Safire is more a libertarian conservative than a

Neocon-artist. Note how he speaks from experience — being told to leak a story and being spied on because of that “leak.” Don’t

overlook his point that Duhbya has “made out to believe” some misleading statements — that’s Duhbya’s way with everything. “Mislead”

— you mean lie? mjh

Transcript for

January 1 – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC – MSNBC.com

MR. SAFIRE: OK. I have a thing about wiretapping. …

I was

writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president [mjh: Raygun?] looks at it and says, “OK, I’ll go with

it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we’ll get something in

the paper.”

And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or

something, and I said, “Hey, you want a leak? I’ll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform.”

And he took it down and wrote a little story about it.

But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so

they hear a White House speechwriter say, “Hey, you want a leak?” And so they tapped my phone, and for six

months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn’t like that. And when it finally broke–it did me a lot of good at the time,

frankly, because then I was on the right side–but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected

of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home–you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my–

everything.

So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what’s happening now is that the–as a result of that

scandal back in the ’70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now,

this court’s a rubber-stamp court, let’s face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.

MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, FISA.

MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows

believe ….

[T]hat’s why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when

they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can’t seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends

looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I’m with the critics on

that.

Military Times Polls
Troops sound off
Military Times Poll finds high

morale, but less support for Bush, war effort
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

Support for President Bush and

for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly in the last year among members of the military’s professional core, according to

the 2005 Military Times Poll.

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority,

among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers. …

Positive feelings about Congress, civilian and uniformed

Pentagon leaders and the media all fell. …

While roughly a third of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, just 13

percent of Military Times Poll respondents do so. …

Kohn said he worried that asking such questions of military members

and publishing the results could tarnish the military’s image as a nonpartisan institution.

The poll “tends to communicate to the

American people that the military is just like any other interest group,” Kohn said. “We want the public image of the military to be

decidedly apolitical.”

Military Times Polls
Disconnect cited

between troops, civilian leadership
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

From Congress to the White House to the

Pentagon, the career-oriented heart of the military appears increasingly estranged from its leaders in Washington,

according to results of the 2005 Military Times Poll.

The poll of active-duty subscribers to the Military Times newspapers also

shows continued disdain for the media and a belief that the military’s prestige may have slipped in the eyes of

civilians. …

58 percent agreed that President Bush had their best interests at heart, down 11 percentage points from a year ago.

…

Congress saw the most dramatic drop: Just 31 percent agreed Congress looked out for their best interests, less than half the

number a year ago. …

David Segal, an expert in military sociology at the University of Maryland , said the results mirror a

similar estrangement between civilian Americans and their political leaders.

“I see military attitudes converging with

You’re not actually

surprised that domestic spying will prove extremely profitable to a few large corporations, are you? mjh

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
By

Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

A year ago, at

a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high

schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret

400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more

than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group

being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project. …

The DOD database

obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far

from any military installation, post or recruitment center. …

Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense

Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. …

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC

News military analyst Bill Arkin. …

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the

descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the

beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.” …

Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is becoming

the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records”

include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation

pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats.

Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys

Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and

unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies. …

Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is

slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of

the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It’s absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth

Project.

“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are

Quakers.”

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