You’re not actually

surprised that domestic spying might involve sniffing through your communications, are you? mjh

Bush Defends Legality of

Domestic Spy Program By ERIC LICHTBLAU, New York Times

As President Bush continued to defend the program at his appearance in

San Antonio, he was asked about a remark he made in Buffalo in 2004 at an appearance in support of the Patriot Act, in which he discussed

government wiretaps.

“Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,” Mr. Bush said at the appearance,

“a wiretap requires a court order.” He added: “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.”

Democrats have seized on the remark, made more than two

years after Mr. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to conduct warrantless wiretaps, in charging that the president had misled the public.

Asked about that today, Mr. Bush said: “I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This

is different from the N.S.A. program.

“The N.S.A. program is a necessary program. …”

Officials also say that the

N.S.A., beyond actual eavesdropping on up to 500 phone numbers and e-mail addresses at any one time, has conducted much larger

data-mining operations on vast volumes of communication within the United States to identify possible terror suspects.

To

accomplish this, the agency has reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the

country’s biggest “switches,” carrying phone and e-mail traffic into and out of the country.

Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program – New York

Times By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security

Agency’s domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight,

according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. …

Several senior government officials have said that when

the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful

of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said. …

But even after the imposition of the new restrictions last

year, the agency maintained the authority to choose its eavesdropping targets and did not have to get specific approval from the Justice

Department or other Bush officials before it began surveillance on phone calls or e-mail messages. The decision on whether someone is

believed to be linked to Al Qaeda and should be monitored is left to a shift supervisor at the agency, the White House

has said.

If you feel you’ve missed some of the details about Jack Abramoff,

world-class crook, here’s a good summary. Read it before the next round of details come out as he turns in everyone he knows. Heads will

roll in 2006. mjh

The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff

A reconstruction of the

lobbyist’s rise and fall shows that he was an ingenious dealmaker who hatched interlocking schemes that exploited the machinery of

government and trampled the norms of doing business in Washington — sometimes for clients but more often to serve his desire for wealth

and influence. This inside account of Abramoff’s career is drawn from interviews with government officials and former associates in the

lobbying shops of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP; thousands of court and government records; and hundreds of e-mails

obtained by The Washington Post, as well as those released by Senate investigators. …

A quarter of a century ago, Abramoff and

anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist were fellow Young Turks of the Reagan revolution. They organized Massachusetts college campuses in the

1980 election — Abramoff while he was an undergraduate at Brandeis and Norquist at Harvard Business School — to help Ronald Reagan pull

an upset in the state.

They moved to Washington, maneuvered to take over the College Republicans — at the time a sleepy

establishment organization — and transformed it into a right-wing activist group. They were joined by Ralph Reed, an ambitious Georgian

whose later Christian conversion would fuel his rise to national political prominence. …

Abramoff also worked on

behalf of the apartheid South African government, which secretly paid $1.5 million a year to the International Freedom

Foundation, a nonprofit group that Abramoff operated out of a townhouse in the 1980s, according to sworn testimony to the South African

Truth and Reconciliation Commission. …

When Republicans wrested control of the House from the Democrats in 1994, Abramoff turned

his focus back to Washington politics. With Norquist’s help, he reinvented himself as a Republican lobbyist on heavily Democratic K

Street. Norquist was one of the intellectual architects of the Republican Revolution and a muse for its leader, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.),

soon to be speaker of the House. …

Nearly two years later, Abramoff’s legal troubles appear to threaten the careers of many of

his colleagues and political allies. Sources familiar with the Justice Department investigation say that half a dozen lawmakers are under

scrutiny, along with Hill aides, former business associates and government officials. …

Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming

senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal — the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in

which six House members and one senator were convicted — said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently

rode in a plane with one of Abramoff’s attorneys, who told him: “There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to

be taken down.”
—–

Find all my entries on Jack Abramoff

Note that the Counterintelligence

Field Activity, or CIFA, with its Talon Reports, is different from earlier reports on the National Security Agency (which is

also a Defense Department agency, by the way). And it is different from the FBI spying on PETA and others. Or the CIA. Or your city,

county and state police. A vast network looking desperately for dots to connect. Are you a dot?

How much spying are we doing

domestically? That’s a secret. What’s it cost? That’s a secret. How many mistakes are made? That’s a secret.

Eisenhower warned

us about the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Raygun revved up military spending ostensibly to bankrupt the Soviets (a model

bin Laden is well-aware of). With the winding down of the Cold War, what was a militarist-money-maker to do? Thank god we have an endless

war on a shadowy enemy who can never surrender.

I’m not saying that Our Savior is destroying our village to save it just because

it makes lots of money for his friends. No, I’m convinced Duhbya is mentally ill with Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome and guilt for 9/11

(perhaps coupled with prolonged oxygen deprivation after that pretzel choking incident). Perhaps Rumsfeld and Cheney are just as

deranged. These guys need help, but our healing begins with their departure. mjh

Defense Facilities Pass Along Reports of

Suspicious Activity
Raw Information’ From Military, Civilians Is Given to Pentagon
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff

Writer

Day after day, reports of suspicious activity filed from military bases and other defense installations throughout the

United States flow into the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, a three-year-old Pentagon agency whose size and budget

remain classified.

The Talon [which stands for “threat and local observation notice”] reports, as they are called, are

based on information from civilians and military personnel who stumble across people or information they think might be part of a

terrorist plot or threat against defense facilities at home or abroad. …

Talon reports grew out of a program called

Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that “enlists the eyes and ears of

Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror,” according to the program’s Web site. …

A former senior CIA official with

wide counterintelligence experience, who is familiar with CIFA’s growth, said the agency’s mandate is “ambiguous, but the Defense

Department is using its assets in its broadest terms.” He added that efforts such as Talon “could be a well-intentioned effort and it

could develop important information.” But, he said that in his view, “the Pentagon has chosen to err on the side of over-collection” of

information.

His concern, he said, was who does the intelligence “go to, and what do they do with it.”

Infoshop News – 1-800-CALL-SPY: Military intelligence database

short on threats, long on stupid Contributed by: arch_stanton

[T]he database, which contains reports such as those called in

to the DOD’s 1-800-CALL-SPY hotline, contains almost 50 anti-war meetings or protests, such as an anti-war meeting held by Quakers last

year. …

In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained

by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

I’m a Soldier, Not a Spy by Grant Doty, a lieutenant colonel in

the Army

Yes, I took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies “foreign and domestic,” but the implication of

domestic intelligence-gathering by the military, even by a limited number of soldiers, should be sufficiently disturbing for American

citizens in and out of uniform that we think long and hard about crossing the line, even a little.

class="mine">Remember right after 9/11, when AssKraft came out in favor of folks like UPS, USPS, & FedEx delivery people, plus meter

readers, et. al., keeping their eyes open and letting the government know of anything suspicious. Even in the moment of our deepest shock

most people recoiled against that idea. AssKraft is gone (awaiting a Supreme Court nomination), but the ideas live on.

Seeing

Wolfowitz’s name throughout this report did nothing to reassure me. mjh

Bush’s false choices

By Ellen Goodman

We have been handed yet another in an endless series of false choices. Those who don’t blindly trust the

president are dismissed as amnesia victims. Americans who don’t connect the dots from 9/11 to Iraq or spying or torture are cast as

actors living in a foolish, fearless, fantasy world. Indeed, 9/11 was the day the president became the commander in chief. The words he

often repeats were spoken to him by a rescue worker at the World Trade Center: ”Whatever it takes.” …

But gradually, 9/11

became the all-purpose excuse for . . . whatever it takes. …

”Whatever it takes” does not mean ”whatever the

president says it takes.” It does not mean becoming our own worst enemies. It does not mean approving torture or domestic

spying. And it most certainly does not mean watching silently as a commander in chief takes on the uniform of a generalissimo.

Who

owns September 11? The White House has built its own memorial and raised a stiff price of admission. It only allows in those who agree

with the president. …

I’ve long thought that the selection

of Duhbya, so obviously unqualified for the presidency, by the Radical Right was part of their campaign to prove government feckless and

worthless. Like putting an idiot in charge of a business you want to run into bankruptcy for tax purposes.

If that seems a bit off

to you, consider that the Radical Right is deliberately running up the deficit to “starve the beast.” Why not give “the beast” an inept

handler? mjh

American Prospect Online – The Death and Life of American Liberalism By Robert

Kuttner

The conservative movement is rooted in a coherent, easy-to-summarize ideology: Government doesn’t work, except to

protect you from terrorists; you deserve to keep more of your own money; cherished American family values, including national security,

are under assault from liberals. The right has fine-tuned and segmented its rhetorical symphony so that the bass notes rock its

political primitives while a softer timbre appeals to the moderate ear.

The right’s famed echo chamber now can “narrowcast”

complementary messages to every major demographic group. “For conservative voters in Peoria,” says Rob Stein of the Democracy Alliance,

“there’s something for everyone. The businessman gets it from The Wall Street Journal editorial page. The soccer mom has FOX News. The

24-year-old beer-drinking guy has Rush [Limbaugh]. The religious right can get the word from Pat Robertson.”

A movement ideology

also produces unity. Despite schisms, the right is simply more disciplined. The discipline is reinforced by new forms of patronage — tax

breaks for the elite, godliness for the base. Worldly sinners among Wall Street Republicans may smirk at the fundamentalists in their

governing coalition, but are happy to share the bounty. They may privately oppose the immense budget deficits, but the heavily

Republican Concord Coalition, so publicly alarmed at the (Republican legacy) deficits of the 1990s, is today prudently silent.

Conversely, social conservatives may wince at the antics and views of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the coalition holds.

Genuine Republican moderates, meanwhile, have been coerced or co-opted into near silence. The resulting legislative unity is also

unprecedented.

Finally, there’s a war on, a conveniently permanent one. The right manipulates fear of terrorism

into public and media acquiescence for a politics that would never prevail in normal times.

And yet, this overpowering structural

tilt conceals some surprisingly good news. Despite its immense advantages, the right barely prevailed in the last two presidential

elections, even against feckless Democratic campaigns. The superior infrastructure just offset the extremism. The country remains

skeptical about most Republican policies, from Social Security privatization to the assault on the courts. As John B. Judis and Ruy

Teixeira have documented, potentially liberal groups are demographically ascendant. There is a latent liberal majority, if liberals can

once again learn to do politics.

Maher Arar is yet another victim of American torture, like Khaled El-Masri. How many more are there that we will

never hear about? mjh

Maher Arar
Maher Arar is a

34-year-old wireless technology consultant. Arar was born in Syria and at the age of 17, came to Canada with his family. He became a

Canadian citizen in 1991 and in 1997 moved to Ottawa.

In September 2002, Arar was in Tunisia, vacationing with his wife Monia

Mazigh and their two small children. On Sept. 26 while in transit in New York’s JFK airport, he was detained by US officials and

from there transferred to a Syrian prison.

In Syria, he was held in a tiny “grave-like” cell for ten months and ten days

before he was moved to a better cell in a different prison. He was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession.

CBC News Indepth: Maher Arar: Timeline

Oct. 27, 2005
A fact-finder appointed

by the Arar inquiry releases a report concluding that Arar was tortured when in Syrian custody three years ago. “I am convinced that his

description of his treatment in Syria is accurate,” Stephen Toope wrote. …

Oct. 6, 2003:
Arar returns to Montreal, 375 days

after U.S. immigration officials arrested him. …

Oct. 29, 2002:
Canada issues travel advisory to all Canadians born in Iran,

Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Syria to reconsider entering the United States. It follows a U.S. decision to photograph and fingerprint people

born in those countries who enter the U.S.

mjh’s

blog — America kidnapped me