Addington/Yoo Doctrine Slapped Down By Supreme Court

This blog has never been reluctant to point the finger of blame for the trampling of the Constitution toward the right suspects, especially David Addington (see inter alia, A Kook By Any Other Name, Geneva Convention Rule To Be Bypassed, Cheney, The Loose Cannon, Ignatius On Kook Addington, and Cheney--Not Intelligence Pros--Wanted CATCH-ALL Program) and John Yoo (see Architect Of Eavesdropping and Torture Policies Unrepentant, Justice Refuses To Provide Legal Rationale for Warrantless Spying To Senate, and Republican Enablers Of Warrantless Eavesdropping).

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling seems to agree (from Unclaimed Territory):

The Hamdan decision represents, in my opinion, a fatal blow to the Addington/Yoo theory of executive power. For the last four years, the Bush administration has been advancing the theory, both publicly and in its internal legal memoranda, that, as Commander in Chief, the president has the sole discretion to make all decisions regarding war-related issues, even when a duly enacted statute purports to limit his authority. This legal theory serves as the basis for not only the system of military tribunals at Guantanamo, but also the NSA program and the interrogation methods endorsed by the administration.

But if a statute can place valid and enforceable limits on the president's power to try foreign enemy combatants captured on foreign soil, then can there really be any doubt that a statute can place similar limits on the president's power to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens within the United States? Of course not.

And the Hamdan opinion completely eviscerates the administration's only other argument in defense of the NSA surveillance program, i.e., that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) somehow authorized the circumvention of FISA. The Court notes that "there is nothing in the text or legislative history of the AUMF even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization set forth in . . . the UCMJ." All you have to do is substitute "FISA" for "UCMJ" and you know exactly what the Court would say about that argument.

May Addington and Yoo's names join Ehrlichman and Haldeman in historical ignominy.

Supreme Court Rules Conflict With Al Qaeda Under Geneva Convention

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that President Bush's plan to subject Guantanamo detainees to judgment by military commissions is unconstitutional.

Not only that, but the Court ruled that captured terrorists, including Al-Qaeda, have to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention rules for detained prisoners of war.

From SCOTUSblog (via AMERICAblog):

(T)he Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva applies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever" --including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment...

This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administration has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).

Russia Blames U.S. For The Deaths Of Their Diplomats In Baghdad

Russian lawmakers unanimously blamed the U.S. for the deaths of four of their diplomats in Baghdad -- citing the atrocious security situation -- as President Vladimir Putin issued an order for the Russian special services to kill the Iraqi terrorists responsible for the crime.

Moscow also demanded in a proposed U.S. Security Council resolution that coalition forces in Baghdad provide better security for diplomats. The United States and Britain resisted the resolution...

"The tragedy that occurred recently in Iraq was only possible because of the growing crisis in the country as the occupying powers increasingly lose control of the situation," read a motion unanimously approved by the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

"All the responsibility for the situation in Iraq, including the security of its citizens and of foreign workers, lies with the occupying powers. We are convinced that they could have prevented this tragedy," the lawmakers said hours before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Moscow for today's G-8 ministerial meeting...

In New York, U.S. and British diplomats objected to language in a Russian draft resolution that said the Security Council "calls upon the government of Iraq and the Multinational Forces to undertake measures aimed at enhancing the security of foreign diplomatic missions in Iraq and their staff."

Meanwhile, Russia isn't letting the actual killers off the hook:

President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia's secret services to find and kill those who kidnapped and killed four Russian Embassy employees in Iraq, the Kremlin announced in a statement.

The bluntness of the statement reflected the deep shock and anger — much directed at the United States — that have unfolded in Russia after the kidnapping on June 3 in an attack that killed a fifth Russian.

"The president gave instructions to the Russian special services to take all measures for finding and destroying the criminals who committed this atrocity," the Kremlin said, the official Russian Information Agency reported.

"Sensitive But Unclassified" Not Good Enough Anymore Says State Department

There is a minor, but interesting, administrative response resulting from the embarrassing cable from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad leaked to the press recently (see U.S. Embassy Cable Details Deteriorating Situation In Iraq).

The State Department's Information Systems and Services office reminded everyone last week that putting SBU (Sensitive But Unclassified) on cables and e-mails is useless in terms of actually keeping the information from the public.

Worse yet, the folks at ISS said in a June 22 announcement, putting SBU on a document "DOES NOT by itself" protect the information from release under the dread Freedom of Information Act.

So if you want to keep it from getting to the public, you need to classify it as secret, top secret, eyes only, and so on. (Another problem with using SBU is that passing such information on is not a security violation, so the divulgers can't be punished.)

This useful reminder was issued only five days after The Washington Post published a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad recounting the daily hardships and dangers confronting Iraqi embassy employees. Every paragraph of that cable was marked SBU.

ISS assures us the new guidance had nothing to do with the publication of that cable, which apparently caused a bit of a fuss at Foggy Bottom. ISS says it periodically reissues such guidance.

We certainly believe them, though we hear no one at the State Department does.

The word in Washington is that the "fuss at Foggy Bottom" had something to do with a deputy Secretary of State moving to a prestigious Wall Street firm.

GOP Congressman Asks A Good Question

From a hearing yesterday that was not officially a hearing:

Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) was out of place when he sat down at the dais in a committee room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday. He had come to participate in an unofficial hearing being held by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. And Jones is neither a Senator nor a Democrat. He is a hawkish Republican from North Carolina. But he asked one of the most poignant questions of the afternoon.

Before him were a panel of veterans of the intelligence wars that had raged before the invasion of Iraq: retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Secretary of State
Colin Powell; Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia; Carl Ford, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research; and Wayne White, a former Iraq analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research...

Representative Jones, who had voted to grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq, had a question. He noted that "my heart has ached ever since I found out that the intelligence...was flawed and possibly manipulated." He said that he had written letters to relatives of every American soldier who has died in Iraq--8000 letters so far. "What perplexes me," he said, "is how in the world could [intelligence] professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?"

It was an important question. Within the intelligence community, there were professionals who knew that critical parts of the Bush administration's case for war--which relied primarily on the argument that Saddam posed a direct WMD threat to the United States--had serious holes. Those who dissented internally did not go public--they worked within the system. But the system did not work. The White House made certain not to pay attention to any of the dissents, and it did not share the disputes with the voters. Why had the entire intelligence community allowed Bush and his aides to get away with this?

The panelists did not get a chance to respond to Jones, for he kept on talking--right over that query--and he segued to another subject, asking how it could be that the neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration gained so much power and had more influence than "you, the professionals."

Wilkerson fielded the question, first noting that as a Republican he was "embarrassed" that Jones was the only GOPer to attend the hearing (which was open to legislators of both parties). Then Wilkerson replied, "I'll answer you with three words: the vice president." That seemed to satisfy Jones. Neither he nor Wilkerson mentioned the two-word answer: the president.

Leo Strauss, Father Of Neo-Con Movement?

A new book questions how much influence the ideas of legendary University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss actually had on the neoconservative movement which was founded by some of his prominent former students.

In the mid-1980's, a highly critical article in The New York Review of Books linked Strauss with conservatism, and in the next few years, numerous pieces in other journals followed suit. It has become received wisdom that a direct line issues from Strauss's seminars on political philosophy at the University of Chicago to the hawkish approach to foreign policy by figures like Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration.

"Reading Leo Strauss," Steven B. Smith's admirably lucid, meticulously argued book, persuasively sets the record straight on Strauss's political views and on what his writing is really about. The epigraph to its introduction, from an essay by the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, sounds the keynote: "Strauss was a towering presence . . . who neither sought nor had any discernible influence on what passes for the politics of the group."

Although it is said that Strauss voted twice for Adlai Stevenson, he appears never to have been involved in any political party or movement. What is more important is that his intellectual enterprise, as Smith's careful exposition makes clear, repeatedly argued against the very idea of political certitude that has been embraced by certain neoconservatives. Strauss's somewhat contrarian reading of Plato's "Republic," for example, proposed that the dialogue was devised precisely to demonstrate the dangerous unfeasibility of a state governed by a philosopher-king.

"Throughout his writings," Smith concludes, "Strauss remained deeply skeptical of whether political theory had any substantive advice or direction to offer statesmen." This view was shaped by his wary observation of the systems of totalitarianism that dominated two major European nations in the 1930's, Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. As a result, he strenuously resisted the notion that politics could have a redemptive effect by radically transforming human existence. Such thinking could scarcely be further from the vision of neoconservative policy intellectuals that the global projection of American power can effect radical democratic change. "The idea," Smith contends, "that political or military action can be used to eradicate evil from the human landscape is closer to the utopian and idealistic visions of Marxism and the radical Enlightenment than anything found in the writings of Strauss."

U.S. Military Intelligence Agent Says The Chem Shells Were Purchased From The U.S.

The degraded chemical munitions shells which were discovered by the U.S. Army in Iraq shortly after the invasion have been declared by the pro-war crowd to be a vindication that we did actually find those missing weapons of mass destruction so hyped by the administration before the war.

The fact that the United States justified going to war to stop active WMD programs is one of those nuances that is too complicated for the apologists to wrap their minds around.

It also turns out that, according to David Debatto, a counterintelligence special agent attached to the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion, California Army National Guard, who was among those who found the chemical weapons, there was paperwork at the site that showed that Iraq had purchased the shells from the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war.

I opened the folded off-white paper form and noticed several interesting things right away. The bombs had been purchased in the United States in 1988 from what appeared to be a government contractor called The Carlyle Group. I am almost embarrassed now to say that I had not heard of The Carlyle Group at that time so the name meant nothing to me. The only reason I remember it at all is that I was amazed that the bill was in English and I was stunned to see that a bomb that was used by Iraq in delivering chemical WMD – the only WMD found during the entire Iraq war – was in fact supplied to Saddam Hussein by the United States.

The date on the bill was either 1987 or 1988, I don’t recall exactly. I do recall that the bomb was manufactured in Spain and shipped through France. So much for their claims of being holier-than-thou. I checked several more bills and they were all identical. These bombs had all been shipped together. Rahman told us that similar weapons had been used all throughout the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s as well as against the Kurds. We were staring at what could have possibly been some of the same type of WMD used in one of the most heinous attacks in recorded history - the gassing of Halabja in March of 1988 which killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians.

I instructed Weichert to both videotape and take digital still photos of the bunker and its contents. The outside area which included many more chemical containers and HAZMAT suits were documented as well. At least fifteen minutes of video and 50 still photos were taken at that location. These were then incorporated and attached to the detailed written report that I wrote and sent up the chain of command through CI channels.

Feds Put Forward Questionable Case Of "Terrorism"

The Miami "home-grown terrorists" spectacle is shaping up to be a pretty flimsy case.

This prosecution is being brought for no other reason than so that the government can claim that they have been vigilant and proactive in stopping "terror" plots.

It is purely CYA to be pointed to as a "victory" following a future real attack.

A plot to topple the Sears Tower in Chicago and attack the F.B.I. headquarters in Miami was "more aspirational than operational," (John S. Pistole, deputy director of the F.B.I.) said Friday, a day after seven Florida men were arrested on terrorism charges...

(Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales) acknowledged that the men, who had neither weapons nor explosives, posed "no immediate threat."

The FBI informant is looking increasingly like an agent-provocateur.

The indictment, which charges the men with seeking support from al-Qaeda to wage a "ground war" on the United States, is based primarily on (Narseal) Batiste's interactions with an unidentified government informant who posed as an al-Qaeda "representative" and discussed plans for bombings and assaults on the Sears Tower, the FBI office in Miami and other targets. Batiste and the six others also allegedly swore an oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda during meetings with the informant, according to the charges...

The case underscores the murkiness that has been common to many of the government's terrorism-related prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cases that often hinge on ill-formed plots or debatable connections to terrorism. It is also the latest in a series of FBI-run stings involving informants or government agents who pose as terrorists to build a case.

The "charismatic Haitian American named Narseal Batiste" who allegedly was the "ringleader" of the group was probably trying to shake down someone he thought was a gullible mark by saying whatever the informant wanted to hear in exchange for big money:

On Dec. 16, 2005, Batiste met in a hotel room with the informant and, around the same time, said he was trying to build an "Islamic Army" to wage jihad, according to the indictment. He also asked for boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios, vehicles and $50,000 in cash.

Nice.

The real proof that the feds knew that this wasn't a real terrorist group is:

"By May, the indictment suggests, the plan had largely petered out because of organizational problems.

If the government really thought that these guys were terrorist material there would have been no arrests Thursday.

The feds would have continued to keep a close watch upon the men for possible contacts with actual terrorists. No question about it.

Their arrests this week show that the real motive of the government here was public relations.

CIA/Treasury Program Accesses Bank Data

This is probably how the CIA was able to discover and empty some of the foreign bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and his sons immediately preceding the March 2003 attack on Iraq.

The New York Times is saying it only targets suspected Al-Qaeda associates.

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database...

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, (Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department) said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)...

Swift's database provides a rich hunting ground for government investigators. Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders...

Treasury officials said Swift was exempt from American laws restricting government access to private financial records because the cooperative was considered a messaging service, not a bank or financial institution.

But at the outset of the operation, Treasury and Justice Department lawyers debated whether the program had to comply with such laws before concluding that it did not, people with knowledge of the debate said. Several outside banking experts, however, say that financial privacy laws are murky and sometimes contradictory and that the program raises difficult legal and public policy questions...

L. Richard Fischer, a Washington lawyer who wrote a book on banking privacy and is regarded as a leading expert in the field, said he was troubled that the Treasury Department would use broad subpoenas to demand large volumes of financial records for analysis. Such a program, he said, appears to do an end run around bank-privacy laws that generally require the government to show that the records of a particular person or group are relevant to an investigation.

"There has to be some due process," Mr. Fischer said. "At an absolute minimum, it strikes me as inappropriate."...

Because of privacy concerns and the potential for abuse, the government sought the data only for terrorism investigations and prohibited its use for tax fraud, drug trafficking or other inquiries, the officials said.

Looking too closely in those directions probably would have resulted in unwanted attention being focused on friends or associates of the administration.

Two Fools Run Off At The Mouth Re WMD

The shameless justification of the unjustifiable Iraq war reached a new low yesterday.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

What can be next?

These prevaricators will probably say that we didn't invade Iraq -- Saddam invaded the United States.

Congress To "Investigate" Data Sellers

The word in Washington is that the NSA uses commercial data sellers to obtain information that it is legally not able to gather itself. Not that the niceties of strict adherence to the law has been a big concern in recent years.

Considering some of the other customers of these companies, this investigation may not turn out to be terribly thorough.

Congress begins hearings Wednesday on the techniques used by private data-collection companies to obtain phone records and other information.

Law enforcement agencies often go to such companies for information. They do so to save time and avoid seeking subpoenas or warrants for the information, even though the data brokers do not always obtain their information legitimately, according to an investigation by the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. Agencies using data from these companies include the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security and state and municipal police departments from Florida to California.

"Most of these data brokers procure the records and information, either themselves or through third-party vendors, by the use of pretext -- that is, the use of ruse, lies and deception to gain access to information that is not publicly available and which they do not have the consent of the 'target' to procure," subcommittee spokesman Kevin Schweers says. "Many documents show that the data brokers are completely aware that the phone records and other information is largely acquired through pretext."

The subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., will hold a series of hearings on the matter...

The subcommittee's investigation found that law enforcement agencies often turn to data brokers for phone records, such as unlisted numbers and information on calls made and received by suspects in an investigation. In many cases, officers would have to get a warrant or subpoena to get the same information from phone companies.

This spring, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported that federal law enforcement agencies spent about $30 million last year to buy information from data brokers. That figure, however, only includes money paid to legitimate data-collection companies, Schweers says. Smaller, less scrupulous firms often do not charge law enforcement agencies for data, he says, so gauging how often federal, state and local authorities use them is difficult.

Abu Zubaydah Not The Terror Mastermind Bush Claimed

The veracity challenged Bush administration publicly hailed the capture of Abu Zubaydah a major victory in the "Global War on Terror."

It turns out that Bush's poster boy for Al Qaeda terrorism was much less important than advertised.

A new book, THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind reveals some interesting facts about the reflexive deception practiced against the American people by the White House.

Abu Zubaydah (was captured) in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques...

In interviews with intelligence officers, Suskind often finds them baffled by White House statements. "Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?" one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah. But Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced...

Suskind's enterprise has turned up several scoops, including the important disclosure that First Data Corp., among the largest processors of credit-card transactions, began to give the FBI access to its records after Sept. 11, 2001. Suskind's account is fuzzy on some of the legal questions, but he argues that the operation "swept up the suspicious, or simply the unfortunate, by the stadiumful and caught almost no one who was actually a danger to America."...

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Chickenshit nation in action, folks. Making us "safe" from "terr'r."

Austrian Right Wing Politician Calls Bush "War Criminal"

This might spice up President Bush's trip to the US-EU summit this week.

Austrian right-wing populist Joerg Haider called President Bush a war criminal on Saturday, days before Austria's government hosts Bush and European leaders in Vienna.

Haider, whose group is part of Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's government coalition, said Bush's meeting with his European peers on Wednesday was pointless as he did not expect the U.S. president to pay attention to what Europe had to tell him.

"He is a war criminal. He brought about the war against Iraq deliberately, with lies and falsehoods," Haider said in an interview with Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse...

Austria's attitude toward the United States has worsened over the last three years, Die Presse reported separately, citing a Eurobarometer poll.

The poll showed 62 percent thought the United States played a negative role for world peace, up from 56 percent in the same poll in 2003, Die Presse said, and 49 percent found the U.S. role in fighting terrorism negative.

U.S. Embassy Cable Details Deteriorating Situation In Iraq

Despite the administration's effort to portray the situation on the ground in Iraq as manageable, a new Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) document from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad (six page PDF) details the security problems being faced by Iraqi employees of the embassy.

The topics covered include: a crackdown on womens rights, power cuts and fuel shortages, kidnappings and threats of worse, security forces distrusted, supervising a staff at high risk, and "Alasas"- informants who are on the watch for people who cooperate with the Americans.

The embassy reported these facts back to headquarters so that policymakers in Washington would have a more realistic appraisal of daily life in Baghdad.

Assertions from pro-war elements that things are getting better for Iraqis will now be seen as clearly nothing other than intentional lies to prolong our ill-fated endeavor in Iraq.

Sectarian Warfare Symptom: Shiite Militias Control The Iraqi Prisons

The U.S. military plan to turn over control of a beleaguered Iraq to Iraqi forces is looking more unrealistic with the admission by an Iraqi official that Shiite militias control the prisons.

Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni Arab inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said in an interview this week.

"We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad."

As a result, Yei has asked U.S. authorities to suspend plans to transfer prisons and detainees from American to Iraqi control. "Our ministry is unprepared at this time to take over the facilities, especially those in areas where Shiite militias exist," he said in a letter to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the official in charge of American detention facilities.

It was previously believed that only a few Baghdad-area "secret" torture facilities were involved.

While allegations of abuse at U.S.-run prisons have waned since the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Iraqi facilities have drawn increased scrutiny since a U.S. Army raid exposed torture of dozens of detainees -- most of them Sunnis -- at a secret Interior Ministry facility in the Baghdad neighborhood of Jadriyah.

The prison was widely alleged to have been operated by a special police unit staffed largely by members of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia with ties to Iraq's largest Shiite political party. The government investigated the facility but never announced the results...

U.S. officials recently said they consider the militias to be as grave a threat to Iraq's security as the Sunni-led insurgency...

Yei's account adds to a growing list of alleged abuses in Iraq's overburdened prison system, long criticized by Sunni leaders who say Sunni prisoners are commonly mistreated...

On Saturday, a group of parliament members paid a surprise visit to a detention facility run by the Interior Ministry in Baqubah, north of Baghdad. "We have found terrible violations of the law," said Muhammed al-Dayni, a Sunni parliament member who said as many as 120 detainees were packed into a 35-by-20-foot cell. "They told us that they've been raped," Dayni said. "Their families were called in and tortured to force the detainees to testify against other people."

The low-grade civil war in Iraq has progressed past the point to which any expectation that the U.S. will be able to find untainted proxies to take control and stop the sectarian violence--allowing the Americans to make a face-saving exit--is wishful thinking at best.

Rather than accept the blame for a misguided and illegal intervention in Iraq, the cowardly leaders in the Bush administration are willing to drag out the inevitable, regardless of the damage to the national interests of the United States.

Not to mention the cost in American lives.

New Jersey Issues Subpoenas Over NSA Program

The telephone companies who may have participated in the NSA warrantless surveillance programs are receiving unwanted attention from the state of New Jersey.

The New Jersey attorney general has issued subpoenas to five telephone companies to determine whether any of them violated the state's consumer protection laws by providing records to the National Security Agency. Experts say it is the first legal move by a state to question the agency's program to compile calling records to track terrorist activities.

On Wednesday, the United States filed a lawsuit to block the subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown pitting the state's authority to protect consumers' rights against the federal government's national security powers.

"People in New Jersey and people everywhere have privacy rights," the state's attorney general, Zulima V. Farber, said on Thursday. "What we were trying to determine was whether the phone companies in New Jersey had violated any law or any contractual obligations with their consumers by supplying information to some government entity, simply by request, and not by any court order or search warrant."

This latest confrontation over the invocation of national security began last month, when Ms. Farber issued the subpoenas to the companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Sprint Nextel and Cingular Wireless -- to determine whether they had turned over the phone records to the federal government without a court order, in possible violation of state laws.

But when the Justice Department filed suit in United States District Court here to block those subpoenas -- a suit that Ms. Farber received on Thursday -- it asserted that the state was straying into a federal matter, and that compliance with the subpoenas would imperil national security.

As a matter of national security policy, the dispute represents the latest twist in the controversy over the boundaries of domestic spying and personal privacy. But as a matter of government practice and legal precedent, the dispute is significant because it transforms what had primarily been a fight between the federal government and civil liberties groups into a far knottier one pitting federal authorities against state ones.

Bush Calls For "Patience" From Americans Over Iraq War

Too bad that Lyndon Johnson is dead and cannot explain to George W. Bush the regretful remorse that accompanied him for the rest of his life over his misguided Vietnam War policy.

Today, the official U.S. military death toll passed 2500 in Iraq. That may be peanuts compared to Vietnam, but it is important nonetheless. And this doesn't begin to address those who have been maimed for life.

Any natural doubts that the current president may have were not on display yesterday as he once again justified staying the course in our ill-fated endeavor in the country which we have ruined.

The president spoke with obvious relish about sitting in the cockpit of Air Force One as he flew into Baghdad. "It was unbelievable -- unbelievable feeling," he said.

Gosh, with the corkscrew approach to avoid AA, he probably hasn't had such fun since landing in a S-3B on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003.

He even tried to suggest (inaccurately) that easily measurable indicators such as oil exports and availability of electricity were up to the standards they were under Saddam.

A little known fact about his lightning trip to Baghdad Tuesday was that, while there, he put pressure on the new Iraqi government to lease their oil fields on a favorable basis to administration friends in Big Oil. This was probably the real reason for his trip, not to try to salvage his sinking approval ratings.

Amnesty International Disputes U.S.-E.U. Denials Of Unlawful Renditions

A new report by the human rights group Amnesty International says that European governments, despite their statements to the contrary, have been "partners in crime" of the United States in conducting illegal "renditions" (kidnappings) of suspected Muslim terrorists.

Europe's governments have repeatedly denied their complicity in the US programme of "renditions"--an unlawful practice in which numerous men have been illegally detained and secretly flown to third countries, where they have suffered additional crimes including torture and enforced disappearance.

As evidence of this programme has come to light, however, it has become clear that many European governments have adopted a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach when it comes to rendition flights using their territory and that some states have been implicated in individual cases. These states include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Turkey and EU members Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

Without Europe's help, some men would not now be held without charge or trial, in abusive conditions, in Egypt, Syria and Guantanamo. Without information from European intelligence agencies, some of the men may not have been abducted. Without access to Europe's airport facilities and airspace, CIA planes would have found it harder to transport their human cargo. In short, Europe has been the USA's partner in crime.

Amnesty is calling for European nations to coordinate an anti-rendition policy at this week's EU summit meeting, and to make such a case to the U.S. at the upcoming U.S.-E.U. summit in Vienna.

Japan Opposes Sanctions On Iran

The government of Japan may soon be forced to choose between the economic well-being of their people and their long-standing political backing of U.S. foreign policy goals.

Despite months of pressure from Washington, Japan has become increasingly reluctant to join a Bush administration plan for sanctions against Iran if negotiations fail to resolve concerns over the country's nuclear program, Japanese and U.S. officials said Monday.

Japanese officials are suggesting that their country, which has more at stake in Iran financially than any other potential sanctions partner, may not join in punitive measures unless there is a broad international consensus along the lines of a U.N. Security Council resolution or other measure backed by nations now reluctant to impose sanctions, such as China. The White House had hoped instead to bring Japan into a "coalition of the willing" that avoided dealing with "recalcitrants" such as Russia and China.

The administration's fallback plan if talks with Iran fail -- tough financial measures imposed by a small group of like-minded countries -- depends strongly on Japanese participation. Without it, administration officials have calculated, the impact would significantly decrease.

Japan consumes 22 percent of Iranian oil exports and is slated to begin development this year of the largest and most modern onshore petroleum fields built in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. That has caused Japan to experience an uncomfortable tug of war between its allegiance to Washington and its financial and energy interests in Iran.

Analysts and Western diplomats have called the Bush administration's bid to sway Japan -- by far Iran's largest trading partner -- a key test of the likelihood that U.S. allies will ultimately agree to make painful sacrifices to force Tehran into compliance...

Initial sanctions under consideration against Iran would largely spare the global trade in Iranian crude oil. But the most severe sanctions -- including cutting Tehran off from access to the dollar, euro, British pound and yen -- would be a step "potentially imperiling European and Japanese trade, including the oil trade," according to a Treasury Department task force report on the measures' likely international impact.

Geopolitical considerations will play an important role in Japan's decision:

Japanese officials have said that while they have deep concerns about Iran's nuclear program, they worry that aggressive sanctions could create a foothold for China. Viewed by Japan as its prime competitor in the global energy market, China ranks just behind Japan in consumption of Iranian oil.

Iranian officials have already threatened to nullify a massive contract signed with Tokyo-based Inpex, an energy giant that is partly owned by the Japanese government, for development of the Azadegan petroleum fields along Iran's long and treacherous border with Iraq.

Inpex has so far postponed full-scale development work, citing a dispute over the number of land mines to be cleared from a drilling area that is estimated to contain reserves of about 26 billion barrels of oil. But sources familiar with the project have also described the delay as an effort by Japan to buy time -- to ensure that progress is made in the nuclear standoff before the Japanese company pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the project.

The Iranians appear to be running out of patience. Last week, Iran's oil minister reiterated on national television a threat to cancel the contract. "If the Japanese do not develop Azadegan, we will not tolerate any more delay and will hand over the job to our own engineers," Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said.

Since Inpex struck the Azadegan deal with Iran in 2004, Bush administration officials have sniped at it repeatedly. Japanese officials characterize this as a rare cold patch in otherwise very warm U.S.-Japan relations.

First Legal Challenge To NSA Program Reaches Courtroom Today

This might be a short hearing.

The National Security Agency's domestic spying program faces its first legal challenge in a case that could decide if the White House is allowed to order eavesdropping without a court order.

Oral arguments are set for Monday at U.S. District Court in Detroit at which the American Civil Liberties Union will ask Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to declare the spying unconstitutional and order it halted...

The ACLU sued the NSA on behalf of scholars, journalists and attorneys, claiming that warrantless wiretaps violate the U.S. Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA...

Justice Department lawyers have asked the judge to dismiss the suit because it would reveal state secrets.

Regardless of how the judge rules on state secrets, the government lawyers say Congress granted Bush surveillance privileges by authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda following the Sept. 11 attacks, and that he has the inherent right to order the wiretaps under presidential war powers.

"That is a total misunderstanding of the way the separation of powers are supposed to work in our democracy," said Ann Beeson, the lead ACLU lawyer in the case.

"It is very clear that when the framers (of the Constitution) set up the three branches of government they gave Congress the power to regulate what the president can do even during wartime and emergencies. If they hadn't done that we'd be back to the days of King George III," she said.

The framers of the Constitution had no idea we would be hit on 9-11, apologists will say, so our founding fathers couldn't have foreseen a time when we would be fighting a devious freedom-hatin' enemy.

If we have to throw away our freedom as Americans, so be it.

Because we are fighting a "war on terror."

The apologists clearly aren't having too much success dealing with their own personal terror.

Real Democracy Requires Truthful Information About Policy, Not Fear-Mongering Secrecy

The head-in-the-sand crowd whines incessantly about the leaking of classified information to the media. They insist that the American people are better off not knowing what their government does in (and to) their name.

Robert Kaiser, who has worked for the Washington Post for decades, rebuts the unjustified fears that revelations of governmental malfeasance damage national security.

Thanks to resourceful reporters, we have learned a great deal about the war that the administration apparently never intended to reveal: that the CIA never could assure the White House that Saddam Hussein's Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction; that U.S. forces egregiously abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib; that the United States had a policy of rendering terrorism suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where torture is commonplace; that the United States established secret prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorism suspects; that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants on the phone calls of countless Americans, as well as keeping track of whom Americans called from home and work.

You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?

True, but the ignorant defenders of the Bush administration wish to remain blissfully ignorant.

Secrecy and security are not the same. On this point, Exhibit A for journalists here at The Post is the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret history of the Vietnam War written inside the Pentagon and leaked to the New York Times and then The Post. Top-secret means a document is so sensitive that its revelation could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." The Nixon administration was in power, and it went to court to block publication on grounds that revealing this history would endanger the nation. A court in New York enjoined the two papers from publishing the information for several days.

But the Supreme Court decided, 6 to 3, that the government had failed to make a case that overrode the constitutional bias in favor of publication. The man who argued the case was Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold. Eighteen years later, Griswold wrote a confession for the op-ed page of this newspaper: "I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication [of the Papers]. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat."

The most important reason that ill-taken policies should be brought to light is that, in a democracy, the people need to know what is going on if they are to make informed choices (as opposed to fear-driven hysteria) about who should be leading the country.

Bad information results in bad choices.

The American experiment is an experiment in self -government. The Founders established Americans' right to govern themselves. Abuse of government power was their abiding concern. The Founders saw a free press as a tool to control the abuse of power, which is why they gave the press special protection in the First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press."

The history of the First Amendment makes clear why the Founders embraced it. Consider, for example, an early draft of the journalist's favorite provision offered to the Constitutional Convention by James Madison: "The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments, and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."

Information is the bulwark Madison had in mind. The people had to know what the government was doing in their name to be able to respond like good citizens. Accountability is only possible when citizens, including members of Congress, know what is going on.

The Bush administration relies on overclassification to protect policies that would not pass the public's smell test. This is intentional on their part.

Steven Aftergood, who works on classification issues for the Federation of American Scientists, calls the administration's approach to secrets "a cultivation of fear as a policy driver." He adds: "We are being told that nothing is more important than the external threat that confronts us, and nothing is more valuable than security in the face of that threat." Aftergood calls this "craven, and an insult to the millions of Americans who have given their lives to defend this country."

One can easily understand the administration's focus on scare-mongering. It works well upon the fearful parts of the American public. They wish to be kept "safe" from "terror." They are being exploited shamelessly.

One more point.

Ironically, the folks who prefer that the American people be kept in the dark about questionable administration policies defend truly damaging leaks (such as Valerie Plame's identity) when it serves the interests of those who are trying to undermine our democracy.

Internet Telephone Providers Must Allow Wiretapping Capability

A court has ruled that IP telephony providers must build-in features allowing the government to conduct surveillance upon the contents of the calls.

Companies that provide Web-based telecommunications services must allow wiretapping by law enforcement officials, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

The ruling upholds a Federal Communications Commission decision that companies such as Vonage Holdings Corp., the country's largest provider of Internet phone service, are under the same legal obligation as telephone companies. The requirement for a wiretap-compatible system could mean higher expenses for broadband service companies, and it marks the further spread of regulation into Internet phone services.

The FCC issued its ruling based on Justice Department concerns that new technology would not accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA...

The requirement for equipment compatible with government surveillance could "impose significant costs to anyone who wants to install a [commercial] broadband network," said Philip J. Weiser, a professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado.

"Any provider of broadband networks now needs to make accounts wire-tappable," he said. "That's not the way they're engineered and it's certainly not the cheapest way."...

Further regulation of Web-based phone services probably will continue as well. Legislation already has passed forcing Internet phone providers to connect emergency calls to local 911 dispatchers, which has been challenged by several providers. The FCC also may require Internet phone companies to pay into a fund for universal telephone service.

U.S. Troop Cut Goal For Iraq Not To Be Met By Year's End

The long-planned schedule for the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is being stymied by the deteriorating security situation.

Senior administration and military officials now acknowledge that there is little chance the United States can reach the milestone of reducing American troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by December, a goal that earlier in the year had seemed within reach.

The subject of future troop levels is certain to be an important part of President Bush's two-day war cabinet meeting, which will start Monday at Camp David. Senior American commanders in Iraq will take part by a video link. In preparation, military planners in Iraq and at the Pentagon have been refining troop-rotation proposals that, in the best case, would reduce levels to 110,000 to 120,000 troops by the end of December, from current levels of about 130,000, administration and military officials said.

Any decision to delay the informal timetable of reducing American troops to 100,000 would signal that the field commanders responsible for securing and stabilizing specific regions across Iraq had prevailed in the military's intense internal discussions of the road ahead. Many of these commanders have said privately that now is not the time to draw down American troops, given the continuing violence and the need to give the new Iraqi government time to prove its competence and to garner popular support.

The troop projections that are expected to be discussed were assembled before the killing Wednesday night of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading foreign terrorist commander in Iraq. But officials said Thursday that they did not expect Mr. Zarqawi's elimination alone to affect the assessments of how many troops were needed in coming months.

The killing of Zarqawi is not looking to be necessarily a win-win situation, according to some experts who spoke to the Washington Post.

Zarqawi himself is considered to have fallen out of favor with al-Qaeda as a whole during that time, allegedly because of his slowness to declare fealty to bin Laden and because al-Qaeda leaders saw that the beheadings and wholesale slaughter of civilians by Zarqawi's group revolted supporters instead of rallying them.

"The man was a burden on al-Qaeda," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and a noted Palestinian observer of international militant groups.

"I believe personally that President Bush unintentionally gave al-Qaeda a huge reward in getting rid of Zarqawi," Atwan said by telephone from London. "He was an unmanageable bully who forced himself as a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq."

No one should mislead themselves into believing that this is necessarily a turning point for the better for the U.S. endeavor in Iraq.

"We've been here so many times: the killing of Uday and Qusay [Hussein], the capture of Saddam, the elections, the transfer of sovereignty, the new government -- all marked by euphoria, lots of talk of tipping points, lots of high fives and then dismay as Iraq continues to spiral into oblivion," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former intelligence officer still active in the Middle East...

"If it is just Zarqawi, it is largely a political and propaganda victory and could disappear as quickly as capturing Saddam or killing his sons," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You are going to turn him into a martyr to those who support his cause. If you have more Iraqi insurgents become more visible and more intense, this doesn't necessarily make it worse for the insurgency."

Specter Bill To Grant Blanket Amnesty To Anyone Who Participated In NSA Programs

Sen. Arlen Specter's "compromise" with the administration over the extra-legal NSA warrantless surveillance programs involves granting a blanket amnesty to participants in the programs, according to the Washington Post.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed legislation that would give President Bush the option of seeking a warrant from a special court for an electronic surveillance program such as the one being conducted by the National Security Agency.

Sen. Arlen Specter's approach modifies his earlier position that the NSA eavesdropping program, which targets international telephone calls and e-mails in which one party is suspected of links to terrorists, must be subject to supervision by the secret court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The new proposal specifies that it cannot "be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to gather foreign intelligence information or monitor the activities and communications of any person reasonably believed to be associated with a foreign enemy of the United States."...

Another part of the Specter bill would grant blanket amnesty to anyone who authorized warrantless surveillance under presidential authority, a provision that seems to ensure that no one would be held criminally liable if the current program is found illegal under present law.

A third provision would consolidate the 29 cases that have been filed in various federal district courts challenging the legality of the NSA program and give jurisdiction over them to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which was established by FISA. Any decision of that court would be subject to Supreme Court review and otherwise would be binding on all other courts.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences In Somalia

CIA efforts to fight terrorists in Somalia --"Black Hawk Down" territory -- may have contributed to the resurgence of anti-American Islamist rebel groups that last week took over that nation's capital, Mogadishu.

The New York Times got a number of U.S. officials to talk about the covert action.

A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.

The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu.

The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there...

Among those who have criticized the C.I.A. operation as short-sighted have been senior Foreign Service officers at the United States Embassy in Nairobi. Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report.

Around that time, the State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords.

One American government official who traveled to Nairobi this year said officials from various government agencies working in Somalia had expressed concern that American activities in the country were not being carried out in the context of a broader policy.

"They were fully aware that they were doing so without any strategic framework," the official said. "And they realized that there might be negative implications to what they are doing."...

Indeed, some of the experts point to the American effort to finance the warlords as one of the factors that led to the resurgence of Islamic militias in the country. They argue that American support for secular warlords, who joined together under the banner of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, may have helped to unnerve the Islamic militias and prompted them to launch pre-emptive strikes. The Islamic militias have been routing the warlords, and on Monday they claimed to have taken control of most of the Somali capital.

"This has blown up in our face, frankly," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit research organization with extensive field experience in Somalia.

Congressman Calls For CIA Open Source Center To Become Separate Agency

Most people do not realize that the majority of the intelligence collected by the CIA comes from "open sources", not from spies abroad.

A lawmaker understands the importance of OSINT and is making a suggestion.

A senior Republican lawmaker on Wednesday called for removing the nation's center for publicly available intelligence from the CIA...

House Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Rob Simmons, R-Conn., said the Open Source Center at Langley, Va., should be turned into an independent agency. The center was created last November by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte and then CIA Director Porter Goss as the government's premiere agency for collecting and processing "open source intelligence," such as information that is available to the public in newspapers and books...

Simmons lambasted critics of open source intelligence who claim it is not as important as other activities within the intelligence community, such as signals intelligence and human intelligence. "It is a discipline. You collect the information. You don't collect the intelligence," he said. "You process it and you analyze it and then you produce something out of the information that you have collected and processed and analyzed, and what you produce is called intelligence."

He added that open source intelligence is "relatively cheap" and "the products are exportable and sharable." But he also acknowledged that some progress is being made on integrating open source information into intelligence activities. For example, at least 30 reports based on open source intelligence have made it into the president's daily brief this year, which is one of the most highly valued intelligence documents within government.

Bolton Whines About Comments By U.N. Official

The odious John Bolton can dish it out with the best of them. When it comes to catching heat, our U.N. ambassador's thin skin becomes apparent for all to see.

The U.S. ambassador rebuked the United Nations' second-highest-ranking official Wednesday for delivering a speech asserting that U.S. officials have undermined the world body by withholding support and failing to defend it from its harshest critics here.

Ambassador John R. Bolton called on Secretary General Kofi Annan to "repudiate" the speech given by his top aide, Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown, or live with "adverse" consequences.

"Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations," Bolton told reporters. "My hope is he looks at the potential adverse effect that these intemperate remarks would have on the organization" and repudiate them.

Bolton called Malloch Brown's speech a "very, very grave mistake," the worst by a U.N. official that he had seen in more than 15 years. He said the address, given in New York on Tuesday, represented a "condescending and patronizing" attack against the American people.

Annan dismissed Bolton's warning, saying that he "agrees with the thrust" of Malloch Brown's speech, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric...

In his speech to a group of foreign policy experts, Malloch Brown said that the "prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the U.N. one way or another."

Malloch Brown voiced frustration that the United Nations receives little gratitude, although it frequently advances U.S. policies from the Middle East to Africa, where it is currently organizing a U.N. peacekeeping operation in Sudan.

He said the United Nations' role is "in effect a secret in Middle America, even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world."

Malloch Brown said the United States has not done enough to highlight the United Nations' contributions, citing its role in managing 18 U.S.-backed peacekeeping operations.

"That is not well known or understood, because much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said...

The speech was an implicit criticism of Bolton's blunt diplomatic style, which contrasts with the traditional give-and-take of U.N. diplomacy. Malloch Brown urged the United States to show a greater willingness to compromise, citing its decision to threaten a possible end of funding to the United Nations if it does not embrace U.S.-backed reforms.

"No more take-it-or-leave-it, red-line demands thrown in without debate and engagement," he said. "In the eyes of the rest of the world, U.S. commitment tends to ebb much more than it flows. And in recent years, the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage."

The "grave mistake", to use the words of our ambassador, was when President Bush gave the recess appointment to the U.N. to a man as undiplomatic as John Bolton.

"Magic Bullet" Specter Cuts Deal With Cheney Over NSA Issue

Sen. Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter has come through again for the administration.

A last-minute deal Tuesday with Vice President Cheney averted a possible confrontation between the Senate Judiciary Committee and U.S. telephone companies about the National Security Agency's database of customer calling records.

The deal was announced by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. They said Cheney, who plays a key role supervising NSA counterterrorism efforts, promised that the Bush administration would consider legislation proposed by Specter that would place a domestic surveillance program under scrutiny of a special federal court.

In return, Specter agreed to postpone indefinitely asking executives from the nation's telecommunication companies to testify about another program in which the NSA collects records of domestic calls.

Great. Both publicly-known NSA warrantless surveillance programs already fall under the jurisdiction of FISA. Specter wants to modify the law so that the program will no longer be "extra-legal."

And if the telecoms weren't really cooperating in the program, why would Cheney have interfered with the Judiciary Committee's desire to call the telecom execs to the witness chair?

If passed, Specter's legislation would give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court power to oversee the NSA program and render an opinion on the constitutionality of conducting domestic surveillance without a warrant. The court, established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), normally considers case-by-case requests by intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance inside the USA.

The deal prompted protests from Democratic lawmakers, who said the Republican-controlled Congress had refused to challenge the administration's expansion of presidential authority. "Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year, and the vice president will just tell the nation what laws we'll have?" said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the committee.

Specter has challenged the administration to justify the legality of intelligence programs inside the country.

After the hearing, Specter said his hand had been forced by the telephone companies' refusal to discuss classified programs. Representatives of more than one company--which ones were not specified in the meeting--agreed to appear, Specter said, but told the panel they would not talk about classified information. Hatch said President Bush "is willing to work with us as long as it doesn't detract from the president's constitutional powers."

If the telcom executives could truthfully testify to no involvement in the NSA domestic programs--they would.

There wouldn't be any of this "refusal to discuss classified programs" if there weren't classified programs that the telecoms are protecting.

ACLU Wants FCC To Examine NSA Issue in AT&T/BellSouth Merger

I wonder if the FCC will get a national security waiver to avoid dealing with this complaint.

The American Civil Liberties Union asked the Federal Communications Commission yesterday to withhold approval of AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth until it reviews allegations that the companies gave customer records to the government without warrants.

In its filing, the A.C.L.U. cited a provision in the Telecommunications Act that says that in considering a merger, the commission must "weigh the public-interest harms of the proposed transaction against the potential public-interest benefits."

The group said the F.C.C. should determine if AT&T and BellSouth handed over phone records to the National Security Agency's surveillance program and, if so, whether that violated any privacy laws.

The A.C.L.U. action comes after USA Today reported last month that AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon provided the agency with call records on millions of Americans in surveillance done after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The F.C.C. is in a position to determine whether the USA Today story is true and can bring the companies to the table and figure out whether they are providing customer information to the N.S.A. and what is the lawful authority for doing so," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty project at the A.C.L.U.

In its letter to the commission, the A.C.L.U. noted that BellSouth had denied participating in the surveillance program. But it voiced concern about what would happen if the company linked up to AT&T.

"It would be a cruel irony if BellSouth had not participated in the program but as a result of this merger, BellSouth customers became unwilling surveillance targets," it said.

It is widely known in Washington that the NSA has used third parties -- data-brokering private sector companies -- to obtain some of the subscriber information in question, thus allowing some telecoms to claim truthfully that they had not provided any data to the NSA.

Depleted Brain Cells, Or More Evidence Of A Phony?

One could pick 100 people at random from the El Paso or San Antonio telephone books, give them a call, and -- including Spanish language-only homes -- find no more than three people who couldn't tell you the name of "America's Team."

From the transcript of President Bush's speech Friday welcoming the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers to the White House: "I want to -- look, I was a Texas Cowboy fan, you know. (Laughter.) Dallas Cowboy fan..."

I wonder if the gooper apologists will counter that Bush was a professional baseball owner, and thus, naturally wouldn't be expected to know the name of the flagship NFL franchise in the state.


Thanks to Tom Shoop's Fedblog for finding this.

Geneva Convention Rule To Be Bypassed

The Geneva Conventions, the standard international law treaties regulating conduct with regard to POWs, detainees, refugees, the wounded, etc., are good enough for every other signatory, but not the U.S.

The third Geneva Convention (1949) covers POWs and detainees. The DOD wants to sidestep an important part of the treaty.

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards...

For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing its policies on detainees, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual on interrogation, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.

The process has been beset by debate and controversy, and the decision to omit Geneva protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq...

President Bush's critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, allegedly by Marines.

But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations. And it undercuts contentions that U.S. forces follow the strictest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars...

(L)awmakers say that differing standards of treatment allowed by the Field Manual would violate a broadly supported anti-torture measure advanced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). McCain last year pushed Congress to ban torture and cruel treatment and to establish the Army Field Manual as the standard for treatment of all detainees. Despite administration opposition, the measure passed and became law.

For decades, it had been the official policy of the U.S. military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Among the directives being rewritten following Bush's 2002 order is one governing U.S. detention operations. Military lawyers and other defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document known as DoD Directive 2310, to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

That provision — known as a "common" article because it is part of each of the four Geneva pacts approved in 1949 — bans torture and cruel treatment. Unlike other Geneva provisions, Article 3 covers all detainees — whether they are held as unlawful combatants or traditional prisoners of war. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by specifically prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture.

The move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, government sources said. David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and Stephen A. Cambone, Defense undersecretary for intelligence, said it would restrict the United States' ability to question detainees...

In his February 2002 order, Bush wrote that he determined that "Common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either Al Qaeda or Taliban detainees, because, among other reasons, the relevant conflicts are international in scope and Common Article 3 applies only to 'armed conflict not of an international character.' "

Some legal scholars say Bush's interpretation is far too narrow. Article 3 was intended to apply to all wars as a sort of minimum set of standards, and that is how Geneva is customarily interpreted, they say.

But top administration officials contend that after the Sept. 11 attacks, old customs do not apply, especially to a fight against terrorists or insurgents who never play by the rules.

"Top administration officials" contend all sorts of lunatic things, and their apologists can rationalize each and every one.

The exploitation of 9-11 at every opportunity to justify turning the U.S. into a belligerent pariah state is not exactly a position of strength that the world's remaining superpower should be willingly portraying.

Military Inquiry Into Haditha Looking Into Cover-up

One of the two military investigations of the Haditha massacre is looking closely at how the matter was handled by the Marine Corps chain of command. False reports were submitted to superior officers early on, and investigators are trying to determine how soon midlevel and senior officers became aware that the truth was being covered up and what actions they subsequently took.

(T)he handling of the matter by the senior Marine commanders in Haditha, and whether officers and enlisted personnel tried to cover up what happened or missed signs suggesting that the civilian killings were not accidental, has become a major element of the investigation by an Army general into the entire episode.

Officials have said that the investigation, while not yet complete, is likely to conclude that a small group of marines carried out the unprovoked killings of two dozen civilians in the hours after a makeshift bomb killed a marine.

A senior Marine general familiar with the investigation, which is being led by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, said in an interview that it had not yet established how high up the chain of command culpability for the killings extended. But he said there were strong suspicions that some officers knew that the Marine squad's version of events had enough holes and discrepancies that it should have been looked into more deeply.

"It's impossible to believe they didn't know," the Marine general said, referring to midlevel and senior officers. "You'd have to know this thing stunk." He was granted anonymity, along with others who described the investigation, because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

In recent weeks, investigators have interviewed the Marine commanders who were serving in Iraq at the time of the killings, including Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, commander of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, commander of the Second Marine Division, a senior Pentagon adviser said.

Military officials said Friday that interviews with all senior officers in the chain of command were a routine part of any wide-ranging inquiry, and did not necessarily indicate culpability on their part.

Military Investigators To Exhume Bodies Of Haditha Victims

The administration apologists should know that the U.S. military is taking the Haditha massacre inquiry much more seriously than do the keyboard commandos.

The military wouldn't be exhuming the bodies of the victims over a bucket of hogwash.

Criminal investigators are hoping to exhume the bodies of several Iraqi civilians allegedly gunned down by a group of U.S. Marines last year in the city of Haditha, aiming to recover potentially important forensic evidence, according to defense officials familiar with the investigation.

A source close to the inquiry said Naval Criminal Investigative Service officials have interviewed families of the dead several times and have visited the homes where the shootings allegedly occurred to collect as much evidence as possible. Exhuming the bodies could help investigators determine the distance at which shots were fired, the caliber of the bullets and the angles of the shots, possibly crucial details in determining how events unfolded and who might have been involved...

NCIS officials said the Nov. 19 incident was not reported to them as a criminal case until nearly four months later -- on March 12 -- and the failure of the Marine Corps to request assistance from investigators sooner could create legal complexities.

The delay already has presented many hurdles for investigators, who have had to rely on dated information, witnesses and suspects who had months to tailor their stories, and a lack of fairly routine forensic evidence that should have been collected at the time the civilians were killed, according to Defense Department officials, defense attorneys and sources close to the criminal probe...

The NCIS is an independent criminal investigative agency that is not in the military chain of command. Its probe has included as many as 50 special agents, forensics investigators and support personnel operating in Iraq and in the United States, the largest homicide investigation of its type since the war in Iraq began in 2003, according to Navy officials...

Sources close to the case said the military is assembling a team of experienced prosecutors for the Haditha shootings case. Defense officials said the Pentagon and the Marine Corps are taking the investigation very seriously...

A separate investigation has found several failures in the aftermath of the shootings, according to top officials familiar with the probe. These include Marines giving false statements and officers in the chain of command not providing proper oversight in the weeks and months that followed. That probe, by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell, is expected to be finished this week.

The "delay" in reporting the killings seems to be a benefit to those who instigated the cover-up. The resultant degrading of the evidence will be helpful when these cases get to the adjudication stage.

Marine Officers Gave False Information To Commanders About Haditha Massacre

Apologists who mistakenly believe that they are supporting the troops when they issue chickenhawkish defenses of war crimes usually compound their error by claiming that there was no cover-up of the incident at Haditha.

The apologists are flat out wrong or intentionally lying when they assert that there was no cover-up.

The U.S. military investigation of how Marine commanders handled the reporting of events last November in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where troops allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians, will conclude that some officers gave false information to their superiors, who then failed to adequately scrutinize reports that should have caught their attention, an Army official said yesterday.

There you have it, wingnuts. Giving false information to one's superiors is not only an unforgivable breach of military discipline, but it constitutes a cover-up. The cover-up, which started in the after-action reports, is believed by military investigators to go even higher.

(A three-month probe, led by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell) has pursued two lines of investigation: not only whether falsehoods were passed up the chain of command, but also whether senior Marine commanders were derelict in their duty to monitor the actions of subordinates. The inquiry is expected to conclude by the end of this week, the official added...

One of Bargewell's conclusions is that the training of troops for Iraq has been flawed, the official said, with too much emphasis on traditional war-fighting skills and insufficient focus on how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Currently the director of operations for a top headquarters in Iraq, Bargewell is a career Special Operations officer and therefore more familiar than most regular Army officers with the precepts of counterinsurgency, such as using the minimum amount of force necessary to succeed. Also, as an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam in 1971, Bargewell received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor, for actions in combat while a member of long-range reconnaissance team operating deep behind enemy lines.

In anticipation of the Bargewell report, the Marine Corps has placed on hold its plan to nominate Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, who was the top Marine in Iraq when the Haditha incident occurred, for promotion to lieutenant general, a senior Pentagon official said. That decision reflects concern that the report may conclude that leadership failures occurred at senior levels in Iraq...

One of Bargewell's findings is that two failures occurred in reporting the Haditha incident up the Marine chain of command. The first is that a squad leader alleged to have been centrally involved in the shootings, made a false statement to his superiors when he reported that 15 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the roadside bombing that killed a Marine and touched off the incident. (The other nine dead initially were reported by the Marines to have been insurgent fighters but are now believed to have been civilians.) That report was entered into an official database of "significant acts" maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq, the Pentagon official said...

A second and more troubling failure occurred later in the day, this official said, when a Marine human exploitation team, which helped collect the dead, should have observed that the Iraqis were killed by gunshot, not by a bomb. The team's reporting chain lay outside that of the other Marines -- who were members of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines -- and went up through military intelligence channels directly to the 1st Marine Division's intelligence director, he said. Had this second unit reported accurately what it witnessed, he indicated, that would have set off alarms and prodded commanders to investigate, he explained.

Bargewell's report also is expected to address why the Marine Corps let stand statements issued by official spokesmen that were known to be false at least two months ago. On Nov. 20, the day after the shootings, Marine Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool told reporters that the Iraqis died in a crossfire, stating that, "Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents." Time magazine, which first began making inquiries about the incident in January, reported that when one of its staff members asked Pool about the allegations, he accused the journalist of being duped by terrorists. "I cannot believe you're buying any of this," the magazine said the officer wrote in an e-mail. "This falls into the same category of any aqi [al-Qaeda in Iraq] propaganda." Another military representative, Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, told the magazine that insurgents caused the civilian deaths by placing the Iraqis in the line of Marine fire.

Hopefully Capt. Pool's e-mail makes it's way to his next promotion board.

The Bargewell investigation evolved from a preliminary inquiry conducted in January by Army Col. Gregory Watt, the New York Times reported yesterday. Watt was asked by senior commanders to look into why there had been no formal Marine Corps review of the Haditha incident. After reviewing death certificates that showed the 24 Iraqis had been killed by gunshot rather than a bomb, as the Marine report had stated, Watt recommended a broader inquiry.

When the Marine leadership in Washington reviewed his report, a senior Marine said yesterday, it asked that an Army general step in to conduct the investigation, another indication that the actions of Johnson and other top officers have been a subject of Bargewell's review.