Observations on current events

Another View of The State of The Union

Gore Vidal: President Jonah
"...When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. 'Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?' He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: 'How eager you are to be slaves.' I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as 'a wartime president,' and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes..."


On Iran:

Why is a comprehensive view assessment, such as this, so rare in print?

F. William Engdahl: Calculating the Risk of War in Iran
"In the past weeks media reports have speculated that Washington is ‘thinking the unthinkable,’ namely, an aggressive, pre-emptive nuclear bombardment of Iran, by either the United States or Israel, to destroy or render useless the deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities.
The possibility of war against Iran presents a geo-strategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proven complicated enough for the United States. Below we try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war.
The dramatis personae include the Bush Administration, most especially the Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the CIA, the UN Ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condi Rice. It includes Iran, under the new and outspoken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It includes Putin’s Russia, a nuclear-armed veto member of the UN Security Council. It includes a nuclear-armed Israel, whose acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, recently declared that Israel could ‘under no circumstances’ allow Iranian development of nuclear weapons ‘that can threaten our existence.’ It includes the EU, especially Security Council Permanent Member, France and the weakening President Chirac. It includes China, whose dependence on Iranian oil and potentially natural gas is large.
Each of these actors has differing agendas and different goals, making the issue of Iran one of the most complex in recent international politics. What’s going on here? Is a nuclear war, with all that implies for the global financial and political stability, imminent? What are the possible and even probable outcomes?..."

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Raw Story: Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence
"The second part of the Senate investigation into bungled pre-war Iraq intelligence is still being held up by an internal Pentagon investigation of Douglas Feith, one of the war's leading architects, RAW STORY has learned.
As previously reported by Raw Story, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) inquiry -- titled Phase II -- is waiting on a report from the Pentagon inspector general as to Feith's alleged role in manipulating pre-war intelligence to support a case for war. Feith, who is also being probed by the FBI for his role in an Israeli spy case, resigned in January 2005.
More broadly, a RAW STORY investigation has found that Feith's access to classified information and his alleged wrongdoing can likely be laid at the feet of more senior officials in the Bush Administration -- namely Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who would have had to have overruled Pentagon background checks to reissue Feith's clearances after he was booted from the National Security Council for allegations of espionage in the mid 1980s..."


The Latest Marker On The NeoCon Roadmap For The World:

This agenda item, along with the ratcheting-up of the DoD budget after the 'catalyzing event' of 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq, it must be remembered, were all quite clearly spelled-out by The Project For The New American Century in September 2000 (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.)

BBC: US plans to 'fight the net' revealed
"As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing 'computer network attack' weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called 'Information Operations Roadmap'. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The 'roadmap' calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is 'critical to military success'. Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance...

...Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
'Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,' it reads.
'Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,' it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. 'Specific boundaries should be established,' they write. But they don't seem to explain how...

...When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.
It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.
'Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system,' it reads...

...And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to 'provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum'.
US forces should be able to 'disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum'.
Consider that for a moment.
The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?
The fact that the 'Information Operations Roadmap' is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.
And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it..."

Domestic Surveillance:

New York Times Editorial: Spies, Lies and Wiretaps: "A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.
The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant..."

Newsweek: Domestic Spying Foes Pushed Out of Bush Admin.
"James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked 'people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it right-and to doing the right thing-whatever the price. These people,' said Comey, 'know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way.'
One of those people-a former assistant attorney general named Jack Goldsmith-was absent from the festivities and did not, for many months, hear Comey's grateful praise. In the summer of 2004, Goldsmith, 43, had left his post in George W. Bush's Washington to become a professor at Harvard Law School. Stocky, rumpled, genial, though possessing an enormous intellect, Goldsmith is known for his lack of pretense; he rarely talks about his time in government. In liberal Cambridge, Mass., he was at first snubbed in the community and mocked as an atrocity-abetting war criminal by his more knee-jerk colleagues. ICY WELCOME FOR NEW LAW PROF, headlined The Harvard Crimson.
They had no idea. Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection, described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold stories of the war on terror.
These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men..."


FEMA:

NY Times: FEMA Workers Arrested for Bribery
"Two FEMA disaster assistance employees working in New Orleans were arrested yesterday on federal bribery charges, accused of accepting $10,000 each in exchange for letting a contractor submit inflated reports on the number of meals it was serving at a Hurricane Katrina relief base camp there.
The charges against Andrew Rose and Loyd Hollman, both of Colorado, came after they told a contractor hired on a $1 million deal to provide meals in Algiers, La., that he could submit falsified invoices for extra meals, a Justice Department statement said.
The two were arrested hours after accepting envelopes containing $10,000 apiece. These were supposed to be down payments in what the two had said should be a $2,500 weekly bribe for each, officials said..."

Domestic Surveillance:

It seems the definition of 'domestic' is one that Bush does not have complete command of. If the calls and emails between the 9/11 hijackers in the US were of interest (which is a reasonable investigative proposition, pursuant to finding out how it was coordinated), the fact remains that those calls are purely domestic and thus illegal under the current law. The surveillance of international calls to such persons would only provide a part of the information. Understanding how they are connected to each other would require conducting purely domestic (illegal) surveillance.
So, if the Administration is arguing that 'if only we had the power that the law does not give us,' then they ought to have asked Congress to change the law. The point, of course, is that they tried to have it changed in 2002; a change that was flatly rejected by Congress.

Presidential Press Conference, Jan. 26: Press Conference of the President
"[Press member question:] Members of your administration have said that the secret eavesdropping program might have prevented the September 11th attacks. But the people who hijacked the planes on September 11th had been in this country for years, having domestic phone calls and emails. So how, specifically, can you say that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Michael Hayden said that because he believes that had we had the capacity to listen to the phone calls from those from San Diego to elsewhere we might have gotten information necessary to prevent the attack. And that's what he was referring to.

Q: They were domestic calls --

THE PRESIDENT: No, domestic outside -- we will not listen inside this country. It is a call from al Qaeda, al Qaeda affiliates, either from inside the country out, or outside the country in, but not domestically..."

Domestic Surveillance:

AG Gonzales gave a speech on the newly renamed 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' (rolls off the tongue nicely, doesn't it?) yesterday at Georgetown University. A group of 30 students stood up in the audience and turned their backs to him while he spoke. Five of them donned black hoods and held up a banner, quoting Ben Franklin's position on sacrificing liberty for security, and how those who do so deserve neither.

The AG used the term 'wartime' and 'war' repeatedly in his remarks, apparently hoping that people would not notice that Congress had never declared it. The difference between declaring war (which only Congress has the power to do), and giving the Executive the authorization to use force is not at all subtle. A declaration of war sets into motion a Congressional reporting requirement for the Executive, something that the White House has been apparently keen to avoid.

Democracy Now ! - Democracy Now! | AG Gonzales' Defense Of U.S. Domestic Spy Program Draws Protests and Criticism from Law Professors, Students
"...One of the panelists was David Cole, law professor at Georgetown and author of several books including Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security.

DAVID COLE: FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was enacted by Congress in 1978 after revelations of rampant wiretapping and surveillance on Americans in the name of national security. And there was the Church Committee held extensive hearings and wrote an extensive report, criticizing this practice and calling for reforms. FISA was one such reform.
It regulates electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence and national security purposes. It permits such surveillance, but with minor exceptions not invoked by the Department of Justice, it requires a warrant from a FISA court. To get such a warrant, you don't have to show probable cause of a crime, you just have to show probable cause that the person you're targeting is a member of a terrorist organization. So if, in fact, that's all they were targeting, they could have gone through the FISA courts. They didn't.
Congress, in FISA, specifically said that FISA and the Title III, which governs ordinary criminal wiretaps, are the exclusive means for any wiretapping by officials within the United States. They are the exclusive means. That means the only means. Congress also said it's a crime to conduct electronic surveillance without statutory authorization in two places: in 50 USC Section 1809 and in 18 USC Section 2511. Both of those statutes, I think, the President violated.
And finally, and most importantly, Congress specifically contemplated the exact question addressed today; that is, authorization for wiretapping during wartime. Section 1811 in FISA is entitled 'Authorization During Time of War.' So this is not some un-contemplated issue; Congress specifically addressed it. And what they said was when we’ve declared war, the President can conduct warrant-less wiretapping, but only for 15 days. And they said in the legislative history, this is so if the President needs further authority, he can come to us and ask for that authority. The President didn't do that here. He simply went ahead and did it without asking for their authority.
Now, the D.O.J.'s argument, and repeated here by the Attorney General, is that the AUMF, the authorization to use military force, somehow implicitly overrides all of this and authorizes the President to conduct warrant-less wiretapping. There's several problems with that argument. First, the authorization says nothing about warrant-less wiretapping. Second, as I’ve indicated, Section 1811 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act specifically addresses discretion of warrant-less wiretapping and says 15 days and no further. And that provision applies when Congress has declared war, the most serious and grave act Congress can do. Here Congress only authorized the use of military force. So if Congress said a declaration of war only gives you 15 days, how can it be that an authorization to use military force somehow gives him four years and more of unchecked power?
In addition, when Attorney General Gonzales was asked by reporters why he didn't go to Congress and ask for additional authority, he said, ‘Well, we talked to some members of Congress, and they said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get that additional authority.’ So how can you argue on the one hand, Congress gave us the authority, but on the other hand, we didn't go to Congress to ask for the authority because if we did, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get it?
Now, when you're a law student, they tell you if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also say if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue, because that's what the Bush administration has done here, sort of taking the pulpit, through the President, through the Attorney General, through Michael Hayden, through the Vice President, to say over and over and over again, it's lawful, as if the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough.
And I think in light of that, the sort of clearly blatantly political nature of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today to express the opposite political view. Now, David Brooks, in commenting on the Alito hearings which discussed these issues, said, ‘Anytime the Democrats are seen talking about law, and the Republicans are seen to be talking about national security, that's a winner for the Republicans.’ And that may be true as a political matter. In fact, Karl Rove said exactly the same thing just last week, that there's a political gain here that they see by invoking fear and national security over law.
But that's precisely why we have law in the first place. It's in recognition that political pressures will push government officials toward violation of rights and towards accretion of government power. This administration has taken the view -- in this case; in the torture case; in the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment issue -- that it can literally override the law and violate criminal statutes. Now, it's on a political campaign to entrench that power. What's at stake here is whether we are a government of laws, rather than a government of men..."



Editor and Publisher: Defending Spy Program, General Reveals Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment
"The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder's Washington office -- despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it.
General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, talked with reporters about the current controversy surrounding the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of communications of suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Hayden has been in this position since last April, but was NSA director when the NSA monitoring program began in 2001.
As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment's search standard of 'reasonableness' without mentioning that it also demands 'probable cause.' Hayden seemed to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.

Here is the exchange, along with the entire Fourth Amendment at the end..."


Electronic Voting:
Anchorage Daily News: State rebuffs raw vote demand
"The state Division of Elections has refused to turn over its electronic voting files to the Democrats, arguing that the data format belongs to a private company and can't be made public.
The Alaska Democratic Party says the information is a public record essential for verifying the accuracy of the 2004 general election and must be provided.
The official vote results from the last general election are riddled with discrepancies and impossible for the public to make sense of, the Democrats said Monday. A detailed analysis of the underlying data could answer lingering questions about an election many thought was over more than a year ago, they say.
'Basically what they say is they want to give us a printout from the (electronic) file. They don't want to give us the file itself. It doesn't enable us to get to the bottom of what we need to know,' said Kay Brown, spokeswoman for the party.
At this point, it's impossible to say whether the correct candidates were declared the winner in all Alaska races from 2004, Brown said.
The private contractor hired to provide Alaska's electronic voting machines is Diebold Election Systems. It has told Alaska officials it owns the 'structure of the database' though the data itself is public..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Michael Isikoff: The Other Big Brother
"...Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's [Counterintelligence Field Activity] role is 'force protection'—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect 'raw information' about 'suspicious incidents.' The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's 'terrorism threat warning process,' according to an internal Pentagon memo...
...there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security..."

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: U.S. accused of spying on those who disagree with Bush policies
"While the White House defended domestic surveillance as a safeguard against terrorism, a Florida peace activist and several Democrats in Congress accused the Bush administration on Friday of spying on Americans who disagree with President Bush's policies.
Richard Hersh, of Boca Raton, Fla., director of Truth Project Inc. of Palm Beach County, told an ad hoc panel of House Democrats that his group and others in South Florida have been infiltrated and spied upon despite having no connections to terrorists.
'Agents rummaged through the trash, snooped into e-mails, packed Web sites and listened in on phone conversations,' Hersh charged. 'We know that address books and activist meeting lists have disappeared.'
The Truth Project gained national attention when NBC News reported last month that it was described as a 'credible threat' in a database of suspicious activity compiled by the Pentagon's Talon program. The listing cited the group's gathering a year ago at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, Fla., to talk about ways to counter military recruitment at high schools..."


On Torture:

AP: CIA Role a Mystery at Army Court-Martial
"The initials were spoken aloud only once all week, and then apparently by mistake. After this past week's testimony, any role the CIA had -- or didn't have -- in the interrogation of an Iraqi general who died in U.S. custody remains a tantalizing and mysterious backdrop to the court-martial of Army Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.
The CIA is 'the ghost at the banquet,' said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert in military law who has been following the court-martial but doesn't know if the CIA was involved in the case.
'We're playing 'Hamlet' without Hamlet here,' said Fidell, an attorney in private practice who teaches military law at American University in Washington. He also represented news organizations in their attempts to open pretrial hearings in Welshofer's prosecution.
Welshofer was convicted late Saturday of negligent homicide in the 2003 death of Republican Guard Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush at a detention camp in western Iraq.
He could be dishonorably discharged and sentenced to up to three years and three months in jail at a hearing Monday. If convicted of the original murder charge, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors said Mowhoush was stuffed headfirst in a sleeping bag and bound with electrical cord, then suffocated with Welshofer sitting atop his chest.
The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.
In 2004, the CIA said one of its officers may have been involved in Mowhoush's death, but the agency refused to elaborate. Last August, The Washington Post reported that documents it examined said Mowhoush was severely beaten by a CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group two days before he died..."


Clues To How Team Bush 'Won' The 'Close' 2004 Election?

The Washington Post: In Test, Diebold Machines Hacked in Florida
"As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.
Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.
Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the 'memory card' that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.
Then, in a warehouse a few blocks from his office in downtown Tallahassee, Sancho and seven other people held a referendum. The question on the ballot:
'Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?'
Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no.
'Was it possible for a disgruntled employee to do this and not have the elections administrator find out?' Sancho asked. 'The answer was yes,'..."


Advice Worth Considering?

William River Pitt: Democrats: Get Up and Walk Out
"...Understand this, congressional Democrats, and understand it well: you are not dealing merely with a body of political opponents in the GOP. You are dealing with a group of people that want you exterminated politically. The days of walking the halls of the Rayburn Building, sharing a bourbon with a colleague from the other side of the aisle, and hammering out a compromise are as dead as Julius Caesar. Collegiality is out. Mutual respect is out. They want you gone for good. Erased. Destroyed.
And you have been far too polite about this. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Back in 1995, Republican Senator Phil Gramm said, 'We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs.' That was eleven years ago. If you listen close, you can hear the beasts baying in the distance, waiting to slip the leash. Your limp tactics in the face of the assault upon you, your vacillation, your strange hope that maybe the GOP will be nicer tomorrow, has left you all smelling like Alpo.
For the love of God, you are being compared to Osama bin Laden all over network television because some within your ranks have had the courage to question the war in Iraq. It hasn't been subtle. Bin Laden, according to the right-wing talking heads, is getting his talking points straight from Howard Dean. These are the out-front spokespeople for the folks running the GOP right now. If you think there is compromise to be had with these people, if you think there is quarter to be given to you, then I have a nice, big red bridge to sell you in San Francisco..."

NY Times Editorial: The Justice Dept.'s Guide to Hunting and Fishing in Cyberspace
"Enough is never enough, not when the government believes that it can invade your privacy without repercussions. The Justice Department wants a federal judge to force Google to turn over millions of private Internet searches. Google is rightly fighting the demand, but the government says America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service, have already complied with similar requests.
This is not about national security. The Justice Department is making this baldfaced grab to try to prop up an online pornography law that has been blocked once by the Supreme Court. And it's not the first time we've seen this sort of behavior. The government has zealously protected the Patriot Act's power to examine library records. It sought the private medical histories of a selected group of women, saying it needed the information to defend the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in the federal courts.
The furor is still raging over President Bush's decision to permit spying on Americans without warrants. And the government now wants what could be billions of search terms entered into Google's Web pages and possibly a million Web-site addresses to go along with them.
Protecting minors from the nastier material on the Internet is a valid goal; the courts have asked the government to test whether technologies for filtering out the bad stuff are effective. And the government hasn't asked for users' personal data this time around. What's frightening is that the Justice Department is trying once again to dredge up information first and answer questions later, if at all. Had Google not resisted the government's attempt to seize records, would the public have ever found about the request?
The battle raises the question of how much of our personal information companies should be allowed to hold onto in the first place. Without much thought, Internet users have handed over vast quantities of private information to corporations. Many people don't realize that some innocuously named 'cookies' in personal computers allow companies to track visits to various Web sites.
Internet users permit their e-mail to be read by people and machines in ways they would never tolerate for their old-fashioned mail. And much of that information is now collected and stored by companies like Google. When pressed on privacy issues, Google - whose informal motto is 'Don't be evil' - says it can be trusted with this information. But profiling consumers' behavior is potentially profitable for companies. And once catalogued, information can be abused by the government as well. Either way, the individual citizen loses."


The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Despite what the White House says, this is not 'old news.' It's further evidence that the Administration knowingly used false information the scare Americans into silence over opposing military action that it had long determined as its final strategy. It reinforces the absurd, and patently false statements statements by the Administration before the invasion that 'war is the last resort' and the 'no decision had been made' to go to war. Lying to the American people is, unfortunately, not a crime. Lying to Congress is, however, an impeachable offense. If a majority of the American people do not think this matters, then this Constitutional Republic has much, much, bigger problems...

NY Times: 2002 Memo Doubted Niger Uranium Sale Claim
"A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was 'unlikely' because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department. Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send '25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers' filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous '16 words' in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, relied on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech. Two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the supposed Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.
But the intelligence assessment itself - including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim - was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times..."

Ray McGovern: Men Intoxicated with Power and Courtiers Who Serve Them
"Individually, the new 'dots' supplied by revelations about the Iraq war in James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration are not very surprising. Collectively, though, they provide valuable insight into the peculiar way in which President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair prepared to launch an unprovoked war - shades of Germany and Quisling Austria two generations ago. Needed: power-intoxicated leaders, court functionaries to serve them, and obedient military leaders able to subordinate conscience to career requirements.
Risen's book throws new light on just how Bush and Blair led their countries into war. It is a case study of the pitfalls in marginalizing foreign policy bureaucracies in favor of sycophants one level down. That part of his book is as revealing as Risen's now-famous disclosures of illegal eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). Cumulatively, the 'dots' furnished by Risen illuminate US-UK plotting and planning in 2002 - a year that will live in infamy...
...Risen's book throws intriguing light on the intrigue. We know from other leaked British official documents that Jack Straw was something of a thorn in the side of Blair's more war-prone advisers, and was regarded as a general nuisance for raising picayune matters like whether the war might violate international law. Here is an excerpt from a memo he wrote to Blair on March 25, 2002, before Blair visited Bush at Crawford and came home committed to support war:

'There has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL [Usama Bin Laden] and Al Qaida. Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September.... regime change per se is no justification for military action ... A legal justification is a necessary but far from sufficient precondition for military action. We have also to answer the big question - what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than in anything.... Iraq has had NO [emphasis in original] history of democracy so no one has this habit or experience.'

Straw and Powell just would not 'get with the program.' Small wonder that Blair and Bush decided to circumvent their chief foreign policy advisers and resort to more unquestioning loyalists like their intelligence chiefs.
Risen makes very clear is that Blair felt an urgent need for some kind of high-level, independent confirmation of what he was hearing on the telephone directly from Bush, and that both Straw and Powell were seen as flies in the ointment. CIA director Tenet, on the other hand, was very close to and loyal to the president. Better still, he enjoyed daily access to the president, had a perfect record for telling him what he wanted to hear, and knew the president's mind on Iraq. And the latter is what Blair wanted to know..."

On Torture:

Democracy Now! - Headlines for January 18, 2006: Swiss Senator Says Evidence Confirms CIA Renditions in Europe
"...In Europe, a Swiss Senator has said there is no longer any question that the CIA undertook in illegal activities in Europe by secretly transporting and jailing suspected terrorists. The official – Dick Marty – is heading up a European investigation into allegations that the CIA operated secret prisons in Poland and Romania. He also said blame has to be placed on all European nations who have helped the U.S. carry out its covert operations.

* Swiss Senator Dick Marty : 'I'd like it to be clear that the problem does not only concern Rumania and Poland. It would be too simple to criminalize these two countries. I think it's to whole of Europe that accepted to keep quiet, because if it's true that something happened in Rumania and Poland, something also happened in many other countries, and many of them were certainly aware of what was going on. And to me, in such a situation, knowing and keeping quiet is as bad as tolerating that such activities be led on its territory,'..."


The So-Called War On Terror

Washington Post: Translator's Conviction Raises Legal Concerns
"For three years federal agents trailed Mohammed Yousry, a chubby 50-year-old translator and U.S. citizen who worked for radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. Prosecutors wiretapped his phone, and FBI agents shadowed and interviewed him. They read his books and notepads and every file on his computer.
This was their conclusion:
'Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist,' prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year. 'Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence.'
Still, the prosecutor persuaded the jury to convict Yousry of supporting terrorism. Yousry now awaits sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman to Rahman's lawyer in Egypt.
In June 2000, Stewart released to a reporter a version of the letter, which discussed a cease-fire between Islamic militants and the Egyptian government. Prosecutors said that the lawyer and the translator, by these acts, conspired to use Rahman's words to incite others to carry out kidnappings and killings. No attack took place.
'Kill who? What are they talking about?' Yousry asked recently as he sat alongside his wife, Sarah, an evangelical Christian, in their modest Connecticut condominium. 'The words I'm looking for, it's insane.'
The prosecution and conviction of Stewart, 66, on charges of aiding terrorist activity, drew international attention, overshadowing Yousry's case. But legal experts, civil liberties lawyers and a juror say Yousry's conviction raises many troubling questions, not least how a court-appointed translator working on instruction from lawyers could be held responsible for navigating complicated and dangerous legal waters.
The trial transcripts reveal that prosecutors advanced no evidence to back up certain claims, including the assertion that Yousry was in touch with Middle Eastern terrorists..."


The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Raw Story: American who advised Pentagon says he wrote for magazine that found forged Niger documents
"...A closer look at the series of overlapping relationships and events, however, suggests that Ledeen may have been connected, even if inadvertently, to the Niger forgeries.
Panorama has been in the crosshairs since late 2002, when one of its journalists, Elisabetta Burba, was handed a set of documents -- including contracts -- purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had purchased 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from the African nation of Niger. These documents were critical in supporting the administration's claims that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.
The documents were later debunked as forgeries, though not before their content had been referenced in the President's State of the Union Address. Questions remain over whether the Administration knew they were forgeries, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was able to discredit them in a matter of hours. The Bush administration nevertheless invaded Iraq shortly thereafter, in March of 2003.
John Pike, director of the military watchdog GlobalSecurity.org, recently told RAW STORY the path of the documents from Italy to the White House is troubling.
'The thing that was so embarrassing about the episode was not simply that the documents were forgeries, but that they were clumsy forgeries, as was so quickly determined by the IAEA,' Pike said. 'It is one thing to be taken in, but to be so easily taken in suggests either bewildering incompetence or intentional deception, or possibly both.'
While Ledeen admits to writing for Panorama, he explained that the work had been in the past, saying, 'That would be a couple of years ago.'
But 'a couple of years ago' would be right around the time when the forgeries were delivered to Burba or sent from the U.S. embassy in Rome via backchannels to the U.S. State Department, bypassing the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Burba says she got the documents from former Italian intelligence asset Rocco Martino. Martino handed the documents off to Burba in the fall of 2002, initially demanding money and then simply providing them.
After investigating the documents for an article and finding them to be suspect, Burba suggested to her editor, Carlo Rossella, that she take a trip to Niger to investigate further. Rossella diverted her to the U.S. embassy in Rome instead. She never ran the article. Burba dropped off the forgeries to the US embassy on Oct. 9, 2002.
But as Burba was investigating the veracity of the documents, head of Italian intelligence Nicolo Pollari was meeting with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
The meeting, which took place in September 2002, is alleged to be brokered by Ledeen, although the only U.S. official Pollari claims to have met is George Tenet, whom he also met in October 2001. Questioned about the meeting, Hadley has said no one involved in the meeting had 'any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed.'
Burba delivered the forgeries to the U.S. embassy a month after the Pollari and Hadley meeting..."

Domestic Surveillance:

NY Times: Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
"In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.
As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about 'whether the program had a proper legal foundation,' but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.
President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a 'vital tool' against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved 'thousands of lives.'
But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive..."


The Environment:

New York Times Editorial: Ignoring Science on Clean Air
"Every five years, the Clean Air Act requires the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to revise federal air quality standards for smog and soot. It is a stressful moment. When Carol Browner, President Bill Clinton's administrator, tightened standards in 1997, industry and its friends in Congress erupted in protest, and a federal appeals court said the rules were unconstitutional. The regulations did not actually take effect until Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in 2001 that Ms. Browner had the right to issue them and had done so properly.
Now it is the turn of Stephen Johnson at the E.P.A., only this time it is the scientists and environmentalists who are upset, and not without reason. Last month, Mr. Johnson proposed new rules governing fine particulate matter, known as soot. The most dangerous of these are microscopic specks that can cause significant inflammation and arterial damage in the bloodstream and the lungs.
At best, Mr. Johnson's proposed rules represent only a modest tightening of the Browner rules - despite considerable additional research over the last few years, some 2,000 studies altogether, expanding the list of adverse health effects associated with fine particles (especially among children) and, collectively, pointing to the need for stronger standards..."

The Media and Iraq:

Why is it so rare to hear/see these sobering numbers on a medium that the whole nation has access to?

The McLaughlin Group: January 13, 2006 Show
"...MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, the human toll: U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,214;
U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, 51,600;
Iraqi civilians dead, 120,690..."

A Declaration Against (The Vietnam) War

Martin Luther King, Jr. A Time to Break the Silence - April 4, 1967
"...A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death..."

The Imperial Presidency, Dub'ya Style:

New York Times: The Imperial Presidency at Work
"You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.
Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners.
The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an 'unlawful enemy combatant.' The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts.
Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous 'signing statement' on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.
Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.
Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade."


On Torture:

Justice may be slow, but I have a feeling we might be getting somewhere with this.

Democracy Now! - Abu Ghraib Commander Takes 5th Amendment At Trial
"...The Washington Post is reporting a high-ranking US army official has invoked his right not to incriminate himself while testifying in the military tribunal of two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The decision by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller – who helped set up interrogations at Abu Ghraib – comes shortly after Col. Thomas Pappas, the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, accepted immunity from prosecution this week and was ordered to testify at an upcoming military trial. According to the Post, Col. Pappas, could be asked how abusive tactics emerged, who ordered their use and their possible connection to officials in Washington. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said: 'It's a steppingstone going up the chain of command, and that's positive. It might demonstrate that it wasn't just a few rotten apples,'..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Jason Leopold: Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11
"The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups...
...What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.
But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law..."

Rising Water:

Will the U.S. want to spend $5 billion? (For perspective, the Iraq War will cost over a trillion dollars.)

BBC: Louisiana studies Dutch dams
"...In 1953, Zeeland was devastated by a flood disaster even worse than the one in New Orleans.
Two thousand people were killed, and the system of dykes protecting the islands and peninsulas in Zeeland's river delta collapsed in nearly 500 places.
After the disaster, Dutch delegates visited Louisiana to marvel at the state-of-the-art levees placed along the Mississippi River in the 1920s and '30s.
Realising that tragedy could perhaps have been prevented, the delegates returned home vowing they would never again be taken by surprise.
Zeeland's pioneering Delta Project was a direct result of these considerations...
...The Oosterscheldebarrier is the biggest and was the most difficult to build: a 9km (5.6-mile) hydraulic wall with sluice-gate doors that are normally left open to protect the area's delicate tidal habitat.
Another wall, the Maeslantbarrier, protects Rotterdam, the Netherlands' second city with a population roughly the same size as that of New Orleans. Consisting of two hollow doors the size of the Eiffel Tower, the Maeslantbarrier was the Delta Project's final instalment.
When it was completed in 1997, the total cost of the project amounted to more than $5bn.
How serious the US is about learning from the Dutch example will therefore depend largely on two things: whether it has the staying power required for such a project, and whether it is willing to pick up the astronomical price tag..."

Domestic Surveillance

Raw Story: Former CIA general counsel tells House Intelligence Bush didn't have wiretap authority
"Former CIA general counsel Jeff Smith has issued a memo to the House Intelligence Committee concluding that Authority for Use of Military Force did not give President George W. Bush the right to order domestic wiretaps without a court order.
In the memo, Smith discusses court precedent, as well as civil liberties outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Smith further concludes that Bush's secondary argument, that he has authority under the constitution to order such wiretaps, is 'seriously undermined' by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which allows for similar surveillance only with a warrant. He further characterizes a president's constitutional power while acting against an existing statute as being at its 'lowest ebb'..."


Rush Deliberately Gets It Wrong, Again:

Media Matters: Limbaugh again falsely claimed FISA court blocked search of Moussaoui's computer
"For the second time in a week, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the FBI a warrant to search the laptop computer of Zacarias Moussaoui. But in fact, the FBI never petitioned the court for a warrant after bureau attorneys determined they did not have sufficient evidence...

...LIMBAUGH: Right, have you heard of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui?

CALLER: I have.

LIMBAUGH: Yeah, well, that's a case where we didn't get to find out what was on his computer, and we found out he was the 20th hijacker.

CALLER: And?

LIMBAUGH: And we missed finding out what was going on beforehand. The FBI wanted to know what was on his computer. Couldn't get a warrant to do it from the FISA court. They didn't like the way the procedures had been followed. Bammo! 9-11 happened..."


Iran

Raw Story: Spurious attempt to tie Iran, Iraq to nuclear arms plot bypassed U.S. intelligence channels
"Several U.S. and foreign intelligence sources, along with investigators, say an Iranian exile with ties to Iran-Contra peddled a bizarre tale of stolen uranium to governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 2003.
The story that was peddled -- which detailed how an Iranian intelligence team infiltrated Iraq prior to the start of the war in March of 2003, and stole enriched uranium to use in their own nuclear weapons program -- was part of an attempt to implicate both countries in a WMD plot. It later emerged that the Iranian exile was trying to collect money for his tales, sources say.
By all credible accounts, the source of this dubious tale was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer who used middle-men and cut-outs to create the appearance of several sources. Ghorbanifar played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal that threatened to take down the Reagan administration, in which the U.S. sold arms to Iran and diverted the proceeds to Nicaraguan militants.
While the various threads of the larger story of Ghorbanifar and his intelligence peddling began in December of 2001, meetings in Paris in 2003 are far more important in illustrating -- as a microcosm -- the larger difficulties faced in untangling the facts relating to global intelligence trafficking..."

Norman Solomon: Axis of Fanatics
"With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a better chance to become prime minister of Israel.
He's media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television. And he's very dangerous.
Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States. Later, during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and then became Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. By the time he moved up to deputy foreign minister in 1988, he was a star on US networks.
The guy is smooth - fluent in American idioms, telegenic to many eyes - and good at lying on camera. So, when Israeli police killed 17 Palestinians at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque in October 1990, Netanyahu led a disinformation blitz asserting that the Palestinians were killed after they'd rioted and pelted Jewish worshipers from above the Wailing Wall with huge stones. At the time, his fable dominated much of the US media. Later, even the official Israeli inquiry debunked Netanyahu's account and blamed police for starting the clash.
Now, with Netanyahu campaigning to win the Israeli election for prime minister in late March, he's cranking up rhetoric against Iran. His outlook seems to be 180 degrees from the world view of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet in tangible political ways, they're well-positioned to feed off each other's fanaticism..."


No Poor Child Left A Dime:

Greg Palast: NO CHILD'S BEHIND LEFT: THE TEST
"...President Bush told us, 'By passing the No Child Left Behind Act, we are regularly testing every child and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.' But there are no 'better options.' In the delicious double-speak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year. I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer better options to the kids stamped failed. Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that. But they don't provide it, the law promises it, without a single penny to make it happen. In New York in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two-hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the Army. (That option did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.) Hint: When de-coding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Raw Story: National Security Agency mounted massive spy op on Baltimore peace group, documents show
"The National Security Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the inflating of protesters' balloons, and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction, RAW STORY has learned.
According to the documents, the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA working with the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department..."


On Torture:

The Guardian (UK) - Swiss claim proof that CIA ran Europe jails
"European investigators looking into allegations of secret CIA-run prisons in Europe said yesterday that an Egyptian government message naming countries where such prisons existed could amount to indirect proof of the claims.
But the investigators from the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights body, said they were trying to confirm that the Egyptian document was genuine. The document's existence was reported on Sunday by the Swiss weekly SonnstagsBlick. The newspaper reported that the document said Egypt had confirmed through its own sources that the US intelligence agency had held 23 terror suspects at a military base in Romania..."


Bush's Costly War of Choice:

Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz: THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR: AN APPRAISAL THREE YEARS AFTER THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFLICT
"Three years ago, as America was preparing to go to war in Iraq, there were few discussions of the likely costs. When Larry Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser, suggested that they might reach $200 billion, there was a quick response from the White House: that number was a gross overestimation. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Iraq could 'really finance its own reconstruction,' apparently both underestimating what was required and the debt burden facing the country. Lindsey went on to say that 'The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.'
Many aspects of the Iraq venture have turned out differently from what was purported before the war: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, no imminent danger that would warrant a pre-emptive war. Whether Americans were greeted as liberators or not, there is evidence that they are now viewed as occupiers. Stability has not been established. Clearly, the benefits of the War have been markedly different from those claimed..."

The study puts the combined direct and macroeconomic cost of the Iraq War between a conservtive $ 1,026 billion and $1,854 billion. That's over a trillion taxpayer dollars. Surely such a vast sum could not have been spent rebuilding America's infrastructure, sending young people to univeristy, developing alternative energy sources to ween the US from its chronic petroleum dependency, or paying down the multi-trillion-dollar national debt? The perception of an administration that's 'protecting America' by invading/bombing oil-rich Muslim nations appears to allow many Americans forget about the priorities that their government has left unfunded.


Electronic Voting:

The Brad Blog: The Soon-to-be-Indicted Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio's Connection To Electoral Fraud
"...In 2004, prior to the Presidential Election, Ney went so far as to send a 'Dear Colleague' letter signed along with the other HAVA co-sponsors to members of congress, urging them not to amend the original legislation. He argued at the time, that paper records on such machines would somehow disenfranchise disabled voters who had been cleverly afforded a special provision in bill which mandated at least one disabled-accessable device in every voting precinct in the country. That device, of course, would be a paperless touch-screen electronic voting machine, like the ones made by Diebold, which, legislators, vendors and lobbyists would later proffer, were required to meet provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Ney had also peronsally gone out of his way in order to keep Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) 'Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act' (HR 550), which would mandate paper records for all votes cast, from ever seeing the light of day in the House Administration Committee. That, despite Holt's bill having now nearly 160 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Ney has succeeded brilliantly at squashing Holt's bill, first proposed as HR 2239 back in 2003, as it continues to both gain co-sponsors and gather dust as the powerful Republican committee chair still refuses to allow it even to be brought up for hearings...
...In addition to the 'Dear Colleague' letter that Ney wrote (signed by him and his co-sponsors of the HAVA legislation) in 2004, asking members of congress not to amend the act to require paper trails, Ney has made every effort to ensure that the myriad reports of massive voter disenfranchisment and electoral irregularities that occurred in Ohio remain little more than 'conspiracy theory' as far as both the Mainstream Media and the majority of the American electorate perceive the matters. He, and others who have lobbied hard on behalf of Diebold have continued to misleadingly forward the idea that what occurred in 2004, and subsequently in 2005, where some 44 out of 88 counties in Ohio went electronic for the first time, is nothing to be alarmed about. It's all little more than the imaginery ruminations of Democratic-party John Kerry supporters, according to such folks. That, despite the fact that it has been the Green and Liberterian parties who have, by-and-large, waged the most aggressive attempt to have votes in Ohio counted, along with the extraordinarily well-documented reports of chicanery exposed nationally throughout various local media. More information in that regard will likely surface via the still-pending lawsuit on all of this brought by the League of Women Voters in Ohio.
Add that to the 'staggeringly impossible' results of the 2005 Election results there which were stunning, to say the least, and the shamefully under-reported story of the non-partisan Governmental Accountability Office's (GAO) damning report on HAVA and its gross failures released last September. All told, it would seem that Ney and the Voting Machine Companyies like Diebold have had every reason to squash whatever reporting they could on these matters, and so far, they've gotten the job largely done. At least in the mainstream outlets..."

Energy Politics:

This November 2003 Rolling Stone article deserves re-reading, especially in light of the coal mining accident in Appalachia. The influence the industry had in shaping policy is quite amazing. Blinded by visions of profits, the duty of protecting the public interest is obviously quite far from the minds of any of the people sworn to uphold this principle...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Crimes Against Nature
"George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Ray McGovern: Heck of a Job, Hayden!
"The eavesdropping-on-Americans scandal came as shock and betrayal to most employees of the National Security Agency - and to other intelligence officers, active and retired.
The idea that the once highly respected former director of NSA, Gen. Mike Hayden, had allowed himself to be seduced into sinning against NSA's first commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Spy on Americans,' was initially met with incredulity. Sadly, no other conclusion became possible as we watched Hayden and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spin and squirm before the press on December 19 in their transparent attempt to square a circle.
For many of us veteran intelligence officers, the press conference put a damper on the Christmas spirit. The Gonzales-Hayden pas de deux should trouble other Americans as well, because the malleable Gen. Hayden, now bedecked with a fourth star, is Deputy Director of National Intelligence - the second highest official in the US intelligence community. Only time will tell what other extralegal activities he will condone.
The framers of the US Constitution must have been turning in their graves on December 19 as they watched Gonzales and Hayden defend the eavesdropping - especially as the two grappled with the $64 million question: Instead of simply flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), why didn't the administration ask Congress to change it, if the law really needed to be made less restrictive? (And that remains a big 'if.')
Well-briefed by executive branch lawyers, Gonzales recited 'our legal analysis - our position' that Congress's authorization of force in the wake of 9/11 gave the president the right to disregard FISA's prohibition, absent a court order, against using NSA to eavesdrop on Americans. This 'position,' of course, is quite a stretch; even the regime-friendly Washington Post has termed it 'impossible to believe' the government's contention. While reading from his script, the Attorney General presented his case as well as it could be argued, but twice he slipped while answering a question as to why the administration decided to disregard the FISA law rather than try to amend it..."

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush's War on Professionals
"...Bush's war on professionals has been fought in nearly every department and agency of the government, from intelligence to Interior, from the Justice Department to the Drug Enforcement Administration, in order to suppress contrary analysis on issues from weapons of mass destruction to global warming, from voting rights to the morning-after pill. Without whistle-blowers on the inside, there are no press reports on the outside. The story of Watergate, after all, is not of journalists operating in a vacuum, but is utterly dependent on sources internal to the Nixon administration. 'Deep Throat,' Mark Felt, the deputy FBI director, whatever his motives, was a quintessential whistle-blower.
Now Bush's Justice Department has launched a 'leak' probe, complete with prosecutors and grand jury, to investigate the disclosure of the NSA story. It is similarly investigating the Washington Post's reportage of the administration's secret prison system for terrorist suspects. The intent is to send a signal to the reporters on this beat that they may be called before grand juries and forced to reveal their sources. (The disastrous failed legal strategy of the New York Times in defending Judy Miller as a Joan of Arc in the Plame case has crucially helped reinforce the precedent.) Within the bowels of government, potential whistle-blowers are being put on notice that they put their careers at risk for speaking to reporters in order to inform the public of what they consider wrongdoing..."

Jason Leopold: NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying
"The National Security Agency, the top-secret spy shop that has been secretly eavesdropping on Americans under a plan authorized by President Bush four years ago, destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US companies it collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the agency feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting unlawful surveillance on United States citizens without authorization from a court, according to a little known report published in October 2001 and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's operations.
NSA lawyers advised the agency to immediately destroy the names of thousands of American citizens and businesses it collected shortly after 9/11 in its quest to target terrorists in this country. NSA lawyers told the agency that the surveillance was illegal and that it could not share the data it collected with the CIA or other intelligence agencies.
The lawyers said the surveillance could result in numerous lawsuits from people identified in the surveillance reports, two former US officials told the Houston Chronicle in an October 27, 2001, report, and was illegal despite any terrorist threat that existed in the days following 9/11..."


Non-existant WMD's

Larisa Alexandrovna: Secretive military unit sought to solve political WMD concerns prior to securing Iraq, intelligence sources say
"New allegations indicate that American civilian military leadership may have used an off-book quasi-military team to address political issues, placing those concerns above securing peace in the region, RAW STORY has learned.
Three U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council say that the Pentagon civilian leadership under the guidance of Stephen Cambone, appointed to lead Defense Department intelligence in March 2003, dispatched a series of 'off book' missions out of the ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The team was tasked to secure the following in order of priority: fallen Navy pilot Scott Speicher, WMD and Saddam Hussein.
While it is known that an authorized special operations unit was dispatched before the invasion of Iraq with similar objectives, sources say another team also operated on the ground in Iraq, primarily from the summer until the fall of 2003...
...During the summer of 2003 through the fall of 2003, the team, whose members who were not named by sources, is said to have interviewed many Iraqi intelligence and former intelligence officers. The UN source says that the political problem discussed had more to do with solving the lack of WMD than anything else.
'They come in the summer of 2003, bringing in Iraqis, interviewing them,' the UN source said. 'Then they start talking about WMD and they say to [these Iraqi intelligence officers] that ‘Our President is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?’'
The source said intelligence officers understood quickly what they were being asked to do and that the assumption was they were being asked to provide WMD in order for coalition forces to find them..."


The So-Called War on Terror:

John Pilger: The Quiet Death of Freedom
"...From 11 September 2001 to 30 September 2005, a total of 895 people were arrested in Britain under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the Act. As for real terrorists, the identity of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, was known to MI5 and nothing was done. And Blair wants to give them more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American surgeon, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr. Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. The then-Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, called Dr. Dhafir, a Muslim, a 'terrorist,' a description mocked by even the judge in his politically-motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US Circuit Court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's 'right' to imprison an American citizen 'indefinitely' without charging him him with a crime. This was the case of Joseph Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged, and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W. Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate effectively voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantánamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship..."


Jack, Nodody Knows Your Name:

Now, apparently, nobody claims to know Mr Abramoff, but the recipients of his cash and favors are numerous...

William Rivers Pitt: Incoming
"...The questions, of course, are straightforward: Who is involved? Who took money from this guy? Who is on his pad? Most significantly, who did Abramoff name when he decided to sing to the prosecutors?..."

Iraq:

Robert Fisk: War without End
"This was the year the 'war on terror' - an obnoxious expression which we all parroted after 11 September 2001 - appeared to be almost as endless as George Bush once claimed it would be. And unsuccessful. For, after all the bombing of Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq and its appallingly tragic aftermath, can anyone claim today that they feel safer than they did a year ago?
We have gone on smashing away at the human rights we trumpeted at the Russians - and the Arabs - during the Cold War. We have perhaps fatally weakened all those provisions that were written into our treaties and conventions in the aftermath of the Second World War to make the world a safer place. And we claim we are winning..."

Howard Zinn: After the War
"...In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative, which still resonates among most people in this country and which maintains the reputation of World War II as “the good war.” There was a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe.
Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany.
I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right..."


The Fourth Estate:

New York Times Editorial: On the Subject of Leaks
"...Leak investigations are often designed to distract the public from the real issues by blaming the messenger. Take the third leak inquiry, into a Washington Post report on secret overseas C.I.A. camps where prisoners are tortured or shipped to other countries for torture. The administration said the reporting had damaged America's image. Actually, the secret detentions and torture did that.
Illegal spying and torture need to be investigated, not whistle-blowers and newspapers."

Quizzing Judge Alito:

Adam Cohen: Question for Judge Alito: What About One Person One Vote?
"...There has been a lot of talk about the abortion views of Judge Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee. But his views on the redistricting cases may be more important. Senator Joseph Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who will be one of those doing the questioning when confirmation hearings begin next week, said recently that Judge Alito's statements about one person one vote could do more to jeopardize his nomination than his statements about Roe v. Wade.
Rejecting the one-person-one-vote principle is a radical position. If Judge Alito still holds this view today, he could lead the court to accept a very different vision of American democracy, one in which it would be far easier for powerful special interests to get a stranglehold on government.
Even if Judge Alito has changed his position on the reapportionment cases, the fact that he was drawn to constitutional law because of his opposition to those rulings raises serious questions about his views on democracy and equality.
The one-person-one-vote principle traces to the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr. At the time, legislative districts had wildly unequal numbers of people, and representatives from underpopulated rural districts controlled many state legislatures. In Maryland, 14 percent of the voters could elect a majority of the State Senate, and 25 percent could elect a majority of the State House. In Alabama, the county that includes Birmingham, which had 600,000 people, got the same number of state senators - one - as a county with barely 15,000 people...
...Baker v. Carr set off what a leading election law treatise calls "the reapportionment revolution." In nine months, lawsuits challenging district lines were filed in 34 states. They did not solve all the problems with legislative districts - the current court is still wrestling with partisan gerrymandering - but they made American democracy much fairer.
As a Princeton undergraduate, Samuel Alito sided with Tennessee and Alabama in the reapportionment cases. What is unclear - and what senators will no doubt try to pin down - is whether he ever changed his mind. He cited his opposition to the reapportionment cases, apparently as a point of pride, in his application for the Reagan Justice Department job in 1985, when he was 35 years old and a midcareer lawyer...
...If Judge Alito was able to forge a conservative Supreme Court majority to overturn the reapportionment cases, the results would be disastrous. The next Tom DeLay-style redistricting in Texas could conceivably stuff most of the state's Democratic voters into two or three multimillion-person Congressional districts, while reserving the state's remaining 30 or so seats for Republicans. Small claques could control entire state governments - as they did until 1962..."

The NSA's Spying on Domestic Targets:

AG Gonzales will obviously need to recuse himself from any action the DoJ takes regarding the prosecution of those in the administration who engaged in violations of FISA.

NY Times: Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program
"A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.
The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.
The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.
With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because 'they needed him for certification,' according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program..."

James Ridgeway: Looks Like Bush Knew Wiretaps Were Wrong
"...Bush, in Buffalo in 2004, was asked about a remark he made at an appearance in support of the Patriot Act, the president said, 'Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,' Bush said. 'A wiretap requires a court order.' He added: 'Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so,'."


Iraq:

Colin Powell's admonition to Bush about Iraq: "If you break it you own it" seems to be not one that will be followed.

The Independent (UK) - White House to withdraw funding for rebuilding Iraq
"The US government is not planning to continue funding reconstruction projects in Iraq, in what appears to be a major climbdown from the White House's one-time pledge to build the best infrastructure in the region.
According to officials cited in yesterday's Washington Post, the Bush administration will not be adding construction funds to the $18.4bn (£10.7bn) it has allocated since the 2003 invasion.
In future it will be up to other foreign donors and the Iraqi government to do what it can to complete even basic tasks such as supplying reliable electricity and water to the country's 26 million people..."

The Pentagon's Favorite Iraqi:

This man's ability to wield influence, even in the face of popular rejection, is utterly amazing.

Washington Post: Chalabi Named Iraq Oil Minister
"As a fuel crisis deepened in Iraq, the government replaced its oil minister with controversial Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, whose poor performance in the Dec. 15 elections was a setback in his recent attempt at political rehabilitation.
The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr Uloom, was put on a mandatory, month-long leave. He had previously threatened to resign over the government's recent decision to increase gasoline prices sharply, a move that has outraged motorists and sparked attacks on gas stations and fuel convoys.
Violence has escalated across Iraq since the elections. On Friday, two US soldiers were killed, one by a bomb south of Baghdad and another by small-arms fire in the western city of Fallujah. Two mortar shells hit near a bus station in the capital, killing five people and wounding 24, police at the scene said.
Threats by insurgents seizing on the unpopularity of the gasoline price increase led to a shutdown this month of the country's most productive oil refinery, in Baiji, north of Baghdad. Assim Jihad, an Oil Ministry spokesman, said the shutdown would cost $20 million a day until the refinery reopened. Meanwhile, foul winter weather has halted oil exports from the southern city of Umm Qasr, Iraq's only major seaport. Many of Iraq's largest power plants, already struggling to meet even a fraction of the country's energy demands, run on refined fuels.
'If these issues are not solved soon, the country will be facing an uncontrollable situation,' Jihad said. 'Dr. Chalabi will be here for the short term, but this will need to be solved by the new government, by the Ministry of Defense and by the coalition forces.'
Chalabi, whose government portfolio already includes heading the country's energy committee and overseeing security for oil infrastructure such as refineries and pipelines, will temporarily take the reins of Iraq's only major industry. He had briefly led the Oil Ministry earlier this year while the current government was being assembled..."


The 'Shameful' Revalation of Domestic NSA Surveillance:

Did Bush make an interim appointment of a 'leaker'?

Jason Leopold: Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
"This past spring, an explosive nugget of information slipped out during the confirmation hearings of John Bolton - nominated by President Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations - that in hindsight should have blown the lid off Bush's four-year-old clandestine spy program involving the National Security Agency...
...The NSA has always blacked out the names of American citizens when it distributes reports about its activities to various governmental agencies because the NSA, by law, is not supposed to spy on Americans. If the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap, the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its reports to other agencies. The names of American citizens that are blacked out can be revealed to government officials if they ask for them in writing and only if they're needed to help the official better understand the context of the intelligence information they were included in.
But that didn't appear to be the case with Bolton.
During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies. Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap...
At the hearing in late April, Bolton, a former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, told Congress that since 2001 he had asked the NSA on 10 different occasions to reveal to him the identities of American citizens who were caught in the NSA's raw intelligence reports in what appears to be a routine circumventing of the rules governing eavesdropping on the American public.
It turned out that Bolton was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001..."