Program X and the Power-gobblers
Real power, goes the axiom, always leaves a little something on the table. Real power has a certain largess, style, openness, availability … the kind of balance that America has tried for in years past [but not in the last thirty or so.] So what does that make the Bushies? Power-hogs, thugs and tyrants, me’thinks … the result of nobody throwing the e-brake in recent memory, too busy forming and reforming their Religious belief and Values surveys and poking into territory not appropriate to American governance. From Dubby’s delusional empiricism to Uncle Dick’s darkly-inspired disdain to the opportunism and misplaced loyalties of Alberto Gonzales, we continue to face an infestation worthy of “tenting” the entire country to rid ourselves of dangerous pests, gnawing away at the pillars that hold our Constitution in place.
Somebody call Terminex before they gobble up the last of it!
Below, the Dubby wants more power [gobble, gnaw, gobble] … Mukraker connects the dots between the scandals — Nine Gate, Fredo Perjury, Subpoena Stonewall and Spygate … and the newest wrinkle in international travel, including extensive profiles of fliers that will include religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions.
Of note: big thunderstorms on the way here in the Patch, it’s dark and threatening out there — so I’m sneaking through a weather window with this post. Maybe I’ll get back to you today — or maybe I’ll be dancing nekkid in the downpour!
Jude
Bush Wants Terrorism Law Updated
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — President Bush wants Congress to modernize a law that governs how intelligence agencies monitor the communications of suspected terrorists.
“This law is badly out of date,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, provides a legal foundation that allows information about terrorists’ communications to be collected without violating civil liberties.
Democrats want to ensure that any changes do not give the executive branch unfettered surveillance powers.
Bush noted that terrorists now use disposable cell phones and the Internet to communicate, recruit operatives and plan attacks; such tools were not available when FISA passed nearly 30 years ago. He also cited a recently released intelligence estimate that concluded al-Qaida is using its growing strength in the Middle East to plot attacks on U.S. soil.
“Our intelligence community warns that under the current statute, we are missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country,” Bush said. “Congress needs to act immediately to pass this bill, so that our national security professionals can close intelligence gaps and provide critical warning time for our country.”
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Bush was trying to exploit the threat from al-Qaida to push the bill. Feingold said the measure was an “egregious power grab that includes broad new powers that have nothing to do with bringing FISA up to date.”
The 1978 law set up a court that meets in secret to review applications from the FBI, the National Security Agency and other agencies for warrants to wiretap or search the homes of people in the United States in terrorist or espionage cases.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the NSA to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without FISA court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could. It also said the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.
After the program became public and was challenged in court, Bush put it under FISA court supervision this year.
The national intelligence director, in a letter Wednesday to the House intelligence committee, stressed the need to be able to collect intelligence about foreign terrorists overseas. Mike McConnell said intelligence agencies should be able to do that without requirements imposed by an “out of date” law.
“Simply put, in a significant number of cases, we are in the unfortunate position of having to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets located overseas,” he wrote the committee chairman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas.
Reyes said Saturday that the committee is intently focused on the issue.
“If changes to the law are required, we are prepared to do so,” Reyes said. “We are actively working with the administration on any emergency requirements they may have. However, we want to avoid repeating the mistakes made by rushing the Patriot Act into law.”
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, contends the White House is asking for more power to conduct warrantless domestic and international surveillance.
“The administration claims the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be ‘modernized.’ Actually, it needs to be followed,” she said. “The reality is, their proposal would gut FISA.”
The ACLU said the legislation backed by the administration would give immunity from criminal prosecution and civil liability for the telecommunication companies that participate in the NSA program. The ACLU urged lawmakers to find out the full extent of current intelligence gathering under FISA before making changes.
“The only thing more outrageous than the administration’s call for even more unfettered power is a Congress that would consider giving it to them,” Frederickson said.
The House Republican leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, said Democrats are delaying necessary changes.
“Rather than learning the lessons of September 11 - that we need to break down the bureaucratic impediments to intelligence collection and analysis - Democrats have stonewalled Republican attempts to modernize FISA and close the terrorist loophole,” he said Saturday. ++
Analysis: Gonzales Testimony Part of Broader Effort to Conceal Surveillance Program
Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel, TPM Muckraker
July 26, 2007
Alberto Gonzales’ testimony that there was “no serious disagreement” within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general’s apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales’ testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.
There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales’s careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that “the president described” was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we’ll call it, for convenience’s sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials — James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally — balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the “Terrorist Surveillance Program’ in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.
The administration’s consistent refusal to discuss any aspect of the program — current or former — aside from what President Bush disclosed in December 2005 appears to be intended, specifically, to gloss over Comey and Goldsmith’s objections. If that’s the case, it could mean that the public has been presented with an inaccurate picture of the origins and scope of Program X. The Bush administration is currently contesting a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documentation establishing Program X’s history — in essence, trying to ensure that the public never learns more about the program and the internal deliberations over it than what President Bush chooses to reveal.
Alberto Gonzales, on this theory, has found himself enmeshed in the administration’s attempt to distinguish the less-troublesome Terrorism Surveillance Program from Program X. And it may mean he perjured himself in doing so. Today, Senate Democrats responded to Gonzales’s dubious testimony on Tuesday by calling for a perjury investigation. At issue is whether Gonzales’ assertions that there was “no serious disagreement” within the government about the TSP was so misleading as to amount to perjury, or whether his distinction between TSP and Program X was merely a careful parsing — perhaps misleading but not, to use Sen. Arlen Specter’s word, actionable.
In December 2005, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau broke the story of the Terrorist Surveillance Program for the New York Times. Risen’s resulting book, State of War, described a surveillance effort where the National Security Agency “monitor(s) and eavesdrop(s) on large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States to search for potential evidence of terrorist activity, without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.” Previously, the NSA only eavesdropped on foreign communications. Although the scope of that effort remains unclear, Risen estimated that NSA eavesdrops on “as many as five hundred people in the United States at any given time and it has potentially has access to the phone calls and e-mails of millions more.”
The New York Times’ publication of those explosive charges prompted President Bush to disclose, on December 19, 2005, what he would later call the Terrorist Surveillance Program:
–”I authorized the interception of international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. This program is carefully reviewed approximately every 45 days to ensure it is being used properly. … “(T)he legal authority is derived from the Constitution, as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.
–… “I want to make clear to the people listening that this program is limited in nature to those that are known al Qaeda ties and/or affiliates. That’s important. So it’s a program that’s limited, and you brought up something that I want to stress, and that is, is that these calls are not intercepted within the country. They are from outside the country to in the country, or vice versa. So in other words, this is not a — if you’re calling from Houston to L.A., that call is not monitored. And if there was ever any need to monitor, there would be a process to do that.”
What President Bush described was far more constrained than the surveillance Risen reported.
Immediately thereafter, whenever administration officials discussed the surveillance program, they would decline to use names for it in most cases (even the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”) and instead refer back to what President Bush disclosed. A letter one month later from Gonzales to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), referred only to “the NSA activities described by the president.” Stumbling for a shorthand, a Justice Department fact sheet issued January 27, 2006 said that “throughout this document, the ‘terrorist surveillance program’ and ‘the NSA program’ refer to the activities described by the president.’”
Most significantly, when Gonzales first testified to the Senate on February 6, 2006, about the NSA’s domestic surveillance, he at first used the term “terrorist surveillance program” — the new choice for describing what Bush disclosed. But when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) asked Gonzales about press accounts reporting that Comey and Goldsmith objected to the “terrorist surveillance program,” Gonzales abandoned the construction. He said he was “only testifying about what the president has confirmed.” And when it came to that, he said, “I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you’re identifying had concerns about this program.” The disagreement, Gonzales said, was about “other matters regarding operations.”
In a move that may prove crucial, the administration convinced then-committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) not to swear in Gonzales for that hearing.
The different phases of the program’s implementation did not become clear until Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May of this year. Comey did not identify the program, only calling it “a particular classified program.” We won’t rehash his story in full here. But during his brief reign as acting attorney general, Comey refused to reauthorize Program X in March of 2004 (here’s an explanation as to why it took two years for this to happen). Comey’s refusal was based on the concerns of Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, but the precise nature of Goldsmith’s concern isn’t publicly known. Goldsmith declined to comment for this story.
It all came to a head on March 10, 2004, with the deadline for reauthorizing Program X looming. That afternoon, the White House called a meeting with the so-called “Gang of Eight” — those congressional leaders briefed about Program X — and Gonzales and Andrew Card made their infamous visit to Ashcroft’s hospital bed that night. The President initially opted to continue the program despite Ashcroft’s refusal to overrule Comey. But the next day, March 11, when faced with the possible resignation of the top echelon of Department of Justice leadership, the President personally told Comey to recommend what changes needed to be made to Program X in order for the Department of Justice to sign off on its legality.
As Comey told the committee, the Department took “two or three weeks” to “get the analysis done and make the changes that need to be made.” Comey (or Ashcroft; Comey couldn’t remember) subsequently signed off on the revised program. Given the depths of Comey’s objections and the amount of time needed to overcome them, what must have emerged was a substantially different program.
Another significant revision to Program X occurred around the same time as Comey’s objections, according to Risen’s book. The Administration had been briefing the chief judge of the FISA court about the program, but in the spring of 2004, a new FISA chief, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, came onto the bench. She raised concerns about NSA-collected intelligence being used, ultimately, for terrorism prosecutions, which could result in suspected terrorists walking free if the evidence that formed the basis for their prosecutions had been collected illegally. Risen reported that “top administration officials suggested that they abandoned some of the most aggressive techniques used in the NSA surveillance operation after the judge complained.”
The sparse record suggests that substantial changes were made to Program X after March of 2004. Precisely what they were, we don’t know. The initial reports, which drew no distinction between the program before and after that crucial month, described a program that surveilled the communications of Americans, including some purely domestic communications, without the issuance of warrants by a court. Prior to 9/11, such surveillance had to be approved by a FISA judge so as not to violate the 4th Amendment.
Perhaps the Administration’s position is that those elements of Program X that were jettisoned in March of 2004 were so substantial that what remained — the program that Bush announced in December of 2005 — was a new and entirely different program. Again, we don’t know. But several members of Congress feel misled, though principally those objections are confined to Democrats, who have an obvious political interest in bringing down Gonzales. Both Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman, members of the Gang of Eight, have stated that there has only ever been one surveillance program.
Unfortunately for Gonzales, not even he has been able to keep the distinction between the Terrorist Surveillance Program and Program X straight. During a June 5th press conference this year, he said that Comey’s dispute “related to a highly classified program which the president confirmed to the American people sometime ago” – precisely the opposite of what he’d testified before. By way of explanation, Gonzales testified Tuesday that his spokesman had subsequently contacted the reporter who’d asked the question, Dan Eggen of The Washington Post, to retract that statement.
Despite that embarrassing admission, Gonzales hewed to the same line this Tuesday he’d taken in the hearing the previous February, saying that Comey’s disagreement was “not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people.” He maintained that line under blistering questioning – including the questions of senators, such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who also sit on the Senate intelligence committee and have been briefed on the program.
Following Gonzales’ testimony, Democrats’ contention that there was only one warrantless surveillance program was bolstered by the release of a May 2006 letter from John Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, specifying that the March 10, 2004 meeting was, indeed, a TSP meeting. In response, an anonymous DOJ official told the Washington Post that in his testimony on Tuesday Gonzales “did not say that the TSP was not discussed at the meeting” — underscoring the absurdity of the distinction that the administration is still trying to draw. Similarly, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee today that he and Comey had objections to the “much discussed” NSA program, a reference clear in context to the TSP.
In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won’t just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress — making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey’s objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House’s claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.
We may be about to learn whether a perjury investigation will pierce the obfuscations and begin to explore the extent of Program X — a program the American public was never supposed to know about. ++
US/E.U. plan to database airline passengers’ personal information raises deep privacy concerns
Nick Langewis, Raw Story
Sunday July 29, 2007
While Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls it “an essential security measure,” worries arise about a looming privacy threat in the new agreement between the United States and the European Union, effective August 1, 2007, that allows the United States to keep extensive profiles of inbound airline passengers.
In addition to data such as name, address, flight itineraries, and credit card information, the United States will now database more intimate details about passengers as provided by airlines, such as race, political opinions, religious beliefs, and sexual orientation.
Personal data received, even on people not under suspicion, is to be kept on file for fifteen years and only used “when lives are at risk,” such as during a terror investigation.
“We’re going to be able to connect the dots more quickly,” says Russell Knocke of the US Department of Homeland Security, “and we’re going to be able to provide our front line personnel with a powerful tool that really can help to save lives.”
Jim Dempsey of the Center of Democracy and Technology worries about how the information will be used, especially in cases of abuse and false accusations. “This is part of a broader trend of the government building databases on the ordinary, lawful activities of ordinary, law-abiding people,” laments Dempsey.
Passengers will have the right to see the information, and there will be avenues to correct anything that needs to be corrected, “in hopefully just a few months,” says CNN’s Kathleen Koch.
The following video [open link] is from CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, broadcast on July 27. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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Add comment July 30th, 2007