This is the FBI, not the CIA. But now that those

troublesome walls between departments have been removed for efficiency, are their also secret FBI prisons? mjh

Checking FBI Spying

IN THE PAST FEW weeks there have been

two significant disclosures concerning the rules that govern domestic spying, just as the House and the Senate are preparing to reconcile

versions of a bill to reauthorize key provisions of the USA Patriot Act.

The first was a release by the FBI of internal reports

documenting violations of the rules of domestic surveillance in national security cases.

The second was a story by Post staff

writer Barton Gellman revealing that the number of “national security letters” — a kind of administrative subpoena used by the FBI to

obtain normally private records — has exploded since the passage of the Patriot Act and now reaches 30,000 per year.

These

reports open a timely window onto the question that animates the debate over the Patriot Act: How responsibly is the government

using its spying powers? Though they don’t provide a complete answer, the new disclosures are troubling. …

… at least 13 cases between 2002 and 2004 of violations serious enough that the FBI itself determined they must be reported to

an executive branch agency called the Intelligence Oversight Board. Moreover, the case numbers on the released documents suggest that

there were hundreds of potential violations examined by the bureau during that period. This is cause for concern.

Rising Support Cited for

Limits On Patriot Act By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Congress edged closer yesterday to limiting some of the

sweeping surveillance and search powers it granted to the federal government under the USA Patriot Act in 2001, including a provision

that would allow judicial oversight of a central tool of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, according to Senate and House aides.

Much Ado About Tuesday

Scott McClellan went to great pains to try

to prevent Voice of America reporter Paula Wolfson from reading aloud from this section of the U.S. criminal code.

US CODE: Title 18,1001. Statements or entries

generally

Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive,

legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or

covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or

representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or

fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

While it is possible Abramoff

didn’t actually deliver a meeting with Bush in exchange for money, it is actually possible he did. Either way, it says a lot about

Republican ethics that he would say he could. mjh

Lobbyist Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting – New York

Times By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 – The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a

West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny,

according to newly disclosed documents.

The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with President Bush in the Oval

Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Mr. Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public

record that Mr. Abramoff had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon. …

A document from Mr. Abramoff’s files that was released last week by a Senate committee shows that in the summer of 2003 he pushed

to sign President Bongo as a client, even offering to travel to Gabon immediately after an August golfing vacation to Scotland “with the

congressmen and senators I take there each year.” …

Mr. Abramoff, a Republican fund-raiser who once was one of the most powerful

lobbyists in Washington [mjh: and a good buddy of Tom DeLay, whom he flew to Scotland for golf, as I recall], has been indicted in

Florida on federal fraud charges. He is also under investigation by a federal grand jury in Washington and two Senate committees.

Right wing starts to reap

the whirlwind By JOEL CONNELLY, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Of course, there’s Alaska’s temperamental,

vengeful GOP Senator-for-life Ted Stevens.

Stevens has just introduced a bill to roll back federal protection of Puget

Sound — clearing the way for more tankers and refineries.

The old bastard shakes down [Washington state’s] business interests

for $250,000 in donations whenever he seeks another term. And this is what we get in return.

Evil deeds backfire.

National Pork Service By Richard Cohen

after … a $223 million bridge from Ketchikan (population 8,900) to Gravina Island (population 50), was mocked as the “Bridge to

Nowhere,” Stevens properly turned the issue into one of virtual civil rights. He recalled the days when Alaska was a mere territory with

few of the usual rights of states and said that now, once again, it was being accorded second-class status: “It will not happen,” he

thundered. “It will not happen,” he bellowed.

The statue of Stevens will note that he was the first senator in American history to

take himself hostage. His threat to resign — an action of vast indifference to all of mankind with the possible exception of the 50

people on Gravina Island — would have deprived the Senate of a reverse Gold Rusher, someone who came down from Alaska to mine for gold

in Washington. His speech, in which over and over he bemoaned the pitiful nature of his state’s modest road system, made no mention of

how Alaskans pay no state income tax and are awarded a piece of the state’s oil revenue. The state is No. 1 in per capita federal aid,

which is a tribute of sorts to Stevens’s ability to game the system at the expense of us all. …

But it is his threat to resign

— “I don’t threaten people; I promise people” — that shall forever be memorialized. It is a model of insistence, of selfishness, of

seeing the government no differently than Huey, Dewey and Louie saw their uncle, the fabulously rich Scrooge McDuck.

Bill Would Sell Land Promised

to D.C. By Juliet Eilperin and Debbi Wilgoren, Washington Post Staff Writers

Tucked inside a huge budget

bill headed for an upcoming House vote is a provision that could spur the federal government to sell off millions of

acres of public land to mining interests, marking a major shift in the nation’s mining policy. …

Congress has barred

the government from selling land outright to mining companies since 1994, on the grounds that they should lease public land the same way

oil and gas firms do to extract the minerals below. But House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.)

said the measure would cut the deficit and promote private ownership. “In some states primarily owned by the federal government,

it’s important that more of that land become private property,” Pombo said. “These environmental groups want

the federal government to own everything.” [brayed the jackass – mjh]

Pombo’s proposal is stuck in 1872 by John Leshy

Not

satisfied with … liberalization of the discredited 1872 [mining] law, Pombo would also let private interests buy federal lands for

purposes that have nothing to do with mining, such as building ski resorts, gaming casinos and strip malls on areas owned by the American

public.

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that “the federal mining law surely was not intended to be a general real estate

law.” Pombo’s bill would change all that ….

[I]nvaluable sites, like wilderness study areas and national forest

roadless areas, are plainly left vulnerable to eventual privatization under this provision. Hikers, hunters and livestock

grazers could find locked gates blocking their passage through previously public lands — with the U.S. government nearly powerless to do

anything about it.

Pombo is trying to sneak his bill through Congress, hiding it in a budget

debate that has been dominated by higher profile controversies. He pushed the bill through committee under the

pretense of raising federal revenue, without mentioning that the public, the owner of these lands, will be the big loser.

Hard-rock mining is the only extractive industry that pays no royalties on the resources it removes from public lands.

Establishing a modest 8 percent royalty, which is at the lower end of what coal, oil and gas companies already pay for federal

resources, would yield twice as much revenue as Pombo expects from his land grab.

Politics – Pombo hopes to help mining – sacbee.com

Environmental Working Group … this week issued a new online report, available at www.ewg.org,

that purports to detail the public land opportunities opened by Pombo’s bill. The report concludes that about 17,000 acres in El Dorado

County, 13,000 acres in Mariposa County and 11,000 acres in Tuolumne County – all currently claimed for mining – could be sold in the

short term.

“Pombo does not like federal lands, so this is consistent with his general philosophy,” said John Leshy, the Interior

Department’s former top lawyer.

Now a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, Leshy likened the

proposal to “a real estate deal that has nothing to do with mining.” He further termed it “a huge change in national policy,” moving the

government toward disposal and away from retention of public lands.

The idea under debate revisits a public lands controversy that

flared during the early 1990s but then went largely underground until recently. Under an 1872 mining law, companies and individuals can

“patent” – or purchase – public land for $2.50 or $5 an acre.

Stung by deals in which the federal government sold off

valuable land for a song, officials imposed a moratorium on mining patents in 1994. …

[His lunacy (mjh)] … helped

keep a spotlight on the 44-year-old Pombo, who in recent months has drawn both high praise [?!] and sharp criticism for his broader

environmental agenda.
—–

Pombo also placed the Bush Administration’s bid to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil

drilling within the budget bill.

I completely

understand Dimdahl’s concerns about being hauled off to court “solely for partisan effectiveness”. If that were all it takes, he’d be

serving a life-sentence. Instead, we are sentenced to his continued braying. That he admires DeLay says volumes about them both.

In this excerpt, I’ve left out most of the anti-liberal hawing after the opening ad hominem attack — talk about hewing to a script,

John! Yeah, yeah, ‘Republicans are the party of ideas’ — like teaching only creationism in the Christian Republic of America; like

letting corporations do anything they want and pay nothing for what they do (through taxes or the courts); like making the Executive a

dictator and the courts a rubberstamp. Big Ideas from the self-designated Deep Thinkers. Ego-serving bullshit.

I am intrigued by

Dimdahl noting “a wily prosecutor could indict a stone.” Wow. Sounds like the “justice” system tilts towards the prosecution. Next thing

you know, Republicans will be lauding Trial Attorneys (instead of just hiring them in droves).

Press on through Dimdahl’s dreck

to read an excerpt from Buckley. The two are master bloviators and both favor legalization of marijuana (finally, we find common ground

between the Left and the Wrong). But Buckley takes the White House smear campaign more seriously (and confesses to being a CIA alumnus).

mjh

ABQjournal: Since When Is Party Loyalty a Crime? By John Dendahl, For the Journal

Bereft of anything resembling an

idea, and spectacularly unsuccessful at demonizing their opposition with nasty rhetoric, the left has now turned to criminalizing

conservatives. …

The Libby indictment may be the most bizarre of all. …

Many lawyers have noted that a wily

prosecutor could indict a stone. … [T]his is no mission to excuse ideological allies if they have broken laws while

serving as public officials.

Conversely, if the threat of being hauled into criminal court now hangs over an officeholder

pretty much solely for partisan effectiveness, we are all in a world of hurt.

William F. Buckley on Patrick Fitzgerald’s Investigation on National Review

Online
Who Did What?
Covert questions.

The hot-blooded search for criminality in the matter of Cheney/Libby/Rove has not

truly satisfied those in search of first degree venality. …

The importance of the law against revealing the true professional

identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby

affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got

themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted. …

The great question here is Robert Novak. It was he who published, in his column, that Mrs. Joseph Wilson was a secret

agent of the CIA. I am too close a friend to pursue the matter with Novak, and his loyalty is a postulate. What was going on? If there

are mysteries in town, that surely is one of them, the role of Novak.

It is here that Buckley amazes me

the most. He’s too close to Novak, the one who knows the most, the most obvious tool of the Radical Right, too close a friend to ask

him: who told you? mjh

—–

By the way, the title given to

Dimdahl’s piece (“Since When Is Party Loyalty a Crime?”) is further evidence the Journal should fire the headline editor. When you hear

left and right gripe about Journal bias, it often starts with a headline. Maybe an article does manage some balance, but headlines

establish the tone. This one is more dismissive of matters than even Dimdahl himself. mjh

I can’t add anything to this indictment of a shallow, image-conscious man in over his head. And I

don’t just mean Brownie. mjh

Winners of Katrina contracts defend deals By HOPE YEN,

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

[E]-mails show that Brown, who had been planning to step down from his post when the storm hit,

was preoccupied with his image on television even as one of the first FEMA officials to arrive in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde, was

reporting a crisis situation of increasing chaos to FEMA officials.

“My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look

fabulous – and I’m not talking the makeup,” writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10

a.m. local time on Aug. 29.

“I got it at Nordstroms,” Brown writes back. “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go

home?” An hour later, Brown adds: “If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”

A

week later, Brown’s aide, Sharon Worthy, reminds him to pay heed to his image on TV. “In this crises and on TV you just need to

look more hardworking … ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!” Worthy wrote, noting that even President Bush “rolled his sleeves to just below the

elbow.”