robbins told the alumni magazine.