Igor's revenge

Murray Waas reports on the website of the Atlantic that Alberto Gonzales is now telling investigators that he was being personally directed by President Bush when, as White House counsel, Gonzales made a much-discussed late-night visit in 2004 to the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, in order to get Ashcroft to certify that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program was legal.

I guess Abu Gonzales didn't like being thrown under the bus...

Excellent FISA flowcharts

Explaining just how much we've lost.

Excellent overview of FISA

Part one, part two and part three excellently well explained by David Kris for Balkinization.

The ACLU. Facts and myths.

It would be as if no illegal activity occurred at all...

Because we'll never know exactly what happened. House comes to compromise on telecom immunity.

Via TPM Muckraker, the Wall Street Journal:

Removing the final barrier to action on the measure, which has been hashed out in recent weeks by senior lawmakers in both parties, House Democratic leaders decided to allow a vote on the bill, despite the opposition of many in their party.

The new agreement broadens the authority to spy on people in the U.S. and provides conditional legal immunity to companies that helped the government eavesdrop after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to congressional aides in both parties.

Right. You guys pass this law and you've just announced corporations are more important than individual citizens and your oath to protect the Constitution is a lie.

And just an aside, a question I've not yet found the answer to. Because the Bush administration was listening in on Americans long before 9/11, why did 9/11 occur? Isn't this whole invasion of privacy issue about protecting America? So why weren't they listening to all the cell phone calls to Saudi Arabia and Yemen and realizing something was up?

Or could it be they were too busy listening for juicy items to blackmail Congress into following their commands? Maybe we could ask the telecoms this question when we get them up on the stand under oath .... OooHHHhhhhh....

Restore FISA

Glenn Greenwald and Firedoglake have a petition. Sign it.

What hangs in the balance with the FISA bill

As explained by the inestimable Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors.

What the hell is Bush blackmailing Reid and Pelosi with

That they fold like wet toilet paper each and every fucking time? WTF!

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:

Harry Reid once again used Senate procedure to tank retroactive immunity and other changes Democrats wanted to the FISA bill. George Bush gets everything he ever hoped for.

She then quotes Glenn Greenwald of Salon:

It seems rather clear what happened here. There are certain amendments that are not going to get even 50 votes -- including the Dodd/Feingold amendment to strip telecom immunity out of the bill -- and, for that reason, Republicans were more than willing to agree to a 50-vote threshold, since they know those amendments won't pass even in a simple up-or-down vote.

But then, there are other amendments which might be able to get 50 votes, but cannot get 60 votes -- such as Feinstein's amendment to transfer the telecom cases to the FISA court and her other amendment providing that FISA is the "exclusive means" for eavesdropping -- and, thus, those are the amendments for which the GOP insisted upon a 60-vote requirement.

The whole agreement seems designed to ensure that the GOP gets everything they want -- that they are able to defeat all of the pending amendments which Dick Cheney dislikes, and to do so without having to engage in a real filibuster. In what conceivable way is this an instance of "Dems not caving" or "holding tough?"

What kind of blackmail did the NSA uncover when they were listening to Congressional phone calls pre-9/11?:

Still, one thing that appears to be indisputable is that the NSA surveillance began well before 9/11 and months before President Bush claims Congress gave him the power to use military force against terrorist threats, which Bush says is why he believed he had the legal right to bypass the judicial process.

According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."

C'mon Reid and Pelosi. NOTHING could be that bad that you sell our country out to the worst... THE WORST.. administration in our country's history. Tell us what you are being blackmailed for and we will forgive you if you just stand up to this 24% supported Moron-in-Chief.

Do the right thing and stand up to this administration.

You know those rightwing twits down the street?

Avendon Carol of The Sideshow suggests:

...it might be worthwhile to have a bunch of these to leave on people's doors when they're out. Might make 'em think.

Click for bigger pic. It's almost too true to be funny.

Isn't it supposed to be legal for only Republicans to expose national secrets for political gain

Without facing legal consequences?

SAN FRANCISCO --A lawsuit alleging that Verizon Communications Inc. illegally turned over customer records as part of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program should go forward because of a recent admission by the U.S. spy chief, lawyers argued Thursday.

In a newspaper interview published last week, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell acknowledged that private-sector companies helped the government investigate suspected terrorists in a probe authorized by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Outrage over the eavesdropping tactics, including obtaining private telephone logs without a warrant, has led to some 50 lawsuits against telecommunications companies and the government, all of which are before U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco.

[snip]

McConnell did not identify specific companies that aided the government. However, he said in the interview with the El Paso Times of Texas that the companies that helped are being sued and risked going bankrupt if the litigation is successful and the government doesn't protect them.

It was his first public acknowledgment of the assistance of private companies in the NSA investigation.

Lawyers for Verizon customers seized on the comments during arguments Thursday before Walker. They said the quotes are enough to connect New York-based Verizon to the government probe, and undermine the government's assertion that confirming any relationship with companies would cause "exceptionally grave harm" to national security.

Update: Somehow this post needs Harry Potter doing the warrantlessly wiretapped Banana Phone!:

Excellent overview of the warrantless spying on Americans

By the eye of Sauron. The blog Amygdala explains.



Benjamin Franklin (1706–90): Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Snuggly the Security Bear

Has teeth...
Via Steve Bates at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat, Mark Fiore explains what NSA can do now with the new FISA update.

Somehow I think Abu will ignore this letter

Don't you?

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Today, my staff was briefed by the Justice Department regarding guidelines to institute the new foreign to domestic wiretapping authority Congress granted to you this month by The Protect America Act.

Regrettably, my colleagues reported that they learned virtually nothing new about how you intend to use the broad new authority to intercept emails and phone calls when one party is in the U.S., or how those U.S. people will be protected from unwarranted government intrusion. With so much at stake, the public needs to have a fuller understanding of what its Justice Department will be doing with its most private communications.

In particular, the Act confers on you the authority to issue year long orders for entire spying programs that identify neither the people nor the facilities that will be tapped. The only requirement is that the communications be of an international character - that at least one leg of the email or call is overseas. By definition, this new program will sweep in all those calls where the other leg is in the U.S., and will do so without court or congressional review. While we have long supported legislation that would allow our government to intercept foreign to foreign calls, this new, warrantless interception of Americans' international communications is far more than what the Administration asked for and what we believe the Constitution allows.

Further, the legislation was silent on how to treat these communications to which someone in the U.S. is a party. We are gravely concerned that Congress chose not to include mandatory protections for American communications, and instead left all such decisions to the Justice Department without further guidance.

Because you are solely responsible for determining how U.S. persons will be protected in this new program, we respectfully request a meeting with you to discuss in more depth how the Justice Department will be using its new authority. In particular, we would like to discuss:

• Whether your new authority will be used to collect all international communications coming into and out of the United States,
  
• Whether you plan to return to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when you discover that a certain line or person has significant contact with the United States, and
  
• How information gathered on people in the United States will be used and what civil liberties safeguards will be put in place for instances in which information is collected on individuals who have no intelligence value to the government.

Congress left all of these questions to your discretion and we eagerly look forward to discussing with you how the Justice Department intends to deal with the serious civil liberties issues implicated by this new law.

Sincerely,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union

The weirdness of the FISA bill

I am truly confounded and have taken several days trying to make sense of it.

Did the Democrats do what I think they just did? Are they that afraid of being handed the Iraqi hot potato? Do they think some sort of terrorist strike is going to happen in August and if they dared block the FISA bill they would be blamed? Do they think we will vote them into the White House just because they aren't Bush? What the hell were they thinking?

Anonymous Liberal at Crooks and Liars thinks the bill was worded to be deliberately confusing:

It is imperative that members of Congress and the media be made aware of the full scope of this bill. It is not as advertised. By carving out a large category of surveillance activities from the definition of “electronic surveillance,” the bill effectively exempts such surveillance from FISA altogether. And while the bill purports to establish conditions and procedures for conducting warrantless surveillance, these requirements are effectively optional and, in any case, there is no penalty in the statute for disobeying them. Those lawmakers who voted for this bill need to be confronted with these facts and shamed into doing something to correct the situation.

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has collected statements from John Dean, Glenn Greenwald, Marjorie Kohn, Marty Lederman and others.

Update 8/12: Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly:

...NSA (and the White House) were specifically looking for new authority to monitor communications that included U.S. persons. And not just communications related to terrorism. They wanted a free hand for warrantless surveillance of any communication between foreigners and Americans that was related to foreign intelligence in any way.

And then, once Democrats reluctantly agreed to that, they decided they wanted even more: the authority to monitor any communications — including domestic calls — "concerning" foreigners. With no FISA court oversight at all.

I'm still not sure about all this. I've read a bunch of media interviews from the period when this was being debated, and the issue of broadening U.S.-to-foreign surveillance rarely comes up explicitly. Whether this was because it was hard to talk about without revealing classified information, or because no one quite understood this was really what was going on, I don't know. But the technical "glitch" appears to have been nothing more than a smokescreen as far as the White House was concerned. From the get-go, they wanted a vastly broadened ability to monitor calls on U.S. soil without a warrant, and they wanted the FISA court out of the picture.

And in the end, thanks to incompetence on the part of the Democratic leadership, they got wildly more than they had ever thought possible. There is, at this point, virtually no oversight on NSA's data collection at all. Hooray.

Do it because I say so

No longer seems to work for Georgie and his cabal.

Bryan of Why Now? explains:

In his Saturday liar-side chat™, the Shrubbery complained that the surveillance law needs to keep up with technology. What he was probably looking for was cover for some of the illegal activities that the cheney-bots have been up to for years.

He apparently thought that Congress was going to rubber-stamp a law to help him, but what he got was a response from a veteran of political battles, John Conyers: Committee demanding details of NSA data-mining.

Gee, you mean governing actually means being accountable and explaining yourself to people? I think they haven't yet gotten the memo.

Sorghum Crow of Sorghum Crow's General Store detects a pattern.

Something deeper and more illegal than we have imagined

Possibly took place with the warrantless wiretapping. Eavesdropping on senators' phone calls so they could be blackmailed? Sabotaging presidential candidates? Listening in on other countries diplomatic efforts?

Josh Marshall says it must be bad: (my bold)

Of course, 'data mining' can mean virtually anything. What kind of data and whose you're looking at makes all the difference in the world. Suggestively, the Times article includes this cryptic passage: "Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used."

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

Listen to former Deputy Attorney General James Comey

Speak carefully about his concern over the move to force Ashcroft to sign over on the warrantless wiretapping program which the Department of Justice considered illegal. He gets a phone call from his staff from Mrs. Ashcroft at the hospital bedside that Gonzales and Card are coming. He literally has emergency lights going as he rushes to the hospital to prevent them from taking advantage of a very ill man:



Then compare with this man:

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

I can't decide whether this picture of Gonzales hiding behind Bush while Comey stands up to them is best:



Or this one:

The story behind the story about Ashcroft in the hospital

Is why it was such a big deal that the White House tried to force an ill man to sign off on the warrantless wiretapping:

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

When will we learn that the Bush administration has been blackmailing members of Congress to keep them in line? That they spied on the Democratic party? That they listened to John Kerry's phone calls?

We, as the employers of the White House residents, have the right to know.

Update: The pressure to sign off on the program may have come from Bush himself.

We rid ourselves of the last King George.

Apparently we need to do it again.
Steve Bates:

For possibly the first time in American history, a Justice Department has not only declined to order an FBI investigation of the matter, even though such an investigation could lead to findings that Bush violated the law and the Constitution, but has also attempted to moot the case on appeal by a bit of chicanery that doesn't begin to pass the sniff test. Such an FBI investigation happened to Nixon in response to Watergate. It happened to Clinton in response to Clenisgate, or actually to the subsequent perjury charges against Clinton (of which he was acquitted). But it took an ACLU lawsuit against the NSA to initiate this case that the increasingly misnamed Justice Department would not begin.

James Bamford for the New York Times:

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

[snip]

In the past, even presidents were not above the law. When the F.B.I. turned up evidence during Watergate that Richard Nixon had obstructed justice by trying to cover up his involvement, a special prosecutor was named and a House committee recommended that the president be impeached.

And when an independent counsel found evidence that President Bill Clinton had committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the impeachment machinery again cranked into gear, with the spectacle of a Senate trial (which ended in acquittal).

Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved — even if they’re presidents — are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.

Even presidents must obey the law and uphold the Constitution. So Georgie must think he's king....

OOooohhhh. THIS is why Abu Gonzales hurried to get the FISA coverage for his spying

So he could say this:

CINCINNATI, Jan. 26 The U.S. Justice Department filed court papers in Cincinnati arguing a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's wiretap program should be dismissed.

The department claims the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs, is no longer significant because the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program is now being conducted under the supervision of a secret intelligence court, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Justice Department lawyers argued in papers filed with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the suit should be dismissed because it no longer has any live significance.The move follows an announcement last week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the program, which had allowed the NSA to monitor calls made between the United States and foreign countries without court approval if one of the parties was determined to be linked to terrorism, is being terminated and replaced by a surveillance program overseen by a secret 11-member court.

Just because they say they're going to do something does not mean they actually will. They just want you to go away.

Glenn Greenwald on Abu Gonzales, warrantless wiretapping and the sudden compliance with FISA:

"But ultimately, there are only two options -- (1) the administration is now complying fully and exclusively with FISA when eavesdropping, in which case all of its prior claims that it could not do so and still fight against The Terrorists are false, or (2) the administration has changed its eavesdropping program some, but it is still not fully complying with FISA, in which case nothing of significance has changed (at least on the lawbreaking issues) because the administration is still violating the law."

Just keep watching. They're hoping you'll get distracted by something shiny....