Abramoff plea deadline Tuesday. And a really interesting WaPo story on a pseudo advocacy group apparently used by Abramoff to launder funds from Russian and other interests for DeLay:

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners will not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay.

The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy. ...

In addition to the million-dollar payment involving the London law firm, for example, half a million dollars was donated to the U.S. Family Network by the owners of textile companies in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, according to the tax records. The textile owners -- with Abramoff's help -- solicited and received DeLay's public commitment to block legislation that would boost their labor costs, according to Abramoff associates, one of the owners and a DeLay speech in 1997.

A quarter of a million dollars was donated over two years by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Abramoff's largest lobbying client, which counted DeLay as an ally in fighting legislation allowing the taxation of its gambling revenue. ...

Two former Buckham associates said that he told them years ago not only that the $1 million donation was solicited from Russian oil and gas executives, but also that the initial plan was for the donation to be made via a delivery of cash to be picked up at a Washington area airport.

One of the former associates, a Frederick, Md., pastor named Christopher Geeslin who served as the U.S. Family Network's director or president from 1998 to 2001, said Buckham further told him in 1999 that the payment was meant to influence DeLay's vote in 1998 on legislation that helped make it possible for the IMF to bail out the faltering Russian economy and the wealthy investors there.

"Ed told me, 'This is the way things work in Washington,' " Geeslin said. "He said the Russians wanted to give the money first in cash." ...

No legal bar exists to a $1 million donation by a foreign entity to a group such as the U.S. Family Network, according to Marcus Owens, a Washington lawyer who directed the IRS's office of tax-exempt organizations from 1990 to 2000 and who reviewed, at The Post's request, the tax returns filed by the U.S. Family Network.

But "a million dollars is a staggering amount of money to come from a foreign source" because such a donor would not be entitled to claim the tax deduction allowed for U.S. citizens, Owens said. "Giving large donations to an organization whose purposes are as ambiguous as these . . . is extraordinary. I haven't seen that before. It suggests something else is going on.

"There are any number of red flags on these returns." ...

Mark Schmitt has an interesting theory about why the Bush White House felt it had to circumvent FISA.

Fox News contributor Martin Frost on King George.

Pentagon Succession. Strange little story about changes to the order of who would succeed Rumsfeld should he die or resign. "The new list -- approved by President Bush last week -- still has Rumsfeld's top deputy as his replacement should the defense secretary die or resign. But it now puts the undersecretaries for intelligence, policy and acquisition next in line, bumping the secretaries of the Army, Air Force and Navy into the following slots. The secretary of the Army has traditionally been No. 3. While the change does not have much of an impact on day-to-day matters, military experts said it does highlight Rumsfeld's interest in keeping his top advisers in line to run the department in the event of a catastrophe." In effect, this makes Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of intelligence, third in line.

More Abramoff coverage from the Post, including this handy list of key players.

Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi under investigation for allegedly bribing a British lawyer to provide false testimony.

Cookies, compliments of the NSA:

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. ...

No columnist left behind, indeed.

WP: "Abramoff's Fall is Surpassing His Rise: Lobbyist's Legal Troubles Could Turn Into the Biggest Congressional Corruption Scandal in Decades." The whole thing is a delicious read, including this:

Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal -- the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which six House members and one senator were convicted -- said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently rode in a plane with one of Abramoff's attorneys, who told him: "There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to be taken down."

"Presidential discretion" should trump a court decision, the White House argues, appealing the Fourth circuit court's rejection of its request to transfer Padilla from military to civilian custody last week. L'etat, c'est moi.

Meantime, Padilla's lawyers "want the Supreme Court to resolve how much power a president has while the nation is at war," the AP reports. "Lawyers Donna Newman and Andrew Patel told the high court in papers filed Tuesday that the justices must step in 'to preserve the vital checks and balances' on the president."

Incredible story about the guy behind the Lincoln Group. Talk about self-invention! Shades of The Talented Mr. Ripley. More from PR Watch.

The Senate Intel committee may need to launch Phase III of its Iraq intel investigation.

NYT: "Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda. ... Some Justice Department prosecutors, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, said they were concerned that the agency's wiretaps without warrants could create problems for the department in terrorism prosecutions both past and future. 'If I'm a defense attorney,' one prosecutor said, 'the first thing I'm going to say in court is, 'This was an illegal wiretap.''"

More from Firedoglake's former prosecutor, ReddHedd.

The CIA Inspector General is probing about ten "erroneous" renditions, the AP reports. That is, when the CIA snatched the wrong guy, and flew him to another country to be tortured. As for all the other cases where they managed to snatch the not incorrect guy and flew him to Egypt or wherever for torture, there is no as yet in-house investigation.

Abramoff's erstwhile SunCruz business partner Adam Kidan, who recently plead guilty to fraud, speaks to Newsday. "I wish I had never met Jack."

Chalabi to take over oil ministry? So the FT hears:

Meanwhile, Iraqi oil officials quoted by Dow Jones said yesterday that the deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi would take over the oil ministry, replacing Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, who has taken a month’s leave. Mr Bahr al-Ulum is reported to be disgruntled with the current government and earlier this month threatened to resign over a rise in oil prices.

Senators Obama and Brownback say the administration has to stop stalling on the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act.

The Kremlin's top economic advisor quits, saying "Russia no longer free."

Accountability -- Over There. "Torture jails force ouster of Iraq Minister of Interior," the Wash Times reports. (Via Steve Benen).

Eleanor Clift: Big Lies of 2005.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and early best wishes for 2006.

If this is true, as is being reported in multiple papers, then it seems the assistant Attorney General (.pdf linked), the President and Vice President have been misleading Congress, as well as the public. Asst. Attorney General William Moschella has this week written Senate and House intelligence committee leaders, "As described by the President, the NSA intercepts certain international communications into and out of the United States of people linked to al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But SIGINT experts are telling the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the NYT, that the NSA is likely monitoring far more than that. As Bruce Schneier tells the LAT today:

"It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program," said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written several books about security.

Schneier and others suspect that the NSA may be turning its satellites toward the United States and gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed — potentially including all e-mails and phone calls from the United States to certain other countries. [...]

One former senior Pentagon official who has overseen such "data mining" said he also believed the NSA was probably conducting such wholesale surveillance.

More from Reuters.

Steve Chapman:

What we have now is not a robust executive but a reckless one. At times like this, it's apparent that Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power. Another paradox: In their conduct of the war on terror, they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it.

What is clear...is that circumventing both Congress and the judiciary -- as the administration has done -- was the wrong way to address whatever problem the intelligence agencies faced. ...

FISA explicitly contemplates the need for warrantless surveillance in wartime -- allowing it for 15 days after a declaration of war, of which the authorization is probably the legal equivalent. If this was not good enough, it was incumbent on the administration to explain why not and seek a legislative change. Mr. Moschella wrote that this was impossible because the goal was to create an early warning system and "any legislative change . . . would have been public and would have tipped off our enemies." But the right answer cannot be such a unilateral claim of power. If there was a problem with FISA -- and that's not yet known -- it was Congress's job to fix it and the administration's job to convince lawmakers of the need to do so.

More big hints of corruption among Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, here and here. It may be legal corruption. But this may not be: lobbyists seeking federal contracts and favors hiring Congressional staff members -- and in particular, their husbands and wives -- as a potential form of bribery by other means...

James Bamford, in the NYT, on "The agency that could be Big Brother."

You can see how it would be hard to get a FISA warrant for this. From the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage:

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 Qaeda, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA.

But Congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably seek to expand the review to include the disclosure that the security agency, using its access to giant phone "switches," had also traced and analyzed phone and Internet traffic in much larger volumes than what the Bush administration had acknowledged.

"We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," said a Republican Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because no decisions had been made on how hearings might be structured.

Current and former government officials say that the security agency, as part of its domestic surveillance program, has gained the cooperation of some of the country's biggest telecommunications companies to obtain access to large volumes of international phone and Internet traffic flowing in and out of the United States.

The agency has traced and analyzed the traffic flow - looking at who is calling whom, where calls originate and end, and other patterns - to gather clues on possible terrorist activities. In cases where security agency supervisors believe they can show a link to Al Qaeda, President Bush has authorized eavesdropping on calls without a warrant within the United States, so long as one end of the phone or e-mail conversation takes place outside the country.

Appalling. Deemed "unlawfully detained" by a US court, Chinese Uighurs continue to be held at Guantanamo Bay prison because the US can find no place to send them. Why doesn't the US let them come here?

Anonymous GOP Senator blocks intel authorization bill -- "first time in 27 years that the bill had failed to pass in before the end of the calendar year." At issue, amendments by Kennedy that would challenge the White House to show the intelligence it had on Iraq, since the White House insists falsely the Congress had the same intelligence. "A congressional report made public last week concluded that Bush and his inner circle had access to more intelligence and reviewed more sensitive material than what was shared with Congress," Dafna Linzer reports. Here's that CRS report.

The NYT explores John Yoo's intellectual pedigree. Since his name and fingerprints are on some of the most objectionable memos, I don't see why those who have been wrongly tortured under the guidelines Yoo set out don't sue him personally in US courts?

Congress specifically denied Bush a US-extension to the war powers he is claiming to have (.pdf linked), says former Senate leader Tom Daschle:

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.

Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution. [...]

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

Where Are the Arrests?

Perhaps I'm a little slow, but there's something else that doesn't make sense about spygate. Since October 2001, Bush has authorized 30 times - every 45 days - warrantless NSA domestic surveillance of what I have heard estimated of approximately 1,000 US persons a year. That would be 4,000 persons over the past four years, if I understand the shifting numbers offered correctly. But whatever it is. The Administration insisted again today that the only US persons being authorized to be spied on by Bush -- that he somehow didn't think he could get FISA warrants on -- are directly linked to Al Qaeda suspects or a related terrorist group. As Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote in a public letter (.pdf linked) to Senate and House Intelligence committee leaders today, "As described by the President, the NSA intercepts certain international communications into and out of the United States of people linked to al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization."

This begs the question: how many people known to be "linked" to Al Qaeda has the administration let roam the streets of America since 9/11? I would guess the answer would be approaching zero.

I simply find it hard to believe that we would have not heard of approximately 4,000 arrests were what Moschella is saying true. Being a close associate on the phone with a known Al Qaeda terrorist abroad must surely be grounds for more than a FISA warrant, which Bush never bothered to try to get. If many Americans had reason to think their neighbor was "linked to al Qaeda," they surely would be on the phone to the FBI right away. Given that PETA and vegan groups are being investigated by the FBI, surely those in the US who regularly converse on the phone with real al Qaeda terrorists abroad -- who are, as Asst. Attorney General Moschella writes, "linked to Al Qaeda" -- would be a rich target for investigation and arrest, it would seem. So, why haven't we heard of more than a scattering of arrests around the country of al Qaeda cells? Some of those which have fallen apart (the Detroit case, for one)? Surely if there were 4,000 US persons in the past four years "linked with al Qaeda," who communicated directly with known al Qaeda terrorists, we should have vast sweeping arrests around the country and our papers would be full of these stories, the trials, the deportations, the threats averted...

But the administration has only cited one arrest from the program, the guy who planned to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.

So what is going on?

Or, should we doubt that the US persons being monitored have such a direct "link" to Al Qaeda or the other terrorist group? Should we doubt that there was even enough probable cause linking them to terror groups or terror suspects or even terrorist phone numbers abroad that they would even be a probable candidate for a FISA warrant?

And remember. These are cases the Bush administration insists required such time urgency, he couldn't risk going to the FISA court even three days after the wiretap had been ordered. So the administration is making a case for urgency here, not like these are casual conversations. So why haven't there been more arrests? Why not more cases?

Something is extremely fishy here. One could be inclined to predict that when all is said and done, it will be revealed that the thousands of US persons being monitored without warrants have a far, far more distant relationship -- indeed likely a non-existent relationship -- to any terror suspect or group than the Bush administration has repeatedly insisted it limited itself to. Perhaps nothing more than they have called Pakistan in a certain time period. Perhaps nothing more than they called Yemen. Otherwise, the administration would have more arrests and terrorism prosecutions to show for it.

I think we're in store for some pretty tortured definitions of "linked to" in the near future, coupled with allegations that the administration continues to lie to Congress and the public about the safeguards it put on this program to prevent vast interception of calls of those suspected of no wrongdoing at all, and what it did with that information. One can almost hear the shredder.

Bill Arkin says the Pentagon is breaking the law with its domestic surveillance activities:

...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. [...]

But JPEN is more than just a compilation of TALON's. It is a near real-time sharing system of raw non-validated force protection information among Department of Defense organizations and installations. ... JPEN shares this information at all levels...

Under the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), the military can maintain information on specific individuals (name of individual or other personal identifiers such as Social Security number or driver's license number) in the JPEN database system for 90 days. JPEN then is supposed to purge all Privacy Act information after 90 days, unless it is part of an ongoing investigation. [...]

Evidently though, the JPEN maintainers didn't abide by the law, and the collectors feeding TALON and other reports into the system overreached in monitoring and retaining information on anti-war and anti-military organizations of no conceivable threat. ...

Even accounting for widespread reports of fraud, Ahmad Chalabi did notably poorly in last weekend's Iraqi elections. According to preliminary vote counts earlier this week, Chalabi's list might not have earned even a single seat in the parliament. How's he going to maneuver this one? MSNBC's Aram Roston investigates, and finds Chalabi's strategy may run as usual through Washington, and specifically K Street. In particular, he notes, the lobbying firm BKSH has recently registered as a lobbyist for Chalabi's deputy, Entefadh Qanbar.

Chicken Little Brooks. Could we imagine how he might construct a defense of the Watergate break-in? The US government harassment of Martin Luther King? Siding with the apartheid regime of South Africa because those ANC activists were allied with the communists? Indeed, we could. With Nexis, we may not have to.

Is Brooks really so limited to believe that the law cannot be updated if need be to accomodate new technology? Ever heard of the telephone? The Internet? The automobile? The credit card? America has survived such innovations with the rule of law intact. Data mining technology is no different. What's needed is an administration that believes itself subject to the rule of law - or one forced to get religion on this issue by the Congress. Even while fighting this grave threat of global terrorism, as this nation has after all faced grave threats in the past.

When the FBI told Martin Luther King Jr. to Commit Suicide. As Nixon press aide David Gergen reminded NPR listeners this morning, the FBI monitored King, and then sent the tapes to his wife to try to "neutralize" him as a civil rights leader. It also sent him a note with a copy of the tapes suggesting he commit suicide or they would release the tapes. It's worth remembering how recently and how grossly the government has abused the civil liberties of Americans in the very recent past - and may be again (check out the NYT stories today on the agent provocateur activities of the NYPD, as well as the NYT and WP stories this week on the Bureau counterterrorism division investigating PETA, vegan groups, a group protesting the use of llama fur, etc.), all in the name of national security. Here are excerpts of the King case study from the Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book III, Final Report, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, United States Senate, April 23, 1976:

I. INTRODUCTION

From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI's "war" against Dr. King:

No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business. 1

The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them.

FBI informants in the civil rights movement and reports from field offices kept the Bureau's headquarters informed of developments in the civil rights field. ...

The FBI's program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press. ...The FBI sought to influence universities to withhold honorary degrees from Dr. King. Attempts were made to prevent the publication of articles favorable to Dr. King and to find "friendly" news sources that would print unfavorable articles. The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King's hotel rooms.

The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from its microphone coverage. According to the Chief of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division, the tape was intended to precipitate a separation between Dr. King and his wife in the belief that the separation would reduce Dr. King's stature. The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide. The FBI also made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited."

The campaign against Dr. King included attempts to destroy the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by cutting off its sources of funds. The FBI considered, and on some occasions executed, plans to cut off the support of some of the SCLC's major contributors, including religious organizations, a labor union, and donors of grants such as the Ford Foundation. One FBI field office recommended that the FBI send letters to the SCLC's donors over Dr. King's forged signature warning them that the SCLC was under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS files on Dr. King and the SCLC were carefully scrutinized for financial irregularities. For over a year, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to establish that Dr. King had a secret foreign bank account in which he was sequestering funds.

The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy Dr. King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness. As early as 1962, Director Hoover penned on an FBI memorandum, "King is no good." At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King told the country of his dream that "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last."' The FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division described this "demagogic speech" as yet more evidence that Dr. King was "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country." Shortly afterward, Time magazine chose Dr. King as the "Man of the Year," an honor which elicited Director Hoover's comment that "they had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one." ...The depth of Director Hoover's bitterness toward Dr. King, a bitterness which he had effectively communicated to his subordinates in the FBI, was apparent from the FBI's attempts to sully Dr. King's reputation long after his death. Plans were made to "brief" congressional leaders in 1969 to prevent the passage of a "Martin Luther King Day." In 1970, Director Hoover told reporters that Dr. King was the "last one in the world who should ever have received" the Nobel Peace Prize.

The extent to which Government officials outside of the FBI must bear responsibility for the FBI's campaign to discredit Dr. King is not clear. Government officials outside of the FBI were not aware of most of the specific FBI actions to discredit Dr. King. Officials in the Justice Department and White House were aware, however, that the FBI was conducting an intelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation, of Dr. King; that the FBI had written authorization from the Attorney General to wiretap Dr. King and the SCLC offices in New York and Washington; and that the FBI reports on Dr. King contained considerable information of a political and personal nature which was "irrelevant and spurious" to the stated reasons for the investigation. Those high executive branch officials were also aware that the FBI was disseminating vicious characterizations of Dr. King within the Government; that the FBI had tape recordings embarrassing to Dr. King which it had offered to play to a White House official and to reporters; and that the FBI had offered to "leak" to reporters highly damaging accusations that some of Dr. King's advisers were communists. ....

The FBI now agrees that its efforts to discredit Dr. King were unjustified...

I doubt the FBI has gone so far off the rails in the current atmosphere but the point is that our whole system is designed to reject the arguments this administration is making - that we should just trust them because the threat is so great. Our whole system is designed *not to trust* their or anybody else's intentions to operate honorably in secret, without true oversight, contrary to most people's understanding of the rule of law, especially when it pertains to government monitoring of Americans by the full force of the US government intelligence apparatus.

Our system is designed *not to trust* that those operating with the powers of the government, often in secret, are wise, are judicious, are fair, are incorruptable. As the King case shows, history demonstrates that terrible abuses happen, in just such an atmosphere. Our system is designed to have checks and balances, oversight, strict limits to power of any single federal branch or agency, to limit these types of stunning, shameful, gross abuses, to make people accountable, to preserve individual liberties. Why? Because the wisdom of our system is to recognize, as Gergen said today, that power corrupts. The American public should never be asked by its leaders to just trust them. We should never be asked by our leaders to tolerate their acting outside the law in secret without active oversight for a sustained amount of time. Our system is designed to reject such arguments as a very dangerous slippery slope.

Is Ted Stevens really offering to resign?

Jim Hoagland:

Not even conservatives will rush to endorse the expansive powers that Bush claims to find in the Constitution to enable the National Security Agency to evade existing law and systematically conduct wiretaps against terrorism suspects on U.S. soil without warrants.

Even weaker is the administration's claim that Congress approved such wiretaps in its September 2001 resolution authorizing the use of force against terrorist organizations. Bush's interpretation is a dangerous inflation of congressional intent. It smacks of the way Lyndon Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to bully Congress into supporting him on Vietnam. That is no path to follow.

Bush's initial response was unpersuasive on why he failed to ask Congress to fix defects in the warrant system mandated in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. For four years, Bush simply set aside the provisions of this law, which grew out of the abuses of the Vietnam-Watergate era. ...

The kind of secrecy and obsessive concern about the powers of the presidency for their own sake that this administration showed even before Sept. 11, 2001, are inconsistent with the workings of American democracy, as well as with the fragmentation of power that marks the nation-state system today. ...

That is the issue.

Abramoff plea could come next week. And this:

...Prosecutors in Washington have been sifting through evidence of what they believe is a corruption scheme involving at least a dozen lawmakers and their former staff members, many of whom worked closely on legislation with Mr. Abramoff and accepted gifts and favors from him. Although Mr. Abramoff is also in negotiations in that case, it is unclear whether a settlement can be reached in time for both agreements to be announced at once.

Depressing must-read WaPo expose of the miserable beginnings and middles of the Department of Homeland Security. Could be the plot for a British Fawlty-Towers style sit-com. But sadly, many people lost their lives in New Orleans because of this - incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Lesson? The Bush White House's predilection for making all decisions based entirely on partisan politics - the DHS was something they resisted but then didn't want the Democrats to ultimately get credit for proposing -- is a disaster for the nation. This is how they planned for war and post-war in Iraq, this is how they responded to Katrina, and this is the crew who appeal to fear in an almost demagogic way at every opportunity as an excuse for their incompetence and lawbreaking. As Judge Luttig described in his Padilla ruling, this administration is fundamentally not serious about even the most sacred decisions - depriving a US citizen of his Constitutional rights, and then saying in effect after three years, never mind. Former Bush EPA director Christie Todd Wittman was on an NPR show tonight with Alan Simpson and Robert Reich talking about this - how policy substance is almost never part of the discussion in the Bush White House, only the partisan political calculus, and how depressing it was -- how ill served the nation is by it.

AP: "Appeals Court, in Rebuke to Bush, Rejects Transfer of Custody for Terrorism Suspect Jose Padilla." Writes a reader, "WOW! The most conservative judge on the most conservative Circuit Court in the country has had it with Bush's abuses of power ... This particular judge, Michael Luttig, is a conservative superstar - the far far right of the Republican Party had him on the list of four favorites for the U.S. Supreme Court. For Luttig to trash Bush like this is a very, very big deal. ... If the Fourth Circuit is willing to humiliate the Attorney General and the President like this, you have to think impeachment is a real possibility. The judiciary knows that Bush is out of control."

Update: More from the Fourth Circuit's Padilla decision, sent along by reader WF:

...The government has held Padilla militarily for three and a half years, steadfastly maintaining that it was imperative in the interest of national security that he be so held. However, a short time after our decision issued on the government’s representation that Padilla’s military custody was indeed necessary in the interest of national security, the government determined that it was no longer necessary that Padilla be held militarily. Instead, it announced, Padilla would be transferred to the custody of federal civilian law enforcement authorities and criminally prosecuted in Florida for alleged offenses considerably different from, and less serious than, those acts for which the government had militarily detained Padilla. The indictment of Padilla in Florida, unsealed the same day as announcement of that indictment, made no mention of the acts upon which the government purported to base its military detention of Padilla and upon which we had concluded only several weeks before that the President possessed the authority to detain Padilla, namely, that Padilla had taken up arms against United States forces in Afghanistan and had thereafter entered into this country for the purpose of blowing up buildings in American cities, in continued prosecution of al Qaeda’s war of terrorism against the United States.

….

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.

Howard Fineman: "Spying, the Constitution -- and the 'I-word.'"

Dan Froomkin on "Return of the 'I-Word.'"

"Secret law breaking has become brazen law breaking": Jonathan Schell:

...Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, [Bush] would simply deny it. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" "We do not torture!" However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refused at his confirmation hearings to state that the torture called waterboarding, in which someone is brought to the edge of drowning, was prohibited. Then when Senator John McCain sponsored a bill prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, Bush threatened to veto the legislation to which it was attached. It was only in the face of majority votes in both houses against such treatment that he retreated from his claim.

But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law. ...

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. ...

Go read Howard Kurtz:

... Documents obtained by the ACLU shows the G-men were tracking PETA types at such frightening events as an animal-rights conference, a community meeting at an Indiana college and a planned protest of a celebrity fur endorser, says this WP story.

Not only that, says the NYT , but "one F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a 'Vegan Community Project.' Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's 'semi-communistic ideology.'"

You never know about those devious vegetarians. ...

I bring all this up, of course, because of the furious debate over the warrantless NSA eavesdropping. Just as White House officials insist the program is tightly focused on potential terrorists, Pentagon and FBI spokesmen maintain that they are not investigating or interfering with legitimate political dissent.

But PETA? Vegans? Catholic Workers? No wonder there's considerable skepticism. ...

This post-9/11 2001 debate on civil liberties in wartime between former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh holds up well to the test of time, and is surprisingly revealing of government surveillance methods that have now come into focus. David Ignatius addresses the current "officers' revolt": " ... In place of the post-Sept. 11 emergency structure, the country needs clear rules that Congress can debate and finally endorse. ... Framing clear rules that meet traditional American legal standards is a sign of the nation's recovery from Sept. 11 -- and it's a process that will serve, above all, the professionals fighting terrorism on the front lines."

The NSA cheats all the time, argues Patrick Radden Keefe in Slate, enabled by a long history of laxness in Congressional oversight:

...[In 2002], as Washington began its full-court press for an invasion of Iraq, the NSA launched a surge of eavesdropping on delegates to the U.N. Security Council in New York. The operation was revealed when an English eavesdropper leaked an NSA e-mail requesting British assistance in the effort. It was a front-page story in Europe and around the world, but the American press didn't run with it, showing a level of deference to NSA secrecy matched only by Congress. Nevermind that the eavesdropping took place in Manhattan and violated the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, all of which the United States has signed.

More dramatic—and also largely overlooked—was the disclosure last spring during John Bolton's confirmation hearings that the NSA was giving policy-makers and other intelligence agencies information about U.S. citizens. Since 1978, the NSA has insisted that when it intercepts a communication between a targeted foreigner and a nontargeted American it will redact the name of the American from the resulting intelligence report. The redactions are made to protect the privacy of the individual who was not the target, and to satisfy the Constitution's prohibition of warrantless searches. Yet at his hearings, Bolton admitted that on several occasions while he was an undersecretary of state he had asked the NSA to reveal the names of Americans in agency intercepts. The NSA obliged without any showing of cause or process of review. Newsweek investigated and learned that during one 18-month period in 2004 and 2005, the NSA supplied the names of 10,000 U.S. citizens to interested bureaucrats and spies. ...

Some more on the backstory to the Times NSA scoop, from the NY Observer.

Growing Congressional calls for a spy probe. From the LAT:

...Some congressional Republicans defended Bush but others said they had doubts. Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) joined three Democrats in a call for an investigation.

"At no time, to our knowledge, did any administration representative ask the Congress to consider amending existing law to permit electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists without a warrant," the five senators wrote.

New rounds of criticism followed reports Tuesday of comments Bush made last year in which he seemed to assure his audience that the government conducted wiretaps only with court approval.

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretaps, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order," the president said in a speech in Buffalo, N.Y. on April 20, 2004, in which he discussed enactment of the Patriot Act.

"Nothing has changed, by the way," Bush continued in the speech. "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

The White House's Phony Example, Re: Case for Warrantless NSA Eavesdropping. From the LA Times:

In confirming the existence of a top-secret domestic spying program, President Bush offered one case as proof that authorities desperately needed the eavesdropping ability in order to plug a hole in the counter-terrorism firewall that had allowed the Sept. 11 plot to go undetected.

In his radio address Saturday, Bush said two of the hijackers who helped fly a jet into the Pentagon — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — had communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the U.S. ...

[But] a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines.

The incident Bush referred to involved at least six communications between the hijackers in San Diego and suspected terrorists overseas.

The current and former counter-terrorism officials, who requested anonymity, said there were repeated phone communications between a safe house in Yemen and the San Diego apartment rented by Alhazmi and Almihdhar. The Yemen site already had been linked directly to the Al Qaeda bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and to the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, several current and former U.S. counter-terrorism officials familiar with the case said.

Those links made the safe house one of the "hottest" targets being monitored by the NSA before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had been so for several years, the officials said.

Authorities also had traced the phone number at the safe house to Almihdhar's father-in-law, and believed then that two of his other sons-in-law already had killed themselves in suicide terrorist attacks. Such information, the officials said, should have set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Under authority granted in federal law, the NSA already was listening in on that number in Yemen and could have tracked calls made into the U.S. by getting a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Then the NSA could have — and should have — alerted the FBI, which then could have used the information to locate the future hijackers in San Diego and monitored their phone calls, e-mail and other activities, the current and former officials said.

Instead, the NSA didn't disclose the existence of the calls until after Sept. 11, according to these officials and U.S. documents produced in two independent inquiries.

"The NSA was well aware of how hot the number was … and how it was a logistical hub for Al Qaeda, and it was also calling the number in America half a dozen times after the Cole and before Sept 11," said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official familiar with the case.

The joint congressional inquiry found that the NSA and the FBI independently had learned of the "suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East" by 1998, and that the NSA had disseminated several reports of communications to and from the undisclosed location.

Go read Katherine at Obsidian Wings on the flip side of Bush's unchecked powers, the unchecked powerlessness of those caught in this secretive extralegal system, designed to be without recourse, even when some of those caught, rendered, tortured are innocent.

Former Reagan Administration Official: "[Cheney]'s living in a time warp", re: perceptions of weakened executive power:

... The vice president entered the fray yesterday, rejecting the criticism and expounding on the philosophy that has driven so many of the administration's actions. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it -- and to some extent that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them," Cheney said. In wartime, he said, the president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired."

Speaking with reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force Two to Oman, Cheney said the period after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War proved to be "the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy" and harmed the chief executive's ability to lead in a complicated, dangerous era. "But I do think that to some extent now we've been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency."

For Cheney, the post-Watergate era was the formative experience shaping his understanding of executive power. As a young White House chief of staff for President Gerald R. Ford, he saw the Oval Office at its weakest point as Congress and the courts asserted themselves. But scholars such as Andrew Rudalevige, author of "The New Imperial Presidency," say the presidency had recovered long before Cheney returned to the White House in 2001. The War Powers Act, the legislative veto, the independent counsel statute and other legacies of the 1970s had all been discarded in one form or another.

"He's living in a time warp," said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and Reagan administration official. "The great irony is Bush inherited the strongest presidency of anyone since Franklin Roosevelt, and Cheney acts as if he's still under the constraints of 1973 or 1974."

Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.) said: "The vice president may be the only person I know of that believes the executive has somehow lost power over the last 30 years."

Yet Bush supporters believe that other branches should take a subsidiary role to the president in safeguarding national security. "The Constitution's intent when we're under attack from outside is to place maximum power in the president," said William P. Barr, who was attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, "and the other branches, and especially the courts, don't act as a check on the president's authority against the enemy."

Even before the NSA surveillance program, the Bush administration has asserted its war-making authority in detaining indefinitely U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, denying prisoners access to lawyers or courts, rejecting in some cases the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, expanding its interrogation techniques to include harsher treatment and establishing secret terrorist prisons in foreign countries.

"The problem is, where do you stop rebalancing the power and go too far in the other direction?" asked David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "I think in some instances [Bush] has gone too far."

Taken alone, the expansion of executive wartime power may seem an obvious outflow of confronting the new threat of global terrorism. But when coupled with the huge expansion of the federal government in general under Bush -- the budget has grown by 33 percent and his administration has broadened the federal role in education and the scope of Medicare -- a growing number of conservatives are expressing concern about the size and reach of government on his watch.

Abramoff in plea negotiations.

Given the gravity of the White House's pronouncements that it is not bound by the law as understood by most Senators and Americans, this sort of "gotcha" find of a one-time only US-to-US call being "accidentally" monitored by the NSA without a warrant seems kind of strange. A kind of, 'we accidentally broke our self made rule once! Only once! See how particular we were?' Something about this doesn't ring quite true.

Also notable is this (from the WaPo tonight):

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John D. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday. ...

Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

I think the theory discussed here may be partly correct. The means by which the administration got "probable cause" to go to the FISA court for warrants on specific individuals or US phone numbers may have involved some sort of large scale data mining or link analysis involving capturing communications from Americans who had done nothing but call a certain country, in a way that the courts would likely determine "unreasonable search and seizure." From the mined data, they got a target list of US person numbers or individuals. What I presumed is that the administration never went to the FISA court at that point, but this FISA judge resignation story suggests perhaps they did, disguising the means by which they got "probable cause" on some of those they were seeking warrants on.

(What doesn't hold water is the scenario being passed around by those defending the President's bypassing the law, that the US had specific US phone numbers from cell phones of senior al Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan, but worried that they wouldn't be able to get a warrant. Of course the FISA court is going to approve a warrant for that! That would be probable cause to anyone. So why in the world are they trying to pull the wool over our eyes on this one? Why the deception?)

(Reader SC sends this information on the composition of the FISA court.)

NYT links. Here's a small but persistent pet peeve. The NYT has embedded hyper-links in some of its articles, but they are usually not very useful. For instance in this graph:

In a highly unusual move, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia released a letter he sent to Vice President Dick Cheney on July 17, 2003, complaining that "given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities." The letter was handwritten because secrecy rules prevented him from giving it to anyone to type.

The Bill of Rights. If like me, you haven't read it in a while, it's worth rereading.

Seems the Bush administration has already violated Amendments 4 (NSA warrantless surveillance), 5, 6, 14 (Hamdi, Padilla).

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ...

Amendment IV: 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.

Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment XIV (Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868. Note: Article I, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of the 14th amendment.)

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Left Coaster's eRiposte continues his shadow Phase II investigation here. The upshot: "The uranium claim was stovepiped to the White House by a few individuals in WINPAC."

Senate members call for spy probe:

Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine joined Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Dianne Feinstein of California and Ron Wyden of Oregon in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees into whether the government eavesdropped "without appropriate legal authority."

Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers have already backed a plan for a congressional hearing into the program, first revealed by The New York Times last week.

TAPPED's Garance Franke-Ruta is doing some data mining of her own, digging into the Church committee reports, here, and some other recent articles pertaining to the social history and law regulating government surveillance on Americans. Or shorter GFR: "George Bush is trying to overturn the law designed to protect America from another Richard Nixon."

Reid, Rockefeller, Leahy letter to President Bush:

Dear Mr. President:

Your recent acknowledgement of the existence of a highly-classified program to conduct electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens and permanent residents without obtaining a court order as required by law has raised a number of troubling issues in the minds of the American people. That is why Democrats and Republicans have called for prompt and thorough congressional investigation of this program. We write to ask that you immediately provide Congress with additional details on the extent and scope of this program, your legal justification for your actions, and your efforts to inform Congress about this program.

The relevant law governing surveillances, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (“FISA”), could not be clearer on the need to obtain a court order for such surveillance.

It also provides for emergency procedures and for authorization of electronic surveillance during a time of war, with reasonable time limits beyond which a court order must be obtained. We are deeply troubled by your assertions that the Constitution and the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress following the 9/11 attacks provide you justification for contravening a statute’s clear language. In your public statements to date, you have not made a convincing legal argument for the authority to do so.

In addition, public statements by several of the handful of Members of Congress who were provided a briefing on this program indicate that insufficient information was provided to them under ground rules that did not enable Congress to conduct satisfactory oversight. There are questions whether your Administration has properly complied with the National Security Act of 1947 requirement to keep the appropriate committees of jurisdiction “fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States.”

It is important for Congress to review these matters. We respectfully ask that you cooperate fully to provide all necessary information on all relevant aspects of this program, including presidential orders, supporting legal opinions, complete descriptions of actions taken under the program, and other information, to the appropriate oversight committees.

As Congress begins to examine this program in greater detail, it is clear Congress and the American people need immediately to understand at least four issues:

* Under what specific legal authorities did you authorize warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens and permanent residents inside the United States?

* Given your assertion that the FISA is insufficient in providing appropriate authority and procedures to protect Americans from terrorism, what specific powers or authorities are insufficient and why, in the four years since the 9/11 attacks, has your Administration not proposed correcting modifications?

* You have stated that you authorized the NSA to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Have you ever authorized the interception, without a warrant, of purely domestic communications, or communications of people without known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations?

* Could you please provide additional information on the legal and other justifications for limiting briefings on these matters to a handful of Members of Congress, as well as information on the dates, attendance, and issues discussed at these briefings, so it can be determined whether you complied with the letter and spirit of the National Security Act of 1947?

Sincerely, ...

Iraqi writer Nibras Kazimi says early Iraq elections results, even accounting for multiple reports of fraud, show Iran has truly won. "The Shia and Sunni Islamists carried the day, and even the cheating on their parts didn't alter the fundamentals of the situation. Sistani, Iran, fears of a civil war; these were the criteria for Thursday's vote. If Iraq stays together, I don't think the elections in four years will be democratic. Iran plays too big of a role now," he writes me. "I find it very sad." More at his blog. Meantime, reader SH wants to know why Chalabi was meeting with US ambassador Khalilzad yesterday, in order to "discuss the contours of the new government"?

Bruce Ackerman in Slate:

Secrecy creates perverse incentives for the very lawyers upon whom the president relies for candid legal advice. And yet we are asked to trust them as they devise secret new security regimes behind the backs of the American people. It is not enough merely to end NSA spying on Americans. It is time to put an end to secret initiatives, rationalized in secret, and justified in the name of national security.

Eric Umansky has an important though unconfirmed report.

This is one of the most disingenuous pieces I have ever read. As everybody has noted, the FISA court has in its history almost never refused a request. As Kevin Drum notes here, "FISA approves 99.98% of all surveillence applications presented to it. What's more, federal law already allows emergency wiretaps without a FISA warrant, as long as you apply for a warrant within 72 hours. Following the law wouldn't have hamstrung the administration in any way." It's inconceivable that days after September 11th, the FISA court would have refused a request to monitor the phone numbers found on the phone of a senior al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan, as their scenario imagines. These writers are too smart not to know that; so one can imagine how worried they are about how these revelations harm their guy.

Update: A reader writes in with a good point:

I'm surprised that no one, not even my conservative friends, has noted that President Bush's discovery of an implied right to conduct warrentless searches in Article II of the Constitution is completely inconsistent with his oft-repeated vow to only appoint strict constructionists to the federal bench. It is intellectually dishonest, to say the least, that President Bush believes that the judiciary is confined to the literal meaning of words when it interprets the Constitution, but the executive branch is allowed to divine implied rights when it interprets the same document. Indeed, there is no rational way to reconcile the two positions - other than as a naked grab for power by the executive branch.

Two good posts on the White House/NSA warrantless snooping issue, from Bill Arkin and Noah Shachtman. Here's Arkin:

... In the spring of 2001, NSA began to change direction in its counter-terrorism targeting under Lt. Gen. Hayden: rather than analyzing the mass of what was collected hoping for the gem in the growing mass of available material, NSA began a methodical process of dissecting terrorist target communications practices and network to determine what to collect. This is commonly referred to at NSA as hunting rather than gathering. It was a procedure that was in its infancy on 9/11.

So what happened? The perceived shackles of domestic collection were removed, the gathering process began again to overwhelm the hunting process, new software, data-mining and link analysis methods were applied to isolate potential domestic targets. The beginnings of an era of greater openness and candidness about NSA's challenges were halted and the agency disappeared into the administration's secret war. ...

The NYT on Bush's Phony Choices:

This administration has a long record of expanding presidential powers in dangerous ways; the indefinite detention of "unlawful enemy combatants" comes to mind. So assurances that surveillance targets are carefully selected with reasonable cause don't comfort. In a democracy ruled by laws, investigators identify suspects and prosecutors obtain warrants for searches by showing reasonable cause to a judge, who decides if legal tests were met.

Chillingly, this is not the only time we've heard of this administration using terrorism as an excuse to spy on Americans. NBC News recently discovered a Pentagon database of 1,500 "suspicious incidents" that included a Quaker meeting to plan an antiwar rally. And Eric Lichtblau and James Risen write in today's Times that F.B.I. counterterrorism squads have conducted numerous surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, on groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group.

Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the power to spy on Americans. Fine, then Congress can just take it back.

Overreach. Charles Lane:

The Supreme Court spoke at the height of the Korean War on the president's authority to override Congress. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal takeover of the steel industry to prevent a strike that would have disrupted the supply of weapons to troops at the front. He cited his authority as commander in chief.

By a vote of 6 to 3, the court rejected Truman's claim. In an influential concurring opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote that the president's power is "at its lowest ebb" when he "takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress."

"With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations," Jackson wrote.

Analysts said that precedent makes Bush's claim of inherent constitutional authority to eavesdrop the most controversial aspect of his legal argument.

Mr. 0.34%. In early elections returns, Chalabi doesn't appear to have done very well, all the papers report, getting less than half a single percent of the vote in Baghdad. "The early results for Baghdad Province, the most diverse in the country, provided the strongest indication of the religious nature of the voting. With 89 percent of the ballots here counted, the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, had won 1.4 million votes, or 59 percent. The runner-up was the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main religious Sunni Arab coalition, with 19 percent. Mr. Allawi's secular coalition, the Iraqi List, was third, at 14 percent. Another prominent secular candidate, Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, won less than a half of 1 percent of the vote in Baghdad, possibly denying him a seat in the Council of Representatives." Then again, it's still early.

Bush Personally Intervened to Try to Kill NYT NSA Scoop. Go read Jonathan Alter on Snoopgate:

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. ...

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism....

Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean: President Bush is “the first President to admit to an impeachable offense.”

Nuclear code briefcases went with Cheney to Kabul? This simply can't be real. The AP via Froomkin:

Cheney then flew to Kabul, where he watched from the front row as Afghanistan's national assembly took its first oath of office.

Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press describes Cheney's chaotic arrival in Afghanistan.

"The Cheneys' seven-hour visit to Afghanistan began when their unmarked C-17 cargo plane landed at Bagram Air Base. They then flew by helicopter to a spot outside the parliament building. The chopper stirred up a massive dust storm, but the Cheneys were shielded when they ducked into a black sport-utility vehicle.

"Security forces surrounded the Cheneys' vehicle and walked along as it moved with their hands on the side of the vehicle. A gun-toting Afghan soldier dressed in fatigues pushed the rest of Cheney's entourage against an outside wall until the gates to the parliament building closed behind them.

"Afghan security forces insisted on searching all the bags carried by members of Cheney's staff and the press who were left outside.

"Secret Service agents objected, saying they had already been checked. A White House advance staffer already on site came out and angrily demanded that the Afghans admit military aides carrying the briefcase that contains the U.S. government's nuclear weapon codes.

" 'I'm telling you to open the gates now,' the White House staffer said. 'These are the vice president's military aides.'

"The Afghans allowed Cheney's military aides through but insisted on doing complete body searches of the rest of his traveling party."

Early Iraq elections results show religious groups leading. More from the FT, via Swopa.

La Loi, C'est Moi. Here's another thing that doesn't make sense from Bush's comments to journalists today about the warrantless, un court supervised spying on Americans. Why should he ever go to the FISA court at all? Since he thinks he has such vast wartime powers to do whatever he wants in violation of statutes and laws, why ever submit to quaint concepts like the rule of law? Why not just shuck the whole thing? Why should he feel any restraint to uphold any part of the FISA law? He and Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo have determined that he has the right to do whatever he feels is necessary in wartime, and the law doesn't matter. So -- what's holding him back? Why is he taking the Chinese menu approach to the law, picking and choosing what he'll abide by, and informing the American public only when the papers get ahold of the news?

(And I can't help but picturing Bush and Harriet Miers, both in their bifocals, gathered in the Oval Office with an NSA briefer carrying stacks of translated intercepts, the Urdu orders for pizza and not Chinese again, etc. I think I feel a top ten list coming on.)

Looks like Rep. Duncan Hunter has been paying a law firm a bit of money starting in November. Reports FECInfo:

...Rep. Duncan Hunter’s PAC, Peace Through Strength PAC reported paying Williams & Jensen $6,655 for legal/admin fees.

As a reader reminds me, "Hunter has admitted that he was one of two congressmen identified in a DoD Inspector General report who were found to have pressured the DoD to contract with Brent Wilkes' ADCS for document digitization services. The other Congressman: Duke Cunningham. The hefty legal fees may signify that the FEC is investigating political contributions made by Brent Wilkes and/or other ADCS employees."

Harry Reid is making sense:

The president and the Republican leadership should stop playing politics with the Patriot Act.

They should join the bipartisan group of Senators who agree the government can fight terrorists and protect the privacy and freedom of innocent Americans.

Americans want both liberty and security. They are not contradictory. We do not have to sacrifice our basic liberties in the course of strengthening national security.

"Bush talking points for morning news conference" -- sent by a reader who wants to be anonymous:

* The Constitution gives me the power to do whatever the *#@& I want to do.

* I don't have to get Congress's permission to do a god-darned thing. Out of the goodness of my heart, I may tell four members of Congress what I'm doing - if I feel like it.

* Trust me.

Republican support for Alito's nomination plummeting, a new Fox poll shows:

A Fox News poll conducted December 13-14, 2005 shows Alito’s support dropping precipitously. Respondents were asked: “If you were voting on Samuel Alito’s nomination, would you vote to confirm him or not?” Only 57% of Republican respondents answered “yes” – a drop of 18 percentage points from a poll conducted shortly after his nomination (75% of Republican respondents answered “yes” in a November 8-9 poll).

Support for Alito among Independents dropped 11 points (from 39% to 28%); Democratic support dropped 9 points from 26% to 17%. Overall support dropped from 46% to 35%. Support for John Roberts in earlier polls was significantly higher (50% and 51%).

Peter Brookes, the Times (UK), "What an extraordinary rendition!"

Go read Bill Arkin on 9/11 Gone Wild, "We are being asked to destroy the country in order to save it."

I think Noah Shachtman is onto something. Wonder if some new data mining or other technology meant that the way they got "probable cause" was through what the courts would deem illegal search and seizure? Is this about some technological application that has an implicit policy change the administration never declared? So you start by mining every single communication to and from Afghanistan and you mine some significant patterns and work backwards? But why even at that point -- when let's say they had a list of targeted phone numbers or specific individuals in the US they then wanted to surveil -- would they not then go to the FISA court, which surely would be sympathetic to their security argument, and one would then have, with a court-approved wiretap, potentially legally admissable evidence? Why stick with a program that could never be used in court? I don't think we can understand this warrantless NSA spying on Americans story without its connection to the whole secret extra legal other decisions the Bush administration has made mostly in secret - the torture, the extraordinary renditions, Gitmo, secret prisons, declaring unilaterally US citizens like Padilla and Hamdi enemy combatants, instantly denied the rights of US citizens, because clearly, the Bush administration never meant to try any of the people picked up by this program in a court of law.

And for such vast, extra legal search and seizure of captured communications, why do they seem to have so very little to show for it? And why did they not consider creating some oversight mechanism, that would give the program some pretense to legitimacy? Why was this policy change all done in secret, with those authorizing the program the same ones who allegedly "oversaw" it, answerable to nobody, a perfect circle absolutely ripe for abuse?

And I think there's a whole new set of hurdles to Alito's nomination that just appeared, that may make even Republican Senators resist putting someone on the Supreme Court who would deem such secret executive powers at the cost of those of Congress. More here about the new hurdles Alito faces.

Murtha Q & A.

Pelosi Letter:

When I was advised of President Bush’s decision to authorize these activities, I expressed my strong concerns verbally and in a classified letter to the Administration. The Bush Administration, however, made clear that it did not believe that Congressional notification was required and it also did not believe that Congressional approval was required to conduct these activities. I have attached a copy of my statement on the President’s disclosure.

Yesterday, several of my colleagues and I sent a letter to Speaker Hastert requesting that he immediately take steps to conduct hearings on the scope of Presidential power in the area of electronic surveillance, and that the Speaker and I jointly appoint a panel of outside legal experts to assist the committees involved in those hearings. I have attached this letter for your information.

I have also been advised by Congresswoman Jane Harman, Ranking Democrat on House Intelligence Committee, that the Bush Administration reversed its decision to brief the full House Intelligence Committee on the details of the activities to which the President referred in his radio address. The refusal to provide the Committee with the information necessary to discharge its oversight responsibilities is reminiscent of an Administration directive in October 2001, which severely restricted the flow of information from the intelligence community to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Congressional and public pressure forced the Administration to rescind that directive and I am confident that a similar result will eventually occur on the NSA surveillance issue. ...

"Prison of Darkness," new Human Rights Watch report, via Eric Umansky.

Militarization of Counterterrorism. After the past week's news, you'll be delighted I'm sure to learn from the Post's Walter Pincus, that the "Pentagon's Intelligence Authority Widens":

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

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

CIFA's new authority will give the agency the ability to propose missions to Army, Navy and Air Force units, which combined have about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian investigators in the United States and abroad. ...

By comparison, the FBI recently disclosed it has about 11,000 special agents overall, about 4,929 of whom are assigned to terrorism investigation.

Noah Shachtman wonders if new technology -- that former Senate Intel committee chair Bob Graham refers to in today's Post piece -- is behind the NSA snoop case? "I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham told the Post, referring to new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. "So maybe the NSA wiretaps were using a new kind of capability... one that might have even made the FISA court uncomfortable?" Shachtman wonders.

It seems likely that the "high ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge" that spoke about the warrantless NSA spying program to the Washington Post this weekend may be Michael Hayden, former NSA director, now principal deputy director of national intelligence. As the Post further reported, "the high ranking intelligence official ...spoke with White House permission but said he was not authorized to be identified by name."

Go read Hilzoy on Bush and the separation of powers:

He is, essentially, claiming that he has the right not just to execute the laws, but to write them himself, and then to judge their application. Moreover, he claims the right to do this in secret. Were he to announce openly that he had decided to concentrate all the powers of government in his own hands, we could at least argue about whether or not we thought that was a good idea. But by acting in secret, he is, essentially, asserting the right to amend the Constitution unilaterally and without having the decency to let us know.

And while it seems unprecedented in American life, in democracies governed by the rule of law, this is the typical state of affairs in dictatorships. Dictators, typically, are the law, and they find the individuals like Yoo easily enough to interpret the piece of paper that is known as the law to justify whatever the leader wants, all in the name of national security of course. A permanent state of emergency. Yoo and Rice are not the exception. Their type are typical features of dictatorships, familiar to anyone who has lived in the Soviet Union or Belgrade or East Germany. The technocrat intellectuals that put the intellectual, legal gloss on such shortcircuiting of the law, that make such abuses easier, the enablers.

If Bush authorizes extraordinary renditions or black site prisons or torture or turning American citizens into "enemy combatants" at the drop of a pin, if he authorizes warrantless spying on Americans, Rice is sure to show up on Meet the Press and invoke the thousands of Americans saved by such illegal measures. Just like she assured us Bush's invasion of Iraq was necessary to prevent an Iraq nuclear mushroom cloud. Until that too is exposed as fraudulent, when she seamlessly changes her tune. She considers this her duty. Loyalty above all else.

There's something else about the Bush/NSA warrantless, oversight-less spying on Americans that doesn't make sense. The case Bush cited yesterday - of two San Diego based hijackers al Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and their overseas communications -- as a justification for going around the FISA court to use the NSA to spy on Americans making calls overseas -- really makes no sense.

Why?

Because it's pretty clear if you were tapping Mr. Al Mihdhar's calls to Germany and Mr. Al-Hazmi's calls to Germany and Afghanistan, that pretty soon, you would want to tap their calls to each other, in San Diego, or their calls with Mr. Atta, who was in Florida.

In other words, you would want to tap the calls between US based persons.

Why? Because what you're really worried about is what those potential terrorist cells are planning to do in the US.

So presumably, you would have to go to the FISA court at that point. (Bush hasn't admitted to the NSA being used to tap US to US calls -- yet).

But that's not how it worked. The way Bush did the NSA warrantless spying on Americans was no fine instrument. It was a blunt instrument. As the NYT reports today (Sunday), Bush ordered every communication to and from Afghanistan monitored by the NSA after September 11:

In the days after the attacks, the C.I.A. determined that Al Qaeda, which had found a haven in Afghanistan, was responsible. Congress quickly passed a resolution authorizing the president to conduct a war on terrorism, and the security agency was secretly ordered to begin conducting comprehensive coverage of all communications into and out of Afghanistan, including those to and from the United States, current and former officials said.

OK. So things were dramatically expanded as the war on terror was expanded from Afghanistan globally. So who else is being monitored, under what parameters, and what is done with their files once they've begun to be monitored -- again, without oversight?

It's not much of a stretch to imagine there are plenty of files opened on people of all sorts of political stripes. I imagine, it's not just the anti-war groups monitored by the Pentagon who have reason to wonder, if they're being monitored by the full technological apparatus of the US foreign intelligence system. It's a very blunt instrument, and there's a "and then they came for me" aspect to all of this, that conservatives shouldn't be so quick to dismiss.

In fact, what starts out as one thing might very quickly have become something else. There's no evidence of any court cases that have resulted from Bush's illegal unauthorized warrantless NSA spying on Americans. As I wrote earlier, presumably even the Bush administration hasn't figured out a way to use secretly, illegally obtained evidence against the accused in a court of law. Cases where it's tried to declare the accused has some extra legal judicial status have virtually all collapsed. No successful terrorism prosecutions, no al Qaeda cells wrapped up domestically. So what has it been used for?

"The Tools of Foreign Intelligence are Not Consistent with a Democratic Society." The WaPo editorial on NSA Spying on Americans:

IN THE WAKE of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the New York Times reported last week, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of hundreds of U.S. citizens and residents suspected of contact with al Qaeda figures -- without warrants and outside the strictures of the law that governs national security searches and wiretaps. The rules here are not ambiguous. Generally speaking, the NSA has not been permitted to operate domestically. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that national security wiretaps be authorized by the secretive FISA court. "A person is guilty of an offense," the law reads, "if he intentionally . . . engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute" -- which appears, at least on its face, to be precisely what the president has authorized.

Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address yesterday, defended his action, chastised the media for revealing it, and suggested both that Congress had justified this step by authorizing force against al Qaeda and that such spying was consistent with the "constitutional authority vested in me as commander in chief." But there is a reason the CIA and the NSA are not supposed to operate domestically: The tools of foreign intelligence are not consistent with a democratic society. Americans interact with their own government through the enforcement of law. And in those limited instances in which Americans become intelligence targets, FISA exists to make sure that the agencies are not targeting people for improper reasons but have sufficient evidence that Americans are actually operating as foreign agents. Warrantless intelligence surveillance by an executive branch unaccountable to any judicial officer -- and apparently on a large scale -- is gravely dangerous. ...

As with its infamous torture memorandum, the administration appears to have taken the position that the president is entitled to ignore a clearly worded criminal law when it proves inconvenient in the war on terrorism. ....

What's more, Mr. Bush's general assurances that the program is legal offer no indication of what legal authority, if any, permits this surveillance...

Congress must make the administration explain itself. ... It should be unthinkable for Congress to acquiesce to such a fundamental change in the law of domestic surveillance, particularly without a substantive account of what the administration is doing and why.

Some Lincoln Group ex-employees are sharing useful information with the Los Angeles Times. Among them, documents which prove the Pentagon has been lying to Congress about its covert propaganda campaign:

On Dec. 2, Pentagon officials told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) that all of the published materials were supposed to be identified as originating with the U.S. military but that identification was occasionally omitted by accident.

But Lincoln Group documents obtained by The Times, along with interviews with military officials and the current and former Lincoln Group employees, show that those who worked on the campaign believed the media products would be far more credible if their origins were disguised.

Wow. Rice really stumbling on Meet the Press, on the question of under what authority, statute and law the President authorized warrantless, un court authorized NSA spying on Americans. How quickly this has become a matter of discussing how much the President violated the Constitution and the law, and in what forum investigations and judgment should be carried out.

Russert: If in fact [the President] broke the law, what then? Is that a Constitutional crisis?

Public Enemy.

Unprecedented Domestic Surveillance. Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer:

In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.

The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA's new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

In describing the briefings, administration officials made clear that Cheney was announcing a decision, not asking permission from Congress. How much the legislators learned is in dispute.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. ...

Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."

No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress's authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted "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."

The brief made no distinction between suspected agents who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the "war on terror" is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle. ...

By law, according to University of Chicago scholar Geoffrey Stone, the differences are fundamental: Americans have constitutional protections that are enforceable in court whether their conversations are domestic or international.

Bush's assertion that eavesdropping takes place only on U.S. calls to overseas phones, Stone said, "is no different, as far as the law is concerned, from saying we only do it on Tuesdays." ...

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI's national security law unit when Bush signed the NSA directive, described the ongoing program as "very dangerous." In the immediate aftermath of a devastating attack, he said, the decision was a justifiable emergency response. In 2006, "we ought to be past the time of emergency responses. We ought to have more considered views now. . . . We have time to debate a legal regime and what's appropriate."

And here's the Times:

In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that 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.

The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense. ...

What do you think, should Bush be entitled to use 9/11 as an excuse to erect such police state features as secret, un-court authorized domestic surveillance, torture, declaring Americans as enemy combatants, Pentagon domestic spying on peace groups, etc.? Does absolutely anything go? Just because John Yoo says it can? When did a coup happen?

Do these guys really have in 9/11 a license to do whatever they want? If it violates the law, they find someone like John Yoo or David Addington who will interpret the law to their ends. If it violates the Constitution, they don't inform Congress. Then they find someone to interpret the law to justify that. Where does it end?

Check out Mark Goldberg's "The Arsonist."

He was on top of Nixon's enemies' list and G. Gordon Liddy plotted his murder. Murray Waas has a remembrance of investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who died today of Parkinson's disease. More from the Post.

Russ Feingold: “The President's shocking admission that he authorized the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens, without going to a court and in violation of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress, further demonstrates the urgent need for these protections. The President believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed. This is not how our democratic system of government works. The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king.

"On behalf of all Americans who believe in our constitutional system of government, I call on this Administration to stop this program immediately and to fully cooperate with congressional inquiries and investigations. We have had enough of an Administration that puts itself above the law and the Constitution."

Amen.

What a phony: "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." His enemies being -- the Senate? The American public?

And guess what. His own White House, including his deputy chief of staff, and his vice president's chief of staff, improperly gave classified information to the news media as well, about Valeria Plame (as just the most obvious example). And Bush has no problem with that. What a phony. Bush's crew use the classification argument to evade scrutiny of their law breaking, at times, and at others, deliberately violate classification rules when it serves their political ends. What a complete and total phony.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls Bush on another aspect of his phony argument here. That briefing a few Senators on the illegal program while restricting them from discussing it constitutes oversight -- or legality:

Feinstein said that informing a handful of members of Congress who are restricted from reporting or responding to the information in any way did not make the policy legal or constitute congressional oversight.

"What is concerning me, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, is if eight people, rather than 535 people, can know there is going to be an illegal act and they were told this under an intelligence umbrella — and therefore, their lips are sealed — does that make the act any less culpable? I don't think so," Feinstein said.

Mr. Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.

And as my friend John says, it's increasingly clear that quagmire in Iraq is the only thing that has saved us from a police state under these guys. We should give thanks to the Iraqis.

More from Judd Legum.

A scoop deferred. I just don't know what to make of this:

The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.

In a statement yesterday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller did not mention the book. He wrote that when the Times became aware that the NSA was conducting domestic wiretaps without warrants, "the Administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security."

Let's face it. It's hard to imagine that any real terrorists out there are not highly conscious of the likelihood of surveillance. Did bin Laden or Zawahiri or Mullah Omar read the NYT today and smack their forehead and say, Jesus Christ, they are on to me! All those calls from Minnesota, I thought nobody would be monitoring!

That's hard to imagine. Okay. Let's try to think of a more realistic example. Let's say there's some American-Yemeni guy in Buffalo who spent a few months in Pakistan and maybe even went into Afghanistan who calls his cousins in Yemen to chat about this and that. Does he think he's not being monitored by somebody over here? I can't believe after the Lackwanna cases and the Sami al Arian cases, etc. that pretty much everyone who had ever stepped foot in Afghanistan, anyone who would think to call anyone affiliated with an Islamic terrorist group or figure or telephone number is not highly conscious of the likelihood they are being monitored. Anyone seriously dangerous enough to be worried about would know to just assume they were being surveilled. They would at least have to presume they are being surveilled, right? (If they didn't, it doesn't seem like they would be that dangerous. Intent is one thing, capabilities another).

And they probably don't spend a lot of time worried about the civil liberties concerns of ordinary Americans and the fine details about US FISA courts. They probably assume that if the NSA isn't picking 'em up, the FBI is, and if the FBI isn't, the Egyptians or Israelis or somebody else are. (These are also people who would presumably be easy enough targets of FISA warrants, one might reasonably assume. In fact, it's hard to figure out anyone who would fall into the 500-US person batch NSA signals intelligence category who wouldn't more easily be authorized by a FISA court to be the subject of FBI surveillance.)

So it's hard to figure out just what is going on here, except these guys [e.g. the administration] try to do in secret what they can't get away with once it's publicly exposed. In other words, asking the Times not to publish was for the administration a matter of convenience, not national security. The Bush administration didn't want the bother to have to argue in public its belief that it had the legal right to authorize warrantless surveillance of US persons. Which is not a national security argument at all, it is an argument about executive privilege. Which brings us back to the question, why did the Times hold this for so long?

More here and here:

By asserting excessive powers, [former CIA general counsel Jeffrey] Smith said, President Bush may provoke a reaction from Congress and the courts that ultimately thwarts executive power.

"The president may wind up eroding the very powers he was seeking to exert," Mr. Smith said.

Update: One other point. Let's say in this NSA US Person information vaccuum the authorities found someone they are really worried about. Let's say just once, they get evidence of a crime or terrorist conspiracy. How is this stuff going to be used in court? Unlike FISA warrant surveillance, which I assume is legally admissable evidence, just how has the White House prosecuted or do they plan to prosecute someone who they get evidence of obtained from inadmissable, extra legal NSA surveillance - in a way that they can't admit in court? They can't. They can declare the person an enemy combatant and ultimately have to go to the Supreme Court over the very legal status of the accused in the case (is this why the Padilla case fell apart?). I guess they can extraordinarily render him to some place in secret (is this what happened with Hadmi?). But that extra legal judicial system is being challenged on so many fronts, it seems to have basically collapsed. Or they are going to have to figure out how to deal with him in the normal justice system, where one worries about things like evidence that is admissable in court. You can see that it's basically an unsustainable program. Or else it netted so few people who were legally prosecutable, that it's useless.

Eric Umansky, (another temporary blogspot refugee), writes and asks me to post, that he's just spoken to NSA expert James "Bamford, who says that in the FISA court's 20 year history it has only rejected one warrant request. That was then kicked up to a FISA appeals court (the only time that court has ever convened) and that court in turn approved the request... In other words, what was the point in avoiding the courts? Just like many of the administration's more shady decisions, the risk-reward here was all screwy..." Update: Any information on the new John "Organ Failure" Yoo legal defense fund? More here.

Senate refuses to end debate on Patriot Act.

Creepy picture, creepy subject:

Update: Specter to call for hearings:

''There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,'' said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said there would be hearings early next year and that they would have ''a very, very high priority.'' He wasn't alone in reacting harshly to the report. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the story, first reported in Friday's New York Times, was troubling.

McClellan said the White House has received no requests for information from lawmakers because of the report. ''Congress does have an important oversight role,'' he said.

Novak to leave CNN. Update: And go to Fox.

Abramoff's Stealth Columnists. Check this out from Business Week, via Romenesko: Cato Institute fellow and Copley News Service columnist Doug Bandow admits he secretly got paid by Abramoff to write up to 24 favorable columns:

Copley News Service syndicated columnist Doug Bandow says he accepted money from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing as many as 24 op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. "It was a lapse of judgment on my part, and I take full responsibility for it," says Bandow, who has resigned his senior fellow position with the Cato Institute. (Read some of Bandow's columns.)

And who is the "one other think-tank expert" who Business Week says was also paid $2000 per column by Abramoff?

Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. "I do that all the time," Ferrara says. "I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."

Ferrara began working at the Institute for Policy Innovation after the period during which he wrote the op-ed pieces for Abramoff. Earlier, he worked at the activist anti-tax organization Americans for Tax Reform.

Ferrara wouldn't say which publications have published pieces for which Abramoff paid him. But a review of his work shows that he wrote articles for The Washington Times that were favorable to the Choctaw Indians and the Mariana Islands.

Update: Reader DF points out that Ferrara has also published in the National Review.

DeLay's former deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy plea agreement? National Journal's Peter Stone reports in a piece on troubles for the Alexander Strategy Group:

... The close links that Abramoff had with Ed Buckham, who runs the firm and is a former chief of staff to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and with Buckham's partner Tony Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to DeLay, is causing headaches for Alexander Strategy. The Justice Department's public integrity and fraud units are investigating Abramoff's lobbying activities and the possible bribery of public officials.

According to legal sources familiar with the probe, Rudy, who was a partner of Abramoff's at the firm Greenberg Traurig, may be close to a plea bargain agreement with prosecutors. Meanwhile, Buckham is reportedly being scrutinized by investigators interested in whether some clients that Abramoff shared with Alexander Strategy may have been used to help pay the $115,000 that DeLay's wife, Christine, received from Alexander Strategy over four years while serving as a consultant to the firm. ....

Why Rove Called Novak. Murray Waas reports, that he was on orders to defend Fran Townsend, the new NSC homeland security czar, who was the subject of internal administration whispering campaign for having worked in the Clinton-era justice department. And who was telling Novak that Townsend was an "enemy within"? David Addington and Scooter Libby, in Cheney's office, were leading that jihad, Waas reports. Go read the piece. The story seems to be sourced by someone trying to help Rove out, e.g. his lawyer, but it does explain the information that gave Fitzgerald pause and resulted in the delay in any Rove indictment before the first grand jury expired.

Kidan Plea. From National Journal's Early Bird:

"Adam Kidan, a New York businessman, pleaded guilty Thursday in Miami federal court to defrauding lenders of more than $20 million in the sale of SunCruz Casinos and agreed to help Miami prosecutors build their case against his former business partner Jack Abramoff," the Miami Herald reports. "A sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 1."

Warrantless Eavesdropping. Bush has approved NSA spying on Americans calling abroad without FISA warrants, the NYT reports. Most of those targeted were calling suspected terrorist numbers, although it's hard to understand precisely who gets monitored, in 500 person batches at a time. Deeper into the story, the paper reports that the administration asked the paper not to report the story, and it held it back for a year, while it also conducted additional reporting:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted. ...

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials. ....

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants. ...

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy. ...

More from Will Bunch, Eric Umansky, Atrios.

Congressional Research Service via Knight Ridder: Congress did not see same Iraq intelligence as White House. Update: Here's the CRS report.

Go read Hilzoy on comedy central.

Per my previous post, that there is growing evidence that DeLay conspired to the money laundering schemes coordinated by Abramoff on DeLay's behalf, a reader who wants to be anonymous writes:

You're right. Today's article in the Statesman may be what puts DeLay away. The really big corruption took place with the DeLay Foundation and DeLay's other charities. Why? Charities doen't have to disclose their contributors to anyone other than the IRS. ...

I think, when all is said and done, the record will show that the first payoffs to DeLay came through the salary his wife received from the Alexander Strategy Group, but that after she left the really big payoffs were made through the DeLay Foundation. Let's hope the DOJ has subpoenaed the Foundation's tax returns because they will show every contributor. Abramoff used several methods to funnel money to the DeLay Foundation. Among the most clever: using community charities to funnel money from Greenberg, Traurig to the DeLay Foundation. Both the United Way of Miami and the Miami-Dade Community Foundation made contributions to the DeLay Foundation. These contributions appear to have been made by the community charity, but they were really orchestrated by Abramoff.

Kontogiannis' arrest and guilty plea in Athens. Alleged co-conspirator 3 in the Cunningham indictment, Thomas Kontogiannis? Not only has he pleaded guilty to bid-rigging in New York back in 2002. Reader CC has found news reports that he was arrested with a US embassy official in Athens before that, and pleaded guilty to visa fraud. He was sentenced then to five years probation. From the NY Post, via Proquest (no link):

...Business dealings between District 29 in Rosedale [Queens] and Kontogiannis date back to 1989, when the local board leased offices at 1 Cross Island Plaza, built in 1985 by Kontogiannis and owned by his wife.

[Celestine] Miller, appointed in 1992, ran the district with an iron fist, but treated herself with kindness - leasing a Cadillac with district funds, sources said.

About the time of Miller's appointment, Kontogiannis ran afoul of the law. He and an official at the U.S. Embassy in Athens were arrested by the FBI for taking bribes to provide phony U.S. visas.

Both pleaded guilty, and Kontogiannis was sentenced to five years' probation.

He told The Post recently he was only trying to help a Greek national visit his dying mother... Sources said his motive was pure greed. ...

FRANK Mosco, the whistleblower in the largest Board of Education scandal in decades, won't leave his home without his bulletproof vest.

Mosco started wearing body armor a few months ago after, he says, four goons attacked him on a Queens street - bashing him on the head, pummeling him to the ground and throwing him into a van.

The brazen beating occurred just days after Queens District Attorney Richard Brown issued grand jury subpoenas to targets of a massive kickback and corruption probe.

The probe, reported exclusively in yesterday's Post, targets the former superintendent of School District 29 in southeast Queens for allegedly taking up to $1 million in kickbacks to steer rigged computer bids to a major developer's business pals.

"Keep your mouth shut," one of the toughs warned Mosco before dumping him out on the pavement.

He says he had told no one about the assault, not even Brown, partly out of fear of possible organized crime links - but mostly out of concern for his family.

It was not the first threat.

Mosco said Kontogiannis' lawyer, Raymond Shain, was the school's representative at a meeting where the bid specifications were laid out - even though Shain was not a board employee.

"He was facilitating the walk-through as a consultant to the district and as a good friend of Miller and he said he was doing it for free," Mosco said. "He bragged he created the bid."

Kontogiannis is not just a side player in this. According to a December 2, 2005 San Diego Union Tribune article, Cunningham cited Kontogiannis specifically to the US Attorneys in his guilty plea as having "participated in the criminal conspiracy."

(Thx also to AK for links.)

High turn out in Iraq parliamentary elections. More from Spencer Ackerman:

Both the administration and the press will point to expanded Sunni participation in the vote as the most significant thing about the election. They'll be right--but not for the reason they intend. As with January's vote for an interim assembly, American perceptions of the election emphasize the simple fact of turnout while obscuring the motivation for that turnout. In January, the Shia and the Kurds voted en masse in order to build their sectarian agendas into the architecture of the Iraqi political process--that is, the constitution. Now, the Sunnis are voting in the hope of rolling back the achievements of their sectarian rivals--that is, to reassert their dominance over Iraq. Both the Shia and the Sunnis portray their own sectarian control as the true national consensus, ensuring that Iraqi politics after tomorrow will remain a brutal zero-sum game. ...

AP: "White House Said to Agree With McCain on Detainees":

After months of resistance, the White House has agreed to accept Sen. John McCain's call for a law specifically banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror, several congressional officials said Thursday.

Wow. Reading this, I'm fairly certain now, that DeLay is going to prison. Abramoff was his chief money launderer:

But around the time Capital Athletic's tax form was filed in fall 2003, listing the $300,000 donation P'TACH says it didn't get, a DeLay-created charity called Celebrations for Children was begun with $300,000 in seed money.

Celebrations for Children was a short-lived effort to raise money for children's charities by providing donors with special access to DeLay, plus yacht trips and other enticements, during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. Watchdog groups protested, claiming the fundraiser violated a new ban on accumulating unlimited "soft" money, and DeLay dropped it in May 2004.

E-mails and documents released so far in the ongoing investigations do not detail where Capital Athletic's elusive $300,000 went, or if it was money raised at DeLay's behest in possible violation of federal law.

So who is really behind this classified Army interrogation document? Cambone? There needs to be a special Congressional oversight committee just for him. Pentagon domestic surveillance would best be used inside that building's sixth floor.

And the fact that there have been no Congressional hearings on the increasing Pentagon domestic surveillance activities, as Walter Pincus reports today, just boggles the mind. More from Bill Arkin.

Tamara Chalabi's Slate diary.

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in the New Yorker: "As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world." (Hat tip, Belgravia Dispatch.)

Sen. Charles Schumer joins Bob Novak in asking President Bush who from the White House leaked Plame's name.

In a nonbinding vote, the House defies Bush and supports McCain anti torture amendment, the NYT reports.

The San Diego Union-Trib on the convergence of the DeLay and Cunningham corruption cases.

Dem Senators Denied Access to Classified Briefings. "U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) will hold a stakeout today, TODAY, December 14, 2005, following Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s briefing for senators...Levin’s stakeout will follow an unusual unclassified briefing by the Secretary in which classified information will not be able to be discussed." This is almost comical, given how Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Sen. Richard Shelby, both Republicans, have done such a good job of honoring classified information. I guess now we know that every leak of classified information that comes out of the Hill could only come from the Republicans. Saves everybody a lot of time on that parlor game.

Not the Onion. CNN: "BREAKING NEWS: President Bush today accepted responsibility for decision to go to war against Iraq based on faulty intelligence." And when the intel was right (on no Iraq-al Qaeda ties, on Niger yellowcake) and the White House was wrong, he was responsible for that too, he forgot to mention. More from eRiposte.

Kevin Drum has the latest on the warmed over RNC talking points, re: torture.

Off the Record reports that Chalabi's daughter Tamara has Cheney's former spokeswoman as a publicist. And the publicist's husband? He's got the Chalabi/INC account:

Ms. Glover Weiss—whose soirées draw media and political figures from Campbell Brown to Paul Wolfowitz—met with Ms. Chalabi two weeks ago at a Caribou Coffee in downtown D.C. The get-together was the suggestion of mutual friends at Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey, the lobbying firm that employs Jeffrey Weiss, Ms. Glover Weiss’ husband.

Mr. Weiss currently represents Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.

Ezra Klein nails the meta Froomkin story. Some adjustments to "reality" are just going to have to be made.

Pentagon spying on Americans. NBC has got ahold of a database (.pdf linked) of domestic "threats" identified by the Pentagon, including Quaker peace groups, anti-war meetings, etc. From the NBC report:

The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database. ...

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.” ...

Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says. ...

Look, that there is a legitimate force-protection rationale for the Pentagon to do some degree of surveillance to protect against violent protests against military facilities or personnel. That was true before September 11th as well. But monitoring peace groups and the activities of anti war protestors who are peaceful, who are not going near military installations, and keeping that data in a database held by the Pentagon -- isn't that a clear violation of the military's own regulations?

This is specifically what Congressional staff have indicated would not happen when they approved increases to the powers of the Pentagon to do domestic surveillance -- and more powers have just been approved -- and they are just flat wrong. As I understand, the new powers for Pentagon domestic surveillance include the military sharing and receiving this information across government agency lines. So the Quaker peace group's information -- suddenly they are being monitored by a lot of people. You can read the database for yourself to see gross examples of abuse here. So, where in the world is Congress? Where is the oversight? Where are the Pentagon's own internal controls? Weren't we supposed to strike some sort of balance between protecting against threats and protecting civil liberties? How in the world do these abuses continue again and again and again?

More from Jesus' General.

Mitchell Wade, MZM and Pentagon Domestic Surveillance. Writer CS writes, "Your post stirred a memory, and I tracked it down to this bit in Walter Pincus's 27 Nov. article in the Washington Post about the Pentagon push to get into domestic surveillance:

One CIFA activity, threat assessments, involves using "leading edge information technologies and data harvesting," according to a February 2004 Pentagon budget document. This involves "exploiting commercial data" with the help of outside contractors including White Oak Technologies Inc. of Silver Spring, and MZM Inc., a Washington-based research organization, according to the Pentagon document.

It's almost comical. Trust us! Well, never mind. Where is the oversight? None of this would have come out without the federal investigation of Cunningham bribetaking. None of it. That's what's even scarier.

Prosecutors have issued subpoenas for bank records of companies linked to Brent Wilkes (co-conspirator #1 in the Cunningham case) as part of the investigation into Tom DeLay. From the AP: "District Attorney Ronnie Earle issued subpoenas last Thursday for California businessmen Brent Wilkes and Max Gelwix, records of Perfect Wave Technologies, Wilkes Corp. and ADCS Inc. in connection with a contribution to a fundraising committee at the center of the investigation that led to DeLay's indictment on money laundering charges."

Meantime, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that prosecutors are still waiting for Cunningham's cooperation in the case. Assistant US Attorney Sanjay Bhandari "said that Cunningham, like other white-collar criminals, is still going through the process of accepting responsibility for his crimes. 'What I mean by accepting responsibility is something beyond standing in court and saying, 'Yes, I did commit offenses and I plead guilty under the plea agreement,' but actually going beyond a level of denial and minimizing their role and actually getting to a point where they can be helpful to you.'" Back when he plead guilty late last month, Cunningham agreed "'to be interviewed, take polygraph exams, submit documents and 'tell everything (he) knows about every person involved presently or in the past directly or indirectly' in his crimes, according to his plea agreement," the SDUT earlier reported. At stake for Cunningham is whether prosecutors recommend a reduction in a ten year prison sentence he could face.

Certainly this has been noted before, but Mitchell Wade's MZM, Inc. became one of the top 100 federal contractors in DC -- in a town of federal contractors -- according to Washingtonian, before its head got exposed as having got there through allegedly criminal means. Its 2004 estimated revenue of over $66 million put it in the big leagues. That is a lot of contracts, even by federal pork standards. Have we established everything that MZM was doing for the government? (Well -- no; because Wade, who came from a Navy intelligence background, dealt in non-public contracts, far more than his alleged co-conspirator Brent Willkes). And it's worth noting that Wade, who worked for a time as a consultant to Wilkes' ADCS, Inc., was reportedly on poor terms with Wilkes long before they were exposed as allegedly bribing Congressman Duke Cunningham. Apparently Wilkes resented that Wade mastered his methods for cultivating those congressmen and others who could steer contracts to him to a degree that Wade started taking business from Wilkes.

Have heard that US government personnel at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) in Charlottesville didn't think too highly of MZM, which got a huge contract there after hiring the son of the NGIC's executive director (according to this July Walter Pincus report). Would be interested to understand more about this. MZM's defunct website says the company has major offices in DC, Charlottesville (the NGIC), Martinsville, VA ("the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center"), Tampa (sounds like SOCOM), South Korea and Iraq. What was/is it doing in South Korea? And Iraq? ("...$5 million sole source contract to provide interpreters in Iraq," according to the San Diego Union-Trib). What's it doing in Tampa for that matter? MZM appears to have been renamed Athena Innovative Solutions. (Here's Athena's client list). Has it managed to get recommended for new contracts in the current appropriations bill headed to the president? Here's some information on who rescued them. (Veritas Capital, the investment firm that bought selected assets of MZM, appears to be a major investor in DynCorp).

And should a company whose founding leader was involved in bribing congressman to get Top Secret contracts really have such a large role in evaluating foreign suppliers? Is a firm with such clear ethical improprieties really who should be in charge of vetting foreign suppliers for any US government agency? And what is/was that whole project really all about?

Update: Reader DF writes, "Under Careers...[Athena Innovative Solutions] are looking for, among other things, 'Media Exploitation Specialists.' They gunning for Rendon/Lincoln Group???" Apparently, yes. Worth noting that according to Wade's bio, from 1991-1993 (Bush I/Cheney Sec of Def) he worked in the Pentagon as a program manager for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. I believe that would have been Duane P. Andrews. Where is Andrews now? Chief operating officer of SAIC (HQ, San Diego).

Also interesting, Wade's background is Navy intelligence, Wilkes' father was a Navy pilot (who died in a military flying accident off Hawaii), Cunningham was a Navy pilot. One more substrand of what might have brought these people together? But how does alleged co-conspirator 3 Tommy Kontogiannis fit in the picture? How did he initially hook up with Wilkes, Wade and Cunningham? Here's a story on his last run in with the law, in a case that has the outlines of the Cunningham case in smallest miniature (paying $1 million bribe to Queens school district superintendant to get steered a $6.5 million contract to supply what turned out to be defective computers to the Queens school district.)

So who really is Tommy Kontogiannis? And what about those foreign suppliers that MZM is supposed to be evaluating at a new facility in Martinsville, VA? Here's what USA Today found about the center that the Pentagon never requested but Rep. Virgil Goode, recipient of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Wade and MZM, snuck into a classified provision of a defense spending bill:

In 2003, [Virgil] Goode [R-VA] said he added a classified provision to a defense spending bill to create the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center, which he understood would be located in his district.

Workers at the center search publicly available databases to perform background checks on potential foreign suppliers of military goods to screen out those that might harm U.S. interests.

You can see that it's not too far of a stretch to wonder about the counter-intelligence implications of this case. Who really is Kontogiannis representing?

(Thx to several readers for various links -- LR, DC, CC, JW, DF, PC, ER, MI, CR, JR, NS.)

P.S. Probably not significant, but interesting to note that Mitchell Wade's mother's maiden name is Saieed. Reader Chris Cruse found the 1930 census records that show Wade's mother's parents, then dry goods merchants in North Carolina, are listed as coming from "Asyria." My friend Andras writes that most likely "indicates an Iraqi connection - Wade's grandparents were most likely Christians from northern Iraq." (Or perhaps from Beirut, further information in census records indicate). Asyriana, indeed.

A very interesting New Yorker/Ken Auletta profile of the New York Times' publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times, the Miller case, and the tumult of the newspaper industry in the digital age.

Via Atrios, Sam Seder on the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda. More from Matt.

Check out Russ Feingold on the Patriot Act and the latest on the Senate-House conference report on renewing it.

Follow the Money. The Washington Post has a cool graphic, "How Abramoff Spread the Wealth." As with the Cunningham case, many targeted were on the Appropriations committee, several were in the leadership.

What the Wilkes-Wade-Cunningham larger story reveals is the vulnerability of the US government appropriations and contracting process -- even its most sensitive elements - to unscrupulous people, whose chief interests are not necessarily motivated by concern for the well being of the United States. It's really the story of a security breach, and how easily penetrated were two of the most national security-sensitive Congressional committees by those who targeted them and others for just that purpose. And they were targeted in the classic ways spies target recruits -- by first identifying who would be useful, and then identifying their weaknesses (money? alcohol? other ways?). In other words, it's a counter-intelligence story too.

And was Cunningham the only one targeted?

More from the Sacramento Bee, Joseph Cannon, and the superb Left Coaster.

Frank Rich: "WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G."

Extraordinary renditions to become costly for US private contractors? The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman reports that the private firms have also become the subject of multiple European investigations and lawsuits.

On the related subject of the US practice of extraordinary renditions itself, the NY Times' Richard Bernstein has a smart analysis of Rice's trip, and why European leaders may be pronouncing themselves reassured by her public comments, even while European publics remain critical:

...Still, there are plenty of reasons that European officials, in contrast to the European public and press, emerged from the meeting with Ms. Rice expressing their satisfaction.

One is the denials from Poland and Romania in response to news reports that they have harbored secret C.I.A. prisons on their territory. The United States has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of these prisons, but for Europe's leaders to declare that the United States, Poland and Romania are all lying would be a huge breach of diplomatic etiquette, especially in the absence of any proof that the press reports are true.

Second, as many commentators have pointed out, usually in a harshly critical tone, European intelligence services have been cooperating with the United States in gathering intelligence on terrorism suspects, so it would be hypocritical to say the least to condemn the United States for a set of practices that European governments have known about all along and quietly condoned. ...

Niger uranium, again. On the face of it, it's absurd. That the French who opposed the Iraq war were the ones who pushed the bogus Niger yellowcake information on the US, Italy and Britain, which supported the war. It's so absurd, and so unsupported by any evidence, that few in the States have really paid much attention to the theory. But it's the subject of fierce dispute in Italy, where the Berlusconi government has been looking for someone else to blame for the Niger yellowcake forgeries caper ever since reporters identified forgeries middleman Rocco Martino last summer, and learned of his and the yellowcake gang's Sismi pedigree.

The LA Times digs further into the French angle of Nigergate, and establishes that: the French investigated but never believed the information in the Niger forgeries and warned the US off of it. And the French were in a position to know, controlling Niger's uranium mines.

So now we have more proof about why the CIA never believed the Niger yellowcake information it had gotten from Sismi, and why it told the White House to keep it out of White House speeches and evidence for war. Unfortunately, the White House used it anyhow.

La Repubblica has previously reported on the French angle to Nigergate, and that the ex deputy chief of the French counterintelligence service, the DGSE, Alain Chouet, is due to testify to the Roman prosecutor Franco Ionta in a reopened investigation into the Niger forgeries caper. More from France's Le Point.

Just Out: Check out my new Prospect piece on a previously-undisclosed Brent Wilkes-connected company, Archer Logistics, alleged to have received contracts from Langley.

Beyond Pentagon Propaganda. Some of this territory has recently been reported by the LA Times, Knight Ridder and Rolling Stone, but Jeff Gerth puts it all together and breaks new ground on the White House's hiring of John Rendon and an ex-Army psyops specialist to lead a secret White House information operation, the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating Committee. From the NY Times:

... The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company, to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. ...

While advising the White House, Mr. Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and media analysis of outlets like Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations. ...

...What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America's image largely devolved into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead. In late 2002 Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the Office of Strategic Influence, but he intended to "keep doing every single thing that needs to be done."

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning." The new Lincoln Group was another winner. ...

Poland probes alleged black-site jails.

This is hard to believe. A single mother of a 13 year old son is being deployed to Iraq.

Fell asleep last night chewing on the thought, that Wilkes might very well be cooperating with investigators. (In a conversation a couple weeks back, his lawyer wouldn't comment on whether he was cooperating or not, but said an August statement about him being cooperative with the investigation was no longer operative). This Belize thing - he has to know that investigators are watching him, right? Would you let yourself look like you were heading south of the border if you knew you were being watched? Or would you let yourself look like that to lead investigators to whoever else? Or as a total decoy?

More on the Wilkes-Cunningham case from the team that is really busting this thing down at the San Diego Union-Tribune. Key point, sent along by Chris Cruse, "Schwarzenegger asked Wilkes to resign from Del Mar Fair Board and State Race Track Leasing Commission. [And] he did resign, effective Nov. 30." There is an awful lot of extraneous muck in this case, even by corruption/money-in-politics standards, isn't there? Maybe it's from talking to all those folks who knew Wilkes in high school in the early 70s (but not only), but there's a 70s/80s disco age cast and recklessness to this all that -- you don't see surface so often in political stories these days, I assumed because politicians would tend to the careful about the possibility they would get caught.

More via Kevin Drum.

This is horrifying:

At least one passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 924 maintains the federal air marshals were a little too quick on the draw when they shot and killed Rigoberto Alpizar as he frantically attempted to run off the airplane shortly before take-off.

"I don't think they needed to use deadly force with the guy," says John McAlhany, a 44-year-old construction worker from Sebastian, Fla. "He was getting off the plane." McAlhany also maintains that Alpizar never mentioned having a bomb.

"I never heard the word 'bomb' on the plane," McAlhany told TIME in a telephone interview. "I never heard the word bomb until the FBI asked me did you hear the word bomb. That is ridiculous." Even the authorities didn't come out and say bomb, McAlhany says. "They asked, 'Did you hear anything about the b-word?'" he says. "That's what they called it."

When the incident began McAlhany was in seat 24C, in the middle of the plane. "[Alpizar] was in the back," McAlhany says, "a few seats from the back bathroom. He sat down." Then, McAlhany says, "I heard an argument with his wife. He was saying 'I have to get off the plane.' She said, 'Calm down.'"

Alpizar took off running down the aisle, with his wife close behind him. "She was running behind him saying, 'He's sick. He's sick. He's ill. He's got a disorder," McAlhany recalls. "I don't know if she said bipolar disorder [as one witness has alleged]. She was trying to explain to the marshals that he was ill. He just wanted to get off the plane."

McAlhany described Alpizar as carrying a big backpack and wearing a fanny pack in front. He says it would have been impossible for Alpizar to lie flat on the floor of the plane, as marshals ordered him to do, with the fanny pack on. "You can't get on the ground with a fanny pack," he says. "You have to move it to the side."

By the time Alpizar made it to the front of the airplane, the crew had ordered the rest of the passengers to get down between the seats. "I didn't see him get shot," he says. "They kept telling me to get down. I heard about five shots."

McAlhany says he tried to see what was happening just in case he needed to take evasive action. "I wanted to make sure if anything was coming toward me and they were killing passengers I would have a chance to break somebody's neck," he says. "I was looking through the seats because I wanted to see what was coming.

"I was on the phone with my brother. Somebody came down the aisle and put a shotgun to the back of my head and said put your hands on the seat in front of you. I got my cell phone karate chopped out of my hand. Then I realized it was an official."

In the ensuing events, many of the passengers began crying in fear, he recalls. "They were pointing the guns directly at us instead of pointing them to the ground," he says "One little girl was crying. There was a lady crying all the way to the hotel." ...

I should say this scenario -- that the authorities made up or imagined the story about him saying he had a bomb -- never occurred to me when I was writing this morning that there had to be a better way for air marshalls to deal with a mentally ill person already off the plane than killing him. And then a reader wrote in suggesting that it was strange not a single passenger interviewed by the media had heard anything about him claiming to have a bomb. Hours and several media reports later, that seems to be even more apparent.

Update: As I just wrote a reader who strongly disagrees with me on this issue (most every other reader who has written in, including a former commercial pilot, have expressed horror as well), "Reading all of the accounts, it sounds like the guy was having ... a panic attack. And the plane was parked at the gate. And he was trying to get off. And the stewardesses were inconvenienced. And the air marshalls were alerted. And they killed him.
I don't think this is a good reason to kill someone. I don't think this is a good reason for air marshalls to put guns at the heads of other passengers. If that makes you feel safer, fine for you, but I would feel distinctly unsafe -- by how the air marshalls handled this."

"Many words, little clarity from Rice," writes the WaPo's Eugene Robinson:

... When Rice was in Kiev, Ukraine, the other day, I thought I heard her say that the United States government has never tortured people we suspect of being terrorists -- How could anyone even think such a thing? -- or maybe she said that, in any event, we promise to stop doing this awful thing we've never done.

The secretary of state pledged that we wouldn't inflict "cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment" on anyone, even foreign nationals on foreign soil. But was she doing to the words "cruel, inhumane and degrading" what Bill Clinton did to the word "is"? And did this new policy apply not only to U.S. personnel but also to civilian contractors working for the military or the CIA? Just as I was starting to get lost in the tall weeds of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the White House helpfully explained that Rice's comments didn't represent a change of policy at all.

Glad we cleared that up.

Earlier in her trip I'm sure I heard Rice say that we would continue abducting terrorist suspects and making them vanish into months or years of secret detention. She didn't want to talk much about those clandestine "black site" CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, which of course don't exist, depending on what the meaning of the word "exist" is. I'm pretty sure I heard her say we still reserve the right to hold people in these nonexistent prisons as long as we want, without charges or due process. ...

More reports of torture leading to junk information the Bush administration eagerly cited for war:

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons. ...

Today I got a tip on the name of the Wilkes'-affiliated company that did get CIA contracts. And it was officially owned, I was told, by a Wilkes' relative -- not a blood relative. I pushed it about as far as one person can push it today, and learned that one Wilkes non-blood relative in the mix is someone whose name I was familiar with...

And by the way. That gossip about Wilkes liquidating some assets and exploring options for Belize? Not as outlandish as it originally sounded to me. In fact, a certain congressman may have gone with Wilkes on a recent trip there for fun -- and to open a bank account. And it wasn't the Duke.

In the bi-partisan spirit of keeping our hard-earned tax money out of the bribes that go to our congressmen, let's bust this thing down. From all that I have been hearing over the past couple weeks, Cunningham is not the only congressman who is vulnerable to potential charges of wrongdoing in this case. And thinking about this, the prosecutors got Cunningham to plead first. Do you go for the crown jewels first? As I understand, prosecutors as a rule tend to go for the smaller fish to get the bigger fish. More to come.

Here's another company, Global Transporation Systems, Inc. (GTS Inc.), that is registered in the Senate as being a lobbying client of Brent Wilkes' Group W Advisors. What GTS does is apparent from the website (freight, logistics, etc.) What kind of government contracts have they received? ***(SEE 'LATE UPDATE' BELOW) And perhaps most important, what really is the relationship between GTS' ownership (lead owner Richard Wenzel) and Brent Wilkes (identified as co-conspirator 1 in the Cunningham indictment)? As you can see from the Senate registration of Group W Advisors' other clients, many of them are themselves Wilkes' affiliates or co-addressed to subsidiaries of the Wilkes Corporation. I don't know if that's the case with GTS Inc., but it's the pattern.

Keep your tips coming. (Thx to N.)

Update: They have some contracts in Iraq.

Update II: Another irony. Was talking to a staffer for the House appropriations committee today. He told me it was "patently absurd" that the committee members, some of whom themselves received generous, legal contributions from Wilkes (and Wade, and their PACs) would be trying to sneak in any recommendations that would benefit Wilkes' less high profile companies in the appropriations bill headed to the president in the next few days. It seemed absurd to me too. But he then said, that the programs for which Wilkes' ADCS originally got contracts, and for which MZM originally got contracts -- the digitization which originally the Pentagon thought it didn't need? Apparently the Pentagon has requested a quadrupling of the budget for that newly discovered need. Who will benefit, if not ADCS? What was the name of the company Duncan Hunter liked better again?

Update III: I talked to someone from GTS Inc. The company has been around since the 80s. It flies freight under contracts from the government and other clients, using its own planes and outside charters. This guy wasn't even aware that the company had a DC lobbyist. But it's a bit of an anomaly in terms of Group W-registered clients in that it kind of seems like a real company that is not owned by Brent Wilkes or co-housed within the main Wilkes corporation umbrella. Still curious.

Here's a wild guess. As Wilkes' various companies started to get larger and larger defense contracts to do things, it didn't have the in house capacity to really do many of those things it was getting government money for. In other words, when your shell companies have to produce, where do you go? Did it hire out? Subcontract to some place that had that capacity -- some place like GTS? Partner? I am not sure. Trying to think aloud.

Late Update (12/12/2005): Spoke with the president of GTS, Richard Wenzel. While GTS hired Group W Advisors as a government relations advisor in late January 2004 in order to explore possible DoD opportunities for its freight forwarding business, GTS ended the relationship in March 2004, Wenzel said. They have no relationship, no partnership, no involvement with Group W Advisors or any other Wilkes' company beyond that. GTS has been around since 1987, it is a freight forwarding company with a lot of business in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, transporting freight from humanitarian relief to high end retail goods to heavy equipment. GTS has no business for the US government in Iraq, Wenzel said. Wenzel had met Brent Wilkes at a private dinner in Washington DC in 2003, they had discussed their lines of work, including Wilkes' defense work and Wilkes' charitable foundation which benefited San Diego's Children's Hospital and a group that supported veterans and their families (Wenzel and his wife are involved with supporting DC's Children's Hospital). Wenzel was interviewing a few DC gov't relations firms shortly thereafter, to see about seeking DoD opportunities for GTS, and he chose Wilkes' company Group W advisors, in part for its competitive price. He had no idea that meant he was hiring a "lobbyist." He met with Michael Mack and Joel Combs. He said he terminated the contract with Group W shortly thereafter, in March 2004, because Wilkes/Group W allegedly "didn't do what he said he was going to do," according to Wenzel. He would not specify what that was. He said he's dumbfounded by what he's reading in the papers about the Wilkes/Cunningham case.

In the Senate v. House conference tussle over extending the Patriot Act, the Senate seems to have won, with four year sunsets for the most controversial provisions rather than the House-pushed seven to ten year sunsets. Also very important improvements to the nat'l security letters procedures that the Washington Post's Barton Gelman wrote about. Recipients are now going to be explicitly informed that they can contact a lawyer and challenge the letters in court.

Update: I guess I called that wrong. Feingold and Conyers are up in arms. Stay tuned.

More here.

It's quite sad that the only way the federal marshalls have determined to deal with a mentally ill passenger is to kill him. I can't believe there is not a way they could have handled this situation without killing someone whose wife was screaming he's mentally ill and doesn't have his medication. Truly. He was already out of the plane when they killed him. And then - these marshalls who were supposedly protecting the other passengers? Treating them like criminals too. My sense is these guys were wired for total overreaction. More here.

Update: Some of the passengers are disputing that Alpizar mentioned anything about a bomb. More from the Post.

Niger Case Reopened. A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI has reopened its investigation into the origins of the Niger forgeries. Today, Italy's La Repubblica reports that the Rome prosecutor Franco Ionta has reopened his investigation into the origins of the Niger forgeries. Expected to testify? Alain Chouet, the former deputy chief of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French counter-espionage service. Chouet has told Repubblica in a recent interview some details that throw cold water over the Italian government's claim that it was the French who were behind the Niger forgeries caper (for one, Chouet says, the CIA came to the French to ask about the information in the forgeries in the summer of 2002 -- a few months before the Panorama journalist brought the forgeries to the US embassy Rome, and about the same time that forgeries middleman Rocco Martino first tried to sell the forgeries to the French services for $100,000. And the photo of Martino in the Brussels train station, in a white summer suit? All from the same summer. And who took that photo? Sismi.). In any case, the forces that shut down these two investigations previously haven't gone away. But there's a whole lot more that has become publicly known since then. (You can watch for an annotated translation of the Repubblica piece here).

Tipping point? The experts are cautious. But, the experts may know too much to call it right.

The esteemed Knight Ridder is experiencing some pushback -- can you imagine? -- from the Senate Republican Conference for a story it published examining Judge Samuel Alito's 311 published opinions and finding them "generally conservative." Would his supporters have it any other way? In any case, Knight Ridder has taken the time to respond to the SRC. Here are the top graphs:

Our story did one simple thing: It examined Judge Alito’s largest body of work, the more than 300 majority, concurring and dissenting opinions he has written over the past 15 years. More than anything else, this work is a window onto a judge’s thinking, judicial approach and decision-making process. It’s how we’ve evaluated every judge to come down the pike, including Chief Justice John Roberts and all of the appellate court nominees who have made headlines over the past few years.

In Judge Alito’s written work, we found irrefutable patterns across every area of the law.

The story never purported to say there weren’t exceptions to those patterns, and we went to great lengths to include many of those exceptions in the story.
But the patterns were the most notable revelations.

Is this for real? Did Rice unilaterally signal a major change of US policy on treatment of detainees? What happened to Cheney? I'm all for it, but just -- skeptical. Where's the evidence of the change of a policy they never wholly admitted but argued the legal right for? Update: Eric Umansky says there's nothing new here. "The key point is that nearly a year ago then-attorney general Gonzales offered just the same language Rice did," he writes. "It wasn't a change in policy and isn't one now; because they consider the anti-torture convention to have loopholes." So, they're just trying to fool everybody, until this gets out of the headlines? Sound about right?

Geez. Latest gossip I am hearing from San Diego is that Brent Wilkes is liquidating his considerable assets and -- get this -- thinking of heading towards Belize. Which apparently according to this same gossip does not have an extradition agreement with the US and citizenship can be bought for $30,000. Urban legend? Who knows.

The LAT reports an antique furniture detail that your Washington crew has unfairly mischaracterized! A commode is, it turns out, a curved side table.

Fitzgerald before new grand jury, the Post reports. (Thx to reader JH). Update: Post says the signs are the investigation is active.

Doublespeak. Someone help me out. When Rice is described, as in this AP report, "saying no U.S. personnel may use cruel or degrading practices at home or abroad," then why are there near constant reports of US personnel using cruel and degrading practices on detainees? Does this hinge on the Bush administration's watered down definitions of "cruel" and "degrading?" Is the missing "humiliating" and "inhumane" the key to understanding her statement? Or is it the "US personnel" that is the key, e.g. the Bush administration has the Egyptians torture detainees for it? Or perhaps because the renditions are flown by contractors, they are not technically US personnel? Anyhow, her doublespeak campaign doesn't seem to be anything but one huge PR and diplomatic disaster. Never seen such negative press coverage of a Secretary of State on a trip abroad in my lifetime. And it's not Rice that is the problem. It's the policy.

Truly, this is sad. Even with the propaganda efforts of the Lincoln and Rendon Groups, global public opinion of the US has become so negative the State Department has decided to take down its website from the Office of Media Reaction. Writes Jefferson Morley, "Another official told me the department is still monitoring foreign media reaction but the resulting written surveys are for 'internal consumption only.' In other words, U.S. officials still want to know what the world thinks of the United States. They just no longer care to share that information with the rest of the government or the American public."

For any readers who have any expertise in these matters, how typical or untypical is it for the registered lobbying company for a client to have the same address as the client? In other words, how typical is it for lobbying company A to have the 100% same ownership and address as lobbied-for client company B? What does this registration say if anything about the operation?

Heard a funny story about Brent Wilkes today, alleged Cunningham co-conspirator 1. That he has a whole lot of water bottles in his office. When someone remarked on them, Wilkes said he was going to be selling that water to the government. Hey, who said Pure Aqua Technologies was a shell company? And didn't we hear about some water contract somewhere? I can't tell if this Wilkes/Cunningham story is in the Sopranos or some other genre, but there's a fell-off-the-truck quality to so much of this stuff.

And what was Bob Ney (R-OH) doing putting into the Congressional Record high praise of Brent Wilkes' "Tribute to Heroes" foundation - of San Diego -- on October 1, 2002?

Mr. NEY. Mr. Speaker, Whereas, San Diego's Tribute to Heroes was established to honor and support local heroes and their organizations; and

* Whereas, San Diego's Tribute to Heroes should be commended for its worthwhile efforts for servicemen and their families, emergency workers, and children's health care; and

* Whereas, San Diego's Tribute to Heroes ball will be held October 5, 2002 at the San Diego Aerospace Museum;

* Therefore, I join with the residents of the entire 18th Congressional District in recognizing San Diego's Tribute to Heroes organization for its dedication."

A charitable foundation started by ADCS President Brent Wilkes spent $36,000 hosting a black tie "Tribute to Heroes" gala in 2002 that feted Cunningham with a trophy naming him a hero, according to the event's Web site and tax filings. The same year, Wade donated nearly $30,000 to Wilkes' foundation.

(Thx to AK for the research help).

If forced to choose who you would believe, innocent German citizen Khaled Masri who says he was tortured by the US after he was snatched and taken to Afghanistan, or Condoleezza Rice, Don Rumsfeld, or any other representative of this administration, who would it be? Who in the world is going to believe anyone but Masri? Update: It would be a beautiful thing for there to be a debate between Dr. Condoleezza "We do not condone torture" Rice and Mr. al-Masri about how much the US condones torture. Someone could tell her to stuff it in her Ferragamo shoes. There's no two ways about it. She lies. Is Rice denying Masri was tortured? Not that I've heard. She's just admitting snatching and torturing him was a mistake because he had the same name as the guy the US meant to snatch and torture.

Update II: And it turns out European audiences don't believe her. Imagine that. More from Dowd:

Our secretary of state's tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing. ...

It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."...

When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.

Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition. ...

Colin Powell and his aides have made no bones about the fact that his inaccurate presentation to the United Nations was the lowlight of his career. Does his successor not grasp the perils of misrepresentation? Does anyone around her not realize that the price paid by the State Department for lack of candor is quite different than the stakes for someone running for office? I mentioned the other day that she really must not be playing word games on the torture issue, but all the reports from Europe suggest that she is being less than direct with every word on the subject of torture including, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy about (I think) Lillian Hellman, "the" and "and" and "but."

So were Wilkes and Wade part of a effort to try to kind of buy Florida for the GOP? And did Wilkes' and Wade's money - either directly or through their PACS - ever reach former Sanibel Island Republican rep. Porter Goss?

Alito not child of immigrants after all. Late father born in 1914 in New Jersey. (Via Atrios).

Go read Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on why it's Congress and not the White House that's key for GOP power. (Which makes the current investigations -- Cunningham et al, DeLay, Abramoff et al -- all the more interesting.)

The Hotline has interesting coverage of USA Today's Susan Page, Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, University of Virginia's Larry Sabato, National Journal's Carl Cannon, and NBC's Rosalind Jordan discussing the "declining Bush mandate." Just as interesting as anything else you may have been reading at the Hotline.

Shorter Don Rumsfeld: When you let the media cover what it sees, just look what happens. Media should cover what Pentagon wants, without payments and storyboards from the Lincoln group.

Cell phone company problems. A friend asked me for help with this. She has a Sprint cell phone service and her phone broke. Sprint won't give her a new phone without making her sign a new contract extending beyond her current contract. She doesn't want to sign a new contract. If she decides to go to a new cell phone provider, she is required to pay the remainder of her current contract. What rights does she have? Update: You'd think the lobbyists were paying off congressmen, or something!

"CIA Ruse Misled Italians," the Post reports. Hmm. Call it even?

Conflicts of Interest: Cunningham, Wilkes and the CIA, Cont'd. Check out my latest post on alleged Randy "Duke" Cunningham co-conspirator Brent Wilkes and the boost his lobbying career has gotten from its Iran-contra era inception from a close friend in the US government. At Tapped. It is interesting how Abramoff got his start in the College Republicans, followed by a tour in South Africa that involved representing a front group for the apartheid era South African intelligence service used to propagate anti-ANC sentiment among right-wing Republican congressmen and Senators; while Wilkes, a veteran of the Young Republicans at San Diego State University, launched his career bringing Republican congressmen to Central America for tours of the contra rebels the US was secretly funding, a project for which his friend at the CIA was reportedly one of the money men. The arcs of their (Wilkes' and Abramoff's) careers have real parallels. What began with a cause seems to have morphed along the way into pure conflict of interest, corruption, and self-enrichment, but who knows, maybe there's a cause to divine in the current practices. More background here, here, here, and here.

Update: Cannonfire has a provocative theory: "Wilkes was a mechanism by which public funds earmarked for national defense were funneled to G.O.P. candidates and causes." (Thanks to Pogo's Nick S. for the link.)

Hitchens v. Pentagon propaganda.

Who you gonna believe? Atrios expresses my views on Rice "the US does not condone torture" in Europe. And please explain how Rice's utterances are compatable with what Germany, the US, and now everybody who reads the Washington Post knows about the case of Khaled Masri, an innocent German citizen who got snatched off a bus by the US, tortured, and detained for months for no reason other than his name is the same as someone else the US meant to do that to? And then the US had the chutzpah to ask the Germans to keep it quiet, please. The only thing protecting Rice from total official ridicule (public ridicule and outrage will be a certainty) in Europe is that the US' tactics are almost certainly no secret to the foreign ministers she is meeting with, and that there's almost certainly been some degree of complicity with the extraordinary renditions from European territory now being investigated. Anyhow, it's nice to see Rice doing her part for annual fundraising for Amnesty International just in time for the holidays. Update: Check out the new ad in support of the McCain anti-torture amendment from the Center for American Progress.

Late Update: More on Rice's trip from Eric Umansky, here and here. Human Right Watch's response on NBC tonight was just right -- her remarks that Europe should decide whether they wanted protection on the Bush administration's terms -- or else, the implicit threat was -- was disingenuous and patronizing.

As I first reported last week, the Randy "Duke" Cunningham corruption case may have links to Langley. The San Diego Union Tribune reports on the operations of Cunningham co-conspirator 1, Brent Wilkes, and his friendship going back to junior high with the man appointed by Porter Goss to be the CIA executive director, their private wine locker at a DC steakhouse, some hotel suites Wilkes paid for for entertaining congressmen, their time in Honduras, Wilkes' yacht anchored behind Cunningham's "Duke-stir," etc.:

...In 1999, Wilkes and his wife bought a $1.5 million home in the Poway hills. He soon bought a second home: a $283,500 town house in the Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. During his visits to Washington, he made his rounds in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. At the Capital Grille, a favored hangout of legislators and lobbyists, he rented a personalized wine locker with his best friend Foggo.

Wilkes spread his taxpayer-provided funds throughout his company, taking executives on periodic retreats to Hawaii and Idaho.

In Honolulu, Wilkes stayed at suites at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel or rented the beachfront mansion of the late hairstyling mogul Paul Mitchell, which typically goes for $50,000 a week.

In Idaho, Wilkes' team stayed at the posh Coeur d'Alene Resort, where Wilkes paid $2,500 a night for a 2,500-square-foot penthouse suite, featuring an indoor swimming pool and outdoor Jacuzzi, said former employees and sources in Idaho.

For dinner, Wilkes would take his team to Beverley's restaurant, where a group meal could easily cost several thousand dollars. For recreation, they would fish, Jet Ski or play at the resort's exclusive golf course, famed for its 14th hole on a man-made floating island in Lake Coeur d'Alene.

There were retreats to Hawaii and Idaho at least once a year, said one source inside the company, with visits to Idaho typically occurring in spring or summer and visits to Hawaii in fall or winter.

Wilkes made no bones about where his money was coming from. His jet-black Hummer bore a license plate reading MIPR ME – a reference to Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests, which authorize funds in the Pentagon.

Wilkes shared the benefits of his largesse with the politicians who helped him. He took Cunningham on several out-of-state trips on his corporate jet. Cunningham has produced no records showing that he paid for food, lodging or transportation while traveling to resorts with Wilkes, although he does have receipts for several campaign trips on Wilkes' jet.

Wilkes also bought a small powerboat that he moored behind Cunningham's yacht, the Kelly C, at the Capital Yacht Club in Washington, D.C. The boat was available for Cunningham's use anytime Wilkes was not using it.

But what landed Wilkes in trouble with federal prosecutors was his gifts to Cunningham. ...

A Duke University pollster analyst appears to have been hired by the NSC to write the bulk of Bush's "victory" speech. The strategy is mostly designed as PR for the American public. Sound familiar?

...Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed. ...

The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p." ...

Bound to go right up there with Condoleezza Rice's 2000 Foreign Affairs article that opined the US military would not be used in any Bush administration to escort children to school, e.g. not for nationbuilding. As a source of ridicule for time immemorial. When Rice is at her best, is when she applies her department's bench strength towards finding practical solutions (Gaza crossing deal, etc.). When she falls flat, is when she tries to play this administration's more ideological than you game. The mushroom cloud bit. And this.

The GOP-only appointment rules that DeLay tried to enforce on K Street now seem to be spreading. Knight Ridder reports that the State Department has been using political "litmus tests" before sending American representatives overseas, to see if they have ever said a word critical of the Bush administration's Iraq policy:

The State Department has been using political litmus tests to screen private American citizens before they can be sent overseas to represent the United States, weeding out critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to department officials and internal e-mails.

In one recent case, a leading expert on conflict resolution who is a former senior State Department adviser was scheduled to participate in a U.S. Embassy-sponsored videoconference in Jerusalem last month, but at the last minute he was told that his participation no longer was required.

State Department officials explained the cancellation as a scheduling matter. But internal department e-mails show that officials in Washington pressed to have other scholars replace the expert, David L. Phillips, who wrote a book, "Losing Iraq," that's critical of President Bush's handling of Iraqi reconstruction.

"I was told by a senior U.S. official that the State Department was conducting a screening process on intellectuals, and those who were against the Bush administration's Iraq policy were not welcomed to participate in U.S. government-sponsored programs," Phillips said.

"The ability of the United States to promote democracy effectively abroad is curtailed when we curtail free speech at home, which is essential to a free society," he said.

In another instance of apparent politicization, a request by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, to arrange a visit by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who lived in Indonesia when he was young, was delayed for seven months. The visit never occurred.

A prominent translator of Islamic poetry who toured Afghanistan to rave reviews last March fell out of favor when he later criticized the Iraq war in front of a department official, two U.S. officials said.

The practices appear to be the latest examples of the Bush administration's efforts to tightly control information, maintain "message discipline" and promote news about the United States and its policies. ...

Current and former officials involved with the State Department's overseas speakers program said potential candidates were vetted -- via Internet searches, for example -- for any comments or writings that criticized White House policy. ...

Waiting for the other shoe to drop. The WP on GOP squeamishness about DeLay.

... DeLay's legal problems could well extend beyond the Austin case. Former DeLay aide Michael Scanlon pleaded guilty to bribery charges Nov. 21, agreeing to cooperate in the widening investigation of his business associate, Abramoff. Six days later, Cunningham pleaded guilty to pocketing $2.4 million in bribes, also promising to help prosecutors.

DeLay aides say neither investigation has directly targeted the former majority leader. But Abramoff's interactions with DeLay and his staff -- including lavish trips to the Northern Mariana Islands and the famed golf course of St. Andrews, Scotland -- has created considerable trepidation among rank-and-file lawmakers, House members and GOP aides say.

In addition, DeLay was ferried three times in 2003 and 2004 on corporate jets owned by the company of Brent Wilkes, a California defense contractor who allegedly made illicit payments to Cunningham in exchange for legislative favors. Neither DeLay nor the company has disclosed the purpose or destination of the trips, which were billed to one of DeLay's PACs at a commercial flight rate as permitted under election law.

"The Scanlon thing, the Cunningham thing, I think you have more people waiting for the other shoe to drop," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). ...

Even if DeLay is never implicated, his return to the majority leader's post would create political "havoc," said one Republican House member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The lawmaker pointed to DeLay's decision in October to fly to Texas ahead of his first courtroom appearance aboard a corporate jet owned by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

"The fact that he flew down on a corporate jet for his mug shot, and not just any corporate jet but Big Tobacco's corporate jet, that's a double whammy," the lawmaker said. "A number of my colleagues say he just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand how this plays."

Have to love Dana Milbank. Here's "Oversight for Sore Eyes."

The LA Times reports that the FBI is reopening its investigation into the Niger forgeries.

AP: "Pentagon describes Iraq propaganda plan." More.

Some Republicans giving Cunningham money to charity. And one Republican who received some money from Cunningham coconspirators Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade announces he is running for Cunningham's seat.

From a chart prepared by the Center for Responsive Politics, from Wilkes' contributions in 1999-2000:

WILKES, BRENT , 4/5/1999, $1,000, Bilbray, Brian P

WILKES, BRENT R, 7/7/1999, $1,000, Bilbray, Brian P

WILKES, REGINA B, 6/7/2000, $1,000, Bilbray, Brian P

WILKES, BRENT R, 5/30/1998, $1,000, Bilbray, Brian P

WILKES, BRENT R, 10/26/1998, $1,000, Bilbray, Brian P

White House shocked, shocked to learn about the Pentagon propaganda efforts. Senate Armed Services committee chair John Warner says he is also concerned about the reports:

...Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that while he could not verify the reports, he was "concerned about any actions that may undermine the credibility of the United States as we help the Iraqi people stand up a democracy.

"A free and independent press is critical to the functioning of a democracy, and I am concerned about any actions which may erode the independence of the Iraqi media," Warner added.

He said he had asked the Pentagon to brief his committee on the issue Friday....

From the Center for Responsive Politics, a short primer on the other beneficiaries of Brent Wilkes' and Mitchell Wade's largesse:

...Political action committees controlled by MZM, Inc., which was founded by alleged Cunningham co-conspirator Mitchell Wade, and ADCS, Inc., which was founded by alleged co-conspirator Brent Wilkes, have contributed more than $1 million in the last 10 years to a roster of politicians, leadership PACs and party committees, including Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R-Va.), Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.), Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), Tom DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority PAC and President Bush. Republicans have been the recipients of 95% of the two defense contractors' giving, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' analysis. ...

POGO blog's Nick Schwellenbach points to a LAT report that the House intel committee is going to investigate "whether Cunningham had influenced spending on classified programs to benefit companies that offered him bribes."

As the LAT's Greg Miller reports:

Cunningham's membership on the Intelligence Committee — which sets the broad spending priorities for the nation's 15 spy agencies and oversees their clandestine activities around the world — has come under less scrutiny.

He was named to the committee in 2001 and more recently served as chairman of its subcommittee on terrorism, human intelligence, analysis and counterintelligence. As a result, he had access to information on a vast array of classified programs that receive about $40 billion in funding each year.

Cunningham's district is home to a number of defense contractors and other companies that do classified intelligence-related work. Shortly after joining the committee in 2001, he wrote to executives at a dozen companies in his district, promoting his new position.

"I feel fortunate to represent the nation's top technological talent in the 'black' world," Cunningham wrote, referring to classified programs whose budgets are not publicly disclosed.

The Feb. 8, 2001, letter went on to say that he "appreciated the opportunity to work with you on key service funding priorities" and that his new position would lead to "even greater opportunities to work together in support of our national security and intelligence communities." ...

eRiposte has another important Nigergate find. Not only did Sismi "correct" multiple glaring flaws in the information from the Niger forgeries it sent on to the CIA, it appears that the US withheld the most glaringly fake forgery from the bunch that it forwarded onto the IAEA. Go read.

Meantime, La Repubblica is reporting the French side of Nigergate today, suggesting that the CIA got ahold of the forgeries themselves as early as July 2002. For Nigergate sleuths, that means that the US would had gotten ahold of the forgeries three months before Panorama journalist Elisabetta Burba walked into the US embassy in October 2002. If true, it would be interesting to know, from where did the US get them?

Blowback

Broken yesterday by the Los Angeles Times, Knight Ridder and the New York Times have major installments on the story that the Pentagon is paying the Lincoln Group tens of millions of dollars, and Iraqi journalists hundreds of dollars per month, to plant US written and storyboarded propaganda in Iraqi newspapers disguised as journalism. And guess what? The revelations are unpopular with top uniformed US military commanders:

...Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said Wednesday that they had no information on the contract. In an interview from Baghdad on Nov. 18, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman, said the Pentagon's contract with the Lincoln Group was an attempt to "try to get stories out to publications that normally don't have access to those kind of stories." The military's top commanders, including Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, did not know about the Lincoln Group contract until Wednesday, when it was first described by The Los Angeles Times, said a senior military official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Pentagon officials said General Pace and other top officials were disturbed by the reported details of the propaganda campaign and demanded explanations from senior officers in Iraq, the official said.

When asked about the article Wednesday night on the ABC News program "Nightline," General Pace said, "I would be concerned about anything that would be detrimental to the proper growth of democracy." ...

As to the possibility that US laws have been broken, because some of that US taxpayer-funded propaganda disguised as journalism is disinforming Americans.... that Rumsfeld defied Congressional orders that he shut down the mission included in the Office of Strategic Influence ... what of that?

Update: Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay has more:

U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign - including psychological warfare experts - intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents.

Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $200 a month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce.

Under military rules, information operations are restricted to influencing the attitudes and behavior of foreign governments and people. One form of information operations - psychological warfare - can use doctored or false information to deceive or damage the enemy or to bolster support for American efforts.

Many military officials, however, said they were concerned that the payments to Iraqi journalists and other covert information operations in Iraq had become so extensive that they were corroding the effort to build democracy and undermining U.S. credibility in Iraq. They also worry that information in the Iraqi press that's been planted or paid for by the U.S. military could "blow back" to the American public.

Eight current and former military, defense and other U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington agreed to discuss the payments to Iraqi reporters and other American military information operations because they fear that the efforts are promoting practices that are unacceptable for a democracy. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

"We are teaching them (Iraqi journalists) the wrong things," one military officer said.

Moreover, the defense and military officials said, the U.S. public is at risk of being influenced by the information operations because what's planted in the Iraqi media can be picked up by international news organizations and Internet bloggers.

"There is no `local' media anymore. All media is potentially international. The Web makes it all public. We need to ... eliminate the idea that psychological operations and information operations can issue any kind of information to the media ever. Period," said a senior military official in Baghdad who has knowledge of American psychological operations in Iraq.

Finally, military and defense officials said, the more extensive the information operations, the more likely they'll be discovered, thereby undermining the credibility of the U.S. armed forces and the American government. ...

And don't miss this deeper down in the KR piece:

... Knight Ridder investigation has found that the American military's information operations have been far more extensive.

In addition to the Army's secret payments to Iraqi newspaper, radio and television journalists for positive stories, U.S. psychological-warfare officers have been involved in writing news releases and drafting media strategies for top commanders, two defense officials said.

On at least one occasion, psychological warfare specialists have taken a group of international journalists on a tour of Iraq's border with Syria, a route used by Islamic terrorists and arms smugglers, one of the officials said.

Usually, these duties are the responsibility of military public-affairs officers.

In Iraq, public affairs staff at the American-run multinational headquarters in Baghdad have been combined with information operations experts in an organization known as the Information Operations Task Force.

The unit's public affairs officers are subservient to the information operations experts, military and defense officials said.

The result is a "fuzzing up" of what's supposed to be a strict division between public affairs, which provides factual information about U.S. military operations, and information operations, which can use propaganda and doctored or false information to influence enemy actions, perceptions and behavior....

The Guardian's Julian Borger has a scoop.

Propaganda is so overrated. Check out this backgrounder to a new big pharma thriller, The Karasik Conspiracy, that the pharmaceuticals tried to control and now are wishing would go away.