Political Skullduggery

Farked Voter Lists in Pakistan

2007-09-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

Problems with voter lists always seem to come at the most sensitive locations.

I wonder if we are also setting them up with any of our crackerjack electronic voting technology.

With their country in turmoil, Pakistani voters are expected within months to go to the polls for the first parliamentary elections here in five years. But as time runs short, independent observers say that the nation is poorly prepared and that the elections will be highly vulnerable to fraud.

The most glaring weakness, they say, is a new voter list that is missing the names of tens of millions of Pakistanis, threatening to seed mass confusion over who is eligible to cast a ballot.

Creation of the list was heavily funded by Washington. It was to be the signature U.S. contribution to the election process.

"The very hard-earned money of U.S. taxpayers was used for this. But that money was not well spent," said Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, executive director of the nonprofit Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency. "This could severely jeopardize the quality of the elections."

Last month, Pakistan's Supreme Court agreed, ordering the Election Commission to go back and try to identify the missing names so they could be added to the rolls. But those involved say that the fix could do more damage and that the result could be a free-for-all, with the various political parties competing to rig the polls.

"The door is now open to the same kind of fraudulent voting as we've had in the past," said one international elections expert in Pakistan who was not permitted to speak for the record. "It's unfortunate because all of it could have been avoided." ...

The U.S. budget for election assistance in Pakistan is $28 million. In July, Richard A. Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South Asia, told Congress that $20 million had gone toward supporting the Election Commission's work and that U.S. officials were "doing everything we can to support free and fair elections."

The single largest contribution to that effort has been the $10 million the United States spent on computerizing the new voter rolls, a program that officials broadly defend, while acknowledging problems.

Why The War Will Never End

2007-09-22T08:14:00.000-05:00

Too many defense contractors are making too much profit.

And when they say it's not about the money, it's about more money, much more.

After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure -- totaling nearly $200 billion -- to fund the war through next year, Pentagon officials said.

If Bush's spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war.

U.S. war costs have continued to grow because of the additional combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new technology, such as mine-resistant trucks designed to protect troops from roadside bombs. The new trucks can cost three to six times as much as an armored Humvee.

The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $147.5 billion for 2008, but Pentagon officials now say that and $47 billion more will be required. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and other officials are to formally present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday. ...

When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses are added, the war in Iraq currently costs taxpayers about $12 billion a month, said Winslow T. Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

"Everybody predicts declines, but they haven't occurred, and 2008 will be higher than 2007," Wheeler said. "It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive. Everyone says we are going to turn the corner here, but the corner has not been turned."

In 2004, the two conflicts together cost $94 billion; in 2005, they cost $108 billion; in 2006, $122 billion.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are financed through a single administration request to Congress, and their costs are combined in the legislation.

The new spending request is likely to push the cumulative cost of the war in Iraq alone through 2008 past the $600-billion mark -- more than the Korean War and nearly as much as the Vietnam War, based on estimates by government budget officials.

We're Only In It For The Money

2007-09-21T09:04:00.000-05:00

Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.

In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.

Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon's purchasing system.

Until the hearing on Thursday, the Army's most detailed public disclosure about the scale of the problem was that contracts worth $3 billion awarded by the Kuwait office were under review. ...

The lawmakers also challenged assertions by the Pentagon officials that the corruption being uncovered was the work of a few isolated individuals. Several committee members suggested that the abuses were far more systemic.

"The problems were so severe that I fear they could represent a culture of corruption," said Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, the chairman of the committee. "I am extremely disappointed to learn that so many individuals violated their integrity and undermined the oaths they made to this country."

13 Congressmen Subpoenaed

2007-09-19T09:07:00.000-05:00

The defense contractor charged with bribing convicted former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham has subpoenaed 13 House members, including former speaker J. Dennis Hastert, to testify in his federal trial.

But the 13 lawmakers are refusing the subpoena, and the House general counsel sent lawyers for the contractor, Brent R. Wilkes, a letter saying that it was overly broad and "did not elaborate as to what testimony you seek from each member."

Wilkes has been indicted on more than 30 counts, including fraud and money laundering, as one of several alleged conspirators who paid more than $2.4 million in bribes to the California Republican. Cunningham is serving an eight-year prison term after pleading guilty to steering millions of dollars in government business to Wilkes and other defense contractors. ...

Most of the 13 members have served on the three committees from which Cunningham steered funding to Wilkes: Appropriations, Armed Services and intelligence. In their investigation, federal prosecutors had sought a massive swath of documents covering almost eight years from those three panels, which resulted in a protracted negotiation and the release of some materials.

Several of the subpoenaed members were recipients of large donations from Wilkes and his associates. They include three California Republicans: John T. Doolittle, who took in more than $80,000 in contributions linked to the contractor; Jerry Lewis, who received at least $60,000 and chaired the Appropriations defense subcommittee while it steered $37 million, at Doolittle's request, to a Wilkes company; and Duncan Hunter, the former Armed Services chairman who received at least $40,000 linked to Wilkes and is now running for president.

As required by House rules, the subpoenas were read into the Congressional Record late Monday evening. John D. Filamor, assistant House counsel, wrote Geragos on Sept. 6 to object to the subpoenas, citing House rules that forbid members from testifying in judicial proceedings unless their testimony is "material and relevant." ...

The other lawmakers subpoenaed: Reps. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the minority whip; Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), a senior member of the Appropriations defense subcommittee; Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee; Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose district adjoined Cunningham's; Joe Knoellenberg (R-Mich.), a senior member of the full Appropriations Committee; John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee; Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of Intelligence; Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of Armed Services; and Jerry Weller (R-Ill.).

U. of Fla. Student Tasered, Arrested at John Kerry Event

2007-09-18T14:08:00.000-05:00

There are some matters you are not allowed to bring up in public.

Democrats Say They Will Use AG Nomination as Leverage

2007-09-18T09:13:00.000-05:00

This kind of pressure might be the best chance to pry some information out of the White House about the illegal domestic spying programs and the like.

But alas, if Bush says no, I doubt that the Democrats will push it.

Two Senate Democrats warned Monday that the Judiciary Committee would delay confirmation of President Bush's choice for attorney general unless the White House turned over documents that the panel was seeking for several investigations.

The selection of Mr. Mukasey — a Washington outsider who met Mr. Bush for the first time during an hour-long interview at the White House on Sept. 1 — seemed to signal that the administration is looking to move past the partisanship that characterized Mr. Gonzales’s tenure.

But two Democrats who will have a powerful say over whether Mr. Mukasey gets confirmed — Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Charles E. Schumer of New York — vowed on Monday to use the nomination to extract information from a reluctant White House.

"All I want is the material we need to ask some questions about the former attorney general's conduct, on torture and warrantless wiretapping, so we can legitimately ask, 'Here's what was done in the past, what will you do?'" Mr. Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, said. ...

The White House wants Mr. Mukasey confirmed by Oct. 8, when the Senate leaves for its next recess. But Mr. Leahy said there would be no quick confirmation without the documents. He said he had told the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, that "cooperation with the White House would be central" to scheduling hearings.

Report: Condi Rice Ready To Support Attack on Iran

2007-09-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

This story is saying that Condoleezza Rice is ready to join the hawkish element led by Dick Cheney that is favoring a U.S. attack -- potentially using nuclear weapons -- upon Iran.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

Under the theory - which is gaining credence in Washington security circles - US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

Senior officials believe Mr Bush's inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

The intelligence source said: "No one outside that tight circle knows what is going to happen." But he said that within the CIA "many if not most officials believe that diplomacy is failing" and that "top Pentagon brass believes the same".

He said: "A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq."

Previously, accusations that Mr Bush was set on war with Iran have come almost entirely from his critics.

Many senior operatives within the CIA are highly critical of Mr Bush's handling of the Iraq war, though they themselves are considered ineffective and unreliable by hardliners close to Mr Cheney.

The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.

Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush's senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.

The US also announced the creation of a new base near the Iraqi border town of Badra, the first of what could be several locations to tackle the smuggling of weapons from Iran.

A State Department source familiar with White House discussions said that Miss Rice, under pressure from senior counter-proliferation officials to acknowledge that military action may be necessary, is now working with Mr Cheney to find a way to reconcile their positions and present a united front to the President.

The source said: "When you go down there and see the body language, you can see that Cheney is still The Man. Condi pushed for diplomacy but she is no dove. If it becomes necessary she will be on board. ...

Miss Rice's bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult "meaningfully" with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

The intelligence officer said that the US military has "two major contingency plans" for air strikes on Iran.

"One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would - over two or three days - hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets."

Greenspan Tells It Like It Is

2007-09-15T08:53:00.000-05:00

Buried in a Bob Woodward article about Alan Greenspan's new book on his years as Fed Chairman:

Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Greenspan has praise for Bill Clinton:

He calls Clinton a "risk taker" who had shown a "preference for dealing in facts," and presents Clinton and himself almost as soul mates. "Here was a fellow information hound. . . . We both read books and were curious and thoughtful about the world. . . . I never ceased to be surprised by his fascination with economic detail: the effect of Canadian lumber on housing prices and inflation. . . . He had an eye for the big picture too."

During Clinton's first weeks as president, Greenspan went to the Oval Office and explained the danger of not confronting the federal deficit. Unless the deficits were cut, there could be "a financial crisis," Greenspan told the president. "The hard truth was that Reagan had borrowed from Clinton, and Clinton was having to pay it back. I was impressed that he did not seem to be trying to fudge reality to the extent politicians ordinarily do. He was forcing himself to live in the real world."

Dealing with a budget surplus in his second term, Clinton proposed devoting the extra money to "save Social Security first." Greenspan writes, "I played no role in finding the answer, but I had to admire the one Clinton and his policymakers came up with."

Greenspan interviewed Clinton for the book and clearly admires him. "President Clinton's old-fashioned attitude toward debt might have had a more lasting effect on the nation's priorities. Instead, his influence was diluted by the uproar about Monica Lewinsky."

The former Fed Chairman doesn't think highly of the current occupant of the Oval Office:

He expresses deep disappointment with Bush. "My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending," Greenspan writes. "Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency. . . . To my mind, Bush's collaborate-don't-confront approach was a major mistake."

Greenspan doesn't cut his own party -- the GOP -- any slack either:

Greenspan accuses the Republicans who presided over the party's majority in the House until last year of being too eager to tolerate excessive federal spending in exchange for political opportunity. The Republicans, he says, deserved to lose control of the Senate and House in last year's elections. "The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan writes. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither."

He singles out J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was House speaker until January, and Tom DeLay, the Texan who was majority leader until he resigned after being indicted for violating campaign finance laws in his home state.

"House Speaker Hastert and House majority leader Tom DeLay seemed readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority," he writes.

Pretty Pathetic Presidential Propaganda

2007-09-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

An old rule in creating effective propaganda is that you stick to the truth as much as possible -- it makes the necessary exaggerations and manipulations of fact more believable. Absolutely critical in effective perception management.

Last night, in his address to the nation, President Bush clearly didn't have much positive material to work with, so he (and his speechwriters) made the amateur mistake of excessively padding the presentation with bullshit.

It didn't fly. If even the pro-war Washington Post is calling him on it, this has to be really embarrassing for the White House.

In his speech last night, President Bush made a case for progress in Iraq by citing facts and statistics that at times contradicted recent government reports or his own words.

For instance, Bush asserted that "Iraq's national leaders are getting some things done," such as "sharing oil revenues with the provinces" and allowing "former Baathists to rejoin Iraq's military or receive government pensions."

Yet his statement ignored the fact that U.S. officials have been frustrated that none of those actions have been enshrined into law -- and that reports from Baghdad this week indicated that a potential deal on sharing oil revenue is collapsing.

In a radio address to the nation less than a month ago, the president himself complained that the Iraqi government was failing to address these issues. "Unfortunately, political progress at the national level has not matched the pace of progress at the local level," Bush said on Aug. 18. "The Iraqi government in Baghdad has many important measures left to address, such as reforming the de-Baathification laws, organizing provincial elections and passing a law to formalize the sharing of oil revenues."

Bush also asserted that Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, was once an al-Qaeda stronghold but that "today, Baqubah is cleared." But in a meeting with reporters on Aug. 27, the head of the State Department team in Diyala said the security situation was not stable, hampering access to food and energy, though he acknowledged that commerce was returning to Baqubah.

"Everything is based around security; if we have security, then we can bring in agencies like USAID," John Melvin Jones said, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development. "It's going to take a while before the security situation gets stable enough so that you can have a lot of these other agencies involved."

Bush also thanked "the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq." But the State Department's most recent weekly report on Iraq said there are 25 countries supplying 11,685 troops -- about 7 percent of the size of the U.S. forces.

At one point, the president cited a recent report by a commission headed by retired Marine Gen. James Jones, saying that "the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is still a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police."

But the report said Iraq's army will be unable to take over internal security from U.S. forces in the next 12 to 18 months and "cannot yet meaningfully contribute to denying terrorists safe haven." It also described the 25,000-member national police force as riddled with sectarianism and corruption, and it recommended that it be disbanded.

The commission also recommended that U.S. troops in Iraq be "retasked" in early 2008 to protect critical infrastructure and guard against border threats from Iran and Syria, while gradually turning responsibility for security over to Iraqi forces despite their deficiencies -- advice the president did not follow in last night's speech.

The president also painted a relatively favorable picture of Baghdad, saying that a year ago much of it "was under siege" but that today "ordinary life is beginning to return." He did not mention that much of the once-heterogeneous city has been divided into Shiite and Sunni enclaves.

CIA General Counsel Nomination Blocked

2007-09-13T08:59:00.000-05:00

Members of the Senate intelligence committee have requested the withdrawal of the Bush administration's choice for CIA general counsel, acknowledging that John Rizzo's nomination has stalled because of concerns about his views on the treatment of terrorism suspects.

The decision followed a private meeting this week in which committee leaders concluded that the troubled nomination could not overcome opposition among Democratic members. It comes less than a month after a key member, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), announced his intention to block the nomination indefinitely.

Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, has drawn fire from Democrats and human rights groups because of his support for Bush administration legal doctrines permitting "enhanced interrogation" of terrorism detainees in CIA custody.

Two U.S. officials familiar with the committee's decision said the request for Rizzo's withdrawal has been conveyed to Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA's director. The officials, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the committee's discussions, said lawmakers had hoped to avoid the formality of a negative vote on Rizzo's nomination out of respect for his long service at the intelligence agency. Rizzo has served with the CIA since 1976 and acted as interim general counsel from 2001 to 2002 and from August 2004 to the present. ...

During his confirmation hearing in June, Rizzo testified that he did not object to an administration memo in 2002 that deemed legal some extremely harsh interrogation techniques for CIA detainees. According to the memo, a technique was not considered to be torture unless it inflicted pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Rizzo testified that the legal opinion "on the whole was a reasonable one."

No Moderates Need Apply

2007-09-12T09:07:00.000-05:00

The White House is closing in on a nominee to replace Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, with former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson considered one of the leading candidates, administration and Congressional officials said Tuesday.

Reports of Mr. Olson's candidacy suggested that President Bush, in choosing the third attorney general of his presidency, might defy calls from Democrats and choose another Republican who is considered a staunch partisan to lead the Justice Department. Mr. Gonzales is departing after being repeatedly accused of allowing political loyalties to blind him to independently enforcing the law.

"Clearly if you made a list of consensus nominees, Olson wouldn't appear on that list," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who led the Judiciary Committee effort to remove Mr. Gonzales. ...

Mr. Olson’s wife, Barbara K. Olson, a conservative television commentator, died aboard the hijacked airliner that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Mr. Olson has since remarried.

Other candidates said to remain in contention include George J. Terwilliger III, a former deputy attorney general under Mr. Bush’s father.

Mr. Terwilliger, now in private practice, is said to be favored by influential lawyers in Bush legal circles, like William P. Barr, attorney general when Mr. Terwilliger was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department. But Mr. Terwilliger, who is from Vermont, may have detractors, including Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who leads the Judiciary Committee and is said to be cool to his appointment.

"Character Assassination Tactics" Decried

2007-09-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

The party of toe-tapping toilet snipes is taking aim at MoveOn.org:

House Republican leaders introduced a resolution Monday condemning a full-page newspaper ad from MoveOn.org that criticizes the character of Gen. David Petraeus, the commanding general of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The resolution, authored by Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), is cosponsored by 11 Republicans, including Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs panel.

"The despicable attack MoveOn.org launched against General Petraeus today should be condemned by all Members of Congress, including the Democratic leadership," Boehner said. "I urge Members on both sides of the aisle to join in support of this resolution so the House speaks with one voice rejecting the character assassination tactics employed by this extremist group."

The full-page ad in the New York Times features a large black and white picture of Petraeus speaking into a cluster of microphones and includes a caption that says: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" The ad then alleges that the testimony of Iraq’s leading general will play politics with the facts.

We Are Never Going To Leave Iraq

2007-09-10T08:20:00.000-05:00

In 12-18 months, we will be asked to give the next U.S. commander in Iraq enough time and the benefit of the doubt that his plan will work.

And then the one after him.

The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has recommended that decisions on the contentious issue of reducing the main body of the American troops in Iraq be put off for six months, American officials said Sunday.

General Petraeus, whose long-awaited testimony before Congress will begin Monday, has informed President Bush that troop cuts may begin in mid-December, with the withdrawal of one of the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, about 4,000 troops. By August, the American force in Iraq would be down to 15 combat brigades, the force level before Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcement plan.

The precise timing of such reductions, which would leave about 130,000 troops in Iraq, could vary, depending on conditions in the country. But the general has also said that it is too soon to present recommendations on reducing American forces below that level because the situation in Iraq is in flux. He has suggested that he wait until March to outline proposals on that question. ...

A White House official said Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had not spoken since they saw each other in Anbar Province last Monday. But the general’s recommendations on how to proceed on reducing the force have been outlined to Mr. Bush and senior officers. ...

Mr. Bush has said he intends to address the nation this week about the recommendations by General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. From the start, General Petraeus, more so than many lawmakers, has viewed the attempt to bring security to Iraq as a long-term effort. The classified campaign plan he prepared with Mr. Crocker calls for restoring security in local areas by the summer of 2008. “Sustainable security” is to be established nationwide by the summer of 2009.

Questions About Domestic Use of Spy Satellites

2007-09-07T09:23:00.000-05:00

The administration is moving ahead in its plan to use spy satellites for "Homeland Security." (See also, National Technical Means To Be Used Domestically.)

Saying they had been left in the dark about Bush administration plans to expand domestic access to spy-satellite surveillance technology, lawmakers questioned the legal basis of the program and asked that it be stopped until the Department of Homeland Security provided them with more information. ...

The objections are unlikely to stop the rollout of the program next month, administration officials said. "This program and its capabilities are too important for an all-hazards agency like the department to be pushed aside by politics," said DHS spokesman Russ Knocke. ...

[Lawmakers] questioned whether the plans would hold up to the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure by the government. A few Republicans sought specific guarantees the program wouldn't use thermal imaging to snoop on people in their homes.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and two Democratic subcommittee chairmen jointly asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide the legal framework for the domestic use of classified and military spy satellites, and to allow Congress to review privacy and civil liberties protections.

"You let this thing go, it may be another blank check to the executive. It may morph into things that will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee. ...

Administration officials say the program can help domestic authorities deal with a variety of threats, from illegal immigration and terrorism to hurricanes and forest fires, by providing access to high-resolution, real-time satellite photos. Military sensors can peer through clouds and tree canopies, detect underground bunkers and penetrate buildings.

Charles Allen, Homeland Security's chief intelligence officer, told the committee that overhead satellite imagery has been used legally for decades to support domestic, federal, scientific, law enforcement and security uses. It has been used to create maps, monitor volcanoes and scout sports events.

The new program, he said, does not require additional laws or authority, and would relieve the need for other agencies to rely on ad hoc means of accessing powerful data tools.

Homeland Security Gets Bad GAO Review

2007-09-06T07:16:00.000-05:00

If Katrina wasn't a big enough hint about DHS, a new report makes it official. (Click to enlarge chart.)

Hobbled by inadequate funding, unclear priorities, continuing reorganizations and the absence of an overarching strategy, the Department of Homeland Security is failing to achieve its mission of preventing and responding to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, according to a comprehensive report by the Government Accountability Office.

The highly critical report disputes recent upbeat assessments by the Bush administration by concluding that the DHS has failed to make even moderate progress toward eight of 14 internal government benchmarks more than four years after its creation. ...

Analysts from across the political spectrum have complained that the DHS has spent $241 billion over four years without performing a disciplined analysis of threats and implications.

The GAO report is the most exhaustive and independent look at the department since its creation, drawing on more than 400 earlier reviews and 700 recommendations by congressional investigators and the department's inspector general, as well as the goals set by the Sept.11 commission, the Century Foundation, congressional legislation and spending bills, and the administration's own plans and internal strategic documents, such as the White House's National Strategy for Homeland Security from July 2002. ...

The DHS met only five of 24 criteria for emergency preparedness, failing to implement a national response plan or develop a program to improve emergency radio communications. The department met just one of six science and technology goals, such as developing research and development plans and assessing emerging threats; and two of 15 computer integration targets, the report says.

Moderate progress, which the GAO defined as taking action on more than half of identified goals, was made in only five of 14 areas -- immigration enforcement; aviation, land and transportation security; securing critical facilities such as bridges, power plants and computer networks; and property management -- and substantial progress in just one, maritime and port security.

Department of Homeland Security: Progress Report on Implementation of Mission and Management Functions (328-page PDF)

Department of Homeland Security: Progress Report on Implementation of Mission and Management Functions -- Comptroller's Statement for Congress (32-page PDF)

Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks

2007-09-04T14:20:00.000-05:00

The GAO report on the progress made by the Iraqi government with the breathing room given them by the surge has just been released.

As the earlier draft report indicated, the Iraqi government failed to meet most of the benchmarks.

Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks (100-page pdf).

The January 2007 U.S. strategy seeks to provide the Iraqi government with the time and space needed to help Iraqi society reconcile. Our analysis of the 18 legislative, security and economic benchmarks shows that as of August 30, 2007, the Iraqi government met 3, partially met 4, and did not meet 11 of its 18 benchmarks. ...Overall, key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds. These results do not diminish the courageous efforts of coalition forces.

The Iraqi government has met one of eight legislative benchmarks: the rights of minority political parties in Iraq’s legislature are protected. The government also partially met one other benchmark to enact and implement legislation on the formation of regions; this law was enacted in October 2006 but will not be implemented until April 2008. Six other legislative benchmarks have not been met. Specifically, a review committee has not completed work on important revisions to Iraq’s constitution. Further, the government has not enacted legislation on de-Ba’athification, oil revenue sharing, provincial elections, amnesty, or militia disarmament. The Administration’s July 2007 report cited progress in achieving some of these benchmarks but provided little information on what step in the legislative process each benchmark had reached.

Two of nine security benchmarks have been met. Specifically, Iraq’s government has established various committees in support of the Baghdad security plan and established almost all of the planned Joint Security Stations in Baghdad. The government has partially met the benchmarks of providing three trained and ready brigades for Baghdad operations and eliminating safe havens for outlawed groups. Five other benchmarks have not been met. The government has not eliminated militia control of local security, eliminated political intervention in military operations, ensured even-handed enforcement of the law, increased army units capable of independent operations, or ensured that political authorities made no false accusations against security forces. It is unclear whether sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased—a key security benchmark--since it is difficult to measure the perpetrator’s intent and other measures of population security show differing trends.

Finally, the Iraqi government has partially met the economic benchmark of allocating and spending $10 billion on reconstruction. Preliminary data indicates that about $1.5 billion of central ministry funds had been spent, as of July 15, 2007. As the Congress considers the way forward in Iraq, it must balance the achievement of the 18 Iraqi benchmarks with the military progress, homeland security, foreign policy, and other goals of the United States. Future administration reporting to assist the Congress would be enhanced with adoption of the recommendations we make in this report.

The Surge as Holding Tactic in a Losing Cause

2007-09-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

Lest you fall for the orchestrated "the surge is working" perception management program, be aware that the political goals of the U.S. troop buildup have not been achieved.

And military "successes" -- especially those as ephemeral as are being currently bragged about -- without consequent political effects are not successes at all, but holding tactics in a losing cause.

The U.S. military buildup that was supposed to calm Baghdad and other trouble spots has failed to usher in national reconciliation, as the capital's neighborhoods rupture even further along sectarian lines, violence shifts elsewhere and Iraq's government remains mired in political infighting.

In the coming days, U.S. military and government leaders will offer Congress their assessment of the 6-month-old plan's results. But a review of statistics on death and displacement, political developments and the impressions of Iraqis who are living under the heightened military presence reaches a dispiriting conclusion.

Despite the plan, which has brought an additional 28,500 U.S. troops to Iraq since February, none of the major legislation that Washington had expected the Iraqi parliament to pass into law has been approved.

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has increased, not decreased, according to the United Nations' International Organization for Migration and Iraq's Ministry for Displacement and Migration.

Military officials say sectarian killings in Baghdad are down more than 51% and attacks on civilians and security forces across Iraq have decreased. But this has not translated into a substantial drop in civilian deaths as insurgents take their lethal trade to more remote regions. Last month, as many as 400 people were killed in a bombing in a village near the Syrian border, the worst bombing since the war began in March 2003. In July, 150 people were reported killed in a village about 100 miles north of Baghdad.

And in a sign that tamping down Sunni-Shiite violence is no guarantee of stability, a feud between rival Shiite Muslim militias has killed scores of Iraqis in recent months. Last week, at least 52 people died in militia clashes in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

At best, analysts, military officers and ordinary Iraqis portray the country as in a holding pattern, dependent on U.S. troops to keep the lid on violence.

"The military offensive has temporarily suppressed, or in many cases dislocated, armed groups," said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group. "Once the military surge peters out, which it will if there is no progress on the political front, these groups will pop right back up and start going at each other's, and civilians', throats again."

There is, however, another possible strategy inherent to the White House PR campaign centered around Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker's upcoming assessment of the situation in Iraq that is part of the ongoing domestic information operation about the progress of the war.

All the happy talk from the administration about the success of the surge, may end up giving them political cover to declare victory and start withdrawing troops.

Season of (Doctored) Reports

2007-09-03T08:28:00.000-05:00

Congress's return tomorrow from its August recess marks the end of summer and the beginning of the "season of reports," as outgoing White House spokesman Tony Snow jokingly dubbed it.

On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on the Government Accountability Office's Iraqi Government Assessment. That document concludes, according to reports on a draft last week, that Iraq has failed to meet 15 of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress. Comptroller General David Walker will testify.

The following day, Armed Services holds a joint hearing with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, looking forward to the upcoming report on Iraq from the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker. Set as witnesses at the Thursday hearing are former defense secretary William Perry, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste and retired Army Gen. John M. Keane.

Later Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on the report on Iraqi security forces, written by a commission chaired by retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones. ...

The House takes up the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program in two separate committee hearings. The Judiciary Committee will address civil rights and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Wednesday. A day later, the Homeland Security Committee will consider domestic use of spy technology.

NASA Using New Security Clearance Rules To Muzzle Global Warming Experts

2007-09-01T07:40:00.000-05:00

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.

The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.

"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."

Nelson and 26 other JPL scientists and other employees have retained a Pasadena civil rights law firm to file suit in federal court in California to block the security program.

Attorney Dan Stormer a partner at Hadsell & Stormer, who with Virginia Keeney, is handling the case, says he will be requesting a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the program. A hearing is set for September 24. (To date, Nelson says as many as 20 percent of JPL's 5,000 employees have refused to fill out the security forms, though those who haven't been investigated and received their badges risk being barred from the site after that deadline.)

"This campaign is an egregious invasion of privacy," says Stormer. "These are people who aren't in classified jobs and who don't handle classified information, yet if they don't submit to these investigations, they'll lose their jobs."

Stormer adds, "This is a classic Bush case of controlling information, and I'm sure the information JPL and Goddard are gathering about global warming has a lot to do with it. Do I have the evidence to prove that? No. But I think we'll find it in this lawsuit."

(More)

Justice IG Looking at Gonzales

2007-08-31T08:57:00.000-05:00

Gonzales knew that the water was heating up in his pan at the Justice Department.

He had to jump out before it became too late.

The Justice Department's inspector general indicated yesterday that he is investigating whether departing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales gave false or misleading testimony to Congress, including whether he lied under oath about warrantless surveillance and the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

The disclosure by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a letter to Congress signals an expansion of the department's internal investigations into Gonzales's troubled tenure, probes that were not previously known to be focused so sharply on the attorney general and his testimony.

Fine's office has also separately expanded a probe into whether senior Gonzales aides improperly considered partisan affiliations when reviewing applicants for nonpolitical career positions. As part of that inquiry, Fine sent hundreds of questionnaires in the past week to former Justice Department job applicants. ...

The scope and pace of the investigations suggest that public attention on Gonzales will probably continue long after he leaves his job on Sept. 17. But officials declined yesterday to say whether Fine's expanding investigations played a role in the attorney general's resignation. ...

Fine, in a letter yesterday to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), said his office "has ongoing investigations" related to Gonzales's testimony on several key issues, including the prosecutor firings and allegations of improper hiring practices, the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, the FBI's use of national security letters, and Gonzales's characterizations of his conversation with an aide before a House hearing. ...

Fine has the authority to refer cases for criminal prosecution, including on perjury or obstruction-of-justice charges, if warranted. He and H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, can also recommend internal disciplinary action for violations of department rules and guidelines, although many Gonzales aides involved in the controversial actions have left the government.

You Can Fool Some of the People ...

2007-08-30T10:25:00.000-05:00

The administration's "pull out all the stops" Perception Management effort to convince the public that the situation on the ground in Iraq is improving seems to be paying dividends, at least according to some people.

The White House is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq, a significant turnabout from two months ago, when a string of Republican defections had administration officials worried that President Bush’s troop buildup was in serious danger on Capitol Hill.

Current and former administration officials say they realize that the September battle over the troop buildup will be difficult. But they also say the president’s hand is stronger now than it was in early July, when Republican senators like Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana publicly called for a change of course.

“There is a tonal shift, and that is important, but there is always the chance that it could be ephemeral, in the same way that the panic of early July proved ephemeral,” said Peter D. Feaver, who helped draft the buildup strategy as an official with the National Security Council but recently returned to his post as a political science professor at Duke University. “I don’t detect any triumphalism in the White House.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging the president, said there was “a sense the dynamic has changed.” But the official was also cautious, adding: “I don’t want to portray overconfidence. This is a very important debate, and September is going to be a very important month.”

With Congress in recess in August, no reliable indication of lawmakers’ sentiments will emerge until the House and Senate return next week.

Democratic leaders say they intend to renew their efforts to force Mr. Bush to withdraw troops as soon as possible, and one prominent Republican — Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee — rattled the White House last week when he called for Mr. Bush to begin bringing a small number of troops home by Christmas.

But other Republicans have not embraced Mr. Warner’s plan. At the same time, some Democrats who had been critical of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war have acknowledged that the heightened American troop levels in Iraq do appear to have produced some signs of military progress.

At least one nonpartisan analyst, Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, an independent newsletter, says the pendulum appears to be swinging — even though the war remains hugely unpopular and Republican lawmakers are under great pressure at home to end it.

“It’s a momentum situation,” he said. “The momentum back in June and early July was really running hard against the war, and it was starting to snowball. But that snowballing stopped, and it has probably kind of reversed itself somewhat.”

Unfortunately for the White House, you can't bullshit history.

The Iraq disaster will look even worse in hindsight than it does to the media-influenced American people now.

The Iraq War -- A Perfect Arena For Fraud

2007-08-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.

The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.

There is no indication that investigators have uncovered any wrongdoing by General Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, who through a spokesman declined comment on any legal proceedings. ...

The inquiries are being pursued by the Army Criminal Investigation Command, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other agencies. ...

The investigation into contracts for matériel to Iraqi soldiers and police officers is part of an even larger series of criminal cases. As of Aug. 23, there were a total of 73 criminal investigations related to contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, Col. Dan Baggio, an Army spokesman said Monday. Twenty civilians and military personnel have been charged in federal court as a result of the inquiries, he said. The inquiries involve contracts valued at more than $5 billion, and Colonel Baggio said the charges so far involve more than $15 million in bribes.

Investigations span the gamut from low-level officials submitting false claims for amounts less than $2,500 to more serious cases involving, conspiracy, bribery, product substitution and bid-rigging or double-billing involving large dollar amounts or more senior contracting officials, Army criminal investigators said. The investigations involve contractors, government employees, local nationals and American military personnel. ...

In a sign of the seriousness of the scandal, the Defense Department Inspector General, Claude M. Kicklighter, will lead an 18-person team to Iraq early next month to investigate contracting practices, said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

Mr. Morrell said Mr. Kicklighter, a retired three-star Army general, would stay in Iraq indefinitely to investigate contracting abuses, and was empowered to fix problems on the spot or take action if his team identified potential criminal activity.

Gonzales Resigns

2007-08-27T09:20:00.000-05:00

Rove gone.

And now Gonzales leaving.

Rats from a sinking ship? Or is some unexpected development on the way?

As recently as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales was denying through his press spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, that he intended to leave.

Mr. Roehrkasse said Sunday afternoon that he had telephoned Mr. Gonzales about the reports circulating in Washington that a resignation was imminent, "and he said it wasn’t true, so I don’t know what more I can say."

White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.

Padilla Suing U.S. Officials Over Abusive Treatment

2007-08-24T07:35:00.000-05:00

Convicted Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla is seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for what his lawyers say were abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006.

Lawyers working on Padilla's behalf filed the civil lawsuit earlier this year in federal court in South Carolina. It was publicly disclosed by the lawyers this week.

"Mr. Padilla suffered gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a scheme of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr. Padilla's humanity and his will to live," the 30-page complaint says.

"The grave violations suffered by Padilla were not isolated occurrences by rogue lower-level officials," the suit says. Besides Mr. Rumsfeld, it names Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lowell Jacoby, among others, who "personally ordered and/or approved Mr. Padilla's detention and interrogation program."

Last week, Padilla was found guilty by a Miami jury of conspiring with Al Qaeda to engage in violent jihad. Federal prosecutors said he attended a training camp in Afghanistan. He faces a potential life sentence in prison.

Some analysts have pointed to Padilla's conviction as vindication of the Bush administration's alleged harsh treatment of him at the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., prior to his transfer to the criminal justice system in early 2006. But other analysts say that regardless of the guilty verdict in Miami, significant constitutional and other legal issues surrounding Padilla's treatment by the military remain unresolved.

Chief among them is whether a US citizen, like Padilla, who was arrested on American soil, can be stripped of most of his constitutional rights while being held in military custody and interrogated as an enemy combatant. Padilla was held at the brig for 43 months.

According to the court docket, a Justice Department lawyer is representing each of the named defendants. Andrew Ames, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government would have no comment on the pending case.

The defendants have been ordered to respond to the suit by Oct. 15.

FOX News as Administration Propaganda Arm

2007-08-23T08:51:00.000-05:00

Condemning the Fox News Channel as a warmonger that's agitating for a U.S. attack on Iran, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced an "online viral video campaign" Wednesday calling on television news organizations "not to follow Fox down the road to war again."

Greenwald, the director behind "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" and "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," has compiled a new three-minute video that mashes clips from Fox's coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath with recent coverage of possible U.S. military action against Iran.

The video and an accompanying "open letter" to ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN -- viewable at www.FoxAttacks.com -- urge news organizations to ask tough questions about administration policy on Iran and say citizens should pressure them to do so.

Three telephone messages to Fox in New York seeking comment were not returned Wednesday. ...

The video has clips of U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, Fox host Bill O'Reilly and others warning of the potential for a U.S. war against Iran, spliced together with graphics that say ''Sound Familiar?'' and ''Other networks followed Fox's lead on Iraq.''

In one clip, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour says during an interview that CNN was intimidated by the administration "and its foot soldiers at Fox News."

"We felt it important right now to raise awareness and ask the media to please ask the hard questions, before it's too late," said Greenwald. "We've focused on TV because they are the ones who have the greatest, quickest input. But over time, we will be asking and expanding this to all media."

In a conference call announcing the campaign, Greenwald and Sanders, I-Vt., said they don't have answers about what to do about Iran, but said they fear the White House will make a unilateral decision to attack.

"We have got to put pressure on the mass media not to play the same craven role they played in Iraq, when they effectually collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies," Sanders said. "What Robert is saying here is that the leader of that effort is Fox News, which in many ways is simply a propaganda machine for the Republican Party and the Bush administration."

Presidential Advance Manual [Sensitive -- Do Not Copy] Offers Tips on Dealing With Protesters

2007-08-22T06:35:00.000-05:00

A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protestors" from President Bush's public appearances around the country.

Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should be shouted down by "rally squads" stationed in strategic locations. And if that does not work, they should be thrown out.

But that does not mean the White House is against dissent -- just so long as the president does not see it. In fact, the manual outlines a specific system for those who disagree with the president to voice their views. It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police "to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."

The "Presidential Advance Manual," dated October 2002 with the stamp "Sensitive -- Do Not Copy," was released under subpoena to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a lawsuit filed on behalf of two people arrested for refusing to cover their anti-Bush T-shirts at a Fourth of July speech at the West Virginia State Capitol in 2004. The techniques described have become familiar over the 6 1/2 years of Bush's presidency, but the manual makes it clear how organized the anti-protest policy really is. ...

The manual offers advance staffers and volunteers who help set up presidential events guidelines for assembling crowds. Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage, for instance, must be "extremely supportive of the Administration," it says. While the Secret Service screens audiences only for possible threats, the manual says, volunteers should examine people before they reach security checkpoints and look out for signs. Make sure to look for "folded cloth signs," it advises.

To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create "rally squads" of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with "favorable messages." Squads should be placed in strategic locations and "at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems," the manual says.

"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."

White House Presidential Advance Manual (12-page PDF)

You Can't Just Say 'GFY' to Leahy And Get Away With It. Or Can You?

2007-08-21T08:37:00.000-05:00

I'm sure Cheney, et al., are quaking in their boots now.

A leading Democrat threatened on Monday to pursue contempt charges against the White House next month over its response to a subpoena for internal documents on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.

"Time is up," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We've waited long enough."

Mr. Leahy's comments ratcheted up the battle between Congressional Democrats and the White House over access to secret documents on the legal underpinnings of the eavesdropping program, which authorized the N.S.A. to listen in without a court warrant on Americans’ international communications.

Nearly two months ago, the Senate voted to subpoena the White House and the Bush administration for access to the documents as part of its investigation into the program.

The White House, in a letter to Mr. Leahy on Monday, said it had identified a number of classified documents that appeared to fall under the subpoena but it said the documents could be covered by a claim of executive privilege. The White House asked for more time to research the issue.

"It remains our goal to avoid a conflict between the branches on this important issue of national security," the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, said in the letter.

But Mr. Leahy made clear that his patience was running out. With Congress on its August break, he returned to Washington and held a news conference announcing that the White House had failed to meet the Monday deadline he had set for complying with the subpoena.

"Follow the law, and don't act like you're above the law," Mr. Leahy told reporters in remarks aimed at the White House. "Go ahead and answer the subpoena."

Leahy also made known one of the reasons that the GOP-led 109th Congress refused to investigate the NSA scandal:

The Senate Judiciary Committee in the conservative-led 109th Congress, chaired by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) also attempted to ask questions about the program’s legal justifications. But Vice President Cheney personally barred him from issuing subpoenas:

"In fact, we were about to issue subpoenas then and one of the senators came to our meeting and said that the vice president had met with the Republican senators and told them they were not allowed to issue subpoenas.

"Not quite sure that's my understanding of the separation of powers, but it seemed to work at that time."

Reverse Psychology

2007-08-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

Day after day last week, outgoing White House political strategist Karl Rove delivered slashing attacks on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. Her healthcare record was "spotty and poor," he declared. Her candidacy was "fatally flawed," he said. And no one with her negative poll numbers, he stated, "has ever won the presidency."

Why did Rove, who often stays in the background, step forward to deliver such public attacks -- especially when the Democrats haven't begun to choose their presidential candidate for 2008 and when the general election is more than a year away?

The answer might seem obvious: Rove saw Clinton as a formidable opponent and wanted to get his licks in early.

For high-level campaign professionals like Rove, however, that kind of thinking may be too simple.

The decision to focus on the New York senator to the exclusion of other potentially formidable Democratic standard-bearers such as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois offered a rare glimpse into a world where things are not always what they seem -- the world of modern-day electioneering, whose denizens often prefer going from A to B by way of Z.

In this case, Rove's weeklong broadside against Clinton ... looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush's reelection bid.

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush's reelection.

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove's team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.

Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn't easily be painted as "nutty."

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd's own words:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds.

"So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," Dowd said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry.

"It wasn't like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

Castro: Cuba Not Cashing U.S. Guantanamo Rent Checks

2007-08-18T07:35:00.000-05:00

The United States pays Cuba $4,085 a month in rent for the controversial Guantanamo naval base, but Cuba has only once cashed a check in almost half a century and then only by mistake, Fidel Castro wrote in an essay published on Friday.

The ailing Cuban leader, who has not appeared in public for more than a year, said he had refused to cash the checks to protest the "illegal" U.S. occupation of the land which he said was now used for "dirty work."

"The base is needed to humiliate and to do the dirty work that occurs there," he said of the detention camp where some 355 terrorism suspects are still being held with no legal rights despite international criticism.

Castro, who turned 81 on Monday out of public sight, said the U.S. checks are made out to the "Treasurer General of the Republic," a position that ceased to exist after Cuba's 1959 revolution.

He said only one U.S. check was ever cashed -- in 1959 due to "confusion" in the heady early days of the leftist revolution.

Castro's refusal to cash the checks to protest the "illegal" occupation has been long known. In a television interview years ago, he showed the checks stuffed into a desk drawer in his office.

The final installment of Castro's long historical essay on Cuba's hostile relations with the United States -- written for future generations -- was published by the ruling Communist Party newspaper Granma.

The essay entitled "The Empire and the Independent Island" recounted Castro's view of U.S. efforts to control Cuba since U.S. troops landed on the island in the Spanish-American War that secured Cuban independence from Spain in 1898.

The United States retained 46.8 square miles (121 square kilometers) at the entrance to Guantanamo Bay in eastern Cuba for a naval base, which has been used as a prison camp for Taliban and al Qaeda terrorism suspects since the Afghanistan war following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The base was initially a coaling station for the U.S. Navy to protect the approaches to the Panama Canal.

Castro said the enclave was "illegally usurped" by the United States, adding that the base no longer had any strategic military purpose in the age of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers packed with fast fighter-bombers.

"If we have to wait for the collapse of the (capitalist) system, we will wait," Castro wrote. He said Cuba was always on alert to the threat of a U.S. invasion.

More Details on the "Sickbed Visit" Released to House Judiciary Committee

2007-08-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

Notes taken by Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. say that Attorney General John Ashcroft was "barely articulate," "feeble" and "clearly stressed" shortly after a hospital-room meeting in March 2004 in which two top White House aides tried to persuade him to sign an extension for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

Mr. Mueller's notes, based on a visit to Mr. Ashcroft's room and released Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee, provide a fuller picture of the events surrounding a March 10, 2004, confrontation over the surveillance program. They go beyond the account that Mr. Mueller gave the committee in July and reinforce an account by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general who testified in May.

In providing corroboration for Mr. Comey's version of events, Mr. Mueller's typewritten entries served to rebut the suggestion of some Bush administration officials who have privately dismissed Mr. Comey's account of the hospital standoff as an overwrought and one-sided description.

In terse shorthand, and despite heavy redactions, Mr. Mueller offered a glimpse of a tumultuous battle over the fate of the eavesdropping program. The notes list 26 meetings and phone conversations over three weeks — from March 1 to March 23 — during a fierce debate that almost led to mass resignations at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. Mueller was not at the meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. He arrived at the hospital shortly afterward, and his entries include an account of his hospital-room meeting with Mr. Ashcroft as well as what he says Mr. Comey told him about the earlier confrontation.

The notes also reveal a series of meetings before and after March 10 between Mr. Mueller and other high-level administration officials. Some of those meetings were attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, suggesting that Mr. Cheney had played a central role in the controversy. Other regular participants included Mr. Gonzales and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the director of the National Security Agency, which conducted the eavesdropping program.

The notes, which were turned over to the committee this week, are not dated. But they suggest that Mr. Mueller gradually became an intermediary between the White House and the Justice Department, meeting with each side almost hourly as the crisis deepened.

During their bedside meeting with Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card tried to obtain his signature on a presidential order reauthorizing the program. Mr. Comey, acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's hospitalization, had declined to sign the reauthorization, he said, because he believed that part of the program was illegal.

During the meeting, Mr. Ashcroft rebuffed the White House entreaties to sign the directive. Mr. Comey was present during that session, and Mr. Mueller's notes show that Mr. Comey then briefed the F.B.I. director on Mr. Ashcroft's remarks. Mr. Ashcroft, the notes said, reviewed his legal objections to the eavesdropping program and complained to Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card that he had been "barred from obtaining the advice he needed on the program by the strict compartmentalization rules of the WH," a reference to the extreme secrecy imposed by the White House.

After the meeting concluded without success, the Bush administration decided to proceed with the program anyway. But Comey, Mueller and half a dozen or so other Justice Department officials threatened to resign if it was not changed. The standoff was averted after President Bush agreed to make changes, Mueller and others have testified, but the changes have never been described.

FBI Director Mueller's notes (6-page PDF)

National Technical Means To Be Used Domestically

2007-08-16T08:21:00.000-05:00

Posse Comitatus, anyone?

The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.

A program approved by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security will allow broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery beginning as early as this fall, with the expectation that state and local law enforcement officials will eventually be able to tap into technology once largely restricted to foreign surveillance. ...

Although the federal government has long permitted the use of spy-satellite imagery for certain scientific functions -- such as creating topographic maps or monitoring volcanic activity -- the administration's decision would provide domestic authorities with unprecedented access to high-resolution, real-time satellite photos.

They could also have access to much more. A statement issued yesterday by the Department of Homeland Security said that officials envision "more robust access" not only to imagery but also to "the collection, analysis and production skills and capabilities of the intelligence community." ...

Under the new program, the DHS will create a subordinate agency to be known as the National Applications Office. The new office, which has gained the backing of congressional intelligence and appropriations committees, is responsible for coordinating requests for access to intelligence by civilian agencies. Previously, an agency known as the Civilian Applications Committee facilitated access to satellite imagery for geologic study.

Oversight of the department's use of the overhead imagery data would come from officials in the Department of Homeland Security and from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and would consist of reviews by agency inspectors general, lawyers and privacy officers. "We can give total assurance" that Americans' civil liberties will be protected, Allen said. "Americans shouldn't have any concerns about it."

Kafkaesque Procedures in Al-Haramain CATCH-ALL Case

2007-08-15T07:10:00.000-05:00

Oakland lawyer Jon Eisenberg calls the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. George W. Bush the strangest he has ever handled. How strange? Eisenberg was required to write one of his briefs in a windowless government office, without notes or lawbooks, under the watchful eye of two federal security guards.

When he got hungry, one of the guards brought him a banana. And when he finished, a security official shredded all his drafts — and even the banana peel, Eisenberg said.

The brief-writing session was just one facet of the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the Al-Haramain case, Eisenberg said. Al-Haramain is one of dozens of plaintiffs across the nation that have filed suit, claiming they were illegally spied on by the government as part of the war on terror.

In most of the cases, including Al-Haramain's, the government has contended that any disclosure about the surveillance program would reveal state secrets and has refused to say whether the plaintiffs were wire-tapped. It has then moved to dismiss the complaints.

But in the Al-Haramain case, the Treasury Department inadvertently disclosed National Security Agency call logs stamped "top secret" indicating that the charity and two of its attorneys had been surveilled. Last year, U.S. District Judge Garr King ruled that the logs -- referred to in the court papers as "The Document" — gave the charity standing to sue in federal court.

Today, Eisenberg and Justice Department lawyer Thomas Bondy will each have 20 minutes to argue over King's decision before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Although the argument will be conducted in public, much of the information in the case, including what was in "the Document," remains veiled in mystery.

Many of the government's motions have been filed under seal, and those lodged publicly contain gaps; one government brief reads: "REDACTED TEXT. PUBLIC TEXT CONTINUES ON PAGE 6."

Some of Eisenberg's briefs have been redacted as well, because they are considered too sensitive for the public to see. But although Justice Department lawyers can see Eisenberg's redactions, he isn't allowed to see theirs.

In the Al-Haramain case, Eisenberg has had to respond to a government filing he was not allowed to see.

Asked Monday if there was any way, under the government's interpretation of the law, that someone could contest the surveillance program, a senior Justice Department official replied, "In the current context, no." ...

The Al-Haramain proceedings turned Kafkaesque in June, he said, when he was told he would have to write a brief in the government office.

The filing was in response to a Justice Department brief that was redacted, he said. In the public portion, a team of government lawyers asserted that the case should be dismissed because of the "state secrets" doctrine. They also contended that the call log does not prove that the plaintiffs were subjects of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

Eisenberg vigorously disputed the public portion of the filing, saying that if the government prevailed, the case would "quietly die without a judicial determination of whether the president. . . has broken the law by conducting warrantless electronic surveillance in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."

As for what was in the sealed part of the government brief, Eisenberg said, "I could only guess," but he decided to write a response based on his knowledge of the case and his hunches. For a week, he said, "I thought a lot about what I wanted to draft and tried to commit it all to memory," since he would not be allowed to bring in notes. "That was a challenge. . . . And, yes. . . I was trying to guess at what the government had argued in the secret portions of its 9th Circuit brief and decide how to respond to something I'd never seen. That was a new experience for me."

In a public brief, Eisenberg described cryptically what happened June 26, when he and his co-counsel Steve Goldberg had to write their sealed response brief under what he called "highly unusual and objectionable restrictions imposed by the government." The conditions included preventing them from bringing notes or law books to the drafting session, and barring one of their co-counsel from participating, the brief said. ...

Asked if he had ever before had to write a brief without any notes or lawbooks, Eisenberg responded, "Of course not. Under any other circumstances, that would be malpractice."

PPT is On The Job

2007-08-14T07:11:00.000-05:00

The "Plunge Protection Team" (PPT) is doing it's behind-the-scenes thing to try to keep the credit crisis that began with the sub-prime meltdown from taking the rest of the financial system down with it.

Informed sources say that Hank Paulson re-activated the PPT last October.

Bush administration sources said they are assessing the need to speak publicly on the credit crunch, lest too many voices create confusion or prompt retail investors to think the problems are deepening.

Instead, authorities are keeping their public comments to a minimum even as Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Board officials are reaching out privately to lenders, brokerages, banks, credit rating agencies and other market participants for real-time data about the size and scope of the situation.

Representatives for the Treasury Department and the White House declined to comment Monday on reports that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened a meeting at his Washington home Sunday. Paulson often works through the weekend and sometimes convenes meetings there, sources said.

Members of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets [the PPT], including the Treasury, Fed, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are in touch regularly via staff members and telephone.

And in a not-entirely unrelated note:

Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's most profitable investment bank, said Monday that it is injecting $2 billion into one of its struggling hedge funds, underscoring the intensity of the turmoil in credit markets and its potential reach into the U.S. economy.

The fund shed about 30 percent of its value in last week's trading, shrinking to $3.6 billion from about $5 billion in a matter of days. Goldman's Global Equity Opportunities Fund is the latest hedge fund to acknowledge big losses in recent weeks as problems in the mortgage industry spread to other parts of the credit market and to stocks. ...

Goldman is providing about $2 billion of the $3 billion infusion into its Global Equity Opportunities Fund, which makes bets on stock price movements. A group of investors that includes billionaire Eli Broad and Hank Greenberg, former chairman of American International Group, are putting in the rest.

The GEO fund is a "quant" fund, meaning it makes its trades based on opportunities in the market identified by computer-based models. In recent days, Goldman said, such funds have come under pressure as a volatile stock market moved in unpredictable ways.

"In response, we've been reducing risk and leverage in GEO," Viniar said. "Unfortunately, the recent simultaneous global unwinding of portfolios utilizing quantitative investment strategies has exacerbated GEO's performance challenges."

Responding to the speculation that has helped roil markets in the past week, the company said that its high-profile Global Alpha hedge fund and North American Equity Opportunities Fund have pared their riskier positions and are "positioned to actively pursue market opportunities."

The Global Alpha fund is down 27 percent this year, with more than half of those losses occurring in the past week, the company said. ...

Wall Street is paying attention to news from quant funds, whose automated models are developed by mathematicians and whose trading involves limited human intervention. These models are often based on trading patterns of assets over a period of time.

The models are closely guarded by each fund, but the problems they faced last week suggest that many share the same strategies, analysts said, leading to fears that too many will fail in a volatile market and send ripples through the entire financial system.

Don't Let The Door...

2007-08-13T07:33:00.000-05:00

I suspect that there is more to the announcement that Karl Rove is leaving the White House than meets the eye.

There usually is when someone as versed in political skullduggery as Rove makes an unexpected resignation announcement.

Or maybe he is just losing it. In a interview conducted Saturday by the Wall Street Journal, Rove made a few interesting comments:

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."

Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA" -- the wiretapping of foreign terrorists -- "a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."

Other people may have their math, but Rove has "the math."

Although that didn't work out so well the last time around.

Bush Shows Off His MBA

2007-08-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

Hint to White House economic team: You might not want to have had the president repeat that numbskull prediction about a "soft landing" for housing at precisely the moment central banks were pumping $150 billion into the financial system to prevent a market meltdown over anxieties about mortgage-backed securities. Brings back memories of "Mission Accomplished."

Seriously, folks, we all need to get used to days like yesterday because there are going to be a lot more of them. In a world in which trillions of dollars have been bet on the premise that low interest rates and record-low default rates would continue forever, "repricing of risk," as the administration likes to call it, is not some minor technical event. It's more like a tectonic shift going on beneath the surface of the economy.

Think about it. In the space of just several months, we've moved from an environment in which fly-by-night brokers were peddling low-interest mortgages to bad credit risks with no documentation and no money down, to one in which the largest banks are raising rates and tightening terms for their best borrowers. ...

And in the course of several hours, a financial system that was seemingly awash in liquidity suddenly didn't have enough. ...

One concern is that rather than spreading risk among millions of investors, the current system has reconcentrated risk on the books of a dozen global broker-dealers who lend most of the money to fund managers so they can buy all those credit instruments. And it is many of the same firms -- Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, Citicorp -- that have also underwritten hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate takeover loans that, suddenly, they cannot sell as they had planned. It's no coincidence that the shares of such firms have taken a beating in the past few months as rumors swirl around Wall Street that one or another is facing major losses.

We may be discovering, in fact, that the new financial order is not all it is cracked up to be.

Although it has provided ingenious new mechanisms to finance the legitimate needs of businesses and householders and new ways for investors to hedge risks, it has also created opportunities for potentially destabilizing speculation. It is now common for the aggregate value of "derivative" instruments to be many times the volume of the stocks, bonds or commodities on which they are supposedly based. And often it is the trading on derivatives markets that now drives the trading on "real" markets, rather than the other way around.

Australian analyst Satyajit Das makes the point that the main achievement of the new financial architecture has not been to spread risk so much as it has been to expand risk by vastly increasing the amount of borrowed money. Making loans to buy bonds secured by packages of other loans makes for big fees and exciting work for bankers. But as Das predicted last year in his book, "Traders, Guns & Money" -- and as we all discovered yesterday -- if the supply of credit suddenly dries up anywhere in the system, the elaborate new structure they've created can come crashing down on itself.

South Carolina GOP Primary To Play Leapfrog

2007-08-09T08:26:00.000-05:00

South Carolina's Republican Party will move its 2008 presidential primary forward to Jan. 19, sources said yesterday, a decision almost certain to spark a cascade of calendar changes that could push the start of voting to New Year's Day or even to before Christmas.

The move, set to be announced today, is likely to cause the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses to be shifted at least to early January, and other states are actively angling to stake out spots earlier in the process. The maneuvering has injected a new note of uncertainty into what is already the earliest-starting presidential campaign in history, and top strategists for the candidates said it would force them to revise their carefully worked out plans.

Katon Dawson, who heads the South Carolina GOP, made the shift to retain the distinction of holding the "first in the South" presidential primary balloting. Dawson's move was sparked by the Florida legislature's decision to upstage South Carolina by moving the state's primary to Jan. 29. South Carolina had been scheduled to vote Feb. 2. ...

The move is certain to trigger action by New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner, who is compelled by state law to set the date of his state's primary at least a week before any other. That could push New Hampshire's primary, currently scheduled for Jan. 22, to Jan. 8.

In Iowa, state law requires presidential nominating caucuses to be held at least eight days before any other voting. ...

South Carolina's Democratic primary, which is scheduled to take place Jan. 29, is not affected by the decision. But the resulting moves by New Hampshire and Iowa would apply to both parties' contests in those states.

The calendar has been shifting despite warnings from officials of the two national party committees, who have threatened to punish state parties holding their voting earlier.

The RNC can block half of a state's delegates to the national convention for defying the party's wishes. The Democratic National Committee has threatened to disqualify delegates pledged to candidates who campaign in states in which it has not authorized early voting.

Those threats have had little impact on state leaders, who predict that the parties would not follow through on those threats by the time of the conventions next summer.

Airlines Suing CIA and FBI For 9/11 Info

2007-08-08T09:07:00.000-05:00

Airlines and aviation-related companies sued the CIA and the FBI on Tuesday, asking a U.S. court for access to information they say would shed light on whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, or whether it had acted reasonably.

The separate lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Manhattan asked a judge to order the U.S. government to let the aviation companies interview the agencies' investigators as part of their defense against lawsuits brought by victims or families of victims of the 2001 attacks.

In the CIA lawsuit, companies including American Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc., US Airways Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. and The Boeing Co. asked to interview the deputy chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit in 2001 and an FBI special agent assigned to the unit at that time.

In the FBI lawsuit, the companies asked to interview a "limited number of former and current FBI employees" who had participated in investigations of al-Qaida and al-Qaida operatives before and after Sept. 11, 2001.

Government spokeswoman Yusill Scribner said she had no immediate comment on the lawsuits.

A victims' compensation fund established by Congress has paid $6 billion to 2,880 families of those who died in the attacks and more than $1 billion to 2,680 injured victims.

But 41 cases filed on behalf of 42 victims remain pending in federal court in Manhattan because some victims decided to pursue the usual court route rather than accept payouts from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001.

NYPD Must Release Intelligence Reports on RNC Protesters, Judge Rules

2007-08-07T07:43:00.000-05:00

A federal judge yesterday rejected New York City's efforts to prevent the release of nearly 2,000 pages of raw intelligence reports and other documents detailing the Police Department's covert surveillance of protest groups and individual activists before the Republican National Convention in 2004.

In a 20-page ruling, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV ordered the disclosure of hundreds of field intelligence reports by undercover investigators who infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups in a huge operation that the police said was needed to head off violence and disruptions at the convention.

But at the behest of the city and with the concurrence of civil liberties lawyers representing plaintiffs swept up in mass arrests during the convention, the judge agreed to the deletion of sensitive information in the documents to protect the identities of undercover officers and confidential informants and to safeguard police investigative methods and the privacy of individuals caught up in investigations.

The city had largely based its bid for nondisclosure on the need to protect those identities and methods, and argued that the public might misinterpret the documents or the news media sensationalize them. But the civil liberties lawyers insisted that the documents — even without the sensitive materials — were needed to show in court that the police had overstepped legal boundaries in arresting, detaining and fingerprinting hundreds of people instead of handing out summonses for minor offenses.

The order was the latest development in the long-running case, which posed thorny questions about the free speech rights of protesters and the means used by law enforcement officials to maintain public order.

It appeared that the plaintiffs, who had denounced the police for trampling on the civil liberties of protesters who were fingerprinted and detained at length for minor offenses, had largely won the day, while the city had achieved a more limited objective.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents the lead defendants in a barrage of more than 80 lawsuits, said of the judge's ruling: "He's given us everything we asked for. He has redacted the names of undercover agents and the particulars of surveillance techniques. We agreed to that. But he has said the city cannot withhold the information it gathered in these operations." ...

The city and the Police Department have come under intense scrutiny over the surveillance tactics, in which for more than a year before the convention undercover officers traveled to cities across the country, and to Canada and Europe, to conduct covert observations of people who planned to attend. But beyond potential troublemakers, those placed under surveillance included street theater companies, church groups, antiwar activists, environmentalists, and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.

And as the convention unfolded, more than 1,800 people were arrested, mostly for minor violations, and many were herded into pens at a Hudson River pier and fingerprinted instead of being released on summonses or desk appearance tickets, which are more customary for charges that amount to little more than a traffic ticket.

As scores of federal lawsuits challenging the mass arrests on Aug. 31, 2004, were filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, with plaintiffs claiming wrongful detentions of up to two days and other violations by the police to keep protesters off the streets, the outlines of the extensive covert surveillance operation began to emerge from court records.

In March, The New York Times disclosed details of the sweeping operation, including a sample of raw intelligence documents and summaries of observations from field agents and the police cyberintelligence unit. Some plaintiffs and their lawyers, seeking to bolster their cases, asked the court to disclose the documents. In May, Judge Francis allowed the disclosure of 600 pages of documents relating to security preparations before the convention.

But a second batch of documents, including pictures and reports by undercover agents detailing which protest groups were infiltrated and the results of the surveillance operations, remained in contention. The city argued that disclosure would reveal sources, methods and other information that might compromise current and future investigations, while the plaintiffs contended that the reports would disprove city claims that the protesters planned to engage in violence, and would show that mass arrests had been unnecessary.

In his ruling yesterday, Judge Francis acknowledged that some information in the documents needed to be protected. He himself edited out what he regarded as privileged law enforcement information in many "field intelligence reports" from agents covering confidential sources and techniques. And he did not order the release of documents in which the Republican convention was not mentioned. ...

In addition to the field intelligence reports, two other categories of documents whose contents and even subject matter have never been publicly discussed -- 84 documents that the city contended were privileged in their entirety and 177 that the city agreed to release with its own editing -- were ordered disclosed in part by the judge.

The city, he said, did not explain "why the documents in the first category are privileged, nor does it explain why it is necessary to redact information from documents in the second category," adding: "The court can only guess at why the city believed that they are subject to privilege." ...

"We believe that these documents will disprove the N.Y.P.D.'s claim that demonstrators planned to engage in violence," Mr. Dunn (ACLU) said. "We believe these documents will reveal not only the vast scope of the N.Y.P.D.'s political surveillance operation, but also that there was no need for the Police Department's harsh treatment of protesters."

Some Details on the "Updated" FISA

2007-08-06T08:35:00.000-05:00

Here are some questions and answers about the new eavesdropping law and the debate surrounding its adoption:

What will the NSA and other spy agencies be able to do now that they couldn't do before?

Intelligence agencies will no longer need a warrant to collect communications between the United States and overseas, including the conversations of Americans, so long as the intelligence investigation is directed at a person believed to be outside the U.S. The conversation does not have to be about terrorism, just a matter of foreign intelligence interest.

The administration has said its intent is not to collect information on Americans. But critics say intelligence agencies are only required to delete Americans' private information from their records if it is deemed not relevant to the investigation.

The attorney general and the director of national intelligence have four months to submit to the secret national security court guidelines for determining what surveillance can take place without a warrant. The court then has six months to approve those procedures and cannot reject them unless it finds that the government has made a clear error in drawing them up, a legal standard critics say will make it nearly impossible for the executive branch to be denied. Democrats had proposed requiring that the court evaluate the guidelines within 45 days and have a greater role in evaluating the procedures. A little-noticed provision in the new law also suggests that warrantless physical searches of homes and businesses inside the United States may be allowed if the investigation concerns a foreign target of an intelligence investigation, a congressional aide said.

What was the urgency about passing this law before Congress took its August break?

The urgency was twofold. Three weeks ago, intelligence officials told lawmakers they were unable to obtain a "significant portion of what we should be getting" because of a judge's ruling in recent months that limited their ability to intercept conversations between foreigners that were routed through the United States - where a lot of computer equipment that handles Internet communications is located. An intelligence official familiar with the matter said the gap had to do with the time involved in processing a warrant. The disclosure of this intelligence gap coincided with a new intelligence report warning of a heightened terrorist threat to the United States. With Congress heading for its month-long summer recess, lawmakers agreed that a short-term fix was needed.

Democrats felt pressured to address the gap before they left town and were unable to pass a measure requiring more court oversight, as many wanted. So many accepted a broader surveillance measure backed by the White House. This law will only be in effect for the next six months.

Plugging a security gap seems to make sense. What is it about the new law that opponents don't like?

The White House and congressional Democrats agreed on the need to close the gap, but differed on how to do it. Both sides said the law should be clarified to ensure that conversations between foreigners could be monitored without a warrant.

The clash arose on the question of warrantless surveillance of conversations between foreigners and people inside the United States. The administration said that it needed quick access to such conversations, and obtaining a warrant would delay intelligence collection.

Many Democrats, however, said the White House's measure went far beyond what was needed to fix the specific intelligence gap.

They said there should be court oversight of government interception conversations involving Americans, even if technically the spy operation was directed at a foreigner. They also wanted to speed the warrant applications and approval process by giving the government more resources to do so.

Much of what the NSA does is classified. Are there questions about the law and how it will work that are difficult for outsiders to answer?

Yes, the largest question critics have raised is whether the administration will consider itself bound by this law. The Bush administration justified previous warrantless surveillance operations, like the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," on a secret presidential order invoking the president's powers as commander-in-chief.

IRS Fails Social Engineering Test

2007-08-06T08:06:00.000-05:00

A new report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) gives details of an audit that showed that a majority of IRS employees surrendered sensitive information, including computer log-on passwords, to investigators using social engineering techniques.

Employees Continue to Be Susceptible to Social Engineering Attempts That Could Be Used by Hackers (22 page PDF).

We made 102 telephone calls to IRS employees, including managers and a contractor, and posed as computer support helpdesk representatives. Under this scenario, we asked for each employee’s assistance to correct a computer problem and requested that the employee provide his or her username and temporarily change his or her password to one we suggested. We were able to convince 61 (60 percent) of the 102 employees to comply with our requests. As part of the audit, we also evaluated whether employees contacted appropriate offices to report or validate our test calls. Only 8 of the 102 employees in our sample contacted either the audit team, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Office of Investigations, or the IRS computer security organization to validate our test as being part of an official Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration audit.

The above conditions were particularly alarming because we had conducted similar social engineering test telephone calls in August 2001 and December 2004. Our 2001 and 2004 test calls yielded 71 percent and 35 percent noncompliance rates, respectively. In response to these two prior audits, the IRS took corrective actions to raise awareness of password protection requirements and social engineering attempts. However, the corrective actions have not been effective. Based on the results of this audit, we conclude employees either do not fully understand security requirements for password protection or do not place a sufficiently high priority on protecting taxpayer data in their day-to-day work. To better understand employee behavior, we asked the employees in our sample why they did not comply with IRS password security requirements. Some of the notable reasons given were that the employee thought the scenario sounded legitimate and believable, did not think changing his or her password was the same as disclosing the password, or had experienced past computer problems.

When employees are susceptible to social engineering attempts, the IRS is at risk of providing unauthorized persons access to computer resources and taxpayer data. In addition, when attempts at social engineering are not reported to appropriate personnel, the IRS cannot investigate incidents and take action to minimize the effect of a security breach. ...

While our calls were part of an official TIGTA audit, hackers could include a reference to a nonexistent TIGTA audit in an attempt to divert attention from their social engineering attempts, particularly if an employee questions the call.

California Moves To Prevent Electronic Voting Skullduggery

2007-08-04T07:29:00.000-05:00

Expressing concern that several brands of electronic voting machines used in California were vulnerable to tampering, Secretary of State Debra Bowen late Friday ordered new security protections be added and limited the use of two types of machines that were to be used in next year's elections in several Southern California counties.

Bowen also withdrew state approval of the InkaVote Plus machines used in Los Angeles County, saying that the machines' maker, Election Systems and Software, had failed to submit its equipment to her office in time to analyze its vulnerability to hacking.

She said her office would examine the InkaVote machines and expressed optimism that they would win approval in time to be used in next year's elections, but did not say what would happen if the machines failed her tests. ...

Her announcement, made just nine minutes before a midnight deadline, was condemned by the head of the state's county registrar's association, Contra Costa Registrar Stephen Weir.

Weir said Bowen's actions -- along with an unusual audit in which she dispatched several computer experts to try to hack into the machines, which they did -- had undermined public confidence in the security of the new electronic machines. But her solutions, he said, would not do anything to restore the public peace of mind, especially for elections that will occur this year, such as a special Congressional election in Los Angeles in two weeks. ...

Bowen ordered that some machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems be limited to one per polling place to limit the chances that they could be tampered with. The Sequoia machines are used in Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties. ...

The security requirements Bowen imposed include: reinstalling the software before the Feb. 5. election to ensure it has not already been tampered with; placing special seals at vulnerable parts of the machines to reveal tampering; securing each machines at the close of each day of early voting; assigning a specific election monitor to safeguard each machine; and conducting a complete manual count of all votes cast. ...

Alan Dechert, president of Open Voting Consortium, and group that is critical of the electronic voting machines, said many activists would be critical that Bowen did not completely decertify those machines. "She's not asking for changes to hardware or software," he said. "This is not really doing much for transparency."

Bowen's actions came on the heels of an audit she released last week. It found that machines manufactured by Diebold Hart and Sequoia-which are used by more than twenty Californian counties--could be compromised either through manipulating the software or physically breaking into the computer hardware.

Misdirection Op

2007-08-03T09:41:00.000-05:00

Now we know why the White House has recently gotten its panties all in a bunch to get FISA changed.

A judge has ruled that an important part of the U.S. COMINT program is illegal.

But there is a deception story being floated by the administration involving this "revelation."

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision. ...

The practical effect has been to block the NSA's efforts to collect information from a large volume of foreign calls and e-mails that passes through U.S. communications nodes clustered around New York and California. Both Democrats and Republicans have signaled they are eager to fix that problem through amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). ...

Gaining access to the foreign communications at issue would allow the NSA to tap into the huge volume of calls, faxes and e-mails that pass from one foreign country to another by way of fiber-optic connections in the United States.

"If you're calling from Germany to Japan or China, it's very possible that the call gets routed through the United States, despite the fact that there are geographically much more direct routes to Asia," said Stephan Beckert of Telegeography Inc. ...

Since March, the administration has quickly tried to build a case for the legislation, while concealing from the public and many in Congress a key event that appears to have driven the effort.

Do not be fooled by the administration about this. The spying being discussed here is not one of the important aspects of the extra-legal NSA domestic warrantless program that has brought the heat down upon the White House.

Intercepting "foreigner to foreigner while both outside the USA" communications has never required a FISA warrant and is not illegal.

The routing of so much of this traffic through the United States is not just an accident of technology. It is a marriage of convenience. The intelligence community assumed that it would be able to take advantage of their traditional legal ability to spy on foreigners and that building the modern telecom backbone in the USA and using it for international transit traffic would make their lives easier.

A judge obviously thought otherwise.

The politics of this "revelation" is important. The White House is already conflating this matter with the illegal NSA CATCH-ALL program that was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005. Sleight-of-hand always requires something in the decoy hand. Todays news is the decoy.

Some Things "Have To Ripen in a Certain Way"

2007-08-02T07:35:00.001-05:00

I guarantee that if Chiquita had been paying protection to FARC, rather than the right-wing AUC, the ambiguity about the legality of the act wouldn't have been in question.

On April 24, 2003, a board member of Chiquita International Brands disclosed to a top official at the Justice Department that the king of the banana trade was evidently breaking the nation's anti-terrorism laws.

Roderick M. Hills, who had sought the meeting with former law firm colleague Michael Chertoff, explained that Chiquita was paying "protection money" to a Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. Hills said he knew that such payments were illegal, according to sources and court records, but said that he needed Chertoff's advice.

Chiquita, Hills said, would have to pull out of the country if it could not continue to pay the violent right-wing group to secure its Colombian banana plantations. Chertoff, then assistant attorney general and now secretary of homeland security, affirmed that the payments were illegal but said to wait for more feedback, according to five sources familiar with the meeting.

Justice officials have acknowledged in court papers that an official at the meeting said they understood Chiquita's situation was "complicated," and three of the sources identified that official as Chertoff. They said he promised to get back to the company after conferring with national security advisers and the State Department about the larger ramifications for U.S. interests if the corporate giant pulled out overnight.

Sources close to Chiquita say that Chertoff never did get back to the company or its lawyers. ...

Chiquita's executives left the meeting convinced that the government had not clearly demanded that the payments stop. Federal prosecutors, however, are now weighing whether to charge Hills; Robert Olson, who was then Chiquita's general counsel; former Chiquita CEO Cyrus Friedheim; and other former company officials for approving the illegal payments, according to records and sources close to the probe.

The company has already pleaded guilty to making $1.7 million in payments to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), and it agreed to pay a $25 million fine. But last week, lawyers for the former Chiquita executives sent letters to the Justice Department, asserting that their clients did not intentionally break the law but believed they were waiting for an answer from the highest levels of the Bush administration. ...

But legal sources on both sides say there was a genuine debate within the Justice Department about the seriousness of the crime of paying AUC. For some high-level administration officials, Chiquita's payments were not aiding an obvious terrorism threat such as al-Qaeda; instead, the cash was going to a violent South American group helping a major U.S. company maintain a stabilizing presence in Colombia.

The prosecution first centered solely on Cincinnati-based Chiquita, the world's largest banana producer and one of its largest food-distribution companies. It has operations in 70 countries and 25,000 employees, and has been in Colombia for more than a century, dating to the days when the company was called United Fruit. [see also 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état]

(...)

On April 24 [2003], the company executives met with Justice officials, including Chertoff. They disclosed the payments and Justice officials said they were against the law. Hills said he agreed, but stressed that Chiquita would have to withdraw from the country if it did not pay AUC, and noted this could affect U.S. security interests in that region.

That's when, according to the five sources, Chertoff acknowledged that the matter was complicated, and said that he would get back to them after conferring with other administration officials.

A week later, Hills and Olson told the company board's audit committee that Justice had advised them that there would be "no liability for past conduct" and that there was no "conclusion on continuing the payments," according to a summary of the case filed by the prosecution. The company authorized new payments to AUC starting on May 5.

The astonishing thing about this is that the Justice Department did eventually bring charges against Chiquita. The publicity -- especially in Latin America -- surrounding the controversy is what forced DOJ's hand.

DOJ HQ Intervenes in Case, US Attorney Resists Pressure, Gets On Dismissal List

2007-08-01T07:44:00.000-05:00

The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

Brownlee ultimately kept his job. But as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales confronts withering criticism over the dismissals, the episode in the OxyContin case provides fresh evidence of efforts by senior officials in the department's headquarters to sway the work of U.S. attorneys' offices. ...

Brownlee said the head of the criminal division had authorized him that afternoon to execute the plea agreement. In his testimony and in an interview afterward, Brownlee recounted that he asked Elston whether he was calling for his boss, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and Elston replied, "No."

"I told him to leave it alone, to go away," Brownlee said, "and he did."

But Elston's attorney, Robert N. Driscoll, said his client had telephoned Brownlee at the direction of McNulty, who that evening had received an appeal for more time by Mary Jo White, a defense lawyer representing an executive for OxyContin's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. White is a former Manhattan U.S. attorney.

A Justice official, who spoke about internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity, also said McNulty had asked his chief of staff to place the call.

Elston was McNulty's top aide until he stepped down in June amid the controversy over the prosecutors' firings. McNulty also has resigned, effective Friday, becoming the sixth senior aide to Gonzales involved in the controversy to leave the department in recent months.

Brownlee -- who testified that he had not received negative performance reviews -- said that he was "concerned" about his name appearing on the firing list and that he spoke to McNulty about it. "He assured me that Mr. Elston was a good man," Brownlee said. "I had my own views."

In addition to assembling the Nov. 1 list of five prosecutors, including Brownlee, who were recommended for dismissal, Elston also played a controversial role in trying to quell the political uproar after the firings took place. Four of those prosecutors have told Congress that Elston warned them that Gonzales might criticize them in public if they spoke out about the circumstances of their removal.

GOP Targeting California's 'Winner Takes All' Electoral College Vote Law

2007-07-31T09:03:00.000-05:00

A prominent Republican lawyer wants to put a proposal on the California ballot next year that could shake up the 2008 presidential contest, a change Democrats say would rig the election.

California awards its cache of 55 electoral votes to the statewide winner in presidential elections -- the largest single prize in the nation. But under the proposal, the statewide winner would get only two electoral votes.

The rest would be distributed to the winning candidate in each of the state's congressional districts. In effect, that would create 53 races, each with one electoral vote up for grabs.

The left-leaning state has voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections. But the change -- if it qualifies for one of two primary ballots next year and is approved by voters -- would mean that a Republican would be positioned the following November to snatch 20 or more electoral votes in GOP-leaning districts.

That's a number equal to winning Ohio.

The so-called Presidential Election Reform Act is being pushed by Thomas Hiltachk, a lawyer in a Sacramento firm that represents the California Republican Party and has worked with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He did not return phone messages left Monday at his office.

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said the governor is not involved with the proposed initiative, and party officials said they have no connection to it.

Democratic consultant Chris Lehane called the plan "an effort to rig the system in order to fix the election."

"If this change is made, it will virtually guarantee that a Republican wins the White House in 2008," Lehane said in an e-mail.

Nineteen of the state's 53 congressional districts are represented by Republicans. President Bush carried 22 districts in 2004, while losing the statewide vote by double digits.

Only Maine and Nebraska allocate electoral votes by congressional district.

A draft of the proposed initiative says nixing the winner-take-all system would give presidential candidates "an incentive to campaign in California. ... Many of the geographic areas of the state would be as important to a candidate's chance for victory as many of the smaller states."

"We'll take a serious look at it, once it qualifies for the ballot," state Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring said.

If it does qualify, Democrats probably would have to spend millions of dollars to defeat it, which could drain money from other races. And there are expected to be additional ballot proposals on abortion and other social issues that could drive up GOP turnout.

The state already moved its presidential primary to Feb. 5 in an attempt to increase its clout in national politics.

In that primary, Republicans will award delegates only to the top vote-getter in each congressional district. A Democrat can qualify for a delegate by winning at least 15 percent of the vote in a district.

The GOP Hearts Hillary

2007-07-30T06:48:00.000-05:00

It's not exactly a secret that the Republicans intensely desire to run against Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president in 2008.

All you have to do is speak to any GOP political type to find this out.

The media has finally decided to report on this idea. But they are pretending that it is a new development.

Since when is Hillary Clinton the pin-up gal of conservative pundits?

After Clinton delivered a foreign-policy cold-cock to Barack Obama's head during a Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday:

— Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative weekly, wrote that she delivered her answer to the now-famous "would-you-meet-with-despots" question "firmly and coolly."

— Rich Lowry of National Review, a conservative weekly, gushed like a schoolboy with a new crush: "She excels . . . Clinton has run a nearly flawless campaign and has done more than any other Democrat to show she's ready to be president."

— David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, wrote that Clinton "seems to offer the perfect combination of experience and change" and said she's changing perceptions in a way that may persuade voters to give her a second look.

— Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist of The Washington Post, summed up the Clinton-Obama smackdown: "The grizzled veteran showed up the clueless rookie."

All this from members of a crowd that's spent the better part of two decades demonizing Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Is the conservative chattering class just hedging its bets, wary that Clinton might win the White House and banish them all?

Or is it a set-up: The vast right-wing conspiracy pumping up the polarizing candidate they really want to face in the general election?

Naturally, no one in politics wants to talk about that with their names attached, lest they alienate people whose favor they need. But here's what some political strategists said when given anonymity:

"Absolutely," said one Democrat, citing Clinton's high unfavorable ratings (42 percent in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, twice Obama's 21 percent). "Look at Fox News. They play her up all the time. Image-wise, they think she's the one Democrat they can beat right now."

"A plausible theory," said a Republican strategist with a top-tier GOP candidate. "Hillary Clinton is our best shot to win the White House. That's pretty much consensus by Republican insiders. It's a really crappy environment for us right now. What she does, and what Obama doesn't do yet, is single-handedly solve our base problems. Because of who she is."

This Sounds Familiar

2007-07-29T07:32:00.000-05:00

You heard it here first:

As incredible as it may seem to the liberal blogosphere, Alberto Gonzales is almost certainly telling the truth here.

There is evidence that there is more than one extra-legal warrantless domestic surveillance program that involves massive data mining of American citizens.

Now the New York Times is on to the scent of the truth, which involves the super-secret CATCH-ALL program.

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

The N.S.A.'s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining.

If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales' defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct. ...

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Here's an important hint. The program involves the data mining of every phone call and e-mail made in the United States.

More than that, we are obliged not to say openly.

More Evidence of Insecure Electronic Voting Systems

2007-07-28T08:51:00.000-05:00

The potential for electronic voting skullduggery appears to be engineered into some of the most popular modern polling technology.

If this wasn't the case, these systems would be more tamper-proof.

Insecure electronic slot machines would never be officially tolerated in Vegas.

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

The House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts.

The House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, and the original sponsor of the bill, Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, said it would require hundreds of counties with paperless machines to install backup paper trails by the presidential election next year while giving most states until 2012 to upgrade their machines further.

Critics of the machines said that some of the measures would be just stopgaps and that the California reports showed that security problems needed to be addressed more urgently.

The California reports said the scientists, acting at the state's request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.

Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.

The reports said the investigators had created situations for each system "in which these weaknesses could be exploited to affect the correct recording, reporting and tallying of votes."

Voting experts said the review could prompt the California secretary of state, Debra Bowen, to ban the use of some of the machines in the 2008 elections unless extra security precautions were taken and the election results were closely audited.

Matthew A. Bishop, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who led the team that tried to compromise the machines, said his group was surprised by how easy it was not only to pick the physical locks on the machines, but also to break through the software defenses meant to block intruders.

Professor Bishop said that all the machines had problems and that one of the biggest was that the manufacturers appeared to have added the security measures after the basic systems had been designed.

By contrast, he said, the best way to create strong defenses is "to build security in from the design, in Phase 1."

The reports also said the investigators had found possible problems not only with computerized touch-screen machines, but also with optical scanning systems and broader election-management software.

Noriega Trying To Stop Extradition

2007-07-27T06:37:00.000-05:00

Manuel Noriega is scheduled to be released from prison Sept. 9, but there is a good chance that he will be sent to France to stand trial there.

The U.S. government had been treating Noriega while in prison as a POW (allowing him to wear his uniform, etc), in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. This should prevent him from being extradited upon release to any other country, but now the government is arguing otherwise.

Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on Thursday made his first court appearance in a dozen years, his face expressionless as his lawyers fought a French request for extradition once he is released from a Florida prison in September.

A black coat covering his general's uniform and insignia, the 72-year-old answered tersely in Spanish to U.S. Magistrate William C. Turnoff's questions about his name, age and whether he understood the proceedings.

The first hearing on the U.S.-backed French extradition bid to try him on money-laundering charges took place in the same 1930s-era courtroom where Noriega was convicted on drug-trafficking charges in 1992 and given a 40-year sentence. He was arrested in January 1990 by U.S. forces after they invaded Panama the month before.

Because Noriega was taken into custody during the U.S. invasion ordered by President George H.W. Bush, he was deemed a prisoner of war by U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler, who presided over his trial and a decade ago also reduced his sentence by 10 years.

Attorneys Jon May and Frank Rubino, flanking the diminutive Noriega, asked Turnoff to postpone any action on the extradition request until Hoeveler rules on their contention that as a POW, Noriega must be returned to his home country once his U.S. sentence is completed.

Now a born-again Christian, Noriega has been credited with time for good behavior and is due for release from his apartment-like cell at a Southwest Miami prison on Sept. 9.

Turnoff said that whatever Hoeveler decides on the POW issue would be "controlling in this matter," but that he saw no reason not to proceed with the extradition case pending that decision. He set an Aug. 28 hearing, more than two weeks after an Aug. 10 session Hoeveler has scheduled to consider Noriega's request to be sent home after his release.

Under the Geneva Convention, a POW must be returned to his home country once the conflict and any sentence have concluded. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Patrick Sullivan argued in a brief to Hoeveler that the rules cannot be invoked to block extradition.

"The defendant can be extradited to France in accordance with all of the United States' treaty obligations — including its obligations under the Geneva Conventions," Sullivan argued.

An appeal by Noriega's lawyers for his release on bond pending the extradition hearing was denied by the judge, who noted that Noriega's prison term runs for seven more weeks. Rubino's claim that Noriega has ties to the community "as a resident of South Florida for 18 years and currently employed by the U.S. government" drew laughter from the packed courtroom. ...

The U.S. move to oust Noriega and the charges that sent him to prison were inspired by intelligence that he had been collaborating with Colombia's Medellin drug cartel to ship cocaine to the United States via Panama, receiving as much as $500,000 per delivery. But it emerged during his trial that he also had been on the CIA payroll for years.

Gonzales Is Likely Telling The Truth

2007-07-26T07:42:00.000-05:00

As incredible as it may seem to the liberal blogosphere, Alberto Gonzales is almost certainly telling the truth here.

There is evidence that there is more than one extra-legal warrantless domestic surveillance program that involves massive data mining of American citizens.

Certain congressional leaders (the "group of eight") know this, and another lawmaker -- Arlen Specter, who is the go-to man for cover-ups dating back to the Kennedy assassination -- on Tuesday actively shut Gonzales up when it appeared that the AG was going to let too much information slip out during questioning at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy threatened yesterday to request a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, as Democrats said an intelligence official's statement about a classified surveillance program was at odds with Gonzales's sworn testimony.

The latest dispute involving public remarks by Gonzales concerned the topic of a March 10, 2004, White House briefing for members of Congress. Gonzales, in congressional testimony Tuesday, said the purpose of the briefing was to address what he called "intelligence activities" that were the subject of a legal dispute inside the administration.

Gonzales testified that the meeting was not called to discuss a dispute over the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program, which he has repeatedly said attracted no serious controversy inside the administration.

But a letter sent to Congress in May 2006 by then-Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte described the congressional meeting as a "briefing on the Terrorist Surveillance Program," the name that President Bush has publicly used to describe the warrantless surveillance program.

Democrats pointed to the Negroponte letter yesterday in an effort to portray Gonzales's remarks as misleading. They said Gonzales is trying to conceal the existence of a dispute between White House and Justice Department lawyers that involved the surveillance program, which many Democrats have criticized as an illegal or unjustified abuse of executive-branch authority.

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate intelligence committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), have also said the meeting focused on the NSA program and have strongly disputed other Gonzales characterizations of the meeting.

Leahy (D-Vt.) told reporters he is giving Gonzales until late next week to revise his testimony about the surveillance program or he will ask Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to conduct a perjury inquiry: "I'll ask the inspector general to determine who's telling the truth."

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said yesterday that Gonzales "stands by his testimony," and that "the disagreement . . . was not about the particular intelligence activity that has been publicly described by the president. It was about other highly classified intelligence activities." ...

Gonzales has repeatedly stood by his original testimony, in which he said the disagreement was not about "the program that the president has confirmed." A Justice official conceded during a background briefing for reporters this week that Gonzales's "linguistic parsing" has caused some confusion, but said that he spoke accurately.

In June, Gonzales veered briefly from his own account when he said at a news conference that the dispute described by Comey centered on the NSA program. But Roehrkasse told The Washington Post several days later that Gonzales misspoke.

Gonzales' real concern is to avoid perjuring himself -- thus his basically truthful testimony. Paradoxically, he is not worried about having enabled the far more serious violations of FISA because President Bush has expressly authorized these, in part through a classified United States Signals Intercepts Directive.

One Extra-Legal Spying Program Was Insufficient

2007-07-25T07:24:00.000-05:00

The preponderance of the evidence is that there are multiple warrantless domestic spying programs -- above and beyond the extra-legal NSA program -- that have been initiated by the Bush administration.

We discussed this inescapable conclusion on this blog way back on February 7, 2006 (see What Other Illegalities Are They Hiding?).

Now, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is having trouble keeping his sworn testimony on these programs consistent.

At the hearing, several senators attacked Mr. Gonzales’s assertions under oath in testimony last year that there had been no disagreement inside the Bush administration over the N.S.A. surveillance program.

Mr. Specter asked Mr. Gonzales, "What credibility is left for you when you say there's no disagreement?"

In answers that seemed to perplex and further exasperate senators, Mr. Gonzales said his past testimony about the program was correct. He said there was no debate about the N.S.A. program whose existence was confirmed by Mr. Bush in December 2005, after it was disclosed by The New York Times.

He insisted, however, that there were other "intelligence activities" that prompted the dispute in 2004 in which Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey and other Justice Department officials had threatened to quit. ...

Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, a Judiciary Committee member who also sits on the Intelligence Committee and has been briefed on the classified N.S.A. activities, said he was "appalled" by Mr. Gonzales’s testimony. "I believe your testimony is misleading at best," Mr. Feingold said. He said he could not elaborate in an unclassified hearing.

Everyone knows that the U.S. government has myriad "other intelligence activities."

But how many of these are legally tenuous enough to prompt a then-Attorney General and his top aides to threaten to resign over them?

More Rovian Political Skullduggery

2007-07-24T08:22:00.000-05:00

One should probably keep in mind the fact that these ambassadors were political appointees who didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to attend these talks.

That's why nobody blew the whistle on these violations of the Hatch Act earlier.

White House aides have conducted at least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush administration's top diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008 and a "general political briefing" at the Peace Corps headquarters after the 2002 midterm elections.

The briefings, mostly run by Rove's deputies at the White House political affairs office, began in early 2001 and included detailed analyses for senior officials of the political landscape surrounding critical congressional and gubernatorial races, according to documents obtained by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The documents show for the first time how the White House sought to ensure that even its appointees involved in foreign policy were kept attuned to the administration's election goals. Such briefings occurred semi-regularly over the past six years for staffers dealing with domestic policy, White House officials have previously acknowledged.

In one instance, State Department aides attended a White House meeting at which political officials examined the 55 most critical House races for 2002 and the media markets most critical to battleground states for President Bush's reelection fight in 2004, according to documents the department provided to the Senate committee.

On Jan. 4, just after the 2006 elections tossed the Republicans out of congressional power, Rove met at the White House with six U.S. ambassadors to key European missions and the consul general to Bermuda while the diplomats were in Washington for a State Department conference.

According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on "corrupt" GOP lawmakers and "complacent incumbents." One chart in Taylor's presentation highlighted the GOP's top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.

In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, asked whether the briefings inappropriately politicized the diplomatic agencies or violated prohibitions against political work by most federal employees.

"I do not understand why ambassadors, in Washington on official duty, would be briefed by White House officials on which Democratic House members are considered top targets by the Republican party for defeat in 2008. Nor do I understand why department employees would need to be briefed on 'key media markets' in states that are 'competitive' for the president," Biden wrote. ...

The Hatch Act insulates virtually all federal workers from partisan politics and bars the use of federal resources -- including office buildings, phones and computers -- for partisan purposes. ...

The ambassadors included in the Rove briefing were Eduardo Aguirre Jr. of Spain, James P. Cain of Denmark, Alfred Hoffman Jr. of Portugal, Ronald Spogli of Italy, Craig Stapleton of France and Robert Tuttle of Britain. Gregory Slayton, the consul general to Bermuda, also attended.

In total, the seven diplomats donated more than $1.6 million to Republican causes from 2000 through 2006, according to a Center for Responsive Politics report on large Bush donors who were named ambassadors.

Allowing The Abuse of Prisoners Must Make Him Feel Like A Tough Guy

2007-07-23T07:06:00.000-05:00

From Bush's Torture Ban is full of Loopholes by David Cole.

Once upon a time, a U.S. official's condemnation of torture was a statement of moral principle. Today, it is an opportunity for obfuscation. We have learned that when President Bush says, "We don't torture," it's important to read the fine print. So it was once again on July 20, when Bush issued a long-awaited executive order purporting to regulate interrogation tactics used by the CIA in the "war on terror." According to a White House press release, the order provides "clear rules" to implement the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of detainees in wartime -- rules the administration insisted did not even apply to the "war on terror" until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last summer. But while the new rules reflect a significant retreat by the administration from its initial torture policies, they are anything but "clear," come far too late in the day, and in any event are unenforceable.

The executive order prohibits the CIA from using torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, sexual abuse, denigration of religion and serious "acts of violence" in its interrogations. While one might have thought that the impermissibility of such tactics in official U.S. interrogations would go without saying, it has not been so since 9/11. This is an administration that narrowly defined "torture" to permit the use of sexual abuse, stress positions, injecting suspects with intravenous fluids until they urinate on themselves, prolonged sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme heat and cold and "waterboarding," i.e., simulated drowning. This is an administration that adopted as official legal policy the counterintuitive and deeply immoral position that international law's ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" did not apply to foreigners held by the U.S. outside U.S. borders. And this is an administration that opined that the president could order torture itself if he so chose as a way of "engaging the enemy," notwithstanding a federal criminal statute and ratified treaty banning torture under all circumstances, including war.

In light of that history, an executive order that categorically bans torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is a significant step in the right direction. And make no mistake -- the administration would never have taken this step of its own accord. President Bush was forced to act by a combination of the Abu Ghraib photographs, international and domestic condemnation of the administration's torture tactics, Congress' overwhelming and veto-proof repudiation of the administration's interpretation of "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," and the Supreme Court's rejection of the contention that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaida.

But how much of a step the administration has really taken remains a serious question. The actual tactics the CIA is authorized to use remain classified, based on the bogus claim that agency interrogators need to keep detainees guessing about how far they can go in order to interrogate effectively. The Army, by contrast, has set forth for the world to see the specific tactics its interrogators can employ -- in the Army Field Manual. And of course, it is black-letter law that no use or threat of physical force is permissible for state and federal police interrogations. Yet both the Army and domestic police obtain useful information from interrogations every day. The limits do not need to be secret for interrogation to be effective.

While the executive order flatly forbids torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, its failure to specify permissible and impermissible techniques seems designed to leave the CIA wiggle room. A prohibition on "acts of violence," for example, applies only to those violent acts "serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhuman treatment," as defined by the Military Commissions Act. The MCA, in turn, limits "cruel and inhuman treatment" to the infliction of bodily injury that entails: "(i) a substantial risk of death; (ii) extreme physical pain; (iii) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature (other than cuts, abrasions, or bruises); or (iv) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty." In other words, the president's order appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or "extreme physical pain," an entirely subjective term.

Article continues at Salon.

White House Gets Snippy About Osama

2007-07-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

Paul Joseph Watson makes a point about the phantom bogeyman of the "war on terror."

White House Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend was asked at a press conference earlier this week what evidence she had that Osama Bin Laden was still alive, considering the fact that he has been gravely ill and on a kidney dialysis machine while traversing the harsh terrain of the Pakistani border region. Townsend's response was to refuse to discuss the matter and immediately leave.

Here's the exchange from the end of the press conference:

REPORTER: Fran, do you know if Osama bin Laden is still on a dialysis machine, is he still ill? What? I mean, could you tell us about that? I mean, because -- it might be laughable, but people are finding it hard, six years this man is sick, moving around from cave to cave, and can't be found -- with a dialysis machine?

MS. TOWNSEND: Have you ever been to the tribal areas? I suspect not.

REPORTER: No, I haven't, but I've seen some great pictures from Ken Herman as to the rough terrain over that way. (Laughter.)

MS. TOWNSEND: It's not exactly easy. If it were easy he'd be dead.

REPORTER: But it's not easy for him to travel around with medics and machinery if he's sick. I mean, is he -- do you know from your intelligence if he's still sick? What do you know about that?

MS. TOWNSEND: I'm not going to talk about that.

Townsend immediately went on the defensive before cutting the press conference short and leaving the room.

Judging from all the available evidence, the White House knows for certain or at least strongly suspects that Bin Laden is dead and has been for many years, but they have chosen to maintain his myth for the purposes of political propaganda and as a hook on which to pin the advance of the imperial Neo-Con agenda. Townsend's reaction to the question is a clear indication that the Bush administration don't even want to be drawn into a debate on whether Bin Laden is still alive. The premise that he might be dead cannot even be entertained because it would strip "Al-Qaeda" of much of the menace that the Neo-Cons need to attach to the group in order to keep Americans frightened and obedient.

According to French newspaper Le Figaro, Bin Laden was on a kidney dialysis machine after he had one shipped to his base in Kandahar Afghanistan in 2000. Other accounts suggest he was also suffering from Hepatitis C at the time and had only two years left to live.

Journalists who met Bin Laden before 9/11 later proclaimed their disbelief about the fact that he didn't appear on video after December 2001 to brag about the fact that he had not been captured. Since that time, every single Bin Laden video tape released has contained vague non-specific messages and in many cases the footage is old and re-hashed. The "new" Bin Laden tape released last weekend was being aired for the third time, having been shot in October 2001 then broadcast in May 2002 before being aired again in October 2003.

Sober Doesn't Mean Sober-Minded

2007-07-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Friday more intense methods of CIA interrogation are acceptable in dealing with terrorism and he praised the broad powers granted law enforcement under the USA Patriot Act.

During a question-and-answer session at an Iowa campaign stop, Romney was asked about aggressive interrogation of those in U.S. custody. In recent years, questions have arisen as to whether the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques cross the line into torture and abuse, such as a practice known as water-boarding. ...

"I support tough interrogation techniques, enhanced interrogation techniques, in circumstances where there is a ticking time bomb, a ticking bomb," Romney said. "I do not support torture, but I do support enhanced interrogation techniques to learn from terrorists what we need to learn to keep the bombs from going off."

Romney answered questions about torture during a Republican debate in May but his answers Friday expanded on the issue.

The former Massachusetts governor also praised President Bush for enactment of the Patriot Act. Critics of the law contend that the government has invaded Americans' privacy using the newfound powers of the act, such as the Justice Department's authority on wiretapping.

"Our president, for all the criticism he receives, has kept America safe these last six years, and he has done it by: One pursuing the Patriot Act, which has given us the intelligence information we needed to find out who the bad guys were and get them out before they got us, and No. 2, when al-Qaida was calling America, he made sure someone here was listening," Romney said. "And No. 3 ... when terrorists were detained, were captured, he made sure we interrogated them."

Romney was beginning a two-day trip through western and northern Iowa, seeking the support of conservative voters by continuing his focus on values. He stressed the importance of enforcing obscenity laws, getting tough on retailers who sell violent video games to kids and education to reduce the number of unwed mothers.

Unitary Executive Run Amok

2007-07-20T07:20:00.000-05:00

This is really special:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts. ...

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration's stance "astonishing."

"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell said. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all." ...

Yesterday, a House Judiciary subcommittee voted to lay the groundwork for contempt proceedings against White House chief of staff Joshua B. Bolten, following a similar decision last week against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers. ...

Under long-established procedures and laws, the House and Senate can each pursue two kinds of criminal contempt proceedings, and the Senate also has a civil contempt option. The first, called statutory contempt, has been the avenue most frequently pursued in modern times, and is the one that requires a referral to the U.S. attorney in the District.

Both chambers also have an "inherent contempt" power, allowing either body to hold its own trials and even jail those found in defiance of Congress. Although widely used during the 19th century, the power has not been invoked since 1934 and Democratic lawmakers have not displayed an appetite for reviving the practice.

Bush Issues Executive Order "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq"

2007-07-19T06:23:00.000-05:00

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2.

(a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;

(b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

July 17, 2007.

Another Good Reason ONDCP Should Be Shuttered

2007-07-18T08:17:00.000-05:00

The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, an overt propaganda arm of the government, was used to assist GOP political candidates during the 2006 election season.

White House officials arranged for top officials at the Office of National Drug Control Policy to help as many as 18 vulnerable Republican congressmen by making appearances and sometimes announcing new federal grants in the lawmakers' districts in the months leading up to the November 2006 elections, a Democratic lawmaker said yesterday.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said documents obtained by his panel suggest that the appearances by the drug control officials were part of a larger White House effort to politicize the work of federal agencies that "may be more widespread than previously known."

Waxman cited a memo written by former White House political director Sara M. Taylor showing that John P. Walters, director of the drug control office, and his deputies traveled at taxpayer expense to about 20 events with vulnerable GOP members of Congress in the three months leading up to the elections. ...

(A) 1994 law bars the agency's officials from engaging in political activities even on their own time. ...

In Waxman's letter to Taylor yesterday, he asked Taylor to voluntarily appear at a deposition July 24 and possibly testify before his committee the following week. He said the panel wants her to explain a memo she wrote indicating that Walters and his deputies made trips at the behest of the White House political office in the months prior to the crucial midterm elections.

"I recognize that federal political appointees have traveled to events with members of Congress in prior administrations," Waxman wrote in his letter to Taylor. "What is striking about your memo to ONDCP is the degree of White House control, the number of trips and the agency involved." ...

(I)n the three months immediately leading up to the 2006 election, Walters or his deputies held events almost exclusively with GOP officials, many of whom were embroiled in tough reelection campaigns.

Two were held with then- Sen. James M. Talent of Missouri, who was defeated last November. At one of those stops, Walters announced that four Missouri counties had been designated part of a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which brings $500,000 in federal funding to help local law enforcement efforts, Waxman said. It was one of several grant announcements made while drug policy officials were appearing with GOP candidates.

Appearances also were held with Rep. Deborah Pryce of Ohio in Columbus and with then-Rep. Chris Chocola of Indiana in South Bend. Pryce narrowly won reelection, while Chocola lost in November.

"You included no Democrats or Independents in your memo of suggested travel for director Walters," Waxman said in his letter to Taylor.

DEA Intimidation Tactics in L.A.

2007-07-17T06:49:00.000-05:00

Raising the stakes in the federal government's war against medical marijuana, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has warned more than 150 Los Angeles landlords that they risk arrest and the loss of their properties if they continue renting to cannabis dispensaries.

The two-page letter sent last week by Timothy J. Landrum, DEA special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office, has whipped up worries among landlords and dispensary operators in a region that has seen a proliferation of the businesses in the last two years.

"I'm devastated," said Lisa Sawoya, who left her lucrative job selling high-tech hospital equipment to open a dispensary 18 months ago in Hollywood. "My landlord believes in cannabis as medicine. But they're taking the letter very seriously. So I'll be closing my doors at the end of this month."

Sarah Pullen, a DEA spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said the purpose of the letters was to "educate" property owners at risk because they were housing marijuana dispensaries.

"By renting their property to individuals violating fed drug laws, they are in and of themselves violating federal law," Pullen said. "These are definitely meant to serve as a notice. What might happen as to the continuing investigations, we'll just have to see."

The DEA move has focused entirely on Los Angeles. Activists suspect that the logistics and timing — more than a decade after state voters legalized medical marijuana with the passage of Proposition 215 — is intended to thin the ranks of Los Angeles dispensaries on the eve of new city regulations. A proposed city ordinance would cap and regulate the number of outlets, which now number more than 400.

Medical marijuana activists say most of the landlords take the threat seriously and have asked the dispensaries to move out.

"Raiding dispensaries and arresting patients hasn't worked to end medical marijuana, so the DEA is trying a new tactic and claiming a new victim in this war," said Steph Sherer of Americans for Safe Access, a group that supports medical marijuana.

Dale Gieringer of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws said the DEA crackdown won't stop patients' marijuana use. Instead, he said, they could be driven to find drugs in the illegal market, potentially putting themselves at risk.

In recent years, courts have upheld the federal government's ability to seize assets. After the DEA raided the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center in 2001, the federal government seized more than $300,000 that West Hollywood had loaned the center to purchase its building.

Gieringer said the most likely outcome of Landrum's letter would be numerous evictions and shutdowns followed by a few select forfeiture prosecutions "to scare remaining landlords."

Hap Kent, who runs Therapeutic Medicinal Health Resources in Sherman Oaks, said he hoped that the DEA would consider letting dispensaries operate for another six months, so patients weren't immediately pushed out on the streets.

"I don't want to put my landlord in jeopardy. I refuse to do that," said Kent, whose dispensary serves patients with AIDS, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and other serious afflictions. "All we want is an amicable amount of time."

Though the possibility of eviction looms for many of the dispensaries, Kent sees a possible silver lining — a political outcry that could get the state to finally respond to voters' wishes and take on the role of directly supplying medical marijuana.

"That's the way it should have been from the beginning," he said.

House Intelligence Committee as Portal to Shady Earmarks

2007-07-16T06:45:00.000-05:00

An internal investigation that the House Intelligence Committee has refused to make public portrays the panel as embarrassingly entangled in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal.

The report, a declassified version of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, describes the committee as a dysfunctional entity that served as a crossroads for almost every major figure in the ongoing criminal probe by the Justice Department.

The document describes breakdowns in leadership and controls that it says allowed Cunningham — the former congressman (R-Rancho Santa Fe) who began an eight-year prison term last year for taking bribes and evading taxes — to use his House position to steer millions of dollars to corrupt contractors.

When the committee's investigation was completed last year, the Republican-controlled panel would not release the results; now that the committee is controlled by Democrats, it still will not release the findings.

The report provides the most detailed account to date of how former CIA Executive Director Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, whose indictment on charges of defrauding the government was recently expanded, allegedly used committee connections to advance his career at the agency.

And the report sheds new light on the roles of senior committee aides, including retired CIA case officer Brant Bassett, who had ties to Cunningham and Foggo as well as to contractors accused of paying the congressman millions of dollars.

Overall, the document provides a penetrating look into how the committee itself became central to the scandal, describing an atmosphere in which senior aides were deeply troubled by Cunningham's actions but nevertheless complied with his requests out of fear.

But the report and committee members' ongoing disagreement over whether it should be released also reflect the political currents still swirling around the scandal.

For all its finger-pointing at staffers, the document fails to address whether other committee members were aware of Cunningham's abuses or were culpable. For instance, the report avoids any scrutiny of former Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who was chairman of the panel when Cunningham's most egregious abuses occurred. Goss went on to serve as CIA director, from September 2004 to May 2006.

Democrats complained bitterly a year ago when Republicans blocked release of a declassified version of the final report. But two weeks ago, several Democrats joined Republicans to block the report's release only to other members of Congress. Five Democrats objected to keeping the report secret.

Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), who assumed leadership of the committee after Democrats won control of Congress last fall, said some Democratic members were reluctant to release a document that singled out staff members for criticism.

"My view was that the report was an internal review, principally of staff activity, and that the full report — with all of the names of staff — was not intended for dissemination beyond the committee," Reyes said. "The important thing is that the committee took the review seriously and incorporated changes" designed to prevent future abuses.

Congressional sources said Reyes and other Democrats had initially voted to let other members of Congress see the document, but reversed course after a fierce protest by the panel's ranking GOP member, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan.

"They are so nervous about this report being out," said one congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Members oppose putting this thing out because you read this and the natural question is: 'Did you know this, and what did you do about it?' I don't think any members wanted that scrutiny."

The latest vote was prompted by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a critic of the so-called earmarks practice that allows members to slip special funding provisions into broader bills. Earmarks were one way Cunningham steered contracts to associates.

Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra, stressed that the investigation found no wrongdoing by staffers or other members, and said the findings were never intended to be released.

"The classified, internal documents of this committee should have remained just that," Ware said. "The decision by a member or staff, against a bipartisan vote of the committee, to disclose this information is beyond the pale and raises concerns about trust on the committee."

The report's principal author said in an interview that the terms under which he was hired to conduct the investigation prevented him from examining lawmakers' roles.

"There was an agreement as to what they wanted to look at, and that was not anything that could be looked at under the sun," said Michael Stern, a former attorney in the House counsel's office who was hired by the committee to lead the internal probe. "The language did not include the culpability or potential involvement of other members."

Stern said that the full, 59-page report he prepared a year ago was classified, but that he also provided the committee a 23-page version that had been scrubbed of classified material. The Times obtained the declassified version.

His Condition Seems Worse Than We Thought

2007-07-15T06:59:00.000-05:00

From a WaPo review of a new book about Dick Cheney by Stephen F. Hayes:

Hayes also interviewed Bush, who offers little insight but provides a stream of typically fractured syntax. Here is the president on his differences with Cheney -- whose daughter Mary is a lesbian -- over the subject of gay marriage: "My only ask was that if his daughter doubted my tolerance to her orientation that I would hope that he would help make it clear to Mary that this is a -- I was just worried about -- the reason I'd federalized the issue is because I was worried about the courts' defining the issue and that we'd end up with de facto marriage that was not traditionally defined, I guess is the best way to put it."

Hayes, of the Weekly Standard, seems to have been so intent to demonstrate access to the president that he neglected to do the merciful (and professional) thing which would have been to paraphrase the poor man's quote, or to edit it out altogether.

Cheney Impeachment as Necessary First Act

2007-07-14T07:20:00.000-05:00

Four more members of the U.S. House signed on this week as cosponsors of H. Res. 333, the measure that outlines articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney for actively and systematically seeking to deceive citizens and Congress about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and for openly threatening aggression against Iran.

Congressman Bob Filner, the chair of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, added his name, along with another veteran Democratic representative from California, Sam Farr.

The additional cosponsorships from Washington Democrat Jim McDermott, a Vietnam-era veteran who has been one of the House's sharpest critics of the war in Iraq, and Virginia Democrat James Moran bring the number of supporters for the articles to 14, including sponsor Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.

House Members are backing impeachment for a number of reasons, including anger with Cheney's involvement with manipulations of intelligence regarding Iraq, illegal spying on Americans and the promotion of torture, as well his recent attempt to avoid scrutiny by claiming that the Office of the Vice President was not part of the executive branch. And then there was President Bush's decision to commute the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff and co-conspirator in moves to punish former Ambassador Joe Wilson for exposing the deceptions that led to war.

The founders were very clear about the fact that abuses of the presidential authority to pardon or otherwise lift the burden of the law from subordinates was an impeachable offense. And a number of House members who take constitutional matters seriously have spoken up for impeachment since the commutation of Libby's sentence.

As Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. said after Bush commuted the sentence of a former aide who could connect the dots outlining presidential and vice presidential wrongdoing, "In her first weeks as leader of the Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi withdrew the notion of impeachment proceedings against either President Bush or Vice President Cheney. With the president's decision to once again subvert the legal process and the will of the American people by commuting the sentence of convicted felon Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, I call on House Democrats to reconsider impeachment proceedings."

That's an increasingly popular sentiment among Congressional Democrats, who are breaking with Pelosi to speak the "i" word.

It is an even more popular sentiment among the American people.

According to recent polling by the American Research Group, 54 percent of Americans want Cheney impeached. Among Democrats, that number rises to 76 percent. A majority of self-described independents back action to hold the vice president to account, as do a striking 17 percent of Republicans. With conservatives such as former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein coming out strongly for Cheney's impeachment, the numbers of Republicans who are pulling for accountability is likely to grow.

Hayden's Grim Briefing To Iraq Study Group

2007-07-12T07:43:00.000-05:00

From Bob Woodward:

Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a "Churchillian" vision of "victory" in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. "A constitutional order is emerging," he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function." ...

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing. ...

Hayden's description of Iraq's dysfunctional government provides some insight into the intelligence community's analysis of Maliki and the situation on the ground. Five days before his testimony, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had written a memo to Bush raising doubts about Maliki's ability to curb violence in Iraq, but his assessment was not as bleak as Hayden's.

Bush's own optimistic statement to members of the study group did not reflect the viewpoint of his CIA director. But a statement from another administration official interviewed by the panel the same day -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- took it into account.

Asked by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a member of the study group, if she was aware of the CIA's grim evaluation of Iraq, Rice replied, "We are aware of the dark assessment," but quickly added: "It is not without hope."

A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, disputed this account of Hayden's testimony to members of the study group. "That is not an accurate reflection of what Director Hayden said at that meeting, nor does it reflect his view, then or now," Mansfield said.

A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."

But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful."

Hayden, 62, a four-star Air Force general and career intelligence officer, has a reputation as a candid briefer. Since 2003, the CIA, which has more than 500 personnel in Iraq to assist in providing intelligence and analysis, has offered the most pessimistic view of any intelligence agency of both the Iraqi government's performance and the situation on the ground there. ...

A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, disputed this account of Hayden's testimony to members of the study group. "That is not an accurate reflection of what Director Hayden said at that meeting, nor does it reflect his view, then or now," Mansfield said.

A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."

But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful."

Hayden, 62, a four-star Air Force general and career intelligence officer, has a reputation as a candid briefer. Since 2003, the CIA, which has more than 500 personnel in Iraq to assist in providing intelligence and analysis, has offered the most pessimistic view of any intelligence agency of both the Iraqi government's performance and the situation on the ground there.

But the government itself was responsible for some of that violence, the CIA official said. "The Ministry of Interior is uniformed death squads, overseers of jails and torture facilities," he said. "Their funds are constantly misappropriated."

In his testimony, Hayden said that the United States had fundamental disagreements with Maliki's Shiite-dominated government on some of the most basic issues facing Iraq.

"We and the Iraqi government do not agree on who the enemy is," Hayden said, according to the written record. "For all the senior leaders of the Iraqi government, Baathists are the source of evil. There is a Baathist behind every bush."

Several participants in the interview described Hayden as dismayed by the startling level of violence in the country but skeptical of the ability of Iraqi forces -- either the military or the police -- to do anything about it.

Sara Taylor To Face Judiciary Committee

2007-07-11T06:32:00.000-05:00

Sara Taylor is scheduled for her turn in the barrel today.

Sara Taylor, the former White House political director, has agreed to answer some questions as a "willing and cooperative private citizen," during testimony about the United States attorney firings last year when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee later today.

But, as a former presidential adviser, she will also honor the president's invocation of executive privilege to keep quiet about "White House consideration, deliberations, or communications, whether internal or external, relating to the possible dismissal or appointment of United States attorneys," according to a written copy of her opening statement provided by her lawyer's office. Those parameters were set forth in a letter to Ms. Taylor's attorney, W. Neil Eggleston, from the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding.

Ms. Taylor acknowledges in the statement that differences may emerge about what falls under Mr. Fielding's parameters and that, "This may be frustrating to you and me." ...

Under Mr. Fielding's guidance Ms. Taylor would not be able to answer the key questions expected from the committee about the firings and the involvement of Mr. Bush’s political team and his top strategist, Karl Rove.

In her written testimony Ms. Taylor said she would not take it upon herself to disobey the president's request during today's hearing but said she would defer to the courts if it came to that in the future.

"While I may be unable to answer certain questions today," Ms. Taylor's opening statement reads, "I will answer those questions if the courts rule that this Committee's need for the information outweighs the president's assertion of executive privilege."

Gonzales as Serial Prevaricator

2007-07-10T07:02:00.000-05:00

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. ...

The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March. ...

Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The format of each memo was similar, and none minced words. ...

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports.

Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no counterevidence at the time."

A Questionable Claim of Iraq Course Change

2007-07-09T06:03:00.000-05:00

This article reflects the point of view of some of the more realistic members of the administration, but does not accurately portray Bush and Cheney's operative mode of denial in dealing with the current situation.

And we all know whose opinion will carry the day. Hint: it is the Fantasists, not the Realists.

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush's Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush's aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war's future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush's strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

"When you count up the votes that we've lost and the votes we're likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim," said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

That conclusion was echoed in interviews over the past few days by administration officials in the Pentagon, State Department and White House, as well as by outsiders who have been consulted about what the administration should do next. "Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point," the official said. "Lots of people are concluding that the president has got to get out ahead of this train."

In a sign of the concern, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates canceled plans for a four-nation tour of Latin America this week and will stay home to attend meetings on Iraq, the Pentagon announced yesterday. ...

Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a "post-surge redeployment."

The views of many of the participants in that discussion were unclear, and the officials interviewed could not provide any insight into what Vice President Dick Cheney had been telling President Bush.

They described Mr. Hadley as deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Mr. Rove. But they also said that Mr. Rove had warned that if Mr. Bush went too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections — and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Mr. Bush has always said he would oppose.

"Everyone's particularly worried about what happens when McCain gets back from Iraq," one official said, a reference to the latest trip to Baghdad by Senator John McCain, who has been a stalwart supporter of the "surge" strategy. Mr. McCain's travels, and his political troubles in the race for the Republican nomination for president, have fueled speculation that he may declare the Iraqi government incapable of the kind of political accommodations that the crackdown on violence was supposed to permit.

The expressed concern about the opinion of John McCain is laughable.

A more embarrassing display of preventable self-immolation than McCain's recent performance would be difficult to imagine.

Michael Jackson comes to mind.

Once someone so thoroughly discredits themselves, it becomes impossible for their next act to summon up enough interest to remain relevant.

Besides, with Bush and minions trumpeting the imminent danger of "Al Qaeda" following us back from Iraq if we leave, no one should be expecting a course change until the U.S. Army breaks down from being over-extended (now predicted for Spring 2008).

Some believe that the increasing Republican political angst over the war will result in a change of heart for the administration. Folks who think this to be the case must remind themselves of the "Unitary Executive" theory which governs decisions at the highest level.

What would ordinarily be constraints upon the office of the president -- including an impending revolt from his own party -- have been redefined into insignificance.

"In a Democracy, the people get the government they deserve." --Alexis de Tocqueville

Appeals Court Throws Out Suit Over Warrantless Spying

2007-07-07T06:27:00.000-05:00

A divided federal appeals court yesterday dismissed a case challenging the National Security Agency's program to wiretap without warrants the international communications of some Americans, reversing a trial judge's order that the program be shut down.

The majority in a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled on a narrow ground, saying the plaintiffs, including lawyers and journalists, could not show injury direct and concrete enough to allow them to have standing to sue.

Because it may be impossible for any plaintiff to demonstrate injury from the highly classified wiretapping program, the effect of the ruling was to insulate it from judicial scrutiny. Thus, the program's secrecy is proving to be its best legal protection.

The majority did not rule on the merits of the case, though the appeals court judge who wrote the lead opinion, Judge Alice M. Batchelder, said the case had provoked "a cascade of serious questions." She listed five, including whether the program violated a 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, along with the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. ...

A number of other challenges to the program have been consolidated before a federal judge in San Francisco, and the federal appeals court there, the Ninth Circuit, will hear an appeal from one of the judge's preliminary rulings next month.

Some of the plaintiffs in that case contend that they have been personally injured by the program, which if proved could give them standing to sue, even under yesterday's ruling. Those plaintiffs, an Islamic charity and two of its lawyers, say they have seen a classified document confirming that their communications were actually intercepted. ...

The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We are deeply disappointed," the group's legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, said in a statement, "by today's decision that insulates the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance activities from judicial review and deprives Americans of any ability to challenge the illegal surveillance of their telephone calls and e-mails."

Mr. Shapiro said the A.C.L.U. was weighing its options, including the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Domenici's "Shift" Is Nearly Meaningless

2007-07-06T07:05:00.000-05:00

Sen. Pete Domenici is a GOP hack who is deeply implicated in pressuring the ousted U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in the direction of politically motivated prosecutions of Democrats during the last election cycle.

And anyone stupid enough to be -- only now -- concluding that the Iraq War is a catastrophe is a fool.

Yet his newfound opposition to the Republican war is being treated as a big deal. It is said to be a meaningful sign that the worm is turning for President Bush.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

I see a panicking GOP that is reluctantly (and hesitatingly) exploring the unfamiliar territory of less-than-complete warmongering.

Domenici's newsmaking shift in position does not call for a U.S. troop withdrawal. He simply is joining a chorus that is attempting to disassociate his Party from responsibility for the ongoing carnage in Iraq.

Signing on to a bill endorsing last December's Iraq Study Group recommendations isn't exactly an earth-shaking development.

On the bright side, he will get to hear about his disloyalty and cowardice from Bush's core -- the 23% of people who are unredeemably authoritarian -- those who haven't a clue about what it means to be an American.

Some Perspective On The Libby Commutation

2007-07-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

From San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford:

So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn sun explodes.

You have to laugh. You have to laugh because if you do not laugh you will likely be overcome by a mad desire to stab yourself in the eye with a sharp feral cat and/or shoot yourself in the toe with a high-powered staple gun, over and over again, all while tearing out pages of the United States Constitution and crumpling them into tiny little balls and hurling them into the smoldering firepit of who-the-hell-cares as you shiver in the corner and swig from a bottle of Knob Creek and wail at the moon. Or maybe that's just me.

But really, you do have to laugh at the vicious antics this administration, and perhaps Dick Cheney in particular, that most nefarious molester of U.S. law and ignorer of all political integrity and deeply homophobic father of a creepily lesbian daughter and overall gruntingly guff sneerer at all moral principle, masterful mocker of everything you somehow still manage to think, even in your most despondent and ethically disillusioned state, that American politics is somehow supposed to be about.

For it was Cheney, you well know, who yanked Bush's puppet strings in order to get Libby off the hook. It was Cheney who whispered sweet, oozing nothings into Dubya's ear to convince him to screw the goddamn law and mock the American jury system and further lock down America's standing as the most corrupt and least accountable nation in the entire developed world.

What, are you surprised by all this? Of course you're not. It is, of course, all about the cover-up, all about preventing Libby from revealing the real criminals in all this, about Cheney's nefarious role in the Plame case, all about ensuring the cabal remains intact and unassailable and throbbing with misprision.

It was so cute as to be actually damaging to the soul. Bush actually ambled forth and said that, while he "respects the jury" in the Libby case, the 2.5 year sentence was simply "too harsh." Baby, if 30 months in a comfy well-stocked rape-free Martha Stewart-decorated facility for compromising national security is too harsh, I've got a draconian little thing called the Patriot Act to sell you, cheap.

Here's a swell side note: You know who gets harsher sentences than 30 months in white-collar prison, George? Pot dealers. That's right. The average sentence for a convicted marijuana dealer in California is 3.3 years. In real prison, George, not that namby-pamby Club Fed where Scooter would've played badminton and sipped tea. Hell, in places like Oklahoma and Alabama, you can get a life sentence for possessing a single marijuana bud, which is ironic indeed, given how if you live in Oklahoma or Alabama, there is nothing that would serve your miserable id better than to be deeply and thoroughly stoned every single day and twice on Sunday. But that's another column.

Just a hint of perspective, George. See, we all know you drank like a monosyllabic fish and were rumored to enjoy your share of premium flake during all those years you were skipping poli-sci class in college as you snorted money from the silver spoon you were born with, so maybe you can appreciate this viewpoint. Or, you know, maybe not.

(More)

"Excessive"? Not

2007-07-04T07:40:00.000-05:00

In commuting the sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, President Bush said that the former vice presidential aide had suffered enough and that the 30-month prison term ordered up by a federal judge was "excessive."

But records show that the Justice Department under the Bush administration frequently has sought sentences that are as long, or longer, in cases similar to Libby's. Three-fourths of the 198 defendants sentenced in federal court last year for obstruction of justice — one of four crimes Libby was found guilty of in March — got some prison time. According to federal data, the average sentence defendants received for that charge alone was 70 months.

Just last week, the Supreme Court upheld a 33-month prison sentence for a decorated Army veteran who was convicted of lying to a federal agent about buying a machine gun. The veteran had a record of public service — fighting in Vietnam and the Gulf War — and no criminal record. But Justice Department lawyers argued his prison term should stand because it fit within the federal sentencing guidelines.

That Bush chose to make an exception for a political ally is galling to many career Justice Department prosecutors and other legal experts. Federal prosecutors said Tuesday the action would make it harder for them to persuade judges to deliver appropriate sentences.

The critics included some Republicans who said Bush's decision did not square with an administration that had been ardently pro law-and-order. "It denigrates the significance of perjury prosecutions," John S. Martin Jr., a former U.S. attorney and federal judge in New York, said of the commutation.

On Tuesday, Bush, speaking to reporters after visiting with wounded military personnel at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, refused to rule out the possibility that he might later grant Libby a full pardon. That would wipe out the felony conviction and allow Libby to retain his law license.

"As to the future, I rule nothing in or nothing out," Bush said — his first public comments on the case since announcing the commutation late Monday.

Sentencing experts said Bush's action appeared to be without recent precedent. They could not recall another case in which someone sentenced to prison had received a presidential commutation without having served any part of that sentence. Presidents have customarily commuted sentences only when someone has served substantial time.

"We can't find any cases, certainly in the last half century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served," said Margaret Colgate Love, a former pardon attorney at the Justice Department. "This is really, really unusual."

A Man Of His Word

2007-07-03T06:51:00.000-05:00

Reducing an "excessive" sentence down to nothing pretty much "takes care of" Libby.

Lieberman Uses Foiled British Terror Plot To Push For Greater U.S. Domestic Spying

2007-07-02T06:28:00.000-05:00

Appearing on ABC's This Week, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) used the foiled terror attempts in London to call for greater domestic spying here in the United States. Lieberman said, "I hope these terrorist attacks in London wake us up here in America to stop the petty partisan fighting going on about ... electronic surveillance," in apparent reference to the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoenas for documents related to Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

Lieberman claimed, "We're at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow email trails of non-American citizens." This is false; the NSA spying program covered the surveillance of American citizens. The "gridlock" exists over whether the administration will cooperate with Congress by explaining why it feels current law is inadequate and why President Bush decided to ignore the law in authorizing a spying program that almost led to mass resignations at the Department of Justice.

Lieberman went further in his calls for greater domestic spying. "The Brits have got something smart going. ... They have have cameras all over London. ... I think it's just common sense to do that here much more widely."

It is entirely unsurprising that Lieberman advocates the use of closed circuit cameras here.

The bedwetting coverage in the U.S. of the fizzled London car bombings has had the distinct message of promoting the use of British-style CCTV systems in U.S. cities.

Supreme Court To Rule On Legality Of Guantanamo Detention Policy

2007-06-30T06:15:00.000-05:00

The Supreme Court yesterday reversed itself and agreed to consider whether detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been unfairly barred from the federal courts by the Bush administration and Congress, a move that may finally determine legal rights for foreign-born terrorism suspects.

The case, which could become one of the most important of the court's next term, will address whether subjecting the detainees to military commissions instead of allowing them access to federal courts violates the Constitution. In April, the court decided not to hear an appeal from the detainees.

Yesterday's decision to change course and hear the case was so unusual that lawyers and court experts went to the archives to try to find the last time it happened. The only consensus was that it had been decades.

"The Supreme Court is going to decide the simple question: Does the Constitution protect the detainees?" said Georgetown University law professor Neal K. Katyal, who successfully argued a detainee case that the court decided just a year ago. In that case, the justices said President Bush did not have authority to set up the military tribunals that the administration thought should hear the cases against the detainees.

In April, three justices -- David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer -- said they were eager to hear the appeals, which presented questions that "deserve this court's immediate attention." It takes four justices to agree to take a case.

Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy said at the time that they would continue to monitor the legal proceedings involving the detainees. It takes five votes to rehear a denial, so perhaps the two justices concluded that they have seen enough. The court's order is silent on which justices agreed to hear the case.

The Bush administration had urged the court not to take the appeals. "The grant of a petition for rehearing from a denial of certiorari is an extraordinary remedy, warranted only where there have been 'intervening circumstances of a substantial or controlling effect' or 'other substantial grounds not previously presented,' " Solicitor General Paul D. Clement told the court this month, adding that petitioners had shown neither.

David Remes, a lawyer for some of the detainees who brought the case, said the court did not have to make the decision to take the case now, "so what obviously happened is the justices decided to confront the issue sooner rather than later." ...

The Supreme Court had twice ruled that Guantanamo detainees had access to federal courts to contest their incarcerations, but the court also made clear that Congress could weigh in on the issue. Lawmakers did so last fall by approving the Military Commissions Act, which stripped habeas corpus rights and mandated special military trials for the detainees.

In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the habeas corpus provision of the act, and that case is what the court agreed to hear yesterday.

Bush Claims Executive Privilege in U.S. Attorney Case

2007-06-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

President Bush moved one step closer to a constitutional showdown with Democrats on Thursday, as the White House asserted executive privilege in refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas for documents related to the dismissal of federal prosecutors.

The move prompted Democrats to accuse the White House of stonewalling, and seemed to put the legislative and executive branches on a collision course that could land them in court. It was the second time in Mr. Bush's presidency that he has formally asserted executive privilege, the power first recognized by the Supreme Court in a 1974 Watergate-era case.

On Thursday morning, the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, telephoned the Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which had issued the subpoenas, to inform them of Mr. Bush's decision. The president also intends to invoke executive privilege to prevent two of his former top aides, Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, the former political director, from testifying, officials said.

"With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path," Mr. Fielding wrote in a letter to the committee chairmen, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. He said the committees had issued "unfettered requests."

Mr. Conyers, in a telephone interview, called the letter "an appalling response to a reasonable question," adding, "This is reckless; it’s a form of governmental lawlessness that is really astounding."

The letter seemed to lay the groundwork for how the administration will respond to a separate, unrelated, round of subpoenas, issued by the Senate panel Wednesday to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department for information about the domestic eavesdropping program run by the National Security Agency.

Administration officials said they had not decided how to respond to those demands, but experts said it seemed clear that the White House would refuse to comply there, too.

"Given the way in which both the U.S. attorney matter and the N.S.A. matter are now percolating through committees, I would be very surprised if there were not a major showdown over executive privilege," said Peter M. Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University and an authority on executive privilege. "It might not get to court, but there will have to be some very high pressure negotiations at a very late stage to avoid that."

The clash pits the Congressional right to conduct oversight -- in this case, an investigation into whether the Justice Department allowed partisan politics to interfere with hiring and firing of federal prosecutors -- against the president's right to unfettered and candid advice from his top aides. Experts disagree about how a court might rule.

Mr. Shane says Congress has a strong argument, because it is making a specific claim that it needs information to conduct an oversight investigation, and "specific claims of necessity usually outweigh general claims" like the one the administration asserts, arguing the president's need for unfettered advice. ...

The next step is for Democrats to decide whether to try to negotiate with the White House or to vote on a contempt resolution, a process that could take months and would lay the groundwork for sending the matter to court. Democrats did not say Thursday how they intended to proceed, although by the sound of their comments, negotiations did not seem likely any time soon.

Senate Judiciary Committee Gets Serious About CATCH ALL

2007-06-28T06:19:00.000-05:00

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department after what the panel's chairman called "stonewalling of the worst kind" of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency's policy of wiretapping without warrants. ...

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said the subpoenas seek documents that could shed light on the administration's legal justification for the wiretapping and on disputes within the government over its legality.

In addition, the panel is seeking materials on related issues, including the relationship between the Bush administration and several unidentified telecommunications companies that aided the N.S.A. eavesdropping program.

Mr. Leahy said Wednesday at a news conference that the committee had issued the subpoenas because the administration had followed a "consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection" in dealing with Congressional efforts to scrutinize the program.

"It's unacceptable," Mr. Leahy said. "It is stonewalling of the worst kind."

The White House, the vice president's office and the Justice Department declined Wednesday to say how they would respond to the subpoenas.

"We're aware of the committee's action and will respond appropriately," said Tony Fratto, White House deputy press secretary.

"It's unfortunate that Congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation," Mr. Fratto added.

The route of acquiescence in the face of blatant lawbreaking -- the operative practice when the GOP controlled Congress -- is definitely the administration's preference.

Convicted Democratic Ex-Alabama Governor Alleges Rove Plot

2007-06-26T06:12:00.000-05:00

As Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama, goes before a federal judge today to fight a recommended 30-year prison sentence, he's telling anyone who'll listen that his prosecution was engineered by White House strategist Karl Rove.

It may be a long shot as a legal argument, but at least one influential Republican and a number of Democrats are questioning whether politics may have played a role in the case.

All but a handful of more than 100 charges against the former governor were rejected, his defenders point out.

And the bribery charge on which he was convicted did not involve pocketing money personally, but rather persuading a rich business executive to put $500,000 into a campaign for a state lottery to support education.

Prosecutors said Siegelman, 61, named the executive to a state board, though the executive had held the same position under three previous governors.

The other charge on which Siegelman was found guilty, obstruction of justice, centered on trying to conceal a $9,200 deal involving a motorcycle he said he was trying to sell.

The 30 years in prison that prosecutors are asking U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller to impose could be a life sentence, his lawyers say, and more than the average meted out to murderers in Alabama.

"Congressional committees ought to investigate what in the world went on in this case," said Grant Woods, a Republican former attorney general of Arizona. Woods, who still tries high-profile cases as a special prosecutor, has reviewed the charges against Siegelman as a former colleague and friend.

"From start to finish, this case has been riddled with irregularities. It does not pass the smell test," Woods said.

Siegelman's supporters argue that his popularity and his history of attracting both black and white voters — dating to 1998, when he was elected governor — made him a target for GOP political strategists and may have played a role in a long-running effort by the offices of Republican U.S. attorneys to bring him down.

His supporters point to a welter of circumstantial and other evidence to support their view.

A previous indictment, for instance, was scotched by another federal judge in 2004 with a scathing rebuke to the government. Just this month, a Republican lawyer signed a sworn statement that she had heard five years ago that Rove was preparing to politically neutralize the popular Siegelman.

And there are links between the case and GOP political activists, as well as an alleged failure by prosecutors or Fuller to conduct a vigorous investigation into evidence that prejudicial e-mails may have been sent to jurors during Siegelman's recent trial.

The controversy in part reflects the loss of credibility suffered by the Bush Justice Department in the wake of evidence that Rove and members of his staff played a role in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. In several of those cases, U.S. attorneys targeted for removal had been criticized by Bush officials for not being sufficiently attentive to GOP political priorities.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto waved away the controversy, saying: "Someone is always making some baseless charge about Karl. Unfortunately I can't comment in this case while legal proceedings are ongoing."

The lead government attorney in the case, career prosecutor Louis Franklin, said he had not been subjected to pressure.

Political corruption cases are nothing new in Alabama. Siegelman's three gubernatorial predecessors — two Republicans and a Democrat — faced criminal inquiries. Two were indicted and convicted.

But Siegelman's case differs from the usual pattern in some ways. For example, former Gov. Guy Hunt, a Republican, was found guilty in state court of personally pocketing $200,000. And state prosecutors sought probation, not jail time, in the Hunt case.

Senate Subcommittee To Release Amaranth Report

2007-06-25T10:14:00.000-05:00

The Bear Stearns CDO Hedge Fund exigency is reminding some people of another recent low liquidity event.

After a nine-month investigation, a bipartisan Senate subcommittee is expected to issue a report today detailing how a single hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, dominated the North American natural gas market last year, causing high prices and extreme volatility that ultimately led to its stunning collapse.

Amaranth, once a star hedge fund, lost more than $6.5 billion on disastrous bets in the natural gas market last summer before shutting itself down. The fund's activities are still under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Investigators from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations examined millions of trading records from the two main American energy exchanges, the New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, and the Intercontinental-Exchange, known by its acronym, ICE. In a 135-page report, the investigators pieced together the events that led to Amaranth's collapse, from the start of 2006 to the fateful final weeks of last September.

The report found that Amaranth held as many as 100,000 natural gas contracts in a single month, accounting for 5 percent of the total amount of natural gas consumed in the United States last year. The position was so large that it allowed the company to dominate trading in natural gas futures and push up prices.

By the end of February 2006, for example, the fund held nearly 70 percent of the open interest in the November future contracts on Nymex and nearly 60 percent in the futures for January.

It was that size that led to its collapse: Amaranth made a huge bet that natural gas spreads — or the difference between two monthly future contracts — would rise, and it kept pumping more money into that bet. When prices fell, Amaranth found itself on the wrong side of the market and could not make up for its losses.

The investigation offers a fascinating insight into the company's doomed trading strategy, revealing both missed opportunities and what appeared to be destructive greed. The turning point came in May 2006, according to the report, when Amaranth's energy portfolio showed a loss of $1 billion.

"By the end of May, at least some of Amaranth's traders and officers were aware of the firm’s predicament — that it had accumulated larger natural gas positions than it could sell profitably," the report said. "In June and July 2006, Amaranth did not, however, pare down its spread positions; it enlarged them."

By the end of August, Amaranth was pumping in more money to hold its position, but the market had taken a different direction. After starting 2006 with $7.5 billion, the fund soared to $9.2 billion and eventually collapsed to less than $3 billion.

The investigation also faults Nymex for failing to restrain Amaranth in time. Nymex officials had known since May 2006 that Amaranth had accumulated sizable holdings in several future contracts. When Nymex finally asked Amaranth to reduce its holdings, in August, the fund simply moved its assets from Nymex to ICE, an exchange that is exempt from federal regulation.

In a hearing on Capitol Hill today, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who is chairman of the subcommittee that conducted the investigation, is expected to draw attention to the lack of regulatory oversight of ICE.

Among the report's recommendations, the report urges Congress to "reinvigorate" prohibitions against excessive speculation, provide more funds to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and close the "Enron loophole," a provision in the Commodity Exchange Act, requested by Enron in 2000, that exempts crucial energy commodities from government oversight.

"Current commodity laws are riddled with exemptions, exclusions and limitations that make it virtually impossible for regulators to police U.S. energy markets," Mr. Levin said.

Update: The reports have now been issued (PDFs).

Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Staff Report - Excessive Speculation in the Natural Gas Market

Appendix - Excessive Speculation in the Natural Gas Market

White House Quietly Discussing Iraq "Decentralization" (Partition) With Congress

2007-06-25T05:47:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration has begun exploring ways of offering Congress a compromise deal on Iraq policy to avert bruising battles in coming months, U.S. officials said.

With public support of the war dropping, President Bush has authorized an internal policy review to find a plan that could satisfy opponents without sacrificing his top goals, the officials said.

The president and senior officials "realize they can't keep fighting this over and over," said one administration official, who along with others declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly or because decisions were pending.

The Republican White House has not opened formal negotiations with the Democratic-controlled Congress. But some senior administration officials — including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad — have been quietly talking with lawmakers about how to adjust policy in the months ahead. Among other ideas, they have discussed whether the United States should advocate a sharply decentralized Iraq, a notion that has seen a resurgence on Capitol Hill. ...

But whatever others in his administration are advocating, Bush has not embraced a drawdown in the absence of greater stability, administration officials emphasized.

The White House has opposed proposals in Congress to partition Iraq, or sharply decentralize its government.

That idea — what proponents of decentralization call a "federal system of government" — is favored by an unusually broad bipartisan group of senators. They were pulled together this month by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a presidential candidate, to cosponsor a nonbinding resolution supporting the federalism plan.

And the administration stance may be easing. On a trip to Iraq about a week ago, Gates openly reflected that greater emphasis outside Baghdad might prove more effective. "Perhaps we have gotten too focused on the central government, and not enough on the provinces and on the tribes and what is happening in those areas," Gates told reporters.

And U.N. Ambassador Khalilzad, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq until April, has discussed the federalism plan with Biden and Biden's fellow sponsor and presidential hopeful Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), lawmakers said.

Khalilzad, in an interview, rejected the idea of imposing decentralization on the Iraqis, saying it could "backfire politically … if it's a 'made-in-Washington' kind of idea."

But Khalilzad said he favored the idea of U.N. officials helping Iraqis decide, in their current deliberations over their constitution, whether to choose a structure that would transfer power to the regions. "If they want to go that route, it's certainly an option," he said.

Ex-Surveillance Judge Criticizes Warrantless Spying

2007-06-24T06:55:00.000-05:00

A federal judge who used to authorize wiretaps in terrorism and espionage cases criticized yesterday President Bush's decision to order warrantless surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," said Royce C. Lamberth, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington and a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, speaking at the American Library Association's annual convention.

Lamberth, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, expressed his opposition to letting the executive branch decide on its own which people to spy on in national security cases.

The judge said it is proper for executive branch agencies to conduct such surveillance. "But what we have found in the history of our country is that you can't trust the executive," he said.

"The executive has to fight and win the war at all costs. But judges understand the war has to be fought, but it can't be at all costs," Lamberth said at the Washington Convention Center. "We still have to preserve our civil liberties. Judges are the kinds of people you want to entrust that kind of judgment to more than the executive." ...

Lamberth took issue with Bush's approach.

He said the special court, established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, met the challenge of reacting quickly to the Sept. 11 attacks. Lamberth was stuck in a carpool lane near the Pentagon when a hijacked jet slammed into it that day. With his car enveloped in smoke, he called marshals to help him get into the District.

By the time officers reached him, Lambert said, "I had approved five FISA coverages [warrants] on my cellphone." He also approved other warrants at his home at 3 a.m. and on Saturdays.

"In a time of national emergency like that, changes have to be made in procedures. We changed a number of FISA procedures," Lamberth said.

Normal FISA warrant applications run 40 to 50 pages, but in the days after Sept. 11, the judge said, he issued orders "based on the oral briefing by the director of the FBI to the chief judge of the FISA court."

Lamberth would not say whether he thought Bush's warrantless surveillance was constitutional. "Judges shouldn't give advisory opinions, and I was never asked to give an opinion in court," he said.

But, he said, when the NSA briefed him about the program, he advised the agency to keep good records so that, if any applications came to the FISA court based on information obtained from the warrantless surveillance, the court could rule on the legality.

He said he never got such an application.

Lamberth defended the court against those who say it is rubber stamp and said if the government is working properly, most applications should be approved.

"We're making sure there's not some political shenanigan going on or some improper motive for the surveillance," Lamberth said. "The fact that they have to submit it to us keeps them honest."

Lambert also criticized FBI Director Robert Mueller for allowing the agents in charge of all 56 FBI field offices to approve National Security Letters. These allow agents to demand information from phone companies, Internet service providers and corporations without court warrants in national security cases.

The Justice Department's inspector general recently estimated there were 3,000 violations of law between 2002 and 2005 in the FBI's use of the letters.

"Once they saw how the field offices had screwed this all up, I thought that would be a good time to centralize the approvals" in one Washington office that could enforce the rules uniformly, Lamberth said. "Unfortunately, Mueller and (Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales did not do that."

Laws Are For Other People

2007-06-23T06:23:00.000-05:00

First, the Office of the Vice President claimed they were exempt from a certain law regarding classified material.

Now, the Office of the President is making the same claim.

The nation is by now used to President Bush acting as if he were above the law, and issuing "signing statements" reserving the right to ignore enacted law, but there is probably more to their reluctance to be bound by the secrecy law in question than meets the eye.

The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.

The issue flared Thursday when Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) criticized Cheney for refusing to file annual reports with the federal National Archives and Records Administration, for refusing to spell out how his office handles classified documents, and for refusing to submit to an inspection by the archives' Information Security Oversight Office.

The archives administration has been pressing the vice president's office to cooperate with oversight for the last several years, contending that by not doing so, Cheney and his staff have created a potential national security risk.

Bush amended the oversight directive in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to help ensure that national secrets would not be mishandled, made public or improperly declassified.

The order aimed to create a uniform system for classifying, declassifying and otherwise safeguarding national security information. It gave the archives' oversight unit responsibility for evaluating the effectiveness of each agency's classification programs. It applied to the executive branch of government, mostly agencies led by Bush administration appointees — not to legislative offices such as Congress or to judicial offices such as the courts.

"Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government," the executive order said.

But from the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in an interview Friday.

Cheney's office filed the reports in 2001 and 2002 but stopped in 2003.

As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much information the president's and vice president's offices are classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office cannot inspect the president and vice president's executive offices to determine whether safeguards are in place to protect the classified information they handle and to properly declassify information when required.

Those two offices have access to the most highly classified information, including intelligence on terrorists and unfriendly foreign countries.

Waxman and J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, have argued that the order clearly applies to all executive branch agencies, including the offices of the vice president and the president.

The White House disagrees, Fratto said.

"We don't dispute that the ISOO has a different opinion. But let's be very clear: This executive order was issued by the president, and he knows what his intentions were," Fratto said. "He is in compliance with his executive order."

Fratto conceded that the lengthy directive, technically an amendment to an existing executive order, did not specifically exempt the president's or vice president's offices. Instead, it refers to "agencies" as being subject to the requirements, which Fratto said did not include the two executive offices. "It does take a little bit of inference," Fratto said.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of the executive order.

He noted that the order defines "agency" as any executive agency, military department and "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information" — which, he said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices.

Cheney's office drew criticism Thursday for claiming that it was exempt from the reporting requirements because the vice president's office is not fully within the executive branch. It cited his legislative role as president of the Senate when needed to break a tie. ...

Several security experts said they were not aware that the president had exempted his own office from the oversight requirements. ...

"If they get a blank check, it's a recipe for disaster. I can't think of a quicker way to break down the credibility of the entire security-classification system."

Blanton noted that the White House had acknowledged that a substantial number of in-house e-mails had disappeared in recent years, at a time when investigators wanted to review them for possible evidence of inappropriate leaks of classified information.

"If there are all these great safeguards in place, then where are the e-mails?" Blanton asked.

Not to mention all sorts of 9/11 related material.

Ashcroft Talks To House Intelligence Committee About CATCH ALL

2007-06-22T06:40:00.000-05:00

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday in front of the House Intelligence Committee about administration disputes over the extra-legal NSA warrantless surveillance program (CATCH ALL).

The administration was sharply divided over the legality of President George W. Bush's most controversial eavesdropping policies, a congressman quoted former Attorney General John Ashcroft as telling a House panel.

"It is very apparent to us that there was robust and enormous debate within the administration about the legal basis for the president's surveillance program," Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Ashcroft on Thursday.

The point is critical to two matters being considered in the Democratic-controlled Congress: One is the House and Senate Intelligence committees' review of 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which includes an extensive examination of the president's warrantless eavesdropping program.

The other is the House and Senate Judiciary Committees' parallel examinations of current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' service to the administration. Under that probe, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey revealed that Gonzales, then White House counsel, tried to pressure him and a critically ill Ashcroft to certify the legality of the wiretapping program, which involved listening in on phone calls and intercepting email.

Comey and Ashcroft, who was in intensive care during Gonzales' 2004 hospital visit, refused to comply.

Also Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized — but did not issue — subpoenas to Gonzales and to the custodian of records at the Executive Office of the President for all administration documents on the legality of the program. The panel approved giving Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, authority to issue the subpoenas, 13-3, with Republican Sens. Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley voting with the Democrats.

The White House made no move to comply.

"It's important for Congress to understand that the information the committee is requesting is highly classified and not information we can make available," said Bush spokesman Tony Fratto. "Also important is for Congress to respect our need to ensure that internal executive branch deliberations are confidential.

Democrats have insisted that the hospital story appears to contradict Gonzales' congressional testimony that there had been no significant disagreement within the administration over the program. Gonzales has stood by his testimony.

'Enhanced Interrogation Technique' Skullduggery

2007-06-21T06:47:00.000-05:00

"We have to work the dark side..." --Dick Cheney, in the aftermath of 9/11.

There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such tactics -- working in close coordination with the military -- until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. ...

Close coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon is referred to in military lingo as "jointness." A retired high-level military official, familiar with the detainee abuse scandals, confirmed that such "jointness" requires orchestration at the top levels of government. "This says that somebody is acting as a bridge between the CIA and the Defense Department," he said, "because you've got the [CIA] side and the military side, and they are collaborating." Human-rights expert Scott Horton, who chairs the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association, also says that the cross-agency coordination "reflects the fact that the decision to introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level." ...

"The irony -- and ultimately the tragedy -- in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions," says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the American Psychological Association. "The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions," he says. ...

Until last month, the Army had denied any use of SERE training for prisoner interrogations. "We do not teach interrogation techniques," Carol Darby, chief spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said last June when Salon asked about a document that appeared to indicate that instructors from the SERE school taught their methods to interrogators at Guantánamo.

But the declassified DoD inspector general's report described initiatives by high-level military officials to incorporate SERE concepts into interrogations. And it said that psychologists affiliated with SERE training -- people like Mitchell and Jessen -- played a critical role. According to the inspector general, the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate at Fort Bragg first drafted a plan to have the military reverse-engineer SERE training in the summer of 2002. At the same time, the commander of Guantánamo determined that SERE tactics might be used on detainees at the military prison. Then in September 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and other SERE officials hosted a "SERE psychologist conference" at Fort Bragg to brief staff from the military's prison at Guantánamo on the use of SERE tactics.

Bush To Veto Stem Cell Bill

2007-06-20T06:52:00.000-05:00

Religious kookery makes bad public policy.

President Bush has chosen to use his veto pen three times - twice on the stem cell issue where politics, ethics and science collide.

Pushing back against the Democratic-led Congress, Bush plans to veto a bill Wednesday that would have eased restraints on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

At the same time, Bush will issue an executive order directing the Health and Human Services Department to promote research into cells that, like human embryonic stem cells, also hold the potential of regenerating into different types of cells that might be used to battle disease.

Democrats made the stem cell legislation Bush promised to veto a top priority when they took control of the House and Senate in January. They do not, however, have enough votes to override a veto.

In his veto threat, the president accused Democrats of recycling an old measure that he already vetoed and argued that the bill would mean American taxpayers would - for the first time - be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

"The president supports and encourages stem cell research, including using embryonic lines, as long as it does not involve creating, harming or destroying embryos," Fratto said. "That is an ethical line that should not be crossed."

Fratto said Bush would outline an initiative that could make federal funding available for research on additional "pluripotent" stem cells - ones that can give rise to any kind of cell in the body except those required to develop a fetus.

The National Institutes of Health says these stem cells offer the prospect of having a renewable source of replacement cells and tissues to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions.

Scientists were first able to conduct research with embryonic stem cells in 1998, the NIH says. There were no federal funds for the work until Bush announced on Aug. 9, 2001, that his administration would make the funds available for lines of cells that already were in existence.

Currently, states and private organizations are permitted to fund embryonic stem cell research, but federal support is limited to cells that existed as of Aug. 9, 2001. The latest bill is aimed at lifting that restriction.

The science aside, the issue has weighty political and ethical implications.

Public opinion polls show strong support for the research, and it could return as an issue in the 2008 elections.

Opponents of the latest stem cell measure insisted that the use of embryonic stem cells was the wrong approach on moral grounds -- and possibly not even the most promising one scientifically. These opponents, who applaud Bush's veto, cite breakthroughs involving medical research conducted with adult stem cells, umbilical cord blood and amniotic fluid, none of which involve the destruction of a human embryo.

This will be the third veto of Bush's presidency. His first occurred last year when he rejected legislation to allow funding of additional lines of embryonic stem cells -- a measure that passed over the objections of Republicans then in control. The second legislation he vetoed would have set timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appealed to Bush on Tuesday to put his veto pen back in his pocket. Reid said the measure acknowledges the ethical issues at stake and offers even stronger research guidelines than exist under the president's current policy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Bush's veto threat as a reason to send out an e-mail letter soliciting contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to help elect more Democrats.

"By vetoing a bill that expands stem cell research, the president will say 'no' to the more than 70 percent of Americans who support it, 'no' to our Democratic Congress' fight for progress, and 'no' to saving lives and to potential cures for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's," Pelosi wrote. "He will say 'no' to hope."

Surprise!

2007-06-19T06:06:00.000-05:00

No reasonable person should have assumed that President Bush's signing statements were merely an empty assertion of presidential powers.

Bush was certainly going to exercise his claimed right to ignore the laws in question.

And he has.

Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers.

In a report to Congress, the non partisan Government Accountability Office studied a small sample of the bill provisions that Bush has signed into law but also challenged with signing statements. The GAO found that agencies disobeyed six such laws, while enforcing 10 others as written even though Bush had challenged them.

House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers , Democrat of Michigan, said yesterday that the GAO's findings demonstrated a need for a more "extensive review" of how the government has followed up on hundreds of other laws challenged by Bush.

"The administration is thumbing its nose at the law," said Conyers, one of the lawmakers who commissioned the GAO study.

A signing statement is a legal document filed in the Federal Register the day a president signs a bill into law. It instructs the executive branch about how to implement the new statutes the bill creates, and sometimes it states that certain provisions are unconstitutional and need not be enforced as written.

Bush's signing statements have drawn fire because he has used them to challenge more than 1,100 sections of bills -- more than all previous presidents combined. The sample the GAO studied represents a small portion of the laws Bush has targeted, but its report concluded that sometimes the government has gone on to disobey those laws.

For example, one law requires the Customs and Border Patrol to relocate its illegal immigrant checkpoints near Tucson every seven days to prevent smugglers from being able to predict where they are, but the agency failed to do so. The border patrol told the GAO that the law is flawed because it "diverts resources," and it characterized the requirement as "advisory."

In his signing statement of Oct. 18, 2005, Bush instructed the border patrol to view the "relocation provision as advisory rather than mandatory" on the assertion that only the president has the constitutional authority to decide how to deploy law enforcement officers.

None of the laws the GAO investigated included the president's most controversial claims involving national security, such as his assertion that he can set aside a torture ban and new oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act because he is the commander in chief. Such material is classified. ...

Of the other five laws that the study found were disobeyed, two provisions required agencies to get permission from a congressional committee before taking certain actions. In both cases, the agencies notified the committee but acted without their permission -- just as Bush's signing statements instructed them.

The other three provisions involved the executive branch giving information to congressional oversight committees, including plans for emergency housing following a disaster; budget documents related to certain military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a proposal to fix a problem related to funding for military medical services. In all three cases, the administration did not obey the laws as written.

The GAO conducted its study by looking at all the provisions in 11 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2006 that Bush challenged in signing statements. It counted 160 such laws that the president had claimed a right to ignore.

Investigators then selected a representative sample of 19 bill provisions Bush had targeted and asked agencies to explain whether and how they had obeyed the provisions. It found that 10 such laws were enforced as written, six were not enforced as written, and three did not have to be enforced because the circumstance envisioned had not materialized.

The revelation that investigators had found six laws that were disobeyed within the small sample prompted angry words from the other lawmaker who commissioned the GAO study, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. He called Bush's signing statements a "power grab" that undermined Congress's authority to write the laws.

"The White House cannot pick and choose which laws it follows and which it ignores," Byrd said. "When a president signs a bill into law, the president signs the entire bill. The administration cannot be in the business of cherry-picking the laws it likes and the laws it doesn't."

GAO To Examine Sarasota Voting Machines

2007-06-18T06:41:00.000-05:00

A House Administration Committee task force has asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to complete its examination of disputed voting machines quickly and report findings by July 27.

The GAO will scrutinize equipment used in Sarasota County, Fla., where Democrat Christine Jennings is contesting her loss in last year’s 13th Congressional District election.

GAO investigators are assigned to determine to what extent machines were responsible for the lower number of votes cast for Congress than for other races.

Jennings contends electronic voting machine errors are to blame for 18,000 ballots being recorded without a congressional choice.

The task force agreed last month to allow the GAO to design a plan to investigate the election, in which Republican Vern Buchanan was certified the winner by 369 votes.

The goal of completing work July 27 put the GAO on a faster timetable; the agency had suggested filing a report in September.

Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-Texas, chairman of the three-member task force, said the schedule that now has been set "respects the need to arrive at a solution sooner rather than later."

Jennings also has contested the election outcome in Florida courts, where she has appealed a ruling in the Republican's favor. Last month, Jennings filed a motion to stay her appeal, saying the move was meant to defer to the congressional investigation.

Bush Met Quietly Last Week With Group of Top Jewish-American Leaders

2007-06-17T07:17:00.000-05:00

The "West Bank first" strategy was doubtlessly among the key topics discussed in this unprecedented (and hushed-up) meeting.

As he prepared for a visit this week from Israel's prime minister, President Bush held an unannounced meeting with the top leadership of the United States' Jewish community to discuss the dramatic events in the Middle East and other foreign policy issues.

Bush meets with smaller groups of Jewish leaders from time to time, but the gathering Thursday was the first time he had met with the entire leadership community, about 50 heads of Jewish advocacy, service and religious organizations of different political orientations.

The White House did not disclose the private session on the president's schedule, and officials asked participants to treat Bush's remarks as off the record. Present for the session were the president's most senior aides, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and political adviser Karl Rove. ...

The U.S. consul general in Jerusalem met with Abbas on Saturday and indicated that an international embargo on funds for the Palestinian Authority will be lifted once a new government is sworn in. ...

"I don't think the U.S. strategy to strengthen President Abbas even stands a chance of success," said Haim Malka, a Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Iran was probably on the agenda as well.

Like Rats From The Proverbial Ship

2007-06-16T05:57:00.000-05:00

Another Justice Department official involved in last year's dismissals of federal prosecutors is resigning, department officials said on Friday.

In this case, the departure of Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to the outgoing deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, had been expected since Mr. McNulty announced last month that he would step down this summer.

At one point, Mr. Elston compiled a list of prosecutors for possible removal, but his principal involvement came after the firings in February when he exchanged e-mail messages with H. E. Cummins III of Arkansas, one of the ousted United States attorneys.

Mr. Cummins testified later to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he regarded Mr. Elston's message as a veiled threat to retaliate against any ousted prosecutor who spoke to a reporter.

Mr. Elston said he was "shocked and baffled" by Mr. Cummins's assertions and denied that his e-mail message was intended to silence any of the dismissed prosecutors.

Mr. Elston is the fifth Justice Department official who played a role in the dismissals to resign in recent months. In addition to Mr. McNulty, others are D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and Monica M. Goodling, a senior aide to Mr. Gonzales.

Michael Battle, who ran an office that serves as a link to the Justice Department’s 93 United States attorneys, departed in March but said his resignation was not tied to the dismissals.

Arizona Senator Blocks Subpoena Vote on NSA Program

2007-06-15T07:16:00.000-05:00

The Republican defense of administration lawbreaking in the NSA warrantless surveillance affair continues with a seemingly desperate move by a GOP senator.

A Republican senator blocked a vote in the Judiciary Committee on whether to authorize subpoenas to the Justice Department to obtain secret legal opinions and other documents related to the National Security Agency's program of domestic eavesdropping. The action by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona will block the vote for a week. After the vote next Thursday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the committee, can decide whether to issue the subpoenas or use them as leverage in negotiations with the Bush administration over access to the documents.

More FBI Data Collection Violations Found

2007-06-14T07:03:00.000-05:00

We have noted here on several occasions the increasing use (and abuse) in the post 9/11 environment of investigatory tools such as National Security Letters by the FBI (see inter alia, Use Of National Security Letters Increasing and Justice IG Finds Abuse of National Security Letters).

It turns out now that the deeper these programs are examined, the more instances of questionable uses of these tools are being found.

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample. ...

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved telephone companies and other communications firms providing information that exceeded what the FBI's national security letters had sought. But rather than destroying the unsolicited data, agents in some instances issued new National Security Letters to ensure that they could keep the mistakenly provided information.

Subpoenas Issued To Former WH Officials

2007-06-14T06:25:00.000-05:00

Congress issued subpoenas ... for former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and political director Sara Taylor, reaching directly inside the White House for the first time in the probe of the firings of federal prosecutors.

The Bush administration appeared in no hurry to encourage the pair to testify, as the subpoenas demanded. Complying could set a precedent for testimony by another adviser not yet on the subpoena list: presidential counselor Karl Rove.

The Democratic chairmen of House and Senate committees implicitly threatened a constitutional showdown if the White House does not comply with the subpoenas -- or strike a deal.

"The bread crumbs in this investigation have always led to 1600 Pennsylvania," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich. "This investigation will not end until the White House complies with the demands of this subpoena in a timely and reasonable manner so that we may get to the bottom of this."

"The White House cannot have it both ways -- it cannot stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses while claiming nothing improper occurred," added Senate Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

White House officials pointed out that White House Counsel Fred Fielding already has offered a compromise by suggesting that Miers, Taylor, Rove and their deputies be interviewed by committee aides in closed-door sessions, without transcripts (and not under oath -- ed.note). Leahy and Conyers have rejected that offer.

"The committees can easily obtain the facts they want without a confrontation by simply accepting our offer for documents and interviews," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday. "But it's clear that Senator Leahy and Representative Conyers are more interested in drama than facts."

No, the real equation is like this: the committees are actually more interested in facts than lies.

The judiciary panels, acting two days after Republicans blocked an effort to hold a no-confidence vote on Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, also sought White House documents about its involvement in the dismissals and efforts to respond to Congressional inquiries into whether as many as nine United States attorneys were removed for political reasons. ...

Congressional investigators have largely completed their interviews of Justice Department officials and assembled thousands of pages of departmental documents. Yet they still cannot definitively answer such basic questions as who initiated the effort to oust the nine prosecutors, how the nine were selected and whether their dismissals were motivated by a desire to push a political agenda, like accelerating investigations of Democrats or protecting Republican elected officials from scrutiny, as some members of Congress have asserted.

The inquiry has at least made clear that Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor, among others at the White House, helped orchestrate the effort, despite an early statement by the Bush administration denying such a role.

National Journal has posted a copy of Miers' subpoena (5 page pdf).

Senate Committee To Vote on NSA Subpoenas

2007-06-13T06:48:00.000-05:00

There could be an important development today in the attempt to establish congressional oversight of the extra-legal NSA warrantless surveillance program (CATCH-ALL).

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote Thursday on whether to authorize subpoenas to gain access to Justice Department documents related to the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program, including a series of secret legal opinions.

The vote comes a week after Democratic leaders on a House Judiciary subcommittee threatened to issue subpoenas for the same documents.

The chairman of the Senate committee, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and its ranking Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on May 21 seeking access to the documents and asked for a response by June 5. The panel will vote on whether to authorize Mr. Leahy to issue subpoenas for the documents He could decide to subpoena the documents or to use that power as leverage with the Justice Department.

Priorities Are Priorities

2007-06-12T09:42:00.000-05:00

It's not like consumer and patient groups are greasing the wheels in Washington, so they shouldn't expect to get a fair hearing of their concerns.

While revising their drug-review policy last year, Food and Drug Administration officials met 112 times with industry representatives but only five times with consumer and patient groups, according to data out Monday from the House Appropriations Committee.

The FDA provided the data in response to questions submitted in March by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.

The meetings occurred between October 2005 and December 2006 and focused on the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, under which manufacturers help pay for the review of their new drugs. ...

"The FDA has essentially become the government affairs office of the pharmaceutical industry," Hinchey said in a statement, which called the relationship between the agency and industry "far too cozy and inappropriate." Hinchey is the author, and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the chief co-sponsor of an FDA reform bill that would prohibit the agency from collecting fees from the companies it regulates. Instead, the money would be deposited into the general fund of the U.S. Treasury.

According to the Appropriations Committee, two officials of the Biotechnology Industry Organization and two officials of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association attended at least half of the 112 meetings.

'No Confidence' Vote Fizzles

2007-06-12T07:23:00.000-05:00

Back in April, when the entire liberal blogosphere was united in predicting Alberto Gonzales' imminent departure from his position of Attorney General, readers here found the following confident prediction:

During Attorney General Gonzales' "reconfirmation hearing" yesterday, the beleaguered chief law enforcement officer of the nation committed no errors grievous enough to force President Bush to send him packing.

His answers were at times in variance with the known facts. But that probably won't bother his boss.

His job looks safe, considering his long friendship with the president. At least until any new evidence surfaces in the U.S. attorney dismissal scandal.

Since then, there has been additional evidence of wrongdoing in the U.S. Attorney scandal. And -- while antagonizing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle -- Gonzales still retains the full support of the only person who counts.

Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales survived a climactic no-confidence vote in the Senate Monday, and with the support of the White House appeared to have weathered a months-long storm of criticism and investigation that once imperiled his tenure at the Justice Department.

Most Republicans, even those who had been critical of Gonzales, closed ranks, and Democrats fell well short of winning the votes necessary to move forward with a resolution declaring that the Senate and the "American people" had lost confidence in the embattled attorney general. Senate Democrats' attempt to bring up the resolution got 53 of the 60 votes needed to end unlimited debate.

Democrats vowed to continue their investigation into whether Gonzales, in tandem with the White House, had politicized hiring decisions and various investigations at the Justice Department in ways that would boost Republicans. There were signs that Democrats were on the verge of taking that investigation to a new level, possibly by issuing subpoenas to the White House for documents and testimony of such figures as political operative Karl Rove.

But the no-confidence vote suggests that the Democrats do not have the political might to force the issue.

Gonzales had already won a vote of confidence from President Bush weeks ago. "There is only one vote that matters, and he's got it," said Charles Black, a Republican political consultant with ties to the White House.

Supporters of a similar resolution in the House said they feared that, after the Senate vote, the House leadership would table the measure without voting on it.

Pwned !

2007-06-11T06:25:00.000-05:00

A dozen administration-smooching lawyers get pwned by Judge Walton.

A dozen of the country's most respected constitutional scholars have leapt to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's aid, asking a federal judge if they could try to convince him about critical legal questions that favor letting Libby remain free while he appeals his conviction in the Valerie Plame leak case.

Within hours of Friday's filing from the scholars, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote back. In the teeny-tiny print of a footnote, he said he was delighted to know that such a distinguished group was available to help argue on behalf of criminal defendants on "close questions" of the law.

Walton promised he'd ring them up very soon when -- instead of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff facing the threat of the slammer -- there might be poor defendants who need big legal minds to avoid incarceration.

Walton sentenced Libby last week to 30 months in prison and will hold a hearing on Thursday to consider whether Libby can remain free while his case is appealed.

"It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant," Walton wrote in granting the scholars' request.

He added: "The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics' willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions."

Indeed, it was an impressive group, including former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and ... Alan Dershowitz. ...

Also joining the brief were Vikram Amar of the University of California's Hastings law school, Randy Barnett and Viet Dinh of Georgetown, Douglas Kmiec and Robert Pushaw of Pepperdine, Richard Parker of Harvard, Gary Lawson of Boston University, Thomas Merrill of Columbia, Earl Maltz of Rutgers and Robert Nagel of the University of Colorado.

The group argued in a six-page brief that Libby, who was convicted of lying to investigators probing the leak of Plame's identity, has a decent shot at appeal on the question of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's appointment to investigate that leak. That appointment was likely inappropriate, they argued, because Fitzgerald lacked any supervision that would make his superiors "politically accountable."

U.S. Rejected Litvinenko's Asylum Bid

2007-06-10T06:15:00.000-05:00

Before Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence agent fatally poisoned in London last year, sought asylum in Britain, he first tried to flee to the United States, according to a new book that also offers fresh details of his uneasy life and relationship with the former KGB agent now accused of murdering him.

According to "Death of a Dissident," written by Litvinenko's friend Alex Goldfarb and his widow, Marina, to be published Tuesday by Free Press, Litvinenko nearly won a new life in the United States when he fled Russia in 2000. But at the last minute, he was told that officials in Washington had "changed their mind" and would not give him a visa. Litvinenko then fled to Britain, where he was killed in November at age 43, poisoned with a lethal dose of the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210.

The book recounts that in late October 2000, Goldfarb, a former Russian biologist who had become a U.S. citizen, flew from New York to Turkey, where Litvinenko had gone with his wife and their 6-year-old son, Anatoly, after they fled Russia. Goldfarb took them to the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, where Litvinenko was questioned for four hours by a man identified only as Mark, who Litvinenko believed was an American intelligence agent. Litvinenko was then told to go back to his hotel to await the decision from Washington as to whether he would be given the visa he needed to enter the United States. ...

As Litvinenko waited for Goldfarb's cellphone to ring with news from the U.S. Embassy, he spotted a man he believed was a Russian agent watching him. After pretending to go up to their hotel rooms, Litvinenko, his family and Goldfarb got into a car and sped to Istanbul, more than 200 miles away. Goldfarb said he turned off his cellphone "because I was afraid that we could be tracked somehow."

When Goldfarb switched on his phone and finally talked to Mark, who had left many messages, he said: "Good news, pal, we're taking them. Twenty minutes, we'll pick them up."

But then Goldfarb told him they were in Istanbul.

"Istanbul? Why in the world did you go there?"

"Someone was watching at the hotel, so we ran."

"I see. Well, that's a complication. Is anyone watching you now?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay, keep your phone on. I'll get back to you."

When Mark called again, his voice was different: "Bad news, pal, they've changed their mind. We are not taking them."

No explanation was given for why the decision was reversed, though Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko said they assumed that helping Litvinenko couldn't be done quietly. U.S. officials did not want to risk aggravating Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had recently taken office. ...

During his hours at the U.S. Embassy, Litvinenko had given the Americans a name they had eagerly sought, according to the book, though the name is not disclosed. In the interview, Goldfarb said it was the name of an American based in Germany who had frequent business dealings in Russia.

When rejected by the United States, the Litvinenkos and Goldfarb then bought tickets to fly to Moscow via London. Since the flight was only stopping over in London to meet the connecting flight, Litvinenko did not need a visa to enter the United Kingdom. But once at Heathrow Airport, he sought asylum, which was eventually granted.

Supreme Court Ruling Will Mandate More Hard-Liners on Capital Case Juries

2007-06-09T06:52:00.000-05:00

A decision by the Supreme Court on Monday that made it easier for prosecutors to exclude people who express reservations about the death penalty from capital juries will make the panels whiter and more conviction-prone, experts in law and psychology said this week.

The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.

It has long been the law in every state with capital punishment that only people who are prepared to apply the death penalty may serve on capital juries. Monday's decision, which involved a juror's equivocation about the death penalty on learning that life without parole was an option, has the potential to make capital juries even less representative.

"It could give judges the authority to exclude about half the population from service in death penalty cases," said Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. That is because support for the death penalty drops from more than 60 percent to about half when life in prison is the alternative.

Even before Monday's decision, a significant minority of Americans were ineligible to serve as jurors in death penalty cases. According to a poll to be released today by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group in Washington that is critical of the death penalty as currently applied, 39 percent of Americans say they have a moral objection to the death penalty that would disqualify them from serving in a capital case. The poll's margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.

Most of the research in this area is conducted by people and groups opposed to the death penalty. But prosecutors do not dispute the finding that capital juries are more apt to convict, arguing instead about the magnitude of the effect.

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has narrowed the availability of the death penalty, barring its use on the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders, and has overturned death sentences based on flawed jury instructions, racial bias in choosing jurors and defense lawyers' incompetence.

Some death penalty opponents found it hard to reconcile those cases with Monday’s decision on the jury selection process that lawyers call death qualification.

"We may have a line of jurisprudence that is at war with itself," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University. "You can't simultaneously keep expanding the bounds of death qualification and also manifest a special concern for innocence in capital cases. As a brute matter of statistics, the farther you go in death qualification, the more wrongful convictions you will get."

Prosecutors say that death qualification is a necessary and narrowly tailored requirement that prevents only people who are unable to follow the law from serving as jurors. ...

(Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association) conceded that the process of excluding opponents of the death penalty also conferred an advantage on prosecutors.

"I won't deny," he said, "that a death-qualified juror is probably more likely to be willing to look at a guilty verdict. I think that the difference is negligible."

Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School who supports the death penalty, agreed that "death-qualified jurors are slightly more conviction prone" than people opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, whom he referred to as abolitionists.

"It makes sense and is consistent with human nature that abolitionists as a class are more pro-defendant in general and less willing to convict," Professor Blecker said. But the many safeguards in the system, he said, outweigh that slight distorting effect. "On balance, the system is, as it should be, skewed to prefer sentencing to life those who really deserve to die, rather than condemning those who deserve to live."

Jurors eligible to serve in capital cases are "demographically unique," said Brooke Butler, who teaches psychology at the University of South Florida. Professor Butler has interviewed more than 2,000 potential jurors over the past seven years and has written several articles on the topic.

"They tend to be white," she said. "They tend to be male. They tend to be moderately well-educated -- high school or maybe a little college. They tend to be politically conservative -- Republican. They tend to be Christian -- Catholic or Protestant. They tend to be middle socioeconomic status -- maybe $30,000 or $40,000" in annual income.

In a study to be published in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, a peer-reviewed journal, Professor Butler made an additional finding. "Death-qualified jurors," she said, "are more likely to be prejudiced -- to be racist, sexist and homophobic."

A 2001 study in The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, drawing on interviews with 1,155 capital jurors from 340 trials in 14 states, found that race played an important role in the willingness of jurors to impose death sentences.

In cases involving black defendants and white victims, for instance, the presence of five or more white men on the jury made a 40 percentage point difference in the likelihood that a death sentence would be imposed. The presence of a single black male juror had an opposite effect, reducing the likelihood of a death sentence to 43 percent from 72 percent.

Stevens May Be Facing His Own 'Bridge To Nowhere'

2007-06-08T06:45:00.000-05:00

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has hired lawyers and has been instructed by the FBI to preserve records relevant to a federal investigation into corruption in his home state, a newspaper reported Thursday.

As part of a larger inquiry, federal agents are investigating the remodeling of Stevens' Alaska home in 2000. The investigation is linked to the VECO Corp. bribery case that last month produced guilty pleas from two executives of the oilfield service company, according to law enforcement officials.

"They put me on notice to preserve some records," Stevens, 83, told the Washington Post, declining to say what kinds of records were involved.

Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, declined to comment Thursday.

Three contractors who worked on the remodeling project at Stevens' home in Girdwood, a resort town south of Anchorage, have said the FBI asked them to turn over their records from the job. One, Anchorage contractor Augie Paone, has previously said VECO executives — including former Chief Executive Bill Allen — helped oversee the home remodeling project.

Paone testified before a federal grand jury in December and has said that he sent bills on the remodeling project to VECO, where someone examined them for accuracy before forwarding them to Stevens. Paone has said as far as he knew, Stevens paid the bills.

Allen pleaded guilty May 7 to bribery and other charges and is cooperating in the inquiry, which has focused on last year's negotiations for a new oil and gas tax in Alaska and a proposed natural gas pipeline that would have benefited VECO.

The inquiry has produced federal indictments against one current and two former GOP members of the Alaska House on bribery and extortion charges.

Cheney Linked To CATCH-ALL

2007-06-07T07:13:00.000-05:00

The bulldogging of NSA's CATCH-ALL program down the throats of reluctant officials had the direct involvement of Vice President Cheney, according to one DOJ insider.

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance. ...

According to Comey, the hospital visit was preceded by a March 9, 2004, meeting at the White House on the Justice Department objections. It was attended by Cheney; Gonzales; Card; Cheney's counsel then, David S. Addington; and others, Comey said.

Comey also named eight Justice Department officials who were prepared to quit if the White House had not backed down, including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, current U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria and Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel and led an internal legal review of the surveillance program.

Abramoff/White House Contacts Still Under Scrutiny

2007-06-06T08:06:00.000-05:00

Congressional investigators are still trying to get to the bottom of the Jack Abramoff-related skullduggery. And they are looking anew at the White House.

House Democrats are expanding their investigation into ties between jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the White House and have contacted several Abramoff associates recently about testifying to Congress.

The contacts were disclosed Tuesday by a House Democratic aide and an attorney familiar with the matter who both spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is ongoing.

The aide declined to identify those the committee wants to talk to. Last month committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., indicated he intended to seek testimony from people who'd worked as lobbyists with Abramoff as well as from former and current White House and administration officials who might have knowledge of Abramoff's connections with the White House.

A committee spokeswoman declined comment. A message for a White House spokesman wasn't immediately returned.

The Government Reform Committee released a report last year saying that Abramoff and his associates had 485 lobbying contacts with White House officials between January 2001 and March 2004.

But Waxman, who became committee chairman in January after Democrats retook control of Congress, says important questions remain unanswered. These include whether White House officials paid for sports and concert tickets and meals they got from Abramoff and his associates, and whether they took official actions as a result, Waxman says.

Abramoff last year pleaded guilty to conspiracy and other charges and admitted defrauding his clients. A two-year investigation into his influence peddling has led to the conviction of a congressman along with 10 former House aides and Bush administration officials. One sitting congressman, GOP Rep. John Doolittle of California, remains under investigation.

Susan Ralston, a key aide to presidential political strategist Karl Rove who had worked for Abramoff, resigned last October after the Government Reform report showed she had extensive contacts with Abramoff.

Waxman wants Ralston to testify, but she is refusing to do so without a grant of immunity, according to a memo Waxman released last month after lawyers for his panel questioned her in private. Meanwhile Waxman wants to talk to others.

Abramoff associates named in his committee's report last year as having extensive contacts with the White House include Neil Volz and Tony Rudy, who have both pleaded guilty to federal charges; Kevin Ring, a one-time Doolittle aide who is under federal investigation; and Todd Boulanger and Shawn Vasell, both still lobbyists.

CBC, House Democratic Leadership At Odds Over Jefferson

2007-06-05T06:13:00.000-05:00

Democratic leaders fear that Rep. William J. Jefferson's indictment yesterday on racketeering and bribery charges, coming exactly one year after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered his ouster from the powerful Ways and Means Committee, could rekindle a smoldering dispute between the speaker and black lawmakers who were once pillars of her power. ...

The Democratic steering committee, which sets committee assignments, will convene this week to consider whether to remove Jefferson from his last committee post: a seat on the Small Business Committee, a relative backwater of power. Senior House Democratic leadership aides said he almost certainly would be dropped. Some leadership aides suggested emissaries could be dispatched within days to ask for Jefferson's resignation from the House. ...

Senior leadership aides cautioned that a quick resignation under pressure could set a dangerous precedent, suggesting that a politicized Justice Department could target troublesome lawmakers with specious indictments. Jefferson spokeswoman Remi Braden-Cooper said that neither the congressman nor his staff had been contacted by the speaker's office. ...

With lawmakers just beginning to return to Washington from a week-long break, it was not clear last night whether Jefferson's indictment would unite Democrats against the nine-term House member, or whether it would reignite tensions between the black Caucus and Pelosi. She made a "culture of corruption" a central attack line in last year's campaign against Republicans.

A serious rupture with the black caucus would divide Democrats at a time when unity is needed to confront Republicans on the war in Iraq and as they face off with President Bush on domestic spending. Despite Davis's initial statement of support, many prominent black lawmakers remained silent. A spokesman for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said she would not discuss Jefferson's case.

But last June, many members of the caucus were incensed when the Democratic Caucus voted to remove Jefferson from the Ways and Means Committee, where he had a hand in tax, trade and health-care policy. Federal investigators were closing in on Jefferson, with guilty pleas from his business associates and word of cash found bundled in his freezer.

The black caucus accused Pelosi of a racially tinged double standard. As she was moving against Jefferson, she allowed Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.), who is white, to remain on the Appropriations Committee despite dealing with his own federal investigation. Mollohan, now chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the departments of Commerce and Justice, did recuse himself in issues involving federal law enforcement.