Surprise!

(Cartoon by Jack Ohman (3/12/14)/published in the Sacramento Bee and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

Oh, my!  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Dino, CA), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is extremely upset with the CIA.  What has the august senator's knickers in a twist?  She claims that the CIA has been nosing around her computer records and those of other committee members.

From the Los Angeles Times:

A long-simmering dispute between the CIA and its Senate overseers erupted into public view Tuesday when the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the agency of possible crimes and of attempting to intimidate committee staffers investigating the CIA's former use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee chairwoman, said the CIA secretly searched computers used by Senate staffers and might have violated constitutional provisions on separation of powers and unreasonable searches, a federal law on computer fraud and abuse, and a presidential order that prohibits the CIA from domestic searches and surveillance.

So Sen. Feinstein demands the White House investigate this intrusion.

Oh, please!

Why on earth did the good senator think she and members of her committee were exempt from all the domestic spying going on (and on ... and on) for lo, these many years. Did she really think that her computer was sacrosanct because of her position?  Her status as a cheerleader for everything the CIA, Defense Department Intelligence, the NSA does apparently isn't enough.

Welcome to our world, Dianne.

"For I Have Promises To Keep ..."

(Cartoon by Matson and found here.  Click on image to enlarge.)

Karen Greenberg (a professor at Fordham University) had an interesting analysis of Obama's presidency from the standpoint of some of the promises he made during his campaign and during the early days of his administration.  Those in the progressive base who worked so hard to get him elected were elated.  The eight-year long nightmare of the Bush Administration was finally over.  Unfortunately, things haven't exactly worked out the way many of us hoped. Greenberg's scorecard on several issues nicely captures our disappointment.

From the 2/27/14 Los Angeles Times:

Ending torture

On his first day in office, Obama ordered an end to the practice of torture, or as the George W. Bush administration preferred to call it, "enhanced interrogation techniques." In the president's words, "effective immediately" individuals in U.S. custody "shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in the Army Field Manual."

Of the four promises, this is the one the president has come closest to keeping.

Greenberg notes that the "black site" prisons were closed down and Obama did set some limits on interrogation techniques (although forced-feeding continued.)

Closing Guantanamo

On his first day in office, Obama also pledged to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention facility — home at the time to 245 detainees — within a year. That proved politically impossible. As of January, 155 detainees remained at the prison, including 77 who had been cleared for release. But the president insists he is still trying. In his State of the Union address last month, he urged legislative action: "This needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay."

But even if the president is successful, there's a catch: He has made it clear that he means to close Guantanamo only in the most technical sense. While he would like to empty the facility, he is quite prepared to keep the strikingly un-American Guantanamo system of indefinite detention itself intact, allowing some suspects in Washington's war on terrorism to be held indefinitely without charges or trial if they are considered a risk to national security.  [Emphasis added]

Unless and until President Obama ends the concept of indefinite detention of anyone, including citizens, not only has this promise been broken, but is totally unacceptable treatment by an allegedly constitutional government.

Ending unnecessary secrecy

Another goal Obama identified on his first day in office as key to his presidency was establishing a "sunshine" administration. He pledged to end the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration and put more information in the public arena.

Obama's self-professed aim was to restore trust between the people and their government by pledging to promote accountability and provide "information for citizens about what their government is doing." Toward that end, the president quickly released a number of previously classified documents from the Bush years on torture policy.

But that, as it happened, was the end of the sunshine. In the five years since, little of note has occurred in the name of transparency and much, including a war against whistle-blowers, has been pursued in the name of secrecy. The administration has also, even after Edward Snowden's devastating revelations, continued for the most part to defend the  NSA's massive, secret, warrantless surveillance.  [Emphasis added]

The NSA has been strengthened and has extended its reach into who knows how many homes and computers, and there is no way for the victims to do anything about it because they don't know about it.  The drone program operates in a similar super-secret fashion, spying and even assassinating.  This is not the transparent government Obama promised.

An end to war without limits

At the outset of Obama's presidency, the administration downplayed the notion of a borderless battlefield that encompassed the globe. It also threw on the trash heap of history the Bush administration's term "global war on terror."

In his recent State of the Union address, the president stated his continued aversion to the notion that Washington should pursue an unlimited war. He was speaking by now not just about the geography of the boundless battlefield but of the very idea of warfare without an end point. "America," he counseled, "must move off a permanent war footing."

But despite the president's insistence on placing limits on war, and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of global warfare via "low footprint" drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as some form of Al Qaeda."  [Emphasis added]

The use of drones, satellite imagery, and interception of phone and email messages, justified by the use of the magic words "Al Qaeda" and "terrorists", has continued to burgeon under the Obama administration. 

The cartoon, showing Obama morphing into George W. Bush, provides an apt image for what we have seen over the past five years.  All those promises broken, and in the most expensive way imaginable, and I'm not talking about just the dollar cost.

 This is not what I voted for.  Not at all.

Ooopsie!

(Cartoon by Steve Sack and published by the Minneapolis Star Tribune 1/21/14)

I started yesterday the way I usually do:  I hopped over to Eschaton to see what Duncan Black had found worthy of note.  He referred his readers to this article in the N.Y. Times which provoked some loud laughter on my part.  Here's the pertinent part of the Times article:

The company that conducted a background investigation on the contractor Edward J. Snowden fraudulently signed off on hundreds of thousands of incomplete security checks in recent years, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

 

The government said the company, U.S. Investigations Services, defrauded the government of millions of dollars by submitting more than 650,000 investigations that had not been completed. The government uses those reports to help make hiring decisions and decide who gets access to national security secrets.

 

In addition to Mr. Snowden, the company performed the background check for Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old military contractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last year. Mr. Alexis, who died in a shootout with the police, left behind documents saying the government had been tormenting him with low-frequency radio waves.

 

The accusations highlight not just how reliant the government is on contractors to perform national security functions, but also how screening those contractors requires even more contractors. U.S. Investigations Service, now known as USIS, is the largest outside investigator for government security clearances. It is one of many companies that has found lucrative government work during the expansion of national security in the last decade.

 

I guess the government has really had fun "outsourcing" governmental functions, but I also guess the government doesn't  bother with checking to see how competent the contractor actually is.

We really shouldn't be surprised.  These kinds of thing keep happening, but nobody in the White House (no matter which administration) or Congress seems to care.  I wonder why that is?  [Sarcasm intended.] 

Intentional Misdirection?

(Political cartoon by Matt Wuerker and published 9/5/13 at Daily Kos.)

So, Obama and Kerry continue to futz and dither over a strike on Syria, now with some input from Russia.

In the meantime, all conversation about the massive NSA domestic spying program has fallen off the national consciousness,

Just a case of pretty keys?

Perhaps.

American Weird

David Horsey's latest column is a bit odd.  I think it likely, however, that he's not really talking about the girls swooning over Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombers, but rather that group of people who were appalled that his picture graced the front of Rolling Stone.

The cover photo makes Tsarnaev look like a moody lead singer from a boy band. Critics from actor and comedian Albert Brooks to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino say the image -- a self-portrait snapped sometime before the bombing -- is way too flattering, given the horror of the crime. But there is a small group of people who probably will be keeping the magazine close to their pillows so they can give their favorite heartthrob a goodnight kiss.

Yes, like every celebrity, Tsarnaev has fans who think he is innocent or has been mistreated or is the fall guy in another evil conspiracy perpetrated by the U.S. government -- or maybe just a sweet boy who had a couple of bad days because of his crazy big brother. ...

The editors of Rolling Stone may have made a poor judgment. I’m not so sure they did; the Tsarnaev photo evokes the mystifying dichotomy between the fairly typical, self-absorbed college kid Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was and the coldblooded terrorist he apparently became. That is the story they are presenting in their magazine.

As far as Tsarnaev’s fans are concerned, though, poor judgment does not begin to describe their misguided enthusiasm for their hero. There are other, better descriptive words starting with irrationality, paranoia, vapidity and ignorance. One attribute they cannot claim is empathy -- empathy for the dead and horribly maimed victims of the bedroom-eyed bomber.   [Emphasis added]

Even if I am imputing more irony to Horsey than is present, I do think the furor over the magazine cover by so many other people is sadly misplaced.  The article inside the magazine makes it clear that Mr. Bedroom Eyes is no Mr. Nice Guy.

And what really shocks me is that with all the sophisticated data mining being done by NSA and Booz Allen the bombing incident actually took place.  I guess nobody's perfect, even when it comes to domestic spying.

Corporate Cooperation

(Editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman and published 7/1/13 in the Sacramento Bee.  Click on image to enlarge so that you can see the amazing details.  Then please return.)

The emphasis on the story of domestic and international spying by our government has once again turned to the messenger rather than the message.  We are learning all sorts of details about Edward Snowden, about what a flake, what a narcissist, what a jerk he is.  The propaganda is a handy diversion from the fact that our government has not denied doing what Snowden said it is doing.  Even some perfectly respectable liberal bloggers have begun to drink the kool-aid and are concentrating on Snowden's flaws rather than on the real story:  our government is spying on us.

I did find one article in the Washington Post which provided some additional information on the program.

The U.S. government had a problem: Spying in the digital age required access to the fiber-optic cables traversing the world’s oceans, carrying torrents of data at the speed of light. And one of the biggest operators of those cables was being sold to an Asian firm, potentially complicating American surveillance efforts.

Enter “Team Telecom.”

In months of private talks, the team of lawyers from the FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security demanded that the company maintain what amounted to an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances. Among their jobs, documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.

This “Network Security Agreement,” signed in September 2003 by Global Crossing, became a model for other deals over the past decade as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. ...

The security agreement for Global Crossing, whose fiber-optic network connected 27 nations and four continents, required the company to have a “Network Operations Center” on U.S. soil that could be visited by government officials with 30 minutes of warning. Surveillance requests, meanwhile, had to be handled by U.S. citizens screened by the government and sworn to secrecy — in many cases prohibiting information from being shared even with the company’s executives and directors.   [Emphasis added]

Unlike Booz Allen, which was only too happy to sell its services to the NSA, Global Crossing and the subsequent foreign investors were roped into the deal by making it a condition of ownership of the chunks of fiber optic touching the US. In other words, it was a forced cooperation, one that completed the international network the NSA wanted.

No wonder our international allies are a little miffed with us.

Oopsie!

(Editorial cartoon by Jim Morin/The Miami Herald (July 2, 2013) and featured at McClatchy DC.)

Most of the stories these days on the massive NSA spy program deal with poor Edward Snowden who is still stuck in limbo at the Russian airport.  So far, none of the places he has sought asylum from have indicated they will take him and not extradite him to the US for prosecution under the Espionage Act.  There's a story there, but it takes the focus away from what I consider to be a bigger story:  the massive spying being done by the NSA on us and, as it turns out, most of the rest of the world.

Some of our allies are understandably outraged by the spying, but I had to root around the L.A. Times on-line edition to find the story I knew had to be there.  In any event, here's the salient part.

Europe turned up the pressure on the Obama administration Monday to respond to new allegations that the U.S. bugged the embassies of some of its long-standing allies and eavesdropped on European Union diplomats around the world.

Leaders and officials of EU countries said that, if true, the reports of American spying on friendly nations were unacceptable and potentially damaging to relations across the Atlantic and to joint endeavors such as upcoming talks on a U.S.-EU free trade pact.

“We cannot accept this kind of behavior from partners and allies,” French President Francois Hollande said on television Monday.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel was equally blunt, saying, “We’re not in the Cold War anymore.” ...

The new allegations add to the concern that many European leaders have already expressed over the alleged collection of mountains of data on the emails and phone calls of millions of their citizens by American intelligence agencies. Privacy laws are generally more stringent in Europe than in the U.S. Germany in particular, where bitter memories of widespread informing and spying in the former East Germany are still fresh, has responded to allegations of U.S. surveillance with outrage.

“Clarity and transparency is what we expect from partners and allies, and this is what we expect from the U.S.,” the European Commission said in a statement Monday.   [Emphasis added]

While I doubt that when push comes to shove our allies will back off on any trade deals that might benefit them, the negotiations just might be a little trickier and tense than they otherwise would have been, which is OK by me.  Those trade deals rarely prove to be beneficial to the 99% of us who don't own the corporations behind the deal-making.

Still, it is, to say the least, both embarrassing and shame inducing to see such quotes from countries which have stood by us for a long time.

Outrageous all the way around.

The Mine Shaft Gap

"Cyber-" , as in "cyberdefense," "cyberattack," and "cybersecurity", has become a very popular building block for Washington-speak, the neologisms that pour out of government whenever a new propaganda campaign to pitch a controversial project is released into the ether. Both the Washington Post and the NY Times have articles laden with the "cyber-" words because the Pentagon is about to announce a new command ("cybercom," naturally) that with the National Security Agency will begin monitoring computer networks abroad and internally in order to keep us "cybersafe."

From the NY Times article:

A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama’s assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons.

Much of the new military command’s work is expected to be carried out by the National Security Agency, whose role in intercepting the domestic end of international calls and e-mail messages after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, under secret orders issued by the Bush administration, has already generated intense controversy.

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets. ...

While the N.S.A.’s job is chiefly one of detection and monitoring, the agency also possesses what Michael D. McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, called “the critical skill set” to respond quickly to cyberattacks. Yet the Defense Department views cyberspace as its domain as well, a new battleground after land, sea, air and space.

Village-speak at its finest, eh?

So, what does this all mean, after the garbage language designed to hide rather than illuminate is stripped away? To begin with, the new military command working in conjunction with the NSA will be developing systems to snoop with more sophistication on domestic emails and internet usage. Because of the howls of outrage when the Bush program to do the same came to light, the Obama administration has decided to gamble on more openness when it comes to invading our rights to privacy. To accomplish this, they're framing the issue as a matter of national security.

Our banks and other commercial institutions might get hacked and our iffy economy might be sent swirling down the commode as all of our savings and checking accounts get drained by the nefarious Chinese/Russian/North Korean/Iranian evildoers who are jealous of our capitalist wealth and freedoms.

More importantly, our government computer systems, including those of the Pentagon, might get attacked by the same miscreants and leave us with no defenses whatsoever. Missiles and bombs will come raining down on us because our military will not be able to engage in any kind of defense as all of its computers get hit simultaneously with the blue screen of death.

There's nothing we can do to prevent such awful consequences but to open a new battlefield, a cyberbattlefield, if you will, a battlefield which has no boundaries in the traditional sense. Not only will the military be able to now spy on Americans (something which to this point has been forbidden), it will be able to electronically invade and spy on other countries, many of them our allies.

The scenario is only too familiar, especially after the last eight years. In fact, it was predicted decades ago, it just took a little longer than George Orwell expected.

This needs to be stopped.

I Am Not Surprised

Well, what do you know: it now appears that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds in collecting the private emails of citizens without a warrant. Even though the 110th Congress renewed the unconstitutional program with little in the way of changes, the NSA still couldn't get it right, perhaps because it had no intention to.

From the NY Times:

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

Unintentional? Unlikely.

Once the floodgate was opened, the NSA began diving into our private lives with gusto and with the assistance of the telecoms (now free of any liability for mistakes). Why the sudden spate of investigations by the Justice Department and Congress? Apparently the NSA picked the "wrong" subject to electronically monitor:

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said. [Emphasis added]

Big mistake, that. It's one thing to mess with the privacy rights of plain old citizens, but members of Congress? No way.

The truly enraging part of this scenario is that the current administration, which promised "change" when it came to adhering to the Constitution, is not calling for the repeal of the law which allows for such warrantless searches. Instead, satisfied that the NSA has done the cosmetic tinkering ordered by the last Congress, Attorney General Holder has certified the program as now A-OK. Apparently he can accept the excuse that although millions of our emails have been unlawfully collected and cached, not all of them have been read. Yet.

I don't see much in the way of change here. And, frankly, I am not surprised.

No More Privacy Illusions

Security as grounds for more intrusion into the networks; raise your hand if you're surprised. Those cyber attacks are such a worry to our war criminals in the executive branch, they've decided to listen in on more conversations to make sure they catch anyone else doing it first.

The latest wiretap is justified by grounds that it's in case the Chinese sources - probably checking on their investment in our government - announce that they're from China and your email is belong to them. From what the NSA has done without any court permission so far, I really don't see how they can be entrusted with this newest violation of our rights to privacy

President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored.

Until now, the government's efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks -- which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data -- have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against the intruders.
(snip)
One of the key questions is whether it is necessary to read communications to investigate an intrusion.

Ed Giorgio, a former NSA analyst who is now a security consultant for ODNI, said, "If you're looking inside a DoD system and you see data flows going to China, that ought to set off a red flag. You don't need to scan the content to determine that."

But often, traffic analysis is not enough, some experts said. "Knowing the content -- that a communication is sensitive -- allows proof positive that something bad is going out of that computer," said one cyber-security expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the initiative's sensitivity.

Allowing a spy agency to monitor domestic networks is worrisome, said James X. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We're concerned that the NSA is claiming such a large role over the security of unclassified systems," he said. "They are a spy agency as well as a communications security agency. They operate in total secrecy. That's not necessary and not the most effective way to protect unclassified systems." (Emphasis added.)

There has been such a loss of faith in our war criminal leaders that of course, this latest wiretapping was not proposed as an actual legal measure. The unitary cretin in chief has stopped even trying to pretend his governing follows that old Rule of Law. A directive has become the new police state method.

That the rightwingers want to know what we are saying is hardly surprising. Now you better not be working in the public interest at those agencies that are supposed to serve the public, like, say Agriculture. Step away from that green piece of meat, it's corporate owned.

We know very well NSA has a few choice telltale words like 'blue', 'rights' and 'Guantanamo' to indicate that they should trace this particular subversive internet communication.

It's time for the prosecution of the occupied White House for issuing illegal edicts and executing illegal acts to begin.

Trial Procedures Via Kafka

In the typical trial in the US, the parties go through a phase known as "discovery." Depositions are taken, evidence is shared, interrogatories are answered. Each side knows what the other side has: there's no chance to hide the salami, nor any way to alter it. That's not how the federal government is operating in the various suits involving the warrantless NSA wire tapping, however. From today's NY Times:

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

But now the procedures have started to meet resistance. At a private meeting with the lawyers in one of the cases this month, the judges who will hear the first appeal next week expressed uneasiness about the procedures, said a lawyer who attended, Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lawyers suing the government and some legal scholars say the procedures threaten the separation of powers, the adversary system and the lawyer-client privilege.

Nancy S. Marder, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and an authority on secrecy in litigation, said the tactics were really extreme and deeply, deeply troubling.

“These are the basics that we take for granted in our court system,” Professor Marder said. “You have two parties. You exchange documents. The documents you’ve seen don’t disappear.”

The extraordinary measures insisted upon by the government are clearly designed to hide and even manipulate evidence, and the government has not provided any rational basis for those measures because there is none. A document which establishes that the NSA engaged in a warrantless wire tap (and that effectively proves the plaintiff's case) is not crucial to the nation's defense and should not be "classified" by the government. The fact that it is simply makes it clear how far this administration is willing to go to hide its own malfeasance.

Hopefully the nation's jurists will come down hard on the Justice Department and its warping of the trial procedures put into effect to guarantee fair play and due process. If they don't, we are doomed.

High On the Agenda

When the 110th Congress convenes next month, it will face a mountain of work, much of it left-over from the do-nothing 109th Congress. At the top of the to-do list is getting a budget passed and in place. Once that is accomplished, the new Democratic Congress can finally set about to fulfill the promises that got them elected. The incoming Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi has already given the nation a preview: hiking the minimum wage and amending the Medicare Part D program to give the government the power to negotiate on drug prices are just two of the items on Speaker Pelosi's "First Hundred Hours" list. In the overall scheme of things, those two items will be the easiest to deal with. More difficult, and, I believe, even more important will involve undoing the Constitutional damage wrought by the current administration.

High on that list is the issue of the NSA spying on Americans. An AP report suggests just what might very well happen should Congress challenge the President on that issue.

Federal agents continue to eavesdrop on Americans' electronic communications without warrants a year after President Bush confirmed the practice, and experts say a new Congress' efforts to limit the program could trigger a constitutional showdown.

High-ranking Democrats set to take control of both chambers are mulling ways to curb the program Bush secretly authorized a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. The White House argues the Constitution gives the president wartime powers to eavesdrop that he wouldn't have during times of peace.

...Lawmakers could impeach or withhold funding, or quash judicial nominations, among other measures.

The president, however, can veto legislation, including a law demanding the National Security Agency obtain warrants before monitoring communications. Such a veto would force Congress to muster a two-thirds vote to override.

Will the President force a constitutional showdown by vetoing any bill limiting his power to spy domestically? Probably, but that doesn't mean the Congress should simply fold up shop the way it has done for the past six years. The Iraq War may have been the defining issue in the 2006 elections, but the lack of congressional action on many fronts was certainly part of the reason the American citizenry threw out the Republican majority.

The AP article focused on the pivotal role of the Supreme Court in such a showdown. While that certainly is an appropriate focus, it comes into play only if Congress does its job. Part of that job will have to be done in the hearing rooms as the Democrats investigate six years' worth of administration corruption and malfeasance. If done fairly and honestly, those investigations might very well defuse any constitutional showdown by engendering enough votes to veto-proof key legislation.

Saddle up, ladies and gentlement: it's time to ride.

Drive a Stake In It

Attorney Generalissimo Betito Gonzales refuses to give up. He continues to demand that the Congress pass the NSA wire tap law or the terrorists will win. He implied as much to the cadets at the Air Force Academy at a speech Saturday. From an AP report:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some critics of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that poses a "grave threat" to U.S. security.

Gonzales was the second administration official in two days to attack a federal judge's ruling last August that the program was unconstitutional. Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday called the ruling "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."

Gonzales told about 400 cadets from the Air Force Academy's political science and law classes that some see the program as on the verge of stifling freedom rather that protecting the country.

"But this view is shortsighted," he said. "Its definition of freedom - one utterly divorced from civic responsibility - is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

..."We believe the president has the authority under the authorization of military force and inherent authority of the constitution to engage in this sort of program, but we want to supplement that authority," he said.

The administration has maintained that its warrantless surveillance program focuses on international calls involving suspected terrorists, and dismisses charges that it is illegal because it bypasses federal law requiring a judge-issued warrant for such eavesdropping.

...Speaking to the cadets, Gonzales dismissed as "myth" the charge that civil liberties were being sacrificed in the fight against terrorism. He defended the Patriot Act and the handling of detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [Emphasis added]

That is some of most tortured logic I've seen since the last time his boss justified the invasion of Iraq. I'll tell you what is divorced from civic responsibility, illegally wiretapping phones without a judicially issued warrant in violation of the Fourth and First Amendment of the US Constitution. That is a true attack on the liberty and safety of the American people.

And if the president already has the authority to ignore the Constitution by virtue of the Authorization of Military Force Act, why is this latest bill necessary? Could it be that the bill, which has a retroactive provision, is required to save the current administration from a raft of trials for high crimes and misdemeanors? If they truly believe that the president has the inherent authority to engage in such activity, why is such a supplement required? Don't they believe hard enough?

No, the bill stinks and Betito and his co-conspirators know it. The reason it stinks is so self-evident that Betito inadvertently let slip the best reason to defeat the bill:

"To achieve victory at the cost of eroding civil liberties would not really be a victory. We cannot change the core identity of our nation and claim success," said Gonzales

Exactly, you corrupt moron.

They're Back

Congress reconvenes today after the election break, and according to an article in the NY Times, it has a full load of work facing it. The question is, how much do we really want these lame ducks to do?

Despite devastating losses at the polls, Republicans will control the post-election session that opens Monday as lawmakers return to try to finish 10 overdue spending bills and other legislation that stalled because of pre-election gamesmanship.

Republican leaders have compiled an ambitious to-do list, hoping to dispose of energy legislation, a trade deal or two, a civilian nuclear treaty with India and other favored bills before turning over the keys to the House and Senate chambers to the Democrats in January.

Democrats have some measures they want completed as well, most notably the spending bills, to save them the added work next year.

President Bush, hoping to get the most out of the remaining days of a Republican majority, is pressing two contentious matters: legislation authorizing domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency and the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. And the Senate has scheduled confirmation hearings for Robert M. Gates to be the new secretary of defense to begin the week of Dec 4.

Members of both parties in Congress have all but written off the wiretapping legislation and the Bolton nomination, given the strong Democratic opposition and the impending power shift. It is also uncertain how hard Congressional Republicans will be willing to press Mr. Bush’s more divisive issues. Some have expressed anger at his decision to remove Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld the day after the election, contending that earlier action might have cut Republican losses.

Getting the budget work done is a must-do: we've waited long enough for that. Deciding on a new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates or another, should also be considered before the Holiday recess, but there should be real hearings on his nomination, not just the pro forma speechifying and approval that we've seen from this Congress the past two years.

That having been said, there is absolutely no reason for the Democrats to allow votes on the Bolton nomination, the NSA wire tapping bill, the oil drilling bill, even the approval of the India nuclear energy bill. We shouldn't have to wait until January to see the results of last week's election. The days of rubber stamping the President's wishes into law are over.