Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

• Lynndie England burned in freak kitchen accident...
• Satan has his own brand of jeans...
• Farris Hassan is on his way home to Florida...
• Fed up pilot maroons drunken passenger on desert island...
• Oil prices up, Dow down for year's end... but energy stocks are AOK...
• Chalabi gets one hell of a boobie prize, at least for the next 30 days...
• Psst!! The NSA's cookie tracking was illegal, too (though I'm sure the righties will find some vague "Constitutional power" authorizing that, too...
• Good news! Looks like the kidnapped Brits have been sprung in Gaza...
• Bush's threat of vetoing anything short of a full extension of the Patriot Act and anything with that horrid McCain torture amendment in it proves to be as good as his word on basically everything else...
• According to Rawstory, Illinois governor Blagoyevich has written to Rummy to protest the U.S. refusal to stop doing business with companies involved in human trafficking. Nice...
• The White House thinks we can't figure out that they're behind the JD leak probe...
• ...Maybe they could start a war with Iran and make all this fuss just go away...
• John Hinckley gets seven get out of jail free cards...
• And Jack Abramoff is close to cutting a deal. Tick... tick... tick...

The National Security Agency / Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is the largest United States government intelligence agency. It is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and for the security of US government communications against similar agencies elsewhere. Established by a U.S. presidential executive order, the NSA works closely with the Department of Defense and is typically directed by a military officer...

Do you people not understand that different agencies operate under different statutes? If Mr. Bush had some probable cause to conduct a domestic law enforcement operation via the FBI, he STILL would have needed a warrant... We're talking NSA here -- essentially a component of Bush's military enterprise (which is probably why he used it instead of the FBI, to shield himself under the John Yoo cloak of "wartime powers") As for the Truong case -- the supposed legal precedent cited by Curt, Powerline and other desperate wingers in defense of Mr. Bush, ThinkProgress debunks this particular myth better than I could:

The Truong case was decided in 1978 — the same year FISA was passed — and did not deal with the FISA law. As the court noted right before the excerpt, "Truong dealt with a pre-FISA surveillance… it had no occasion to consider the application of the statute…” The Truong case dealt with the President’s power in the absence of a congressional statute. So the right is citing caselaw that predates the law in question ...

More relevant is the Katz case, which seems to be the prevailing caselaw relevant to our current mess, having been decided in 1980, two years after FISA became law:

Warrantless ''National Security'' Electronic Surveillance.--In Katz v. United States,151 Justice White sought to preserve for a future case the possibility that in ''national security cases'' electronic surveillance upon the authorization of the President or the Attorney General could be permissible without prior judicial approval. The Executive Branch then asserted the power to wiretap and to ''bug'' in two types of national security situations, against domestic subversion and against foreign intelligence operations, first basing its authority on a theory of ''inherent'' presidential power and then in the Supreme Court withdrawing to the argument that such surveillance was a ''reasonable'' search and seizure and therefore valid under the Fourth Amendment. Unanimously, the Court held that at least in cases of domestic subversive investigations, compliance with the warrant provisions of the Fourth Amendment was required.152 Whether or not a search was reasonable, wrote Justice Powell for the Court, was a question which derived much of its answer from the warrant clause; except in a few narrowly circumscribed classes of situations, only those searches conducted pursuant to warrants were reasonable. The Government's duty to preserve the national security did not override the gurarantee that before government could invade the privacy of its citizens it must present to a neutral magistrate evidence sufficient to support issuance of a warrant authorizing that invasion of privacy.153 This protection was even more needed in ''national security cases'' than in cases of ''ordinary'' crime, the Justice continued, inasmuch as the tendency of government so often is to regard opponents of its policies as a threat and hence to tread in areas protected by the First Amendment as well as by the Fourth.154 Rejected also was the argument that courts could not appreciate the intricacies of investigations in the area of national security nor preserve the secrecy which is required.155

The question of the scope of the President's constitutional powers, if any, remains judicially unsettled.156 Congress has acted, however, providing for a special court to hear requests for warrants for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence situations, and permitting the President to authorize warrantless surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information provided that the communications to be monitored are exclusively between or among foreign powers and there is no substantial likelihood any ''United States person'' will be overheard.157

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The left is planning to impail themselves on the question of whether or not we should be monitoring our enemies in order to stop their efforts to kill us. And they will use as the core of their argument their unbridled partisan hate to rationalize why we should not protect ourselves and take down Bush. Every 1oth grader knows FISA cannot trump the constitution, and decades of court precedence backing up the constitutional claims just seals the case.

"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law."

"To avoid further charges of cronyism, Attorney General Gonzales should call off the investigation. Better yet, Mr. Gonzales ought to fulfill his own oath of office and appoint a special counsel to determine whether federal laws were violated."

There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons.

These parallel violations underscore the continuing, disturbing parallels between this Administration and the Nixon Administration - parallels I also discussed in a prior column.

Indeed, here, Bush may have outdone Nixon: Nixon's illegal surveillance was limited; Bush's, it is developing, may be extraordinarily broad in scope. First reports indicated that NSA was only monitoring foreign calls, originating either in the USA or abroad, and that no more than 500 calls were being covered at any given time. But later reports have suggested that NSA is "data mining" literally millions of calls - and has been given access by the telecommunications companies to "switching" stations through which foreign communications traffic flows.

In sum, this is big-time, Big Brother electronic surveillance.

Given the national security implications of the story, the Times said they had been sitting on it for a year. And now that it has broken, Bush has ordered a criminal investigation into the source of the leak. He suggests that those who might have felt confidence they would not be spied on, now can have no such confidence, so they may find other methods of communicating. Other than encryption and code, it is difficult to envision how.

Such a criminal investigation is rather ironic - for the leak's effect was to reveal Bush's own offense. Having been ferreted out as a criminal, Bush now will try to ferret out the leakers who revealed him.

• The Rasmussen boobie poll
• Go ahead and spy on me (the right loses its collective mind)
• Kill the 'Clinton and Carter did it too' meme
• Capitol Hill Blues
• Why spy
• In case you missed it -- Barrons to Congress: consider impeachment...

Tags: politics, News, Bush, national security, NSA, government, spying, president

"The religious right's position on embryonic stem cell research is clear: consign Alzheimer's and Parkinson's sufferers to death on the off chance that a blastocyst will crawl out of the garbage pail to work the breakfast shift at Burger King." - Jerry And Joe Long, at Huffblog.

Ann Coulter and Icabod Crane...


... Coulter definitely was in the running for quote of the year with this gem from a recent column:

Which brings me to this week’s scandal about No Such Agency spying on "Americans.” I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo. ...

Thanks, Ann. Thanks for being completely psychotic. ... Anyway, this year, we chose the following separated at birth all-stars:

Honerable mention: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and "the Iranian hostage taker guy" ...

Runner up: Judge Sam Alito and Niles from "Frasier"...


And our winner: Karl Rove and Egghead Jr.

...But can he play baseball... Happy New Year!!!

Update: You know, sometimes when there's more to give, you give. Here are a few more honorable mentions for this year.

For best duo whose public policy positions are abhorrent but whose voices could make the phone book funny: Henry Kissinger and Ben Stein...

For best odd couple with leather bar moustaches: John Bolton and the dad from "American Chopper"...

For doing a heck of a job on both sides of the Bush spectrum: Mary Mapes and Michael "Brownie" Brown...

For best possible match-up from the present and the hereafter: Pope Benedict XVI and the late Agatha Christie...

For most frightening: The greedy Orc from "Lord of the Rings" and Dick Cheney...

(Honorable mention for scariest duo: Our good friends Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and their fellow alien/human coupling, Lilo and Stitch)...

Once again, Happy New Year!

The Foreign Office has had the draft of Craig's book for clearance for over 3 months now, and they are doing everything they can to try and prevent him from publishing his side of the story. Their latest attempt to cover their own backs was to inform him, the night before Christmas Eve, that these two documents cannot be published, and that he was to return or destroy all copies immediately.

I am in discussion with the FCO over what I am and am not allowed to publish in my book. The FCO is seeking to gut the book of all evidence of complicity with the Uzbek regime.

With Bliar cornered on extraordinary rendition, they are particularly anxious to suppress all evidence of our complicity in obtaining intelligence from Uzbek torture.

In particular, they have demanded I do not publish the attached documents, and that I hand over all copies of them.

The obvious answer to this is to post these documents as widely on the web as possible. This is also potentially very valuable in establishing that I am not attempting to make money from these documents - you don't have to buy my book to see them, they are freely available. If you buy the book, you are only paying for the added value of my thoughts.

This will only work if we can get the [documents] very widely posted, including on sites in the US and elsewhere outside the UK … there is a chance that those who … post this stuff will get threatened under the Official Secrets Act.

• Blair complicit in torture, too?

In interviews with a number of reservists home for the holidays, a pattern emerges on the Pentagon’s propaganda effort. Soldiers are encouraged to contact their local news media outlets to offer interviews about the war. A detailed set of talking points encourages them to:

--Admit initial doubts about the war but claim conversion to a belief in the American mission;

--Praise military leadership in Iraq and throw in a few words of support for the Bush administration;

--Claim the mission to turn security of the country over to the Iraqis is working;

--Reiterate that America must not abandon its mission and must stay until the “job is finished.”

--Talk about how “things are better” now in Iraq.

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

The administration contends it is still acting in self-defense after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, when it passed a resolution authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks."

"Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act," said one official who was briefed on the CIA's original cover program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. "It's an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

The interpretation undergirds the administration's determination not to waver under public protests or the threat of legislative action. For example, after The Washington Post disclosed the existence of secret prisons in several Eastern European democracies, the CIA closed them down because of an uproar in Europe. But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as "black sites" in classified documents.

The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.

"The executive branch will not pull back unless it has to," said a former Justice Department lawyer involved in the initial discussions on executive power. "Because if it pulls back unilaterally and another attack occurs, it will get blamed."

Which was just the conclusion I drew in this post. It may sometimes seem that GWB is mentally out to lunch, and in a lot of ways I think he is (particularly his childish glee at the grisly business of war, torture and nasty means of intelligence gathering,) but make no mistake, this guy was willing to do anything, violate any law, ignore any court and do whatever he had to do not to have a second 9/11 on his watch.

But isn't that what we want, you might ask? To be safe from terrorism at all costs? My answer would be "no." I'd rather have my country and its values and Constitution intact. I have enough faith in our armed forces and career intelligence professionals that they could follow the rules, clean up the problems in their operating procedures, and not get 9/11'ed again without turning the president into a king and the intelligence agencies and military into his secret police. I'm not the only one -- and not all of those who agree with me are Democrats (unless Phyllis Shclaffley and Bob Barr have suddenly changed sides.) Let's let conservative pundit Larry Sabato phrase it, shall we:

“The lesson is obvious, Mr. President: You're a lot closer to Nixon than you are to Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton. And that's not where you want to be. Nixon's second term ended rather badly, as you will recall.”

U.S. Defends Conduct in Padilla Case
Supreme Court Asked To Overrule 4th Circuit

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 29, 2005; A04

A federal appeals court infringed on President Bush's authority to run the war on terror when it refused to let prosecutors take custody of "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, the Justice Department said yesterday, as it urged the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

The sharply worded Justice Department filing was the latest salvo in an increasingly contentious battle over Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in 2002 and initially accused of plotting to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb." Padilla was held for more than three years by the military before he was indicted last month in Miami on separate criminal terrorism charges.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit refused last week to allow prosecutors to take custody of Padilla from the military and rebuked the Bush administration for its handling of the high-profile case. The Bush administration took strong issue yesterday with the Richmond-based court's decision and appealed it to the Supreme Court.

It was another remarkable turn in Padilla's case, which has evolved into a legal spat between the executive and judicial branches of government. The dispute is especially unusual because it involves the 4th Circuit, which has been the administration's venue of choice for high-profile terrorism cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The 4th Circuit has given the government extraordinary latitude on national security matters, ruling for prosecutors in the cases of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi and Padilla are the two U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants as part of the government's campaign against terror since Sept. 11.

The Justice Department brief said the 4th Circuit had mischaracterized the events of Padilla's incarceration and engaged in "an unwarranted attack on the exercise of Executive discretion." Prosecutors accused the court of going so far as to "usurp" Bush's authority as the nation's commander-in-chief and his government's "prosecutorial discretion."

In Padilla's case, the same three-judge panel that is now drawing the government's ire strongly backed the president's authority to hold Padilla without charges or trial in an earlier ruling. That decision, like the one refusing to authorize Padilla's transfer, was written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, who was a contender to be nominated by Bush to the Supreme Court this year.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts is the Supreme Court justice who oversees cases from the 4th Circuit, but it was unclear yesterday whether Roberts would rule himself on the government's request for Padilla's transfer. The full court is considering whether to take up the merits of Padilla's detention by the military.

The presumption of innocence is foundational to any democratic form of government. Without that presumption, the state is free to exert whatever control it arbitrarily chooses in the incarceration or punishment of its citizens. This effectively destroys the firewall that safeguards the individual from the vagaries of government power and intrusiveness. It is absurd to talk about democracy if the most fundamental of protections for its citizens are not provided. When the presumption of innocence is denied, justice is denied, and democracy withers.

For the first time in American history this principle is being challenged outright in the government's case against Jose Padilla. The Bush Administration is claiming that the president has the authority to strip a citizen of his constitutional rights in the name of national security. If they are successful in their efforts, the "inalienable" rights of man will cease to be. Citizens will no longer be protected by clearly articulated due process rights interpreted by an independent judiciary, but quickly dispatched by executive fiat. Justice will be dispensed at the discretion of the president.

For, as the government surely must understand, although the various facts it has asserted are not necessarily inconsistent or without basis, its actions have left not only the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake –- an impression we would have thought the government could ill afford to leave extant. They have left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror –- an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant. And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today. While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be.

• Padilla update
• The Madness of King George
• Color me skeptical...

I'm a Soldier, Not a Spy

By Grant Doty

Friday, December 30, 2005; Page A27

As Americans take stock of the news that the government has been involved in domestic warrantless eavesdropping as well as surveillance of "potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States," many people are troubled, including me.

Although the government may be interested in my ACLU membership, my wife's participation in war protests or my affiliation with the liberal United Church of Christ, my real anxiety stems from the fact that I am a soldier and may now be under suspicion from my friends and neighbors.

Specifically, given the information slowly leaking out of Washington, it may not be farfetched for some to think that when I "stumble across people or information" that might be of interest to the government, I might report it to the Pentagon's three-year-old Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

While such a conclusion would be false (I hadn't heard of CIFA before reading about it in the news this month), in an Orwellian world, the protestations of someone labeled the "eyes and ears" of the state are reasonably suspect.

What makes me think that the people with whom I interact regularly will somehow believe I won't report suspect words and actions? When I walk to my bus stop in Bethesda each morning, I see who has a "War Is Not the Answer" yard sign. One of the people I regularly see on my commute wears a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals button on her overcoat. My church, which prayed for me during my year in Iraq, has an e-mail list that informs me about local civic actions, including war protests. I attend night law school, frequently in uniform, and through the social network of law students know when the gay, lesbian and bisexual organization is planning to lead the picketing of Judge Advocate General Corps recruiters who come to campus.

Now that we've learned that the military may be collecting such "raw, unverified information" in the form of "Talon reports," my fear is that when friends and neighbors see me, in or out of uniform, their speech could be chilled. I wonder: Will I begin to see a change in behavior? Will my neighbors draw their shades more often? Will they think twice about putting a bumper sticker on their car? Will I be deleted from the church list? Will my law school class discussions be more reserved?

"Paranoia," some may say. The only people who need to worry are those with something to hide. This may be true. In fact, being with the president or against him in the war on terrorism may be the current controversy, but I can envision a time when antiabortion groups and churches might fear soldiers attending meetings or services if such groups are labeled "threats" by a subsequent administration. Are they sincere pro-lifers or moles? Perhaps gun owners' groups might feel that soldiers are joining to get access to membership lists or activities if such groups are deemed "dangerous." Is one a Second Amendment defender or domestic spy?

Yes, I took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies "foreign and domestic," but the implication of domestic intelligence-gathering by the military, even by a limited number of soldiers, should be sufficiently disturbing for American citizens in and out of uniform that we think long and hard about crossing the line, even a little.

The writer is a lieutenant colonel in the Army. The views expressed here are his own.

• Just 46 percent of Americans have a favorable view of President Bush, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup. (They like Laura, though) ...
  
• 33% of Americans would like to vote Dubya off the Survivor island first if they had the chance, just behind Paris Hilton, according to a new Parade Magazine poll ...
  
• Two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track under Mr. Bush's and the Republican Congress' leadership, according to the latest NPR poll by Stan Greenberg and Public Opinion Strategies... (though as often happens in polling, the two pollsters' analyses of the data differ according to their political leanings...)
  
• A GMI global attitudes poll finds Americans among the most gloomy and pessimistic people in the Western world regarding our economy and the direction of our country, and blowing more and more money on escapism to ease the pain...

Would you like fries with that?

Previous:

• Ah, now I get it...
• The Rasmussen boobie poll

Tags: Polls, Americans, Opinion,

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Dec. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- More than four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, many U.S. adults still believe some of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which have now been discredited, according to a new Harris Poll. For example:

-- Forty-one percent (41%) of U.S. adults believe that Saddam Hussein had
"strong links to Al Qaeda."
-- Twenty-two percent (22%) of adults believe that Saddam Hussein "helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11."
-- Twenty-six percent (26%) of adults believe that Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded."
-- Twenty-four percent (24%) of all adults believe that "several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis."

However, all of these beliefs and others have declined sharply since the questions were asked in February 2005. For example:

-- Those who think Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda have fallen from 64 to 41 percent.
-- Those who believe that Iraq was a serious threat to U.S. security are down from 61 to 48 percent.
-- Those who think Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 are down from 47 to 22 percent.
-- Those who think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are down from 36 to 26 percent.
-- Those who think Iraqi hijackers attacked the United States on 9/11 have fallen from 44 to 24 percent.

Although public support for the war in Iraq has been waning, a 56 percent majority of all adults believe that "the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein." However, this has also fallen from 76 percent since February.

These are the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 1,961 U.S. adults surveyed online between December 8 and 14, 2005 by Harris Interactive(R).

These new poll findings and trends show how slowly most people change their minds once they believe something to be true. Nevertheless, they also show that, over time, beliefs can change greatly. [Source: P.R. Newswire]

Which brings me to this week’s scandal about No Such Agency spying on “Americans.” I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo. -- Ann Coulter, in her wacky syndicated column, December 31, 2005

The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.

The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake.

Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program.

"Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."

Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035.

...it would be interesting to know if this "policy" was only implemented at the NSA or if it was a sort of "total awareness" going on at all government sites under the Bully Boy. The article states that the CIA did use them in 2002 until Daniel "Brandt called it to the agency's attention." Following cookies being placed upon anti-drug online ads (this would be in the Clinton years), "strict rules" were set in place in 2000 but as of 2001 at least 23 agencies were found by Congress to still be using them.

The Berger and Katz Cases.--In Berger v. New York,140 the Court confirmed the obsolesence of the alternative holding in Olmstead that conversations could not be seized in the Fourth Amendment sense.141 Berger held unconstitutional on its face a state eavesdropping statute under which judges were authorized to issue warrants permitting police officers to trespass on private premises to install listening devices. The warrants were to be issued upon a showing of ''reasonable ground to believe that evidence of crime may be thus obtained, and particularly describing the person or persons whose communications, conversations or discussions are to be overheard or recorded.'' For the five-Justice majority, Justice Clark discerned several constitutional defects in the law. ''First, . . . eavesdropping is authorized without requiring belief that any particular offense has been or is being committed; nor that the 'property' sought, the conversations, be particularly described.

''The purpose of the probable-cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment to keep the state out of constitutionally protected areas until it has reason to believe that a specific crime has been or is being committed is thereby wholly aborted. Likewise the statute's failure to describe with particularity the conversations sought gives the officer a roving commission to 'seize' any and all conversations. It is true that the statute requires the naming of 'the person or persons whose communications, conversations or discussions are to be overheard or recorded. . . .' But this does no more than identify the person whose constitutionally protected area is to be invaded rather than 'particularly describing' the communications, conversations, or discussions to be seized. . . . Secondly, authorization of eavesdropping for a two-month period is the equivalent of a series of intrusions, searches, and seizures pursuant to a single showing of probable cause. Prompt execution is also avoided. During such a long and continuous (24 hours a day) period the con versations of any and all persons coming into the area covered by the device will be seized indiscriminately and without regard to their connection with the crime under investigation. Moreover, the statute permits. . . extensions of the original two-month period--presumably for two months each--on a mere showing that such extension is 'in the public interest.'. . . Third, the statute places no termination date on the eavesdrop once the conversation sought is seized. . . . Finally, the statute's procedure, necessarily because its success depends on secrecy, has no requirement for notice as do conventional warrants, nor does it overcome this defect by requiring some showing of special facts. On the contrary, it permits unconsented entry without any showing of exigent circumstances. Such a showing of exigency, in order to avoid notice, would appear more important in eavesdropping, with its inherent dangers, than that required when conventional procedures of search and seizure are utilized. Nor does the statute provide for a return on the warrant thereby leaving full discretion in the officer as to the use of seized conversations of innocent as well as guilty parties. In short, the statute's blanket grant of permission to eavesdrop is without adequate judicial supervision or protective procedures.''142

Both Justices Black and White in dissent accused the Berger majority of so construing the Fourth Amendment that no wiretapping- eavesdropping statute could pass constitutional scrutiny,143 and in Katz v. United States,144 the Court in an opinion by one of the Berger dissenters, Justice Stewart, modified some of its language and pointed to Court approval of some types of statutorily-authorized electronic surveillance. Just as Berger had confirmed that one rationale of the Olmstead decision, the inapplicability of ''seizure'' to conversations, was no longer valid, Katz disposed of the other rationale. In the latter case, officers had affixed a listening device to the outside wall of a telephone booth regularly used by Katz and activated it each time he entered; since there had been no physical trespass into the booth, the lower courts held the Fourth Amendment not relevant. The Court disagreed, saying that ''once it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects peo ple--and not simply 'areas'--against unreasonable searches and seizures, it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.''145 Because the surveillance of Katz's telephone calls had not been authorized by a magistrate, it was invalid; however, the Court thought that ''it is clear that this surveillance was so narrowly circumscribed that a duly authorized magistrate, properly notified of the need for such investigation, specifically informed of the basis on which it was to proceed, and clearly apprised of the precise intrusion it would entail, could constitutionally have authorized, with appropriate safeguards, the very limited search and seizure that the Government asserts in fact took place.''146 The notice requirement, which had loomed in Berger as an obstacle to successful electronic surveillance, was summarily disposed of.147 Finally, Justice Stewart observed that it was unlikely that electronic surveillance would ever come under any of the established exceptions so that it could be conducted without prior judicial approval.148

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Americans say they are following the NSA story somewhat or very closely.

Just 26% believe President Bush is the first to authorize a program like the one currently in the news. Forty-eight percent (48%) say he is not while 26% are not sure.

Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans believe the NSA should be allowed to listen in on conversations between terror suspects and people living in the United States. That view is shared by 51% of Democrats and 57% of those not affiliated with either major political party.

"Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?"

"Is President Bush the first President to authorize a program for intercepting telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?"

A narrow plurality of likely voters nationwide believe President Bush acted within his Constitutional powers when he authorized the interception of international communications without the approval of a federal judge, but the public is closely divided on the issue, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Nearly half – 49% - said they think he has the power to authorize the intercepts, while 45% said he does not, the survey showed.

The interactive survey of 1,929 likely voters nationwide, conducted Dec. 20-21, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Asked if the President’s actions made Americans more safe or less safe, 50% said the nation was safer because of his actions, while 18% said the actions put the country more at risk and 26% said it made no difference in our level of safety.

However, 44% said they were concerned that the communication intercepts were a step toward stripping Americans of their privacy. Another 23% said they believe the secret intercepts are important in rare cases to fight terrorism, and 29% said they were necessary to combat enemies.

• Who's side are they on??? The Times spins for Collin
• Go ahead and spy on me (the right loses its collective mind)
• Kill the 'Clinton and Carter did it too' meme
• Eric Alterman is on fire
• Capitol Hill Blues
• Why spy
• In case you missed it -- Barrons to Congress: consider impeachment
• NYO Confidential

• Pimp my reporter

Tags: News, MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell, Bias, Media, Right wing

• Color me skeptical

A British woman and her parents were kidnapped by a group of unidentified gunmen today in the southern Gaza Strip.

Kate Burton, 25, who worked for Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, was bundled into a white Mercedes car with her mother and father this afternoon only a few hundred yards from the Rafah border with Egypt.

Armed men snatch three Britons – a woman, man and child – in Egyptian Sinai and carry them by force through the Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip

According to one report, the abductors are members of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees who recently threatened to "cleanse" the crossing terminal. Last week, the British Foreign Office warned citizens not to enter the Gaza Strip for any reason for fear of kidnapping or other forms of terror.

Local reports indicated that the hostages were a 25-year-old human rights worker and her visiting parents, and said they had been snatched in the town of Rafah.

"We are in a position to confirm reports of three Britons missing in the occupied territories ... at this stage, we have no further details," a Foreign Office spokesman said.

It was reported that the woman worked at the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights.

It was said the three Britons had been travelling in a car 200 yards away from the border crossing when they were approached by gunmen in a white Mercedes.

They were bundled into the attackers' car and driven off at high speed. The Mercedes was pursued by a security vehicle, but got away.

The mastermind of the Munich kidnappings during the 1972 Olympics says he has no regrets... And guess who's helping Stephen Spielberg promote the controversial film?

Tags: Movies, Munich

Powell OK with Bush's spying tactics
The New York Times, December 26, 2005

WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that it would not have been ''that hard'' for President Bush to have obtained warrants for eavesdropping on domestic telephone and Internet activity, but that he saw ''nothing wrong'' with the decision not to do so.

''My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants,'' Powell said. ''And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that.''

But Powell added that ''for reasons that the president has discussed and the attorney general has spoken to, they chose not to do it that way.''

''I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions,'' he said.

Asked if such eavesdropping should continue, Powell said, ''Yes, of course it should continue.''

Powell said he had not been told about the eavesdropping activity when he served as secretary of state.

He spoke on the ABC News program ''This Week'' about the disclosure, first reported in The New York Times, that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications by Americans without approval from a special foreign intelligence court.

Though Powell stopped short of criticizing Bush, his suggestion that there was ''another way to handle it'' was another example of his parting company on a critical issue with the president he served for four years. ...

• Go ahead and spy on me (the right loses its collective mind)
• Kill the 'Clinton and Carter did it too' meme
• Eric Alterman is on fire
• Capitol Hill Blues
• Why spy
• In case you missed it -- Barrons to Congress: consider impeachment
• NYO Confidential

Tags: politics, News, Bush, national security, NSA, government, spying, New York Times,
Collin Powell,

What side are you on?

... I have a question to American journalists in general.

In your heart, would you rather be a good American or a good journalist?

It is obvious these days journalists don’t feel like they can be both. I understand journalists are supposed to be the “watchdog” over our government by covering and reporting on its activities; however, under no circumstances should this be tolerated at the expense of our national security.

I don’t want to know what top secret programs we have.
I don’t want to know how we are spying on our enemy.
I don’t want to know in which countries the CIA is holding prisoners.
I don’t want to know all of our interrogation methods…

…because if I know, our enemy knows. That is dangerous for America.

It is time for the journalists of America to become Americans first.

What an absolutely absurd question. And here's one for you: What country do you want to live in? You apparently would be very much at home in the old Soviet Union, where bugging your phone and your kitchen were de regeur... or maybe you could cozy up in a little cabin in Havana, where the government watches your every move, and there's nery a terror attack? Wake up, whoever you are! This country was founded on the principles of freedom -- primarily freedom from oppressive, intrusive government. If you don't like that, and you'd rather be spied on in order for your daddy, the president to "keep you safe", move to North Korea.

Washington needs to step up to the plate and take the gloves off with respect to MSM's apparent mission to stoop to new depths in order to throw obstacles in front of the NSA, the CIA and the Administration. They do this in the name of protecting individual rights -- but most every thinking American knows there's a political agenda behind it. Mainstream America is supportive of our government doing everything it can to protect it's citizens from indiscriminate murder. Even if it means invading the privacy of suspected terrorist conspirators that happen to be living in this country! U.S. Citizens or not! That's how we feel about it here.

Nobody ever said it was a risk-free proposition to stand by the U.S. Constitution.

Not the nation's founders, certainly: They risked their very lives in waging the war for independence that led to enshrining the Constitution's democratic ideals in the first place.

And now the threat of terrorism sharpens the risk posed by living in an open, democratic society.

As long as the nation values and protects by law the rights of everyday Americans to be spared from unwarranted snooping, its enemies could find ways to exploit that openness - as they assuredly did on Sept. 11, 2001.

Citizens have a choice. They can live with that risk, understanding it for the central role it plays in making this a nation worth preserving. Or they can surrender to fear - out of a misguided sense that no civil liberty is so cherished as to risk another terror attack by its defense.

In President Bush's first formal defense to Congress of his secret, warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, there is the scent of surrender.

In a letter sent on Thursday to Congress from the Department of Justice, the Bush administration argued that national security trumps the privacy concerns of individuals.

While giving a nod to the "important and legitimate privacy interest at stake," a top Justice Department lawyer said it "must be balanced... against the government's compelling interest in the security of the nation."

It sounds like a classic example of trying to justify the means by the ends. Security is all-important, therefore the normal requirement to obtain court approval for surveillance had to be short-circuited?

That reasoning is an affront to Americans who hold dear both their liberty and their lives...

Keep in mind that while the Carter administration asked Congress to enact the FISA statute in 1978, Attorney General Griffin Bell emphasized that the law "does not take away the power of the president under the Constitution." And in 1994, when the Clinton administration invited Congress to expand FISA to cover physical as well as electronic searches, the associate attorney general testified: "Our seeking legislation in no way should suggest that we do not believe we have inherent authority" under the Constitution. "We do," she concluded.

Of course, there are inconvenient facts which should, by now, be known to all, but since we're dealing with a country populated by approximately 40 percent mindless Bush-bots, here it is in black and white, courtesy of no less a liberal stooge than Mrs. Alan Greenspan, first in a pre-Christmas conversation with "go ahead and tap myphone!" Bush stooge Sen. George Allen:

ALLEN: Well, generally speaking, it is much better. I agree with you that it makes more sense if it is practicable to have independent judicial review, do the FISA courts. However, the president needs to have flexibility.

The law, his constitutional rights and duties and responsibilities, allow him to do so. President Bush is not the first president to do this. His predecessor, President Clinton, did. President Carter did.

And if one wants to look at various cases, like the United States versus Trong, had to do with—it was a 1980 case, during the Jimmy Carter administration, where they don‘t have time to be going through all this paperwork.

And the number of hours or days that it may take to get that warrant means that that information is not gleaned, the information is not acquired, and maybe we don‘t corral some of these terrorists as quickly as we could or it‘s a complete missed opportunity .

MITCHELL: Let me just clear the record up, Senator, because we‘ve checked today, with both the Carter and the Clinton White Houses, and every lawyer that we‘ve spoken to says that they did not do this.

They did not do what this administration has now conceded and, in fact, claims credit for doing, which is to use the National Security Agency to spy on Americans, to spy on people making calls to and from the United States without a court warrant.

ALLEN: Well, I‘ve actually—well, the documents I saw that President Clinton actually authorized the attorney general, then Janet Reno, and certain key people to give the authority for such warrantless eavesdropping ...

MITCHELL: For the FBI, but not for the NSA is my understanding.

ALLEN: Well, right, for the FBI, OK.

MITCHELL: I think the big difference is that it‘s this super secret spy agency that many people are suggestions doesn‘t have any controls over it other than this intelligence court.

Well, let me take you beyond that, because the intelligence court itself has had one resignation, admittedly a Democrat. A Clinton-era appointee has resigned from this 11-person court and we talked—NBC News talked to another member, not a Democrat, and he says that he has some concerns—not deep concerns but some concerns—of the other remaining 10 judges are going to meet within the next two weeks. So people involved in this are concerned about the president.

ALLEN: I think it‘s completely legitimate to be concerned, but people also need to understand the law, the responsibilities and in fact, the constitutional authority of the president of the United States. If they don‘t like it, I suppose they can propose amendments to the Constitution.

But the president is trying to—in this effort, trying to identify terrorist threats, determine those threats, and then act. And one of the ways you have to do it is to try to intercept some of these calls.

They get all sorts of information off of laptops, off of different means about these terrorists and al Qaeda in particular, and they need to act on it. And no one‘s actually been harmed by this. This is not as if somebody is being detained or they‘re ...

MITCHELL: Well, how would we know?

ALLEN: Well, they‘re not being ...

MITCHELL: We actually don‘t know whether anyone‘s been harmed.

ALLEN: Well, being detained is a different thing. No one‘s talking about suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which has been done by presidents in time of war in previous years in our history of our country.

MITCHELL: But the point is that we don‘t know whose privacy has been invaded nor what records are being kept. So there‘s no way to know what‘s out there. You wouldn‘t know if your phone calls were intercepted.

ALLEN: That‘s true. That‘s true. And it‘s one of those risks or one of those judgment calls we have to make that is it worth it to allow the president and our intelligence agencies, our national security agencies, allow them the flexibility ... especially the way communications are now, whether it‘s the Internet or cell phones that move around all over the country and all over the world, do we want them to have that ability to act quickly, flexibly to protect America from terrorist threats? I‘m willing to take that risk.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MITCHELL: Welcome back. We‘ll be talking to Senator Joe Biden about the domestic surveillance program and Iraq in a moment. Today, Republicans accused Democrats of playing politics with the White House spy story. The RNC sent out this press release saying, quote, “Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter both authorized search/surveillance without court orders.”

The RNC press release goes on to cite an executive order from President Clinton on February 9th, 1995 that says, “The attorney general is authorized to approve physical searches without a court order.”

But that actually leaves out a crucial part of the sentence. So let‘s clean that up. The actual executive order from President Clinton reads, “The attorney general is authorized to approve physical searches without a court order if the attorney general makes the certifications required by that section.”

And that section refers to a requirement that the attorney general certify that the search will not involve quote, “The premises, information, material, or property of a United States person.”

In other words, U.S. citizens or anyone inside the United States. It‘s the same story about how the RNC is framing former president Jimmy Carter‘s executive order, which is taking it out of context.

OK on domestic spying leaves Bush on thin ice even with right-wing radicals
Tuesday, December 27, 2005 If our government had checks and balances without all of the governmental branches belonging to only one political party, the impeachment process would have already begun.

Even without this balance, this administration is going down the spiral to political suicide just as fast as it can make decisions.

Finally it bit the one bullet that will explode in its face. Even partisan politics cannot cover up a president’s running a covert intelligence operation that violates our Constitution. This president doesn’t have a clue he is treading on the one sheet of thin ice even right-wing radicals will abandon him on.

Mr. Bush — since he is not acting like our president, he should not be addressed as such — has thrown down the gauntlet, stating he has every right to bypass a court set up specifically to deal with terrorist activities. Mr. Bush cannot use the excuse of expediency, as this court even allowed wiretaps without permission with a 72-hour window before the court was notified to set wiretaps. What more could one want? How easy would it be? Evidently not easy enough for this power-grabbing bunch.

Now Mr. Bush says he is doing these illegal wiretaps to “protect the people.” Not one president was ever sworn in to office to “protect the people.” When you are sworn in as president, the oath you swear is to protect the Constitution — something Mr. Bush must hate, with the blatant disregard he has shown it.

Henry Pabian, Plain Township

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush ranks as the least popular and most bellicose of the last ten U.S. presidents, according to a new survey.

Only nine percent of the 662 people polled picked Bush as their favorite among the last 10 presidents. John F. Kennedy topped that part of the survey, with 26 percent, closely followed by Bill Clinton (25 percent) and Ronald Reagan (23 percent).

Bush was also viewed as the most warlike president (43 percent), the worst for the economy (42 percent) and the least effective (33 percent). But he was rated most highly in response to a question on who would do the right thing even if it were unpopular.

The survey was conducted by the Chicago-based National Qualitative Centers, a marketing research company, as part of research for a forthcoming book on popular preferences, one of its authors, Ken Berwitz, said on Friday.

As you may remember, last year our staff conducted an extensive review of all the misinformation we identified and corrected in the early days in order to name the first annual "Misinformer of the Year." We singled out one particularly egregious purveyor of falsehoods and awarded Bill O'Reilly the dubious title. O'Reilly graciously accepted the award on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

This year, of all the news anchors, columnists, pundits, and reporters whose work we've critiqued and corrected, one man stands alone as a clear successor to the O'Reilly throne. We are pleased to announce broadcast journalist, former newspaper bureau chief, former presidential speechwriter, and best-selling author Chris Matthews has earned the title of 2005's "Misinformer of the Year." At times, it has even been difficult to tell the difference between 2005's Misinformer of the Year and his predecessor.

• Why spy
• In case you missed it -- Barrons to Congress: consider impeachment
• NYO Confidential

By the standards of past attorneys general, Ashcroft and Gonzales were well qualified for the job. Still, neither of them had much occasion to consider the legal limits of presidential power before they took office. Ashcroft taught business law and later became attorney general of Missouri. He then spent 14 years as a governor and senator before becoming Bush's first-term AG. Gonzales was a partner at a corporate law firm before Bush became governor of Texas. He served as a legal adviser to the governor, and was briefly Texas secretary of state and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

By the standards of past White House counsels, both Gonzales and Miers were lightly qualified, since neither of them had Washington experience before guiding the president. By contrast, two of President Clinton's White House counsels, Lloyd Cutler and Abner Mikva, were eminent attorneys with decades of experience in assessing the limits of federal power.

Secret court modified wiretap requests
Intervention may have led Bush to bypass panel

By STEWART M. POWELL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA, which intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications.

"They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration."

Unwarranted Executive Power

The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws
By THOMAS G. DONLAN

Unnatural Disaster

AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers. [Emphasis added]

It was not a shock to learn that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct intercepts of international phone calls to and from the United States. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the government to gather the foreign communications of people in the U.S. -- without a warrant if quick action is important. But the law requires that, within 72 hours, investigators must go to a special secret court for a retroactive warrant.

The USA Patriot Act permits some exceptions to its general rules about warrants for wiretaps and searches, including a 15-day exception for searches in time of war. And there may be a controlling legal authority in the Sept. 14, 2001, congressional resolution that authorized the president to go after terrorists and use all necessary and appropriate force. It was not a declaration of war in a constitutional sense, but it may have been close enough for government work.

Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn't last four years.

In that time, Congress has extensively debated the rules on wiretaps and other forms of domestic surveillance. Administration officials have spent many hours before many committees urging lawmakers to provide them with great latitude. Congress acted, and the president signed.

Now the president and his lawyers are claiming that they have greater latitude. They say that neither the USA Patriot Act nor the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act actually sets the real boundary. The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him.

"We also believe the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Department of Justice made a similar assertion as far back as 2002, saying in a legal brief: "The Constitution vests in the president inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that Constitutional authority." Gonzales last week declined to declassify relevant legal reviews made by the Department of Justice.

Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.

Surely the "strict constructionists" on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary eventually will point out what a stretch this is. The most important presidential responsibility under Article II is that he must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That includes following the requirements of laws that limit executive power. There's not much fidelity in an executive who debates and lobbies Congress to shape a law to his liking and then goes beyond its writ.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was "unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities." But the senator was so respectful of the administration's injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 -- make his misgivings public and demand more information.

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

Wrong. If we don't discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy -- in the mirror.

• Political motives
• This call is being recorded for (classified) purposes...
• Daschle begs to differ...
• The spying game
• The presidential crime blotter
• The truth (without jokes)
• CensureBush.org
• Shame on the New York Times
• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

BAGHDAD, Dec. 26 -- Unexpectedly low support from overseas voters has left Ahmed Chalabi -- the returned Iraqi exile once backed by the United States to lead Iraq -- facing a shutout from power in this month's vote for the country's first full-term parliament since the 2003 invasion. ...

... With 95 percent of a preliminary tally from the Dec. 15 vote now completed, Chalabi remained almost 8,000 votes short of the 40,000 minimum needed for him or his bloc to win a single seat in the 275-seat National Assembly, according to election officials. Without a seat in the assembly, Chalabi would presumably be unable to obtain a post in the resulting government. ...

... Chalabi's supporters here had hoped he would do well among exile voters who were allowed to cast ballots overseas. But results announced Monday showed he received just 0.89 percent of the "special vote,'' from Iraqi citizens in foreign countries, hospitals, the army and prisons. Kurdish politicians received the largest share of the special vote, with the backing of millions of Iraqi Kurdish exiles and members of the security forces, while the current governing coalition of Shiite religious parties has so far won the most votes overall.

Chalabi's bloc has done poorly across the country, according to the preliminary tally, which left it statistically unlikely that the bloc could win a seat outright. Final results are expected by early next month.

Chalabi pulled out of the governing Shiite alliance ahead of the elections, opting instead to form a small party of his own, after the alliance refused to guarantee him the top job of prime minister, his aides said at the time. ...

Spy net may pull in all U.S. calls overseas
Many Americans' privacy is at risk, some say

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
THE BOSTON GLOBE

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to al-Qaida, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA. ...

... The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiber-optic lines and Internet switching stations and then uses a computer to check for names, numbers and words that have been identified as suspicious.

"The whole idea of the NSA is intercepting huge streams of communications, taking in 2 million pieces of communications an hour," said James Bamford, the author of two books on the NSA, who was the first to reveal the inner workings of the secret agency.

"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has obtained documents about the NSA's using Freedom of Information Act requests.

The NSA's system of monitoring e-mails and phone calls to check for search terms has been used for decades overseas, where the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches does not apply, declassified records have shown.

But since Bush's order in 2001, Bamford and other specialists said, the same process probably has been used to sort through international messages to and from the United States, though humans have never seen the vast majority of the data.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said. ...

...Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation. ...

... Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties. ...

The Curious Section 126 of the Patriot Act

What is it that the National Security Agency began doing after 9/11 that necessitated Presidential authorization for warantless surveillance?

We have all learned in the past week that the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978 contains provisions that allow the government to conduct quick reaction surveillance of an individual and go to the court afterwards for a warrant.

So what would the NSA need to do that isn't covered by the provisions of FISA?

My guess is the government decided after 9/11 to monitor everyone. [emphasis added]

Thanks JMC for pointing out that the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act Of 2005 contains a Section 126, inserted by the House, requiring the Attorney General to submit a report to Congress "on any initiative of the Department of Justice that uses or is intended to develop pattern-based data-mining technology."

Data-mining is defined in Section 126 as:

"a query or search or other analysis of one or more electronic databases, where--

(A) at least one of the databases was obtained from or remains under the control of a non-Federal entity, or the information was acquired initially by another department or agency of the Federal Government for purposes other than intelligence or law enforcement;

(B) the search does not use personal identifiers of a specific individual or does not utilize inputs that appear on their face to identify or be associated with a specified individual to acquire information; and

(C) a department or agency of the Federal Government is conducting the query or search or other analysis to find a pattern indicating terrorist or other criminal activity.

In English?

Congress is seeking assurances that "the privacy and due process rights of individuals" is protected in the course of the government using massive databases of non-publicly available data; both proprietary databases and its own compiled intelligence and law enforcement databases to "search" for terrorists and terrorist connections.

In this program, the subject of monitoring is not one individual but everyone. Pattern-based data-mining is used to find links that might indicate terrorist activity.

In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

NEW YORK The politician and onetime administration and U.S. newspaper source, Ahmed Chalabi, "appears to have suffered a humiliating defeat at the recent Iraq polls," NBC News reports today, according to the uncertified preliminary results.

It said that preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes.

In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate Chalabi, the current deputy prime minister who some neocons thought might soon head the country, had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote. In the Sunni province of Anbar, 113 people voted for him.

"The election results in Iraq may present Chalabi’s ardent U.S. supporters with a quandary: Chalabi, as well as other losing candidates, is alleging fraud in the election, even though the Bush administration hailed the vote as a historic step for democracy in Iraq," NBC reports. Indeed, the country is now in political turmoil over this.

During the election, Chalabi’s campaign posters proclaimed, "We Liberated Iraq."

Just last month, with the help of major U.S. lobbyists, he toured this country, meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and appeared widely on American television.

"I thought the Thomas More Law Center made a huge mistake in taking this case and in pushing this case to the extent they did," Santorum said Wednesday. He said he would end his affiliation with the center.

The leading Democratic challenger in Santorum's 2006 re-election battle, state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., accused him of backtracking on intelligent design.

Casey spokesman Larry Smar said Wednesday that Santorum's statements were "yet another example of 'Election Year Rick' changing his positions for political expediency." Casey has led Santorum in recent polls.

In an opinion piece from January 2005, here's what Rick Santorum said about the Dover Area School Board and intelligent design:

Recently, the Dover Area School District in York County updated their biology curriculum in an attempt to create a more balanced approach to teaching evolution. A statement regarding the status of evolutionary theory and the existence of alternative theories will be read to all students during the time evolution is studied in the high school biology course. Additionally, students will be able to voluntarily view reference books in the library that present a variety of cutting-edge scientific views both supporting and opposing Darwinian theory. The Dover Area School District has taken a step in the right direction by engaging in the debate and attempting to teach the controversy of evolution. (emphasis ours)

Yesterday, one day after the Dover Area School District was told by a federal judge that their new "more balanced approach to teaching evolution" was unconstitutional, Rick's point of view seems to have, um, grown an opposable thumb.

"There will come a day when there will not be a George W in the White House," Sen. Craig warned, after calling top conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday to explain his position. "And tragically enough, and I hope never, it could be a Hillary Clinton."

Craig wondered aloud: "Who will be her attorney general, and what might he or she do to your liberties and mine? There's the question."

The Idaho Republican told Limbaugh: "You know, I've been here a little while, and I remember Janet Reno, and I remember Waco and Ruby Ridge."

Would you buy some freedom from this Senator...?

And the best NewsMax headline of all: 22 Congressmen Hate Christmas. Ho ho ho, baby!

Tags: News, Politics, Hillary, Election, Santorum, Intelligent design

"What you have seen is a Congress, which has been AWOL through intimidation or lack of unity, get off the sidelines and jump in with both feet," especially on the national security front, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

"This is partly a function of approval ratings," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). "People pay attention [to polls] and start saying, 'Lets take a more independent tack.' It is frankly self-interest, self-preservation."

The Department of Defense now says that analysts may not have followed the law and its own guidelines that require the purging of information collected on U.S. persons after 90 days. The law states that if no connection is made between named persons and foreign governments or transnational terrorist organizations or illegal activity, U.S. persons have a right to their privacy and information about them must be deleted.

Thanks to RL, I now know that the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more. ...

Yesterday's New York Times editorial on National Security Agency spying in the United States refers to "your mail and your e-mail" and "your telephone conversations" being monitored.

The connotation of course is that the "you" is some New York Times reading Cappuccino drinking upper middle class Manhattan intellectual, that thousands if not tens of thousands of similar Americans are having their phones tapped and e-mails intercepted.

Come on. The government is not just repeating the targeting of political opponents a la J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is not picking out a Seymour Hersh or a Cindy Sheehan to find their links to foreign influences nor seeking to ruin their lives by developing incriminating evidence on them.

I know I sound like some Fox news watching, flag waiving, gun toting, Cappuccino hater defending the national security state.

The New York Times and the government may not want to say the obvious, that by and large, it is Muslims in America who are being monitored in the 9/11 Order. It is not the liberal or the literary in the back of the New York City taxicab that is the target. It is the driver.

If the government is going to find the next Mohamed Atta in our midst, it is going to do so, it thinks, through the intercepted phone call to uncle Mohamed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. It is going to correlate the purchase, the airline ticket, the license plate at the Mosque.

What has happened since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of the past: We must pledge allegiance to a certain post 9/11 Order, abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of defeating the terrorists.

We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it.

• The spying game
• The presidential crime blotter
• The truth (without jokes)
• CensureBush.org
• Shame on the New York Times
• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

The success of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shia religious parties, has been far greater than expected according to preliminary results. It won 58 per cent of the vote in Baghdad, while Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister strongly supported by Tony Blair, got only 14 per cent of the vote. In Basra, Iraq's second city, 77 per cent of voters supported the Alliance and only 11 per cent Mr Allawi. ...

... Another victor in the election is the fiery nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia fought fierce battles with US troops last year. The US military said at the time it intended "to kill or capture him".

Mr Bush cited the recapture of the holy city of Najaf from the Mehdi Army in August 2004 as an important success for the US Army. Mr Sadr will now be one of the most influential leaders within the coalition.

All the parties which did well in the election have strength only within their own community. The Shia coalition succeeded because the Shia make up 60 per cent of Iraqis but won almost no votes among the Kurds or Sunni, each of whom is about 20 per cent of the population. The Sunni and the Kurdish parties won no support outside their own communities.

The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad, sounded almost despairing yesterday as he reviewed the results of the election. "It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities," he said. "But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operation." ...

...The election also means a decisive switch from a secular Iraq to a country in which, outside Kurdistan, religious law will be paramount. Mr Allawi, who ran a well-financed campaign, was the main secular hope but that did not translate into votes. The other main non-religious candidate, Ahmed Chalabi, won less than 1 per cent of the vote in Baghdad and will be lucky to win a single seat in the new 275-member Council of Representatives.

"People underestimate how religious Iraq has become," said one Iraqi observer. "Iran is really a secular society with a religious leadership, but Iraq will be a religious society with a religious leadership." Already most girls leaving schools in Baghdad wear headscarves. Women's rights in cases of divorce and inheritance are being eroded.

• The presidential crime blotter
• The truth (without jokes)
• CensureBush.org
• Shame on the New York Times
• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

(archive of Spy headlines on the Reid Report here.)

Salvatore: In your book, My Life, you wrote very movingly about wanting to save your marriage. Mr President, what insights and modifications have you felt that you have wanted to focus on to keep your marriage now healthy and strong?

Clinton: I think the most important thing, particularly for us, because Hillary has to go to Washington every week, is to maintain the communication. To me, the most important thing is for people, particularly when their children are grown, to stay involved in each other's lives. You have to continue to be each other's best friend.

That's what we really work on. Sometimes we're better at it than other times. But we've built a whole life together. It's always easy to bag it. It's harder to stay. But you know, after a certain point it seems like a lot of trouble to start again, too. There's something to be said for sticking.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." -- Alexander Hamilton

Bush has admitted to a violation of FISA without colorable defense. He is liable to prosecution with sentence for each illegal wiretap of up to five years in the penitentiary.

50 USCS § 1809 (2005)
§ 1809. Criminal sanctions
(a) Prohibited activities. A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally--
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.
(b) Defense. It is a defense to a prosecution under subsection (a) that the defendant was a law enforcement or investigative officer engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction.
(c) Penalties. An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $ 10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.
(d) Federal jurisdiction. There is Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section if the person committing the offense was an officer or employee of the United States at the time the offense was committed.

He has no colorable defense - not in the Use of Force Resolution nor in some unenumerated "plenary power" of dictatorship in the Constitution

Bush has dared the Congress to impeach him. I think that the Congress should oblige him, and if this Congress refuses, let it stand before the American people next year to tell us why.

In his first discussion of the underpinnings of the Bush administration's decision to eavesdrop without warrants on communications between the United States and abroad, Vice President Dick Cheney cast the action today as part of a broader effort to reassert powers of the presidency that he said had been dangerously eroded in the years after Vietnam and Watergate.

Talking with a small group of reporters on Air Force Two as he flew from Pakistan to Oman, Mr. Cheney spoke in far broader terms about the effort to expand the powers of the executive than President Bush did on Monday during an hourlong news conference.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it," said Mr. Cheney, who was in many ways the intellectual instigator of the rapid expansion of presidential authority as soon as Mr. Bush came to office.

Today, he made no effort to play down his central role in aggressively seizing those powers, citing his early battle to keep private the names of people he consulted while drawing up recommendations for Mr. Bush on energy policy. That effort was ultimately upheld in the courts.

Mr. Cheney appears to have been the first senior administration official to brief a very small number of Congressional leaders on the program and the underlying technology that has permitted the National Security Agency to find and immediately tap into "hot numbers" - telephone calls and e-mail messages suspected to contain communications between terror suspects in the United States and abroad.

Ordinarily, any tap that includes one party inside the United States has required obtaining a warrant from a secret court that oversees the enforcement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - itself an effort to address of the abuses during the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Cheney was unapologetic about circumventing the legal protections, echoing President Bush's declarations that it was an appropriate use of executive authority, and going further than Mr. Bush by insisting that it has prevented subsequent attacks.

"The fact of the matter is this is a good, solid program," he said on CNN during his stopover in Pakistan. "It has saved thousands of lives, we are doing exactly the right thing, we are doing it in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, and it ought to be supported. This is not about violating civil liberties, because we're not."

Later, aboard Air Force Two, he said, "I'm sure there is going to be a debate," adding, "It's an important subject." But having served in Congress as chief of staff to President Ford - a period when he first became concerned about infringements on presidential power - he said he believed the pendulum had swung back too far after the Nixon resignation.

After expressing respect for the powers of Congress, he told reporters: "But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy."

He described the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973 in a post-Vietnam effort by Congress to prevent the president from committing troops without sharp congressional oversight, as "an infringement on the authority of the presidency" and suggested it could be unconstitutional. Similarly, he said budget legislation passed in the 1970's restricted the president's ability to impound money.

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the '70's served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Cheney's philosophy on both the wiretap issues and detention and interrogation policy took legal form in a series of memorandums and briefs, many of them written by John C. Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's office of legal counsel.

Professor Yoo, a mild-mannered legal scholar from Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, has told friends that he was taken aback when he became the best-known proponent of pushing the envelope of presidential powers. But many of the documents he and his colleagues wrote described broad and unilateral executive power to combat terrorism, including detaining people without charge indefinitely, subjecting detainees to harsh interrogations and to eavesdropping without first obtaining warrants, under some conditions.

For example, in a Sept. 21, 2001, memorandum, administration lawyers said that eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages without a court's permission could be proper, notwithstanding the Fourth Amendments ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The government may be justified," Mr. Yoo wrote in the memorandum, "in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." Four days later, Mr. Yoo wrote that Congress cannot place "limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response."

"These decisions," wrote Mr. Yoo, who left the administration two years ago, "under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make."

• CensureBush.org
• Shame on the New York Times
• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

HARRISBURG, PA., Dec. 20 - A federal judge ruled today that it is unconstitutional for a Pennsylvania school district to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology courses because intelligent design is a religious viewpoint that advances "a particular version of Christianity."

In the nation's first case to test the legal merits of intelligent design, Judge John E. Jones III issued a broad, stinging rebuke to its advocates and a boost to scientists who have fought to bar intelligent design from the science curriculum.

The judge also excoriated members of the school board in Dover, Pa., who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of "breathtaking inanity" and "dragged" their community into "this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

Eleven parents in Dover, Pa., a growing suburb about 20 miles south of Harrisburg, sued their school board a year ago after the board voted to read students a brief statement introducing intelligent design in ninth grade biology class. The statement said that there are "gaps in the theory" of evolution and that intelligent design is another explanation they should examine.

Judge Jones concluded that intelligent design is not science, and that in order to claim that it is, its proponents admitted that they must change the very definition of science to include supernatural explanations. He said that teaching intelligent design as science in public school violates the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits public officials from using their positions to impose or establish a particular religion.

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect," Judge Jones wrote. "However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."

The six-week trial in Federal District Court in Harrisburg gave intelligent design the most thorough academic and legal airing it has had since the movement's inception about 15 years ago, and was often likened to the momentous Scopes case that put evolution on trial 80 years before.

Intelligent design posits that biological life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent source. Its adherents say that they refrain from identifying the identity of the designer, and that it could even be aliens or a time traveler.

But the judge said the evidence in the trial proved that intelligent design is "creationism relabeled." The Supreme Court has already ruled that creationism, which relies on the Biblical account of the creation of life, cannot be taught as science in a public school.

The decision by the judge, a longtime Republican nominated for the federal bench by President Bush during his first term, is legally binding only for school districts in the middle district of Pennsylvania. It is unlikely to be appealed, because the school board members who supported intelligent design were unseated in elections in November, and replaced with a slate that opposes the intelligent design policy and said it would abide by the judge's decision.

Stand with Congressman Conyers: Demand Censure for Bush-Cheney Misconduct, Investigate Impeachable Offenses

I am taking steps against the Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraq War and its collection of intelligence. I am going to need you to stand with me in fighting for accountability.

Join me to demand censure for Bush and Cheney in addition to the creation of a Special Committee to investigate impeaching the Bush Administration for its widespread abuses of power.

I have sought answers from the administration to questions arising from the Downing Street Minutes, the Valerie Plame leak, and scores of other abominable abuses of power that pervade the activities of this White House. 121 Members of Congress and many citizens like you have joined me in asking these questions of the President.

I have just completed a thorough review of this administration’s misconduct and have produced a 250-page report that provides evidence suggesting further steps to be taken. [A copy of the report may be found at RawStory.com, and also at CensureBush.org where additional action items may be found.]

It is time to take bolder measures in our pursuit of justice. This White House has responded to questions about its conduct with misleading statements, obfuscation, and vicious attacks against their critics. We must take the next step towards restoring accountability in our federal government. To this end I have:

• Introduced a resolution of censure for both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, and;

• I am calling upon Congress to create a select committee similar to the Ervin Committee, which investigated President Nixon’s Watergate crimes. This select committee should investigate those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment.

This administration must be held accountable for its misdeeds. We have considerable work to do and I am going to need your help to make this effort successful. Join me in sending a message to the President, the media, and the American people that we are not going to stand for an imperial presidency any longer.

Sincerely,

John Conyers

• Shame on the New York Times
• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

• Bush's presser
• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

Tags: News, Bush, Iraq, War, Spying, Foreign Policy, Media

The president, as commander-in-chief, has certain authorities under the onstitution, Gonzales said, and those were expanded by Congress to include electronic surveillance a few days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The president’s use of that authority is “consistent with law in my judgment,” he said, adding that he had met Sunday night with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and other senior lawmakers to explain the authority.

John Roberts of CBS confirmed that that particular media organization is still not to be taken seriously when he used his time to re-ask the ridiculous question of whether or not the President believes he has made any mistakes.

I have to stop writing now, but in closing I have to say that based on the insipid questions coming from the press, the only person in the room who is truly concerned about our national security is the President himself.

Q You have stretched this resolution for war into giving you carte blanche to do anything you want to do.

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, one might make that same argument in connection with detention of American citizens, which is far more intrusive than listening into a conversation. There may be some members of Congress who might say, we never --

Q That's your interpretation. That isn't Congress' interpretation.

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, I'm just giving you the analysis --

[...]

Q If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: That question was asked earlier. We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

Did you get this? Gonzales says it was okay to spy on Americans without authorization because the war resolution gave them that power. But when asked why they didn't ask for specific congressional authorization, he says, well, Congress wouldn't have given them that power.

Wow.

• Before and after
• I am not a lawyer, Tim...
• The Madness of King George

Tags: News, Bush, Iraq, War, Spying, Foreign Policy, Media

Slide 3:

Slide 4:

Slide 5:

Slide 6:

(Text) Legal Protections for U.S. Persons in the U.S.:
Must Be for a Foreign Intelligence Purpose
Probable Cause Standard Applies
Must Be an “Agent of a Foreign Power”
Spy, Terrorist, Saboteur or Someone Who Aides or Abets Them
Requires a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court Order

Question one is whether Congress made statutory changes to the above after 9/11, whether Mr. Bush authorized the NSA to change the procedures without consulting Congress, or whether he simply acted as he wished, without regard to the eixstence of the FISA rules. Question two, and it might be the bigger question, is if the 9/11 attacks have forced us to scrap these basic, common sense protections for American civil liberties and to turn our country essentially over to strongman rule, doesn't that mean the terrorists have won...? View the entire slideshow (in text or graphic version) here.

Tags: Politics, News, Republicans, Bush, Government, National Security, Syping

MR. RUSSERT: What are the other authorities?

SEC'Y RICE: Tim, again, I'm not a lawyer, but the president has constitutional authority and he has statutory authorities.

RUSSERT: What Democrats and Republicans in Congress are asking, what is the authority that you keep citing? What law? What statute? Where in the Constitution does it say that the President can eavesdrop, wiretap American citizens without a court order?

RICE: Tim, the President has authorities under FISA which we are using and using actively. He also has authorities that derive from his role as Commander in Chief and his need to protect the country. He has acted within his constitutional authority and within statutory authority. Now, I am not a lawyer and I am quite certain that the Attorney General will address a lot of these questions. (Full Transcript) -- Pic and links courtesy of Crooks and Liars, where you can also find the video...

TITLE 50 > CHAPTER 36 > SUBCHAPTER I > § 1802

§ 1802. Electronic surveillance authorization without court order; certification by Attorney General; reports to Congressional committees; transmittal under seal; duties and compensation of communication common carrier; applications; jurisdiction of court

(a)

(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that—

(A) the electronic surveillance is solely directed at—

(i) the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers, as defined in section 1801 (a)(1), (2), or (3) of this title; or

(ii) the acquisition of technical intelligence, other than the spoken communications of individuals, from property or premises under the open and exclusive control of a foreign power, as defined in section 1801 (a)(1), (2), or (3) of this title; (B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party; and (C) the proposed minimization procedures with

TITLE 50 > CHAPTER 36 > SUBCHAPTER I > § 1809

§ 1809. Criminal sanctions

Release date: 2005-03-17

(a) Prohibited activities A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or (2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.

SEC. 201. AUTHORITY TO INTERCEPT WIRE, ORAL, AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO TERRORISM.

Section 2516(1) of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by redesignating paragraph (p), as so redesignated by section 434(2) of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-132; 110 Stat. 1274), as paragraph (r); and

(2) by inserting after paragraph (p), as so redesignated by section 201(3) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (division C of Public Law 104-208; 110 Stat. 3009-565), the following new paragraph:
`(q) any criminal violation of section 229 (relating to chemical weapons); or sections 2332, 2332a, 2332b, 2332d, 2339A, or 2339B of this title (relating to terrorism); or'.

SEC. 202. AUTHORITY TO INTERCEPT WIRE, ORAL, AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO COMPUTER FRAUD AND ABUSE OFFENSES.

Section 2516(1)(c) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking `and section 1341 (relating to mail fraud),' and inserting `section 1341 (relating to mail fraud), a felony violation of section 1030 (relating to computer fraud and abuse),'.

The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.

Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This joint resolution may be cited as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force'.

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

(b) War Powers Resolution Requirements-

(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.

(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

Previous:

• The Madness of King George

Tags: Politics, News, Republicans, Bush administration, Government, Condi, National Security, Syping

His credibility now in tatters, Bush injected a dose of reality into his rhetoric. He used some form of the word "sacrifice" four times, spoke three times of the "loss" caused by war and braced Americans for more to come: "There is more testing and sacrifice before us."

He said Iraq has been more difficult than expected, a rare admission of error. This is exactly what many senior Republicans had urged Bush to do — speak bluntly about war as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II and eloquently about the cause and sacrifice as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War.

"Tonight was a high water mark in his acknowledgment that mistakes have been made and that he has to accept his share of the blame," said Republican Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Did it work? That's for Americans to judge, but even with a softening of his rhetoric Bush is still giving doubters little leeway. People are still either with him — or for defeat.

"Defeatism may have its partisan uses," he said, "but it is not justified by the facts."

Some of them were further incensed by Bush's remarks yesterday. "The president believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed," Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.) said. "He is a president, not a king." Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) said the administration "seems to believe it is above the law."

Rep. Dan Burton (Ind.) was among Republicans responding. "The liberal media and its liberal allies are attacking the president" for spying tactics that are legitimate and legal, he said on the House floor yesterday afternoon. "The fact is, the president is defending the United States of America."

... in addition to Burton, the other Constitutional wimps and sycophants in our first branch of government think they might finally like to give a bit of presidential oversight a go... From that article:

Democrats have long complained about a dearth of congressional investigations into Bush administration activities, but their criticism has been gaining validation from others after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, problems in Iraq and ethical lapses.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said this fall that "the people's representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities [on national security] and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don't do something about it, it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is."

In an interview last week, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said "it's a fair comment" that the GOP-controlled Congress has done insufficient oversight and "ought to be" doing more.

"Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own," said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. "I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches."

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

Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.

"I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters this month: "It has basically lost the war-making power. The real debates on budget occur not in Congress but in the Office of Management and Budget. . . . When you come into session Tuesday afternoon and leave Thursday afternoon, you simply do not have time for oversight or deliberation." ...

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

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

"Republicans have made a mockery of oversight," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the committee's ranking Democrat. "There was nothing too small to be investigated in the Clinton administration and there's nothing so big that it can't be ignored in the Bush administration."

"We have a system of law," Feingold said. "He just can't make up the law. … It would turn George Bush not into President George Bush, but King George Bush."

In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that sometime in sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror. Indeed, the same Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who helped write the twisted memo on legalizing torture, wrote briefs supporting the idea that the president could ignore the law once again when it came to the intelligence agency's eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages.

"The government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties," he wrote.

Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.

This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests. ...

...President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them. ...

"Isn't Congress supposed to provide more oversight regarding these sorts of programs? Moreover, considering the programs that have been revealed so far, does anybody else wonder what else the Bush administration might be up to, what other domestic surveillance programs we don't know about? ..."

the Drudge Report--HUGE RED FONT and all--chose to aid and abet the civil liberties Chicken Littles at the N.Y. Times. That's a shame. The real headline news is not that President Bush took extraordinary measures to protect Americans in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but that the blabbermouths at the Times chose to disclose classified information in a pathetically obvious bid to move the Iraqi elections off the front pages. And to help sabotage the Patriot Act reauthorization, which went down in the Senate this afternoon.

• Going their own way
• Just say no...
• Headline wrap: Catch and release

Tags: Politics, News, Republicans, Bush, Government, Corruption, National Security, Syping

"There's a little bit of the movie Casablanca in this, where, you know, the inspector says 'I'm shocked, shocked that this kind of thing takes place'.

"Well, most of our European friends cannot be shocked that this kind of thing takes place... The fact that we have, over the years, had procedures in place that would deal with people who are responsible for terrorist activities, or suspected of terrorist activities, and so the thing that is called rendition is not something that is new or unknown to my European friends."

"The United States is going through a period right now where public opinion world-wide is against us.

The state department's plans for post-war Iraq were discarded

"I think that's a function of some of the policies we have followed in recent years with respect to Iraq and in not solving the Middle East's problem and perhaps the way in which we have communicated our views to the rest of the world, we have created an impression that we are unilateralist, we don't care what the rest of the world thinks.

"I don't think it's a fair impression"

"I was deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us, and what really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us."

"Often maybe Mr Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney would take decisions into the president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a number of occasions."

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies.

Yesterday, the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have.

And the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies and endangers our country.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees, called the program "the most significant thing I have heard in my 12 years" in the Senate and suggested that the president may have broken the law by authorizing surveillance without proper warrants.

"Let me just say that winning the war on terror requires winning the war of information," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters. ". . . And so we will be aggressive in obtaining that information, but we will always do so in a manner that's consistent with our legal obligations."

The Washington Post, citing an informed U.S. official, reported that the NSA's warrantless monitoring of U.S. subjects began before Bush's order was issued in early 2002 and included electronic and physical surveillance carried out by other military intelligence agencies assigned to the task.

Since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s, the NSA has adhered to tight restrictions on its activities in the United States and has devoted its efforts almost exclusively to obtaining intelligence overseas. Domestic spying, much of which is handled by the FBI, is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by a special and highly secretive court that meets at Justice Department headquarters in Washington.

The order issued by Bush in 2002, however, allowed the NSA to monitor without a warrant international telephone calls, e-mails and other communications between people in the United States and those overseas. The Associated Press reported last night that Bush reauthorized the order 36 times.

A government official familiar with the NSA order said the president urged that the change be explained to only a very limited group of people on a "need-to-know" basis. That meant that, for nearly four years, only two people in the judicial branch of the U.S. government knew about the warrantless searches: U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and rotated off the court in May 2002, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.

The official said that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and top officials in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review first briefed a few key officials on the plans to change the 25-year prohibition on most domestic surveillance. In a series of meetings, officials also answered Lamberth's questions about what some informally called "the president's program," and they asserted that no information gained through warrantless surveillance would be used to gain the court's authorization for secret wiretaps and warrants.

Under the president's plan, only the presiding judge of the secret court was allowed to hear cases in which warrantless surveillance may have played a role, the government official said.

Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly declined to comment yesterday. According to the government source, both raised questions about whether the program was constitutional but neither suggested they had a basis for asserting that Bush did not have the authority he claimed. They focused, instead, on the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Five Republicans voted against the reauthorization: Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Craig and Frist. Two Democrats voted to extend the provisions: Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time. He immediately objected to an offer of a short term extension from Democrats, saying the House won't approve it and the president won't sign it.

Hello Everyone:
>
> Katherine Harris was on Sean Hannity's radio program as a guest today and
> she flatly denied that she is dropping out of the Florida Senate race!

> Harris promoted her website http://www.electharris.com/ on the air and
> Hannity pledged to donate the maximum amount of money to her campaign!
>
> We will see what happens!

The Senate campaign of Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) is becoming increasingly beleaguered because of poor fundraising at the national level, according to some Republican officials.

Far from using the fourth quarter to turn around the dismal results for money raised in the second and third quarters, the campaign is already indicating in advance of the Dec. 31 reporting date that 2005 will end on a sour note for Harris, according to a well-placed source.

The second-term congresswoman’s weak fundraising figures are at the heart of what has gone wrong for the former Florida secretary of state who played a major role in the 2000 presidential race. In July, an official affiliated with the campaign said Harris was seeking to raise $15 million to $20 million.

When her fundraising raised eyebrows in the second quarter, the campaign explained it had not yet shifted into high gear. At the end of September, Harris had raised $1.3 million and had only $470,000 cash on hand. The campaign said those numbers were low because of hurricanes that had recently struck Florida.

The fourth quarter is not going well, either.

A source close to the campaign said, “The quarter has been slow. People will not be jumping up and down when they see the figures.”

When those statistics are released next month, some Republicans believe, they will trigger other Republicans to announce their candidacies.

Also in that piece is the nugget that Harris is being advised by GOP strategist and frequent TV pundit Ed Rollins. And still, her campaign is being called "unfocused and unimpressive" and it seems her hometown operatives are missing in action. What gives, Kathy?

Previous

• Nobody likes Kathy
• New Rules

In other news you won't hear much about today because CNN and MSNBC are doing wall-to-wall coverage of The Happy, Voting Iraqi (and Fox is spending the day on its knees at the presiden't feet):

- Questions have arisen over whether, in addition to abducting a German citizen, spiriting him off to Afghanistan and accusing him of being a terrorist, only to later release him without charges, the U.S. also tried to buy him off...

- The White House is sort of denying the latest issuance from the mind of Ye Olde-ass Prince of Darkness, Bob Novak, who snapped at a Raleigh luncheon the other day that President Bush surely knows exactly who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to him (Novak) and that ""I'd be amazed if he doesn't." Added TPOD: "So I say, don't bug me. Don't bug (Washington Post reporter) Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is." Yeah, and stay off my lawn!!!

- Some GOP House members are steamed over a last-minute gift to the president in the way of language favoring Mr. Bush's guest worker idea shoved into an immigration bill. Someone's being naughty right before Christmahannukwanzika!

- The Pentagon is being subpoenaed for documents related to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not to worry though. Later today the Lincoln Group will "improve" that headline for international media consumption to read "Pentagon heralded for bringing democracy to the American Gulf Coast..."

- Of course, if that doesn't work out, they could always torture their criti... oh, no wait, they can't... The House has voted 308 to 122 to support John McCain's anti-torture language. Who are those 122 Congresspeople?

- The cursed war on Christmas reaches new lows. Oh, Rudolph! If only I could have saved you from the Jesus-haters who don't understand your relevance to the Christ child...! (actually you WILL here about this today. I'm thinking Chris Jansing -- full bore coverage...)

- Getting around in New York City tomorrow could be a bitch if that transit strike happens ... Get their money right, Bloomberg!

- Hold that Mini Me Christmas order! Fake data questions have arisen over that revolutionary cloning experiment in South Korea...

- Gavin Newsom tries -- and fails -- to look like less of a knee-jerk, P.C. jackass over that silly San Francisco cop video he overreacted to last week... Meanwhile the cop who produced it defends himself... (Hey Gavin, aren't you the guy who basically killed the election for John Kerry and touched off nationwide amendment mania with your lovely marriage stunt? That's what I thought. Now kindly go away...)

- Lance Armstrong will stand trial for defamation after calling an Italian cyclist -- whose testimony makes those doping allegations look a lot more solid -- a liar. Maybe Armstrong's wife could testify as a character witness for him ... oh, that's right, he dumped her for Cheryl Crow...

More headlines to come as they devleop...

Tags: news, headlines, Iraq, CIA, Bush administration, Bush, Novak, Pentagon, San Francisco, Armstrong

KABUL, Afghanistan -- When The Rendon Group was hired to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai with media relations in early 2004, few thought it was a bad idea. Though Rendon's $1.4million bill seemed high for Afghanistan, the U.S. government was paying.

Within seven months, however, Karzai was ready to get rid of Rendon. So was Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and now the American envoy in Iraq, according to interviews, e-mails and memos obtained by the Tribune. The complaint: too much money for not enough work.

Despite such grumbling, The Rendon Group, based in Washington, managed to secure even more U.S.-funded work with Karzai's government, this time a $3.9 million contract funded by the Pentagon, to create a media team for Afghan anti-drug programs. Jeff Raleigh, who helped oversee Rendon in Kabul for the U.S. Embassy, and others in the U.S. government said they objected because of Karzai's and Khalilzad's opposition but were overruled by Defense Department superiors in Washington.

"It was a rip-off of the U.S taxpayer," said Raleigh, who left the U.S. Embassy in September.

Rendon departed Afghanistan in early October when its $3.9 million contract expired. But diplomatic sources said it is in line for another multimillion-dollar Afghan contract: a three-year deal to work on counternarcotics public relations.

The company's work in Afghanistan is just a sliver of the more than $56 million the Pentagon has paid Rendon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became one of the leading media consultants in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It also is doing work for the Pentagon in Iraq.

Its performance, and the Defense Department's use of the company to shape its anti-terrorism message, has come under renewed scrutiny amid reports that the Bush administration hired Rendon to track foreign media and reporters and to help foreign governments shape their own anti-terrorism messages and images.

Advocates say Rendon helps fight propaganda from Islamic fundamentalists. Critics say the Pentagon's use of media firms such as Rendon blurs the line between public relations and propaganda.

... Foley has $2.35 million cash on hand, compared with Harris' $470,000. Nelson had $6.5 million cash on hand as of Sept. 30.

• New Rules

Related: Famous heterosexuals who are definitely not gay...

Tags: politics, News, elections, Florida

So the fundamental question is, do we have the confidence and universal values to help change a troubled part of the world. If you're a supporter of Israel, I would strongly urge you to help other countries become democracies. Israel's long-term survival depends upon the spread of democracy in the Middle East.

Q Mr. President, I would like to know why it is that you and others in your administration keep linking 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq when no respected journalist or Middle Eastern expert confirmed that such a link existed.

THE PRESIDENT: What did she -- I missed the question. Sorry. I didn't -- I beg your pardon, I didn't hear you. Seriously.

Q I would like to know why you and others in your administration invoke 9/11 as justification for the invasion of Iraq --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes --

Q -- when no respected journalists or other Middle Eastern experts confirm that such a link existed.

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that. 9/11 changed my look on foreign policy. I mean, it said that oceans no longer protect us, that we can't take threats for granted; that if we see a threat, we've got to deal with it. It doesn't have to be militarily, necessarily, but we got to deal with it. We can't -- can't just hope for the best anymore.

And so the first decision I made, as you know, was to -- was to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan because they were harboring terrorists. This is where the terrorists planned and plotted. And the second decision, -- which was a very difficult decision for me, by the way, and it's one that I -- I didn't take lightly -- was that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He is a declared enemy of the United States; he had used weapons of mass destruction; the entire world thought he had weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations had declared in more than 10 -- I can't remember the exact number of resolutions -- that disclose, or disarm, or face serious consequences. I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, you're a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that threat, as far as I -- concerned.

And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he refused. And I made a tough decision. And knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country. (Applause.)

• Running out of options
• Gangland