Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
The Economy and Mr. Bush
"the U.S. economy kept growing [in 2005] at a rate close to the impressive 4.2 percent notched up in 2004, which many had assumed was unsustainable... Yet on one important measure, the economic news hasn't been as good. The majority of workers have not felt the benefits... the problem for workers lies in take-home pay. Wages for blue-collar manufacturing workers and non-managers in services have remained stagnant since the economic recovery began in November 2001.
Part of the reason lies in the rising cost of non-wage benefits, especially health insurance. The value of benefits received by the average civilian worker rose 5.1 percent in the year to September, and that increase followed two years in which benefit costs were roaring ahead at a rate of more than 6 percent. These increases, which outpaced inflation, help explain disappointing wages. If it costs more to provide medical insurance to workers, employers will pay themselves back by holding wages down.
But it may also be true that technology and globalization are contributing to wage stagnation; if workers can be replaced by machines or foreigners, they have limited bargaining power. In the four years since the recovery began, inflation-adjusted compensation (that is, wages plus benefits, as measured by the government's Employment Cost Index) has risen just 0.8 percent per year on average, less than in past recoveries and less than gains in productivity would seem to justify.
... the signs that market forces may be making it hard for workers to win pay gains raise fresh questions about President Bush's tax strategy. Mr. Bush has cut taxes on capital, even though capital has increased its share of the proceeds from the economy; the cuts may ultimately force a compensating increase in taxes on workers, whose incomes haven't done as well. This amounts to common sense inverted. Rather than counteracting a troubling aspect of the economy, Mr. Bush's policy makes it worse."
Bush's Envoy Sparks Another Diplomatic Incident Over War Claims
"The US ambassador in London has been forced into an embarrassing retreat after his embassy clarified comments he made denying that the United States was involved in removing terrorist suspects to Syria.
Robert Tuttle told Radio 4's Today programme last Thursday that there was no evidence that US forces had sent suspected terrorists for questioning in Syria, a practice known as 'extraordinary rendition'.
The US embassy issued a statement yesterday acknowledging that there had been claims that a suspect arrested in New York had been sent by the CIA for torture in Syria."
Power That Bush Can't Just Take
"why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
... There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.
The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom."
Monday, December 26, 2005
Bush Presses Editors on Security
"President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.
The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.
Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, would not confirm the meeting with Bush before publishing reporter Dana Priest's Nov. 2 article disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders."
Bush is a 'divider,'
"When CNN/USA Today/Gallup pollsters asked in a telephone survey whether President Bush is a 'uniter' or a 'divider,' 49 percent said a uniter and 49 percent said a divider."
He's got us pretty nicely divided right down the middle, I would say.
Saga of Incompetence - Washington Post
"Will incompetence be remembered as the salient characteristic of the Bush presidency?"
Powell Speaks Out on Domestic Spy Program
"Though Mr. Powell stopped short of criticizing Mr. Bush, his suggestion that there was 'another way to handle it' was another example of his parting company on a critical issue with the president he served for four years."
U.S. Opposes Litany of Global Treaties in 2005
"'There is no good reason why the United States is not ratifying CEDAW,' says Ritu Sharma, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Women's Edge Coalition, an umbrella group representing 180 non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
'It simply lacks the political will' to ratify the treaty, she adds.
Consisting of a preamble and 30 articles, the treaty defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets an agenda for national action to end abuse of women's human rights.
But CEDAW is not the only international treaty that Washington is reluctant to sign on to.
Recently, when the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted to a adopt a new treaty that protects cultural rights worldwide, the United States stood alone in its opposition.
The treaty allows nations to maintain, adopt, and implement policies they deem appropriate to protect the diversity of cultural expressions on their territory.
The U.S. rejected the treaty by arguing that it could have a chilling effect on the ongoing negotiations at the
World Trade Organization (WTO).
"This convention invites abuse by enemies of democracy and free trade," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told UNESCO members in a letter in October.
And just a few days ago when government leaders from around the world gathered in the Canadian city of Montreal to take further steps to curb global warming, once again the U.S. turned its back on the international community."
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Bush/Cheney Have Disgraced Their Office; They Should Resign
"hardly a day goes by without more disclosures which strengthen any number of impeachable offenses that could form a Congressional action under our Constitution. An illegal war, to begin with, against our Constitution which says only Congress can declare war. An illegal war under domestic laws, and international law, and conducted illegally under international conventions to which the US belongs, should cause an outcry against this small clique of outlaws committing war crimes who have hijacked our national government.
An illegal, criminal war means that every related U.S. death and injury, every related Iraqi civilian death and injury, every person tortured, every home and building destroyed become war crimes as a result - under established international law.
There are those on talk radio or cable shows who scoff at international law. They rarely tell their audiences that the United States has played a key role in establishing these treaties, like the Geneva Conventions, and the United Nations Charter. When these treaties are agreed to by the U.S. government, they become as binding as our federal laws.
By these legal standards and by the requirements of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, the war-declaring authority), George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are probably the most impeachable President and Vice President in American history.
... the most recent, blatant impeachable offense - Bush ordering the spying on Americans in our country by the National Security Agency. This disclosure stunned many N.S.A. staff who themselves view domestic surveillance as anathema, according to Matthew M. Aid, a current historian of the agency.
Domestic eavesdropping on Americans by order of the President to the National Security Agency violates the 27-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act unless they obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.
... The crime, says Professor David Cole of Georgetown Law School, is "punishable by five years in prison." Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School said that the President ordered such a crime and ordered US officials to commit it..this is a serious felony..what happened here is not just a violation of Federal law, it's a violation of the U.S. Constitution.an impeachable offense.""
Saturday, December 24, 2005
The Department of Justice Memo, Debunked
"The Justice Department advances two theories about why Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program was legal and both of them fail. The truth is simple: the program was illegal because it violated federal criminal law."
Constant's pations: Impeachment: NSA warrantless monitoring -- no defense is credible
"the Bush Presidency has violated the Constitution by ignoring the system of checks and balances, inherent in the FISA statute, which mandate court and legislative action and review. By any measure, because President Bush has asserted executive, judicial, and legislative powers specifically recognized in Truong as being distinct from the President, the White House has ignored judicial precedent, which relies on order, regularity, and predictability.
Bush's actions are more than contrary to the rule of law and Constitution, they exercise central power by a single person -- power that the Constitution mandates be delegated and strictly separated two three distinct, separate, and competing branches.
Bush is what Madison in Federalist 51 cited Montesquieu -- a classic tyrant, unrestrained by the necessary and Constitutional competing ambitions of both the legislature and judiciary.
What the President has done is turned the Constitution upside down to suit his own purposes -- the very notion contrary to liberty, as described in Federalist 47. Liberty, Madison writes, can only be preserved by separating power.
Madison in Federalist 47 reminds us that the Executive cannot create the law -- permitting himself the liberty to ignore the law, or will of the people, as Bush has done"
Constant's pations: Impeachment: NSA warrantless monitoring -- no defense is credible
"the Supreme Court concluded that the executive must seek a warrant before it undertakes domestic security surveillance."
NSA spying broader than Bush acknowledged
"Since the Times disclosed the domestic spying program last week, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaeda.
But the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the paper said, quoting an unnamed official.
The story quoted a former technology manager at a major telecommunications firm as saying that companies have been storing information on calling patterns since the Sept. 11 attacks, and giving it to the federal government. Neither the manager nor the company he worked for was identified."
Friday, December 23, 2005
Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency - New York Times
"Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens."
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Boosting Democracy, On Purpose or Not
"this has been a lost year for Bush. The president flailed, stumbled or simply disappeared when the going got tough at home."
Unable to End 'Unlawful' Detention, Judge Says
"A federal judge in Washington ruled yesterday that the continued detention of two ethnic Uighurs at the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is 'unlawful,' but he decided he had no authority to order their release.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson criticized the government's detention of Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu Hakim, who have been jailed at Guantanamo for four years; they have been cleared for release because the government has determined they are not enemy combatants and are not a threat to the United States. But Robertson said his court has 'no relief to offer' because the government has not found a country to accept the men and because he does not have authority to let them enter the United States.
Robertson wrote that the government has taken too long to arrange a release for the men, who cannot return to their Chinese homeland because they would likely be tortured or killed there. U.S. authorities have asked about two dozen countries to grant the men political asylum, but none has accepted, in part out of fear of angering China...
"The detention of these petitioners has by now become indefinite," Robertson wrote in a 12-page opinion. "This indefinite imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay is unlawful.""
Power We Didn't Grant: Tom Daschle
"In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president 'was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that's what we've done.'
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."
FAIR USE NOTICE:
"This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner."
Bush Impeachment Not Out of the Question
"West Virginia’s senior Democratic senator, Robert Byrd, this week set forth the case for impeachment:
“The President claims that these powers are within his role as Commander in Chief,” Byrd said in a December 19 statement. “Make no mistake, the powers granted to the Commander in Chief are specifically those as head of the Armed Forces. These warrantless searches are conducted not against a foreign power, but against unsuspecting and unknowing American citizens. They are conducted against individuals living on American soil, not in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is nothing within the powers granted in the Commander in Chief clause that grants the President the ability to conduct clandestine surveillance of American civilians. We must not allow such groundless, foolish claims to stand.
“The President claims a boundless authority through the resolution that authorized the war on those who perpetrated the September 11th attacks. But that resolution does not give the President unchecked power to spy on our own people. That resolution does not give the Administration the power to create covert prisons for secret prisoners. That resolution does not authorize the torture of prisoners to extract information from them. That resolution does not authorize running black-hole secret prisons in foreign countries to get around U.S. law. That resolution does not give t"
Bush and Wiretaps: Congress, Citizens, This Means War
"Bush and his advisers do not claim that his actions are legal because they abide by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA; they quite clearly violate that law. Instead, they claim his actions are legal because as commander in chief, he can violate the law if he chooses and still be acting legally.
It is, in other words, his royal prerogative.
That is an extraordinary assertion of executive power, particularly since the president claims this authority will last 'so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens,' which is pretty much forever."
Fear of the Devil: This Maze Leads to a Trap Without an Exit: "Waging war on Absolute Evil — through torture and missile strikes on civilians populations and the shriveling of domestic civil liberties, as though freedom is some childish indulgence, not our strength and greatest hope — is a trap with no exit."
Fear of the Devil: This Maze Leads to a Trap Without an Exit
"Domestic spying is pretty far down on the list of crimes this administration has committed in the last five years in its battle with the Devil, but the president's brazen attitude about it — making him, in the words of Watergate whistleblower John Dean, the first president in U.S. history to admit an impeachable offense — has tipped a historical balance."
The Hidden State Steps Forward
"Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.
... There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.
The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff has called a "cabal." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported the same thing. Cabinet meetings were for show. Real decisions were made elsewhere, out of sight. Another White House official, John DiIulio, has commented that there was "a complete lack of a policy apparatus" in the White House. "What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm." As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were made.
With Bush's defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, "Yes, I am above the law--I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is--and if you don't like it, I dare you to do something about it." "
On Wiretapping, Bush Isn't Listening to the Constitution
"this administration seems to be saying that it IS the law. It contends that it can decide on its own what the law is, how to interpret it, and whether or not it has to follow it.
... The president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the attorney general tell us that the president can order domestic spying inside this country -- without judicial oversight -- under his power as commander in chief. Really? Where do they find that in the Constitution? Time and time again, this president has used his express, but limited, constitutional power to command the military to justify controversial activities -- after the fact.
The president is the commander in chief of the military. That doesn't give him the power to spy on civilians at home without any judicial oversight whatsoever, without ever revealing those activities to even well-established courts that review these matters in secrecy.
... [The president] also took an oath of office, to ''preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." With his arrogant usurpation of power and refusal to follow well-established wiretapping laws, I believe that this president is not living up to that oath. By shunning the oversight of the courts and ignoring the express language of the laws passed by Congress, this president is, in my judgment, defiantly and stubbornly ignoring the Constitution and laws passed by Congress. "
The Pentagon Breaks the Law:
"the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more.
... JPEN is more than just a compilation of TALON's. It is a near real-time sharing system of raw non-validated force protection information among Department of Defense organizations and installations. Feeding into JPEN are intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, and security reports, TALONs as well as other reports.
JPEN shares this information at all levels, from military police guarding entry gates at military bases to terrorism warning watch standers at the Defense Intelligence Agency. JPEN began as a pilot project in the Washington, D.C. area and was initially fielded in June 2003.
Under the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), the military can maintain information on specific individuals (name of individual or other personal identifiers such as Social Security number or driver's license number) in the JPEN database system for 90 days. JPEN then is supposed to purge all Privacy Act information after 90 days, unless it is part of an ongoing investigation.
... The managers of JPEN are hardly being inadvertent about either the 90-day restriction or the intentional collection of information on U.S. persons. So far, it appears that they have broken the law. And what is more, they are agitating internally to find ways of circumventing the legal restrictions. "
Iraq's Election Result: a Divided Nation:
"Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.
Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.
The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said: 'In two and a half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq.'
"
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program
"Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, told fellow FISA court members by e-mail Monday that she is arranging for them to convene in Washington, preferably early next month, for a secret briefing on the program, several judges confirmed yesterday.
Two intelligence sources familiar with the plan said Kollar-Kotelly expects top-ranking officials from the National Security Agency and the Justice Department to outline the classified program to the members.
The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court."
News of Surveillance Is Awkward for Agency - New York Times
"Testifying before a Senate committee last April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the National Security Agency, emphasized how scrupulously the agency was protecting Americans from its electronic snooping.
'We are, I would offer, the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting U.S. privacy,' General Hayden said. 'We just have to be that way.'
It was one of General Hayden's favorite themes in public speeches and interviews: the agency's mammoth eavesdropping network was directed at foreigners, not Americans. As a PowerPoint presentation posted on the agency's Web site puts it, for an American to be a target, 'Court Order Required in the United States.'
In fact, since 2002, authorized by a secret order from President Bush, the agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens and others in the United States without obtaining court orders. The discrepancy between the public claims and the secret domestic eavesdropping disclosed last week have put the N.S.A., the nation's largest intelligence agency, and General Hayden, now principal deputy director of national intelligence, in an awkward position.
While a few important members of Congress were informed of the special eavesdropping program, several lawmakers have said they and the public were misled."
Court Refuses U.S. Bid to Shift Terror Suspect
"A federal appeals court delivered a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration Wednesday, refusing to allow the transfer of Jose Padilla from military custody to civilian law enforcement authorities to face terrorism charges.
In denying the administration's request, the three-judge panel unanimously issued a strongly worded opinion that said the Justice Department's effort to transfer Mr. Padilla gave the appearance that the government was trying to manipulate the court system to prevent the Supreme Court from reviewing the case. The judges warned that the administration's behavior in the Padilla case could jeopardize its credibility before the courts in other terrorism cases.
What made the action by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., so startling, lawyers and others said, was that it came from a panel of judges who in September had provided the administration with a sweeping court victory, saying President Bush had the authority to detain Mr. Padilla, an American citizen, indefinitely without trial as an enemy combatant."
American global warming gas emissions accelerate to a record high
"Emissions of global warming gases from the United States have nearly doubled in 14 years and reached an all-time high in 2004, according to figures released by the American government. But new analysis suggests Europe is also falling behind in its attempt to meet legally binding United Nations targets.
The US energy department report shows emissions rose 2% in 2004 and stood one year ago at 7,122.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year - about 25% of the world total. The rise was the greatest in five years and is part of an accelerating trend. Revised figures also published showed emissions in 2003 were at the second highest level."
Revolt of the Professionals
"There has been growing uneasiness among these national security professionals at some of what they have been asked to do, and at the seeming unconcern among civilian leaders at the Pentagon and the CIA for the consequences of administration decisions.
The quiet revolt of the generals at the Pentagon is a big reason U.S. policy in Iraq has been changing, far more than Bush's stay-the-course speeches might suggest. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is deeply unpopular with senior military officers. They complain privately about a management style that has stretched the military to the breaking point in Iraq. For months they have been working out details of troop reductions next year in Iraq -- not just because such action will keep the Army and Marine Corps from cracking but because they think a smaller footprint will be more effective in stabilizing the country.
A similar revolt is evident at the CIA. Professional intelligence officers are furious at the politicized leadership brought to the agency by ex-congressman Porter Goss and his retinue of former congressional staffers. Their mismanagement has peeled away a generation of senior management in the CIA's Directorate of Operations who have resigned, transferred or signaled their intention to quit when their current tours are up. Many of those who remain are trying to keep their heads down until the curr"
Impeach Bush and the Bush Administration
"'The president's dead wrong. It's not a close question. Federal law is clear,' said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law. 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors.'
'There's little enthusiasm for impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress, but few lawmakers have rallied to Bush's defense.'
Here's commentator Jack Cafferty on CNN yesterday: 'If you listen carefully, you can hear the word impeachment. Two congressional Democrats are using it. And they're not the only ones.'
Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter writes about the spying program : 'This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.'
(Alter also reports 'that on December 6, Bush summoned [New York] Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running' the Dec. 16 Times story that first reported Bush's secret authorization of the eavesdropping."
The American nightmare
"The irony of President Bush's proud statement this week on the Iraqi elections was inescapable. 'The Iraqi people now enjoy constitutionally protected freedoms and their leaders now derive their powers from the consent of the governed,' he said at the start of a press conference in which he defended eroding those freedoms at home while asserting his power to act without judicial check."
What torture does to torturers | csmonitor.com
"When an individual merges unthinkingly 'into an organizational structure,' warned Milgram, 'a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.'
Government agencies, especially those defending the nation through espionage and military action, depend on personal integrity. Yet they create these 'sanctions of authority.' They can even require unethical actions. When they do, however, they risk creating in the perpetrators either an anguished guilt or an amoral numbness. A convicted Watergate-related figure, Egil 'Bud' Krogh, recalls what it was like to sacrifice conscience for what he saw as President Nixon's unquestionable authority. Whenever you do something like that, he says poignantly, 'a little bit of your soul slips through your fingers.'
That's not what democracy is about. None of us wants our public servants turned into pliant emotional wrecks. And none of us wants the nation cast in the role of the gray-coated Grand Experimenter, calmly overriding individual ethics in the name of collective expediency. With the torture debate over for now, it's time to begin the conversation on the broader differences between moral and immoral authority."
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Intelligent design ruled religion not scientific theory: "'In making this determination,' wrote Judge John E. Jones III, 'we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. ... We hold that the ID policy is unconstitutional.'
... Last October, the Dover Area School Board voted to include a brief statement as part of the ninth-grade biology curriculum that questioned the Darwinian theory of evolution, and referred students instead to a Christian textbook titled "Of Pandas and People." Eleven parents of children in the Dover district, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other lawyers, sued the board.
In his opinion, Jones found that the religious nature of intelligent design "is evident because it involves a supernatural designer." Intelligent design holds that some parts of nature are too complex to be accounted for by evolution and therefore are the handiwork of an unspecified intelligent designer.
The judge wrote that evidence at the trial -- in which scientific witnesses were called by both sides and which often resembled a classroom more than a courtroom -- "demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism." The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1987 decision, Edwards vs. Aguillard, ruled that creationism was also religiously based and, as such, could not be taught in public schools.
Because copious evidence was presented during the trial in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., Jones wrote, "no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than we are to traipse into this controversial area." He concluded that the goal of intelligent design proponents "is not to encourage critical thought," as they asserted in testimony, "but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory," the bedrock of biology, "with ID." "
Trifler, Fibber, Sophist, Spy: How Bush Abolished the Constitution: "Monday's White House news conference showed President Bush at his craven worst. He defended his decision to authorize spying by citing his reliance on - as he put it - 'the constitutional authority to protect our country. Article II of the Constitution gives me that responsibility and the authority necessary to fulfill it.' That's the sort of misleading inaccuracy you'd expect from a fast talker in a high school debating match. You don't expect it from a president, though this president has lowered the bar of credible discourse so much that American political discourse usually reeks of barroom skank. Article II does not give the president a blank check to do as he will, in time or peace or war. Article II is pretty specific. It lays out electoral law, qualifications, matters of succession. It states with unequivocal clarity that 'President shall communicate to Congress' by various means. It spells out the Oath of Office, which maybe the president had in mind when he referred to the 'responsibility and the authority necessary' to protect the country. The Oath, however, says nothing about abrogating all other constitutional powers in deference to the presidency, no matter what the circumstances. To the contrary: "I do solemnly swear(or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." President Bush is confusing protecting his power and self-fulfilling prerogatives (see "enemy combatants," secret prisons, open-ended detentions without charge, etc.) with protecting and defending the Constitution. Note that Article II considers the president's responsibility toward the Constitution to be supreme-beyond his responsibility to the nation: Principle above immediacy, law above expediency. In his news conference Monday Bush simply rewrote the Constitution to suit, soothe and sanction his crimes.
Section 2 of Article II does refer to the president's role as Commander-in-Chief. But here's where this president, like every president since Ronald Reagan, has expressly misread this clause, which says nothing about the president being Commander-in-Chief of the nation-of people like you and me, of the school bus driver, of Exxon's employees, of anybody not wearing a military uniform. "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into actual Service of the United States." That's all. Grant him the Air Force and the Marines on top of that. But no one, and nothing, else is under his military command. (John Lukacs, the historian, wrote in 2003 of the "unnecessary and unseemly habit" of president's "quite wrong" salutes as they step off planes or choppers, "especially George W. Bush, who steps off his plane and cocks a jaunty salute.") What Section 2 of Article II does require the president to do is seek the advise and consent of Congress son various matters in executive and foreign policy purviews. Blank checks? Extraordinary powers in time of war? Executive privilege? Executive prerogative? Nada, nada, nada, nada. One last thing Article II does address:"
Bush Shows He Believes He is Above the Law: " This is a president who believes no law applies to him.
He long ago violated a 1971 statute that bars the detention of U.S. citizens "except pursuant to an Act of Congress." In his "war on terror," Bush has nonetheless thrown American citizens into the clink and asserted he has the right to hold them there indefinitely, without charge and without showing any evidence against them.
He failed to comply with U.S. and international laws against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners - his political apparatchiks at the Pentagon and in the Justice Department instead concocted justifications for violating them. The president relented only days ago, and only after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) forced submission by engineering overwhelming votes in Congress to bring a measure of sanity to our detention schemes.
The Geneva Conventions have been tossed aside like wastepaper. They are replaced by gross violations of basic human rights at U.S. detention facilities, secret and semi-secret, around the world. The Pentagon, supposedly restricted from gathering information on the American citizenry, has compiled a vast database of information on anti-war protesters and those opposed to military recruitment practices.
Who else is in their sights? We do not yet know.
This president simply disregards the Constitution, save for the one clause he invokes to justify his violation of so many others: He is, he says, commander-in-chief. This power trumps all.
It wipes out an individual's guarantee of a public trial, and the right to be brought before a court to hear charges. It erases the clause that says treaties are "the supreme Law of the Land." It eviscerates the citizens' protection against being deprived of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Now with his extra-legal surveillance scheme, Bush has violated the right of the people to be free from "unreasonable searches and seizures." "
Clash Is Latest Chapter in Bush Effort to Widen Executive Power
"From shielding energy policy deliberations to setting up military tribunals without court involvement, Bush, with Cheney's encouragement, has taken what scholars call a more expansive view of his role than any commander in chief in decades. With few exceptions, Congress and the courts have largely stayed out of the way, deferential to the argument that a president needs free rein, especially in wartime.
... The vice president entered the fray yesterday, rejecting the criticism and expounding on the philosophy that has driven so many of the administration's actions. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it -- and to some extent that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them," Cheney said. In wartime, he said, the president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired."
Speaking with reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force Two to Oman, Cheney said the period after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War proved to be "the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy" and harmed the chief executive's ability to lead in a complicated, dangerous era. "But I do think that to some extent now we've been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency.""
Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest
"A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
... Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work."
Donors Underwrite DeLay's Deluxe Lifestyle: "As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants — all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.
Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.
Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two.
Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Texas Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress. His lawyer says the expenses are part of DeLay's effort to raise money from Republicans and to spread the GOP message."
Analysis: Bush Ties Surveillance to 9/11 Law
"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday the administration believes Congress gave Bush the authority to use 'signals intelligence' — wiretaps, for example — to eavesdrop on international calls between U.S. citizens and foreigners when one of them is a suspected al-Qaida member or supporter.
The law Gonzales is relying on is the Authorization to Use Military Force, which Congress passed and Bush signed a week after 19 hijackers crashed four commercial jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The administration's interpretation allowed the government to avoid requirements under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The act established procedures that an 11-member court used in 2004 to oversee nearly 1,800 government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage.
'I think they were aggressive,' said Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmiec, who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
"Were they right? Here, I think context matters. Within six months, 12 months of the attacks, I think that the AUMF (authorization law) would have been a basis for legal authority," he said. "But that diminishes the further we are from the attacks."
... Kmiec said Bush clearly believes he did the right thing and deserves credit for keeping some members of Congress informed. "But he was entirely reliant on the quality of legal advice he received," Kmiec said.
Gonzales, who was White House counsel when the program was created, said just because Congress' war authorization doesn't mention electronic surveillance doesn't mean the law doesn't allow it. He cited a 2004 plurality opinion by Supreme Court Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor to back him up. Although Congress never included the word "detention" in the war authorization, O'Connor said lawmakers gave the president power to detain enemy soldiers — even U.S. citizens — captured on the battlefield.
"That's ridiculous," said Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe. "O'Connor wasn't saying that anything not mentioned (in the authorization) is OK ... To use that to say it's OK to eavesdrop on people ... is to stretch the authorization completely beyond recognition.""
Experts ponder Bush's rationale / Some wonder why law wasn't changed instead of circumvented by administration
"Abraham Sofaer, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said he didn't understand why the existing procedure requiring warrants was inadequate, given that the court rarely refuses such requests, can grant them within hours, or even minutes, and allows surveillance for 72 hours without a warrant in special circumstances.
While wartime necessity has historically granted presidents enormous leeway even in the face of congressional and legal obstacles, Sofaer warned that the rationale is open to abuse.
'Necessity relates to emergency, and it's always a special exemption to the law,' said Sofaer, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But, he added, 'to issue an executive order over and over again to set up a special way of doing something, I don't consider it a necessity.'"
For years, Bush said court orders required for spying - Yahoo! News: "In 2004 and 2005, Bush repeatedly argued that the controversial Patriot Act package of anti-terrorism laws safeguards civil liberties because US authorities still need a warrant to tap telephones in the United States.
'Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order,' he said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.
'Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so,' he added.
On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use 'roving wiretaps,' which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.
'You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order -- and by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example,' he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
But under Bush's super-secret order -- first revealed Friday by the New York Times and partly confirmed by Bush and other top US officials -- the National Security Agency does not need the court's approval.
... Vice President Dick Cheney offered similar reassurances at a Patriot Act event in June 2004, saying that "all of the investigative tools" under the law "require the approval of a judge before they can be carried out.""
Cheney Says President Has Spying Authority
"Republicans said Congress must investigate whether Bush was within the law to allow the super-secret National Security Agency to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to al-Qaida.
'I believe the Congress — as a coequal branch of government — must immediately and expeditiously review the use of this practice,' said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.
Snowe joined three other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, in calling for a joint inquiry by the Senate judiciary and intelligence committees.
The administration defends the program, saying Congress gave Bush the authority to use 'signals intelligence' — wiretaps, for example — to eavesdrop on international calls between U.S. citizens and foreigners when one of them is a suspected al-Qaida member or supporter.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cites the Authorization to Use Military Force law, which Congress passed and Bush signed a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The administration believes that law lets the government avoid provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The surveillance act was passed after public outcry over abuses during the Nixon administration, which spied on anti-war and civil rights protesters. Under the act, known as FISA, an 11-member court oversees government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage."
Monday, December 19, 2005
Bush administration has "pushed the presidential-powers argument beyond what was legally justified or prudent": "'The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress. . . .
'Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as 'plenary' -- a term defined as 'full,' 'complete,' and 'absolute.' '
Gellman and Linzer write that Congress in the 1970s passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.'
But the Bush administration has argued that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."
And Gellman and Linzer write: "Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the 'war on terror' is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.""
Bush Leaves Out the Bad News in Iraqi Poll
"President Bush is making selective use of an opinion poll when he tells people that Iraqis are increasingly upbeat.
The same poll that indicated a majority of Iraqis believe their lives are going well also found a majority expressing opposition to the presence of U.S. forces, and less than half saying Iraq is better off now than before the war.
... Half said the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was wrong, up from 39 percent in February 2004."
Sunday, December 18, 2005
White House Letter: 2 hawks a-nesting ... under a no-flight zone - Americas - International Herald Tribune
"two years ago Rumsfeld paid $1.5 million for Mount Misery, a former bed and breakfast with a checkered past. (The 19th century red-brick house on 4.5 waterfront acres, or 1.8 hectares, was built by Edward Covey, a notorious breaker of rebellious slaves who beat the abolitionist Frederick Douglass on and off there in 1834.)"
Rumsfeld living in a house built by someone who used to beat slaves? That seems an appropriate association for him somehow, doesn't it?
Senator Says Bush Is Acting Like 'King George'
"the spying is indicative of a 'pattern of abuse' including torture and secret prisons. The president, Feingold said is 'grabbing too much power.'"
Legality of Wiretaps Remains in Question
"Bush said his decision was 'fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.' And the president's lawyers have maintained that the commander in chief has the 'inherent' authority to act in the interest of national security, even if he overrides the law.
But the Supreme Court did not accept that claim when it was tested in the past.
In 1972, the justices unanimously rejected President Nixon's contention that he had the power to order wiretapping without a warrant to protect national security. The decision came in the case of three men who had allegedly plotted to bomb a CIA facility in Michigan. After the ruling, charges in the case were dismissed.
The 4th Amendment protects Americans from 'unreasonable searches and seizures' by the government, said then-Justice Lewis F. Powell, a Nixon appointee, delivering the court's ruling, and such freedoms 'cannot be properly guaranteed if domestic security surveillances are conducted solely within the discretion of the executive branch.'
He said Nixon's lawyer should have obtained a search warrant from a judge before the government tapped the telephones of the alleged plotters."
BBC NEWS | Defining torture in a new world war:
"as far as the definition of torture is concerned, a lot depends on what is meant by 'severe.' In a memorandum on 1 August 2002, the then Assistant US Attorney General Jay Bybee said that 'the adjective severe conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.' He even suggested that 'severe pain' must be severe enough to result in organ failure or death.
Such an interpretation would obviously leave an interrogator a great deal of latitude, and that memo was subsequently disowned by the Bush administration.
What seems to have evolved is a series of interrogation techniques which in the US view do not amount to torture as defined by the UN Convention but which go beyond the simple business of asking questions.
... Senator McCain has written against any ill-treatment of prisoners: "We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear - whether it is true or false - if he believes it will relieve his suffering," he said in an article in Newsweek.
He is particularly against "waterboarding". "I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture," he said.
But the administration clearly feels that the CIA's hands should not be tied too tightly.
Stephen Hadley, the US National Security Adviser, has spoken of the dilemma faced by governments which say they abide by the rule of law yet which need to get information to save lives. "The president has said that we are going to do whatever we do in accordance with the law. But you see the dilemma. What happens if on September 7th 2001, we had gotten one of the hijackers and based on information associated with that arrest, believed that within four days, there's going to be a devastating attack on the United States?"
One very grey area of the rendition policy is that sometimes a prisoner is handed over secretly to a country which itself carries out the interrogation. Such a country might not be so particular as to the methods used
There is a view among some lawyers that the US would violate international law if it knew of such practices by governments to which it hands over suspects."
MercuryNews.com | 12/18/2005 | Bush defends spying in U.S.
"The president ordered the NSA to act without approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, a special federal tribunal created in 1978 to authorize domestic counterterrorism operations.
``I don't understand why that wasn't used,'' said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. ``Congress has clearly provided for what was going on. It seems to be that that procedure should have been followed.''
In a Democratic response, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., called Bush's address a ``shocking admission'' and demanded that he halt the program immediately.
``The president believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed,'' Feingold said. ``This is not how our democratic system of government works. The president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow.
``He is a president, not a king.''"
Bush's Fumbles Spur New Talk of Oversight on Hill
"Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said 'it's a fair comment' that the GOP-controlled Congress has done insufficient oversight and 'ought to be' doing more.
'Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own,' said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. 'I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches.'
Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.
Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.
"I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters this month: "It has basically lost the war-making power. The real debates on budget occur not in Congress but in the Office of Management and Budget. . . . When you come into session Tuesday afternoon and leave Thursday afternoon, you simply do not have time for oversight or deliberation.""
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Bush Defends Secret Spying in the U.S. - Yahoo! News
"'I didn't hear him specify any legal right, except his right as president, which in a democracy doesn't make much sense,' Bamford said in an interview. 'Today, what Bush said is he went around the law, which is a violation of the law — which is illegal.'
Retired Adm. Bobby Inman, who led the NSA from 1977 to 1981, said Bush's authorization of the eavesdropping would have been justified in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks 'because at that point you couldn't get a court warrant unless you could show probable cause.'
'Once the Patriot Act was in place, I am puzzled what was the need to continue outside the court,' Inman added. But he said, 'If the fact is valid that Congress was notified, there will be no consequences.'"
Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers
"The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.
Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for 'detecting, identifying and engaging' internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.
Defiant in the face of criticism, the Bush administration has portrayed each surveillance initiative as a defense of American freedom. Bush said yesterday that his NSA eavesdropping directives were "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." After years of portraying an offensive waged largely overseas, Bush justified the internal surveillance with new emphasis on "the home front" and the need to hunt down "terrorists here at home."
Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as "plenary" -- a term defined as "full," "complete," and "absolute."
A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA's new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
In describing the briefings, administration officials made clear that Cheney was announcing a decision, not asking permission from Congress. How much the legislators learned is in dispute.
Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to "calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system.""
MI6 and CIA 'sent student to Morocco to be tortured'
"Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.
After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.
Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda.
... In September he was taken to Guantanamo Bay where he has been charged with involvement in al-Qaeda plots and faces trial there by military commission. Stafford Smith said: 'I am unaware of any evidence against him other than that extracted under torture.'"
On Hill, Anger and Calls for Hearings Greet News of Stateside Surveillance
"Domestic spying, much of which is handled by the FBI, is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by a special and highly secretive court that meets at Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
The order issued by Bush in 2002, however, allowed the NSA to monitor without a warrant international telephone calls, e-mails and other communications between people in the United States and those overseas. The Associated Press reported last night that Bush reauthorized the order 36 times."
On Hill, Anger and Calls for Hearings Greet News of Stateside Surveillance
"'How can I go out, how can any member of this body go out, and say that under the Patriot Act we protect the rights of American citizens if, in fact, the president is not going to be bound by the law?' [Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)] asked."
GOP consultant convicted of telephone harassment during election - The Boston Globe
"A Republican political consultant from Maine who has been a leading fund-raiser for President Bush was found guilty of telephone harassment yesterday by a federal jury in New Hampshire in connection with an Election Day plot to disrupt Democratic operations during a 2002 Senate race.
James Tobin of Bangor, a former official of the Republican National Committee, was acquitted of the most serious charge against him, interfering with voters' rights. He faces a maximum penalty of 7 years in prison when he is sentenced in March."
In Speech, Bush Says He Ordered Domestic Spying - New York Times
"Mr. Bush's public confirmation Saturday morning of the existence of one of the country's most secret intelligence programs, which had been known to only a select number of his aides, was a rare moment in the presidency. But he linked it with a forceful assertion of his own authority to act without court approval, making it clear that he planned to resist any effort to infringe on his powers.
... Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Friday that "there is no doubt this is inappropriate" and that he would conduct hearings to determine why Mr. Bush took the action."
Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives - New York Times
"A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.
... The administration's legal experts, including David S. Addington, the vice president's former counsel and now his chief of staff, and John C. Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, have pointed to several sources of presidential authority.
The bedrock source is Article 2 of the Constitution, which describes the "executive power" of the president, including his authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Several landmark court decisions have elaborated the extent of the powers.
Another key recent document cited by the administration is the joint resolution passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for Sept. 11 in order to prevent further attacks.
Mr. Yoo, who is believed to have helped write a legal justification for the National Security Agency's secret domestic eavesdropping, first laid out the basis for the war on terror in a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum that said no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response."
That became the underlying justification for numerous actions apart from the eavesdropping program, disclosed by The New York Times on Thursday night. Those include the order to try accused terrorists before military tribunals; the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret overseas jails operated by the Central Intelligence Agency; the holding of two Americans, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, as enemy combatants; and the use of severe interrogation techniques, including some banned by international agreements, on Al Qaeda figures.
... Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate counsel to President Bush from 2001 to 2003, explained the logic behind the assertion of executive power.
"After 9/11 the president felt it was incumbent on him to use every ounce of authority available to him to protect the American people," Mr. Berenson said."
Bush says he authorized use of wiretaps
"the president confirmed media reports that he had authorized the NSA, the government's intensely secret electronic and satellite spy agency, to intercept communications by people living in the United States who are suspected of terrorist activities.
'This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security,' Bush said of the controversial program, launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The media reports suggested that the authorization was a significant shift in the NSA's activities, which is normally tasked to spy on communications internationally.
Bush called the media reports improper and suggested they stemmed from illegal leaks of classified information.
'As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.'"
Friday, December 16, 2005
Military pays $300 million for advertising and PR that "is just propaganda"
"Bailey also went into business with Paige Craig, 31, a former US Marine who served in Iraq and elsewhere. [Bailey and Craig are flatmates in a fashionable part of Washington, close to U Street. The flat is just yards away from Café Saint- Ex, popular with young professionals.]
In September, Iraqex won a $6m Pentagon contract to design and execute 'an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support'. It appears one project was an attempt to persuade the Iraqi and US public that Iraqi troops played a vital role in last year's effort to clear Fallujah.
A strategy document obtained by ABC News revealed the Lincoln Group was seeking to promote the 'strength, integrity and reliability of Iraqi forces during the fight for Falujah'. In reality, most assessments suggest the small number of Iraqi troops present were minimally involved.
But the real breakthrough came this summer when Bailey's company, having again changed its name to the Lincoln Group, secured a $100m contract for information and psychological operations. Part of the contract was for placing 'faux' news stories in some of the 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers that now exist.
Pentagon officials have said that, while not factually incorrect, these stories only presented one side of the story and would not include anything negative about the occupation. It was reported this week that the $10Om was part of a larger $300m "stealth PR effort" in a number of countries around the world.
One PR consultant with experience of the private-intelligence sector, said: "Doctrinally, this is all part of what the military calls information superiority. It is part of the plan for what they call, rather upsettingly, full-spectrum dominance. The truth is that it is just propaganda. And there has always been propaganda in a war. And this is a war, so ... thus runs the thinking."
According to reports from former Lincoln employees, their main task was to take news dispatches, called storyboards, which had been written by specially trained psy-ops troops, have them translated into Arabic and then distribute them to the newspapers. "
Shocking The Conscience Of America: Bush And Cheney's Call For Torture Are Decisively and Correctly Rebuffed by the House
""McCain has said that ultimately the debate is over who we are. We will never figure that out until we stop talking about ticking bombs, and stop playing games with words."
...Last year, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert tried to slip a provision into a law authorizing the CIA to torture. But he got caught, and the effort died.
The House GOP leaders wanted to avoid letting this matter come to a recorded vote in the House. How many members would dare to vote for torture? Even though public opinion polls are all over the lot, as Maggie Gallagher found, when Gallup asked more specific questions, Americans recoiled.
For example, Gallup asked, 'Would you be willing, or not willing, to have the U.S. Government torture known terrorists if they know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S.?' Fifty-nine percent were not willing.
The poll asked if the following activities were right or wrong: forcing prisoners to remain naked and chained in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms for several hours: (79 percent said this was wrong); having female interrogator make physical contact with Muslim men during religious observances that prohibit such contact (85 percent said this was wrong); threatening to transfer a prisoner to a country known to use torture: (62 percent said this was wrong); threatening prisoners with dogs (69 percent said this was wrong); using the technique of waterboarding, which simulates drowning (82 percent said this was wrong). The only 50/50 split came on sleep deprivation.
Senator McCain has been in negotiations with the House, and with the White House. Then Congressman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) forced the issue in the House, calling for a motion to instruct the House conferee to accept the language of the McCain Amendments. "No circumstance whatsoever justifies torture. No emergencies, no state of war, no level of political instability," Murtha, a heavily decorated and much respected veteran, said.
Only one lonely voice dared to speak on the House floor against this motion. Congressman C.W. Bill Young of Florida opposed the McCain amendments because he did not believe terrorists should have the protection of our Constitution. The argument was absurd. They already have that protection"
Shocking The Conscience Of America: Bush And Cheney's Call For Torture Are Decisively and Correctly Rebuffed by the House
"not even Franklin Roosevelt's horrific internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is, in my view, as low a point as President Bush and Vice President Cheney's call for the unrestricted, unreviewable power to torture. It seems the precedent for Bush and Cheney's thinking resides in the Dark Ages, or Stalin's Russia."
Op-Eds for Sale: Right Wing Columnist Admits Being Paid to Promote Indicted Lobbyist's Clients
"A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s. "
Bush had access to more intelligence than he shared with Congress
Dafna Linzer writes in The Washington Post: 'A congressional report made public yesterday concluded that President Bush and his inner circle had access to more intelligence and reviewed more sensitive material than what was shared with Congress when it gave Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq.'
Here's that Congressional Research Service report .
Dana Milbank wrote in The Post yesterday that as of Wednesday, Bush had asserted fully 102 times that Congress saw 'the same intelligence' about Iraq's weapons as he did.
But I guess that doesn't make it so."
White House Briefing -- News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration
"Bush has recently gotten good press for admitting mistakes -- but its worth noting that they're other people's mistakes. Even now, he's still not admitting he did anything wrong himself. "
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying
"Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity.
The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was 'engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction,' according to the law.
'This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration,' said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. 'It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans.'"
In wartime, this lawyer has got Bush's back - Los Angeles Times
"Yoo doesn't employ the usual rationale for a strong Bush presidency. He says in his book that it is not the 9/11 terrorist attacks that justify the extraordinary presidential powers he advocates. In Yoo's view, the constitution itself gives the president lots of leeway, allowing him to invade Iraq without congressional permission and to disregard such treaties as the Geneva Convention, which governs the moral code of conduct of war.
"I'm pretty sure that's an argument no one has ever made before," Yoo, 38, said recently with evident pride. Most people, he said, "say the world's too dangerous and the Constitution's obsolete."
Michael Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University, believes that Yoo "sees the president essentially as an elected king."
"It strains the imagination to believe that those who wrote our Constitution could so quickly forget the danger that flows from unlimited power," Glennon said. "If the framers truly intended to create a Sun King, why did they explicitly assign so many powers to the Congress?"
To answer this question, Yoo relies partly on the dictionary. Although the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to "declare" war, that wording doesn't mean the president needs to consult Congress to "make war" or "commence war," Yoo's book says.
Yoo's critics say this relegates Congress to the role of an ambassador making a courtesy call: Excuse me, in case you hadn't noticed, we're bombing you to smithereens.
... president has this whole set of powers in matters of defense that Congress cannot override," said Sofaer, now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "I don't believe there are any powers that the president has that Congress cannot override."
What most concerns him, Sofaer said, are Yoo's views on the treatment of detainees.
"The torture convention is written specifically for people who think their emergency is different than any other emergency in human history," Sofaer said. "You can't just say that because you happen to be governing the United States during an attack unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that all the conventions governing the rules of war go out the window."
... 'In the war against Al Qaeda, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply,' Yoo explained in November on C-Span. 'Al Qaeda is not a nation. Under the McCain amendment, all we could do is question people…. The real effect of the McCain amendment would be to shut down coercive interrogation.'
To Yoo, it is crystal clear who gets to decide the difference between coercive interrogation and torture abroad.
'Outside the United States it would be the president,' Yoo said. 'If the president thinks that because of an extraordinary need to protect the country, he needs to order an interrogation, he needs to be able to do that.
"
Bush aides deny laws were broken in spy effort - Yahoo! News
"The New York Times said Friday that the president authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2002 to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without getting warrants previously required for internal spying.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was "not going to comment on intelligence activities, because intelligence activities by their very nature are activities that are sensitive and that should not be compromised."
'The president of the United States acted lawfully in every step that he has taken to defend the American people and to defend them within his constitutional responsibility,' Rice told NBC television.
At any given time since the order, the NSA monitored 500 people inside the United States and 5,000 to 7,000 people overseas suspected of having terrorist ties, the daily reported.
US officials told the Times that the program had disrupted terrorist plots, citing Ohio trucker Iyman Faris, who in 2003 pleaded guilty to supporting Al-Qaeda by planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City."
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Ban Torture. Period. - New York Times
"McCain's amendment is attached to a malignant measure - introduced by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and now co-sponsored by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee - that would do grievous harm to the rule that the government cannot just lock you up without showing cause to a court."
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times: "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches."
Democrats Criticize Bush For Saying DeLay's Innocent
"Democratic leaders sternly criticized President Bush yesterday for saying former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is innocent of felonious campaign finance abuses, suggesting his comments virtually amounted to jury tampering before DeLay stands trial.
'The president of the United States said a jury does not need to assemble, that Tom DeLay is innocent,' said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). 'To have someone of his stature, the president of the United States, prejudge a case is something I've never seen before.'
During an interview Wednesday on the Fox News Channel, Bush was asked whether he believes DeLay is innocent of the charges of money laundering and conspiracy that led to his indictment in Texas and resignation from the House Republican leadership in September. "Yes, I do," the president replied.
That response pushed the White House on the defensive yesterday. Administration officials have repeatedly deflected questions about other legal probes -- especially Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's inquiry into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name -- by saying they could not comment on ongoing investigations. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the apparent inconsistency a "presidential prerogative.""
White House, McCain reach agreement on anti-torture amendment - KRT Wire | 12/15/2005 |
"Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he would try to block the defense bill, which sets policy for the military, unless the White House gives him written assurance that the torture ban would not result in a reduction in intelligence-gathering."
It gives me such confidence to know we have intelligent men like Mr. Hunter chairing our House committees. He wants assurance that a ban on torture will not harm our intelligence gathering efforts. Doesn't he read the concensus which states that torture doesn't produce good intelligence. Apart from the fact that it is morally indefensible, illegal, and appalling stupid strategically, that is. But let's not expect him to have morals, legal sense, or strategic intelligence. Let's just expect him to shut up if he can't say something worthwhile.
Sources: White House to Accept Torture Ban
"After months of resistance, the White House has agreed to accept Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)'s call for a law specifically banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror, several congressional officials said Thursday.
Under the emerging deal, the CIA and other civilian interrogators would be given the same legal rights as currently guaranteed members of the military who are accused of breaking interrogation guidelines, these officials added. Those rules say the accused can defend themselves by arguing it was reasonable for them to believe they were obeying a legal order."
It's outrageous that they should have sought to allow torture under any circumstances, though it looks like they actually made torture a policy in this Administration. What a sick bunch of crazies. They disgust and frighten me.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Does 30,000 Mean Anything to Bush?
"While it’s a relief, I suppose, to know that Bush understands that his war has killed at least 30,000 Iraqis, does even that figure mean anything to him?
He acted as though it was a totally acceptable number.
In fact, as David Sirota has noted, Bush in the very next breadth made a joke as he interrupted the next questioner to say, “I’ll repeat the question. If I don’t like it, I’ll make it up.” The White House transcript reads: “(Laughter and applause.)”
That is the definition of obscenity."
Columnist Says Bush Knows Who Leaked Name
"Syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has repeatedly declined to discuss his role in disclosing the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, said in a speech this week that he is certain President Bush knows who his mystery administration source is.
Novak said Tuesday that the public and press should be asking the president about the official rather than pressing journalists who received the information.
Novak also suggested that the administration official who gave him the information is the same person who mentioned Plame and her CIA role to Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward in the summer of 2003."
House Defies Bush and Backs McCain on Detainee Torture - New York Times
"In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain's measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.
Although the vote was nonbinding, it put the Republican-controlled House on record in support of Mr. McCain's provision for the first time, at the very moment when the senator, a Republican, is at a crucial stage of tense negotiations with the White House, which strongly opposes his measure.
... "If we allow torture in any form," Mr. Murtha said, "we abandon our honor."
... Another Republican who voted against the measure, Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, said he opposed it because he said laws already barred torture and abusive treatment.
"It's absolutely unnecessary," said Mr. Tiahrt, who is on the House Intelligence Committee. "
