America... Spying on Americans

Uh, am I the only one whose scroll button is working?

I dont know who said that,or even if it was said,but that is a false statement.
At that particular port,becuase of the fact that its not deep enough,ships do not tie up at a pier.
They anchor in the harbor,and are resupplied by smaller "shuttle" boats.
That is also how the crews go ashore for liberty.

So,having the smaller boats getting so close is (or was) standard operating procedure.

Link

What do I disagree with? The fact that he interrupted what had been a very interesting conversation to yell "Clinton" and bring up a bunch of irrelevant crap. Yes, Parados was wrong, but he shouldn't have been talking about Clinton in the first place because that's not what this thread, or the immediately preceding discussion, was about. I can scroll for a while but at some point all quality discussion is obscured by the trollishness.

Gosh, what a surprise.

I did not attach any timeline connecting the clinton administration to the US Cole. you did. and you attacked me for your own words. if you could shoot yourself in the foot any worse i cannot see how.

i never met a person who self immolates on purpose like you do.

I know martyrdom has its place, but never before thought of anyone willfully offering themselves up for stupidity's sake

mysterman's post quoted this in his remark about when the US Cole was attacked:



which you read as being my remark

but it was taken from combining my blue colored responses to your black words of an earlier post.



Mysteryman was actually correcting you, not me.

then, you attacked your own quote as mine.



you have now far surpassed the illustrious Gump or Rainman and have moved on to that rarified ground of intellectual prowess held by Daffy Duck.

US naval "shuttle" or "supply" ships did not attack the Cole, they were yemeni fishing boats, the latter were not supposed to come near the Cole by the SROE. if necessary, they were to be fired upon if they got too close. the gunners allowed those boats to get within the perimeter of safety of the SROE.

the cole report is still mostly secret, although the executive summary is available at the link.
http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/cole.pdf

but note one finding.

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 24, 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2005

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

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

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

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

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

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

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

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

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

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

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.

That sounds a lot like an urban legend, especially when you look at the charts and sea/port handbooks. (Or online at the Port of Aden website.)

The USS Cole wasn't at a 'normal' pier because the refueling was done at a floating pier.

I have been to the port in Yemen,and you are wrong.The US Navy does not have resupply boats in Yemen (at least not when I was there).

The ships were resupplied by local contractor vessels.
That is why that boat was allowed to get so close.

Bush employs "Big Lie" technique to defend illegal spying on Americans
By Barry Grey
24 December 2005
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

The Bush administration is employing its standard tactics of fear-mongering, intimidation and lies to defend its illegal spying on Americans. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen repeatedly assert that Bush's secret authorization for the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor international telephone calls and email messages sent from the US without obtaining court-issued warrants does not violate either legal statutes or the Constitution.

In fact, the practice directly contravenes the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978. That law was enacted in response to revelations of illegal government spying on Americans on a massive scale that emerged during the Watergate crisis. FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a secret body to oversee and approve government requests for wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The law explicitly bars warrantless wiretaps.

So brazen is the administration's defiance of the law and the constitutional principle of congressional and judicial oversight of the executive branch that one of the eleven judges on the secret FISA court resigned Wednesday in protest. This is a court which routinely grants government requests for wiretaps, usually within a few hours and, when requested, retroactively?-a fact the White House ignores in claiming that it must bypass the court to quickly track the movement of terrorist suspects within the US.

One of Bush's claims, that the NSA program does not target purely domestic communications, was exploded by a report in Wednesday's New York Times. The article cited unnamed officials who affirmed that the NSA had intercepted communications to and from people within the borders of the US.

Vice President Cheney, speaking on Tuesday to reporters aboard Air Force Two as he flew from Pakistan to Oman, indicated the real motivations behind the administration's decision to override legal limits on its powers to conduct electronic surveillance. According to press reports, he said, "Watergate and a lot of the things during the '70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area."

In other words, the Bush administration deliberately set out to roll back and reverse the measures, limited as they were, that were taken to prevent the kind of illegal and unconstitutional practices for which the Nixon administration became notorious?-and which ultimately led to impeachment proceedings and Nixon's resignation. These practices included the compilation of an "enemies list," massive surveillance of anti-Vietnam War protesters, civil rights activists and political opponents, and an array of "dirty tricks" operations including break-ins and other criminal acts.

The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was used by the Bush administration as the pretext for mounting this assault on constitutional safeguards and democratic rights, with the so-called "war on terror" providing the overarching rationale.

That such practices are once again rampant is documented by recent reports of spying on opponents of the Iraq war and political dissidents by the military, the FBI and other government agencies. The Bush administration has gone beyond Nixon in asserting dictatorial presidential powers, with its policy of seizing so-called "enemy combatants," including US citizens, and placing them in indefinite military confinement without any recourse to the courts. Now it is defiantly asserting its right to disobey acts of Congress by declaring it will continue to authorize warrantless wiretaps.

Bush's assurances that only people known to have links to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups are being targeted by the NSA program have zero credibility, coming from an administration that has made lying its basic modus operandi. Were the NSA wiretaps targeting only terrorists, there would be no need to circumvent the FISA court. The decision to conduct warrantless surveillance makes sense only if the aim is to target political "enemies" who have no plausible connection to terrorist organizations.

On Wednesday, press and television news outlets cited remarks made by Bush in April of 2004 to suggest that he is lying when he now gives assurances about protecting civil liberties. Speaking in Buffalo, New York last year, Bush said: "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretaps, it requires?-a wiretap requires a court order."

Bush continued: "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down the 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."

Bush gave this speech some two-and-a-half years after he authorized warrantless wiretaps of American citizens?-a program he has boasted of reauthorizing dozens of times since.

As for fear-mongering and intimidation, Cheney on Tuesday reiterated the statements made earlier by Bush to the effect that those who criticized the NSA surveillance program and the administration's assertion of quasi-dictatorial powers were disarming the country, threatening the safety of the American people, and giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. He told reporters on Tuesday, according to a December 21 Washington Post article: "Either we believe that there are individuals out there doing everything they can to try to launch more attacks, try to get ever deadlier weapons to use against us, or we don't...

"And so if there's a backlash pending, I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take these steps in order to defend the country."


The case of al Hazmi and al Mihdhar

One canard employed by Bush to defend his violation of the law is particularly revealing. On two occasions, the first being his live radio address last Saturday, Bush cited as a justification for the NSA program the example of Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, two of the 9/11 hijackers. These two Al Qaeda operatives from Saudi Arabia are believed to have been among the men who commandeered American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

Bush said last Saturday that al Hazmi and al Mihdhar communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the US. But, because of the FISA requirement for warrants, "we didn't know they were here until it was too late."

The Washington Post on December 21 published an article by Josh Meyer citing "current and former counter-terrorism officials" who debunked both the claim that US intelligence had failed to track these communications and the notion that the warrant requirements of FISA constituted an impediment to doing so.

According to the Post, the officials "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 had already been linked directly to the Al Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and to the 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Yemen.... Those links made the safe house one of the ?'hottest' targets being monitored by the NSA before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had been for several years..."

The article continued: "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 US government.

"Under authority granted in federal law, the NSA was already listening in on that number in Yemen and could have tracked calls made into the US 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."

The Post noted that the NSA did not reveal the existence of the phone calls until after September 11, and then quoted one "senior counter-terrorism official familiar with the case" as saying, "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."

So much for the claim that the NSA was unable to monitor the phone calls of al Hazmi and al Mihdhar.

The case of these two hijackers, far from legitimizing the "war on terror" and the resulting arrogation of unchecked presidential powers, is one of the most damning of the many murky aspects of 9/11 that remain entirely unexplained and render the official version of the attack completely implausible.

Both were known Al Qaeda operatives, identified by the CIA in January 2000 as participants at an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. Even earlier, according to the 9/11 Commission report issued last year, the two were being tracked by the NSA.

The report states: "In late 1999, the National Security Agency (NSA) analyzed communications associated with a man named Khalid, a man named Nawaf, and a man named Salem. Working-level officials in the intelligence community knew little more than this. But they correctly concluded that ?'Nawaf' and ?'Khalid' might be part of ?'an operational cadre' and that ?'something nefarious might be afoot.'"

Despite this, they were allowed to fly to the US shortly after the Malaysia meeting under their own names and set up residence in San Diego. There they took a course at a flight training school, where instructors noted their insistence on learning how to fly a Boeing commercial jet, and their lack of interest in learning how to take off or land.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, "The al Qaeda operatives lived openly in San Diego under their true names, listing Hazmi in the telephone directory."

Not only that. The Commission report further notes: "The housemate who rented the room to Hazmi and Mihdhar during 2000 is an apparently law-abiding citizen with long-standing, friendly contacts among local police and FBI personnel. He did not see anything unusual enough in the behavior of Hazmi or Mihdhar to prompt him to report to his law enforcement contacts. Nor did those contacts ask him for information about his tenants/housemates."

This despite the fact that, according to the Commission report, Hazmi "developed a close relationship with his housemate." In a footnote, the Commission writes: "Although Hazmi did not use his housemate's telephone to make calls, he apparently received calls on it..."

Unlike virtually all other individuals cited in the 9/11 Commission report, the "housemate" is never named. This confirms the fact that he is an important FBI informant on Islamist groups and individuals in San Diego. The claim that his FBI handlers never inquired about his housemates is incredible on its face.

When one of the pair's visas expired, the State Department quickly renewed it, and al Mihdhar, who left the US in June 2000 to return to Yemen, was allowed to return prior to September 11, 2001 without the slightest difficulty.

According to the official cover-ups carried out by the 9/11 Commission and a separate congressional inquiry, the CIA never informed the FBI of the movements or activities of al Hazmi and al Mihdhar. This was, the story goes, one of the many failures to "connect the dots" that contributed to a massive "failure of intelligence" and allowed the 19 hijackers to seize the planes and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Others include the rejection by FBI headquarters of a request from the FBI office in Minneapolis to seriously investigate Zaccarias Moussaoui, the Islamist extremist whom local FBI agents suspected of seeking flight training for terrorist purposes, the failure of the FBI leadership to follow up on a memo from the Phoenix, Arizona office warning of Islamists taking flight training in various parts of the country, and Bush's inaction following his August 6, 2001 daily briefing from the CIA entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

Last August, news surfaced of the existence of a special military intelligence unit called Able Danger that in 2000 identified Mohammed Atta, the purported 9/11 ringleader, and three other future hijackers, including al Hazmi and al Mihdhar, as Al Qaeda. According to a member of Able Danger, the unit was blocked from sharing the information with the FBI, and the 9/11 Commission refused to mention its existence in its official report.

All of this points not to a "failure of intelligence," but to a deliberate policy of shielding the hijackers and allowing them to prepare some kind of terrorist attack. The new right-wing administration needed a Pearl Harbor-like event to shift public opinion and create an atmosphere of fear and patriotic hysteria so it could press forward with plans, already well prepared before 9/11, for military interventions in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, and an unprecedented assault on democratic rights at home.

See Also:
With the White House defiant on illegal spying: Why no outcry for Bush's impeachment?
[21 December 2005]
Bush defends illegal spying on Americans: the specter of presidential dictatorship
[19 December 2005]



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I have not been to Yemen, but I was told otherwise. i defer. so, you think small fishing boats were mistaken for supply vessels?

Barron's Magazine calls for Bush impeachment
Barron's Magazine calls for Bush impeachment:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=65801&highlight=

BBB

I find it amazing that almost every president has been threatened with impeachment.
The last three, two term presidents have all been threatened with impeachment.
All Empires fall from within. If we can't figure out how to straighten out this country it will happen in our life times. For those of you who are getting ready to jump on the stupid wagon, it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or Democrat in office.

Which wagon are you calling the "stupid wagon"? I agree that it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or Democrat in office.

The stupid wagon is everybody anti repeublican and everybody anti democrat.
I know everybody thtas seen my posts probably feels that I am pro Bush and Pro republican. In reality, I am pro whatever president I need to answer to. I will never ultimetly 100% agree with any president. But, as long as I where this uniform, I will support their decision and uphold whatever mission I am sent.
Please do not confuse this with blind obedience. This is a pledge I have taken several times in my life. And, its been done with both parties in office.
I must follow my orders as much as I expect my subordinates to follow the orders I give them.
Once the mission is over, if they choose to debate they may.
I will never expect everyone to completely understand or agree with the life people in the military chose.

Thanks for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me.

Personally I think it is as clear as dirt, but to each their own.

pachelbel, thank you for the article. I doubt it will do much good for the blind defenders, nonetheless, it is good that people keep speaking up against this particular administration who in my book goes beyond republican/democrat squabbles to a classification all of their own which defies adequate description.

This time, revel, I'm going to agree.

(Totally as a side comment--johnboy can't think of anything fresh to add to this- There was a long, long reprint of a commentary by "Barry Grey." Who the hell is Barry Grey? Does he write for a "legitimate" newspaper or is he sitting at home, in his underwear, writing diatribes.
There seems to me to be a pretty wide gulf between the media and the administration and it is growing.
Sure, blame Clinton. But I came of age in the Johnson-Nixon years. We were lied to. Johnboy did the Vietnam thing because that was what I was expected to do.
I reckon my point is this: are we being told the truth? Is our government
honest?)