America... Spying on Americans

But citizens are not soldiers. Your insistence that only Democrats and liberals are concerned about this has been contradicted about 100 times. Libertarians, Republicans and other people who respect the rule of law and the Constitution have all come out against this program and the way it has been put in place.

Advise and Assent
Advise and Assent
The Los Angeles Times Editorial
Sunday 19 Februay 2006

That the United States Senate has a body called the Intelligence Committee is an irony George Orwell would have truly appreciated. In a world without Doublespeak, the panel, chaired by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, would be known by a more appropriate name - the Senate Coverup Committee.

Although the committee is officially charged with overseeing the nation's intelligence-gathering operations, its real function in recent years has been to prevent the public from getting hold of any meaningful information about the Bush administration. Hence its never-ending delays of the probe into the bogus weapons intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. And its squelching, on Thursday, of an expected investigation into the administration's warrantless spying program.

The committee adjourned without voting on a proposal to probe the National Security Agency program, under which government agents have set up wiretaps on Americans without the warrants required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Bush has acknowledged that he greenlighted the program, essentially claiming that Congress gave him the power to break federal law and violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights when it authorized the use of force after the 9/11 attacks. Though the administration's legal defense has been laughable, its argument that the powers are essential to fight terrorism has scored political points, ratcheting up the pressure on the Senate.

Roberts justified his committee's cave by saying the White House had committed itself to working with senators to pursue legislation on the matter. Translation: Bush won't accept any curbs on his power whatsoever, but he'd be happy to see a bill legalizing his wiretaps.

There's a slim chance the House of Representatives might show more backbone. The same day the Senate committee was performing stupid pet tricks for White House table scraps, the House Intelligence Committee approved its own inquiry into the NSA program. Yet the House is still divided on whether the investigation's scope would involve an intensive look at operational details or merely examine the status of surveillance laws.

There was one piece of good news last week. In a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to respond to a request for documents on the NSA program within 20 days. Meanwhile, a Kentucky man is preparing a civil-rights suit over the wiretapping. If Congress continues to dither, the courts will be Americans' last hope for an honest appraisal of the spy program - and for at least a slight brake on the White House's relentless pursuit of excessive executive branch power.

Doing the President's Dirty Work
Doing the President's Dirty Work
The New York Times Editorial
Friday 17 February 2006

Is there any aspect of President Bush's miserable record on intelligence that Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not willing to excuse and help to cover up?

For more than a year, Mr. Roberts has been dragging out an investigation into why Mr. Bush presented old, dubious and just plain wrong intelligence on Iraq as solid new proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al Qaeda. It was supposed to start after the 2004 election, but Mr. Roberts was letting it die of neglect until the Democrats protested by forcing the Senate into an unusual closed session last November.

Now Mr. Roberts is trying to stop an investigation into Mr. Bush's decision to allow the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without getting the warrants required by a 27-year-old federal law enacted to stop that sort of abuse.

Mr. Roberts had promised to hold a committee vote yesterday on whether to investigate. But he canceled the vote, and then made two astonishing announcements. He said he was working with the White House on amending the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to permit warrantless spying. And then he suggested that such a change would eliminate the need for an inquiry.

Stifling his own committee without even bothering to get the facts is outrageous. As the vice chairman of the panel, Senator John Rockefeller IV, pointed out, supervising intelligence gathering is in fact the purpose of the intelligence committee.

Mr. Rockefeller said the White House had not offered enough information to make an informed judgment on the program possible. It is withholding, for instance, such minor details as how the program works, how it is reviewed, how much and what kind of information is collected, and how the information is stored and used.

Mr. Roberts said the White House had agreed to provide more briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee 'Äî hardly an enormous concession since it is already required to do so. And he said he and the White House were working out "a fix" for the law. That is the worst news. FISA was written to prevent the president from violating Americans' constitutional rights. It was amended after 9/11 to make it even easier for the administration to do legally what it is now doing.

FISA does not in any way prevent Mr. Bush from spying on Qaeda members or other terrorists. The last thing the nation needs is to amend the law to institutionalize the imperial powers Mr. Bush seized after 9/11.

Both good pieces, BB.

Disgusting bunch of loosers-we deserve our reputation in the world.

BBB
The big flaw in Bush administration policies follows a pattern of all delusional leaders.

Bush thinks that any policy that protects his personal interests also protects the Common Good interests of the American people.

Taint so.

BBB

Privacy Guardian Is Still a Paper Tiger
Privacy Guardian Is Still a Paper Tiger
By Richard B. Schmitt
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 20 February 2006

A year after its creation, the White House civil liberties board has yet to do a single day of work.

Washington - For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.

Someday, it might actually meet.

Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.

More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members - one was treasurer of Bush's first campaign for Texas governor - has kept the board from doing a single day of work.

On Thursday, after months of delay, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a first step toward standing up the fledgling watchdog, approving the two lawyers Bush nominated to lead the panel. But it may take months before the board is up and running and doing much serious work.

Critics say the inaction shows the administration is just going through the motions when it comes to civil liberties.

"They have stalled in giving the board adequate funding. They have stalled in making appointments," said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.). "It is apparent they are not taking this seriously."

The Sept. 11 commission also has expressed reservations about the commitment to the liberties panel.

"We felt it was absolutely vital," said Thomas H. Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who led the commission. "We had certainly hoped it would have been up and running a long time ago."

The inaction is especially noteworthy in light of recent events. Some Republicans joined Democrats to delay renewal of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act because of civil liberties concerns. And the disclosure in December that Bush approved surveillance of certain US residents' international communications without a court order has caused bipartisan dismay in Congress.

"Obviously, civil liberties issues are critically important, and they have been to this president, especially after 9/11," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, adding that the White House had moved expeditiously to establish the board. "We do not formally nominate until we are through the background investigation and the full vetting. It takes time to present those nominations to the Senate. But now that they have been confirmed, that is a good thing."

The board chairwoman is Carol E. Dinkins, a Houston lawyer who was a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was the treasurer of George W. Bush's first campaign for governor of Texas, in 1994, and co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, which recruited Republican lawyers to handle legal battles after the November 2004 election.

Dinkins, a longtime partner in the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales once was a partner, has specialized in defending oil and gas companies in environmental lawsuits.

Foremost among her credentials, she told Senate Judiciary Committee members in a response to their questions, was the two years she spent as deputy attorney general in President Reagan's Justice Department. There, she said, she had to weigh civil liberties concerns while overseeing domestic surveillance and counter-intelligence cases.

The board vice chairman is Alan Charles Raul, a Washington lawyer who first suggested the concept of a civil liberties panel in an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times in December 2001. Raul, a former Agriculture Department general counsel currently in private practice, has published a book on privacy and the digital age and is the only panel member with apparent expertise in civil liberties issues.

The panel's lone Democrat, Lanny J. Davis, has known Bush since the two were undergraduates at Yale. Civil liberties groups regard the Washington lawyer, who worked in the Clinton White House, as likely to be a progressive voice on the panel.

The board also includes a conservative Republican legal icon, Washington lawyer and former Bush Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The fifth member is Francis X. Taylor, a retired Air Force general and former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, who is chief security officer at General Electric Co.

The board members declined to comment for this article. Three referred calls to Dinkins, who referred calls to the White House.

The idea of such a watchdog agency was broached almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, as conservatives and liberals alike saw a need for the government to consider the implications of new and growing anti-terrorism measures.

The idea was to have professionals ask hard questions about whether the government was going too far in collecting and disseminating information about suspected terrorists, and to have those professionals make their views known in regular reports to the president.

The board was given a broad mandate to review the civil liberties effects of proposed regulations and executive branch policies related to the war on terrorism. It will report to Bush.

The law gives the panel access to classified information under certain circumstances, but not the power to subpoena documents. The board, which is within the Executive Office of the president, operates at the behest of the administration.

Civil liberties groups saw it as a promising first step.

"The board has the potential to be an important force in protecting civil liberties if the White House gives the board a role in the policymaking process, as Congress intended," the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington advocacy group, wrote at the time the law was passed.

So far, that potential has not been realized.

The Bush administration waited nine months to send the nominations of Dinkins and Raul to the Senate for approval. The three other members of the board did not require Senate confirmation, but they could not function without a chairman.

Doubts about funding also developed. The administration proposed an initial budget of $750,000, which lawmakers doubled. But critics consider that far from adequate. A similar board in the Homeland Security Department was initially proposed to have a $13-million budget.

Some members of Congress are concerned that the administration may still be trying to shortchange the board.

The fiscal 2007 budget that the administration released this month includes no express mention of any funding for it. That triggered a letter of protest from Maloney and Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) to the Office of Management and Budget.

A spokesman for the office, Scott Milburn, said in an interview that money was being requested for the board, but he declined to say how much.

Congress, which championed the idea of the board, also dragged its heels. Dinkins and Raul were officially nominated in September, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was busy with a Supreme Court nomination. The panel held a confirmation hearing in November, but only two of the 18 members showed up.

The committee finally approved Dinkins and Raul on Thursday without discussion. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said his panel moved as quickly as possible considering its other duties, such as Supreme Court nominations, and considering the time the White House took in sending the nominations to the panel.

The top Judiciary Committee Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said in an interview: "They seem to be good people. They have done good things in their lives. But they certainly don't bring any special expertise to what I consider to be an extremely challenging position."

But Durbin said he believed the board could still be a valuable addition to the debate over security and liberty as concern over the growing power of government after Sept. 11 cuts across ideological lines.

Dinkins asserted in her written responses to the Senate committee that the board would not be a pushover for the administration.

"The president will be best served if the board offers unvarnished and candid advice concerning whether counter-terrorism policies are developed with adequate consideration of privacy and civil liberties," she wrote. "It is critical that ... the board get up and running as quickly as possible."

Good Ole George Bush ... The fascists FASCIST!!

Anon

Re: BBB

Talk about delusional! Democrats are delusional concerning their own self importance. He isn't protecting his own personal interest first. He's protecting all of ours. Bush could care less about tapping phones for his own personal enjoyment.

I don't even participate in half of these debate threads, as they are so ridiculous. BBB, I certainly don't read your entire posts. This so-called domestic spying is not an important issue, except that just maybe we will prevent something bad from happening. In heartland of America, which is where I am, virtually everybody I know thinks the Democrats have lost their minds. Why don't you worry about something that is worth worrying about?

Because Okie... First they came for the liberals, blah-blah-blah...

Re: BBB


Shouldn't that be the Democrats, many Republicans, just about every Constitutional scholar. many conservative punidits, the ABA, some members of the FISA court, etc, etc, etc.....

The people you know seems to be pretty limited okie. The people you blame is even more limited.

Re: BBB


Maybe you should worry about why everyone you know is so poorly informed as to think that this issue has anything to do with political affiliation.

Re: BBB


So it has nothing to do with political affiliation? I have some swampland for sale. Are you interested?

The Cato Institute has webbed a CNN discussion about the wiretapping. Richard Epstein, a professor of constitutional law at Chicago University, debates Victoria Toensing, a deputy attorney general under Reagan whose last notable contribution to public debate was to defend and downplay the Plame leak.

http://www.cato.org/realaudio/epstein-on-cnn-02-13-06.html (Real Player required.)

If this performance is the best that the Bush entourage can do (it gets especially good towards the end of the debate), their confidence in their own arguments must be very weak indeed.

Why do you say so, Thomas?

Because she was stringing together platitude after platitude, and could only avoid losing the debate by obstructing him as he tried to finish his sentences. But it's not a point I'm interested in dwelling on.

By contrast, there are two questions I am interested in dwelling on. They both assume that the government broke the law, and assume that blowing the whistle about it necessarily revealed information the law-breaker classified as secret. On those assumptions, two interesting questions arise:

1) How do the various "whistleblower protection statues" deal with such an issue? Jesselyn Raddak wrote an interesting article for FindLaw in which she outlined "a defense of Russell Tice, the whistleblower who revealed the president's authorization of NSA's warrantless domestic wiretapping". Since she explicitly labels it a defense, I imagine that she would have left out any good legal arguments on the other side. What would those arguments be, and would they be sufficiently persuasive to make a court rule against Tice?

2) How does all this fit into the precedent of the Nurenberg Trial, in which an American-established court held that officials have a duty to resist illegal orders from their superiors? Does American jurisprudence only impose this duty on foreign countries?

Toensing and Joe DiGenova, what a pair!

Occasionally, Joe will say something that makes sense while his "better" half is merely a Republican talking points parrot.

Re: BBB
Wrong thread.. oops

Data mining program continues after lawmakers order it closed
RAW STORY
Published: February 24, 2006


A controversial intelligence data mining program, which was closed by lawmakers over privacy concerns two years ago, has continued to receive funding and remained in operation under different code names in different agencies, according to today's National Journal.

Excerpts from the Journal's article follow:

#
Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.


...

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA. ...

Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused on building information technologies to help analysts and policy makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a synonym for the headsail of a ship.)

...

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else."