Today is The Day We Fight Back

The Incredibly Enlightened Marty Griffin

It's been a while since I wrote about KDKA's Marty Griffin.

Back then it was about the unconstitutional Ten Commandments monuments at some local public schools.

This time it's about something else.

In an hour long rant began with Marty vehemently opposing this editorial in the NYTimes about NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden.  The fun thing is that even though he read the thing on the air, he kept making the same mistake about what the editorial said.

Marty kept saying the Times wanted a pardon for Snowden.  Marty kept saying Snowden was a traitor.

And this is what they actually wrote:

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community. [Emphasis added.]

A plea bargain or clemency is not a pardon, Marty.  You should know that.  A "substantially reduced punishment" also not a pardon, Marty.  You should know that, too.

In addition, Marty said a number of times that the NSA surveillance stopped 50 terror attacks - so they're justified.

Only there's a problem with that number.  From the Huffingtonpost:

"Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" [Senator Patrick] Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or no?"

"Yes," [NSA chief Gen. Keith] Alexander replied, without elaborating.

It's impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified. [Emphasis added.]

That would be the same Keith Alexander that lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance.

Marty, you should know this, too.

But the real take-away from Marty's rant is his collateral damage.  In insisting that the Times wants a pardon for Edward Snowden (something we already know is untrue), Marty repeatedly asked why not a pardon for "Mr. Bradley?"

Who, you might ask, might this "Mr Bradley" be?

That would be Marty Griffin's snarky name for Chelsea Manning.  Throughout the hour, Marty Griffin insisted on calling Manning a "he" throughout his rant.  He (Marty) added that "Mr Manning" had some sort of  "bizarre sex-change thing" going on.  He then returned to using the masculine third person pronoun and "Mr Bradley."

Can't even use her last name, I guess.

How enlightened of you, Marty Griffin!

And For All This, We Thank The Patriot Act

Let's start here:

Two United States senators on Wednesday accused the Justice Department of making misleading statements about the legal justification of secret domestic surveillance activities that the government is apparently carrying out under the Patriot Act.

The lawmakers — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both of whom are Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. calling for him to “correct the public record” and to ensure that future department statements about the authority the government believes is conveyed by the surveillance law would not be misleading.

And:

The Justice Department denied being misleading about the Patriot Act, saying it has acknowledged that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and that its statements about the matter have been accurate.

Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall have for months been raising concerns that the government has secretly interpreted a part of the Patriot Act in a way that they portray as twisted, allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct some kind of unspecified domestic surveillance that they say does not dovetail with a plain reading of the statute.

The dispute has focused on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. It allows a secret national security court to issue an order allowing the F.B.I. to obtain “any tangible things” in connection with a national security investigation. It is sometimes referred to as the “business records” section because public discussion around it has centered on using it to obtain customer information like hotel or credit card records.

By the way, this is from 2011.

So what's this Section 215?  For this we turn to slate.com.  They start with Section 103(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:

The Chief Justice of the United States shall publicly designate seven district court judges from seven of the United States judicial circuits who shall constitute a court which shall have jurisdiction to hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance anywhere within the United States under the procedures set forth in this Act, except that no judge designated under this subsection shall hear the same application for electronic surveillance under this Act which has been denied previously by another judge designated under this subsection. [Emphasis from Slate.]

And then they point out that the Patriot Act:

Section 215 modifies the rules on records searches. Post-Patriot Act, third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical, church, synagogue, and mosque records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it's trying to protect against terrorism.

And:

As Section 215 stands today—in the reauthorized version of the Patriot Act passed in 2005—"tangible things" (aka user data) sought in a FISA order "must be 'relevant' to an authorized preliminary or full investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

It's about those "tangible things" and how they can get got.  Here's the relevant passage from the Patriot Act:

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.

Where am I going with all this?

First here, to this DemocracyNow! interview where Amy Goodman is interviewing William Binney on NSA Surveillance:

Well, after some of the laws they passed, like the PATRIOT Act and their secret interpretation of Section 215, which is—my view, of course, is same as Tom Drake’s, is that that gives them license to take all the commercially held data about us, which is exceedingly dangerous, because if you take that and put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country.

And then finally here where Binney gives up more info:

I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.

Binney replied no … it was broader than that. [Emphasis in original.]

And then finally:

I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic. In other words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that it was not using its governmental powers (called “acting under color of law” by judges), but that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).

Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based upon. Since all digital communications go through private company networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn them over.

Ain't the Patriot Act grand?  Ain't government secrecy grand?  It's allowing all this to happen!

Gotta go, there's a knock on my

Oh, How Times Have Changed...

From yesterday's Tribune-Review (and let me just say HEY to the good folks at the Tribune-Review who've visited this blog - more than a hundred times since May 1st!):

It doesn't take a member of Mensa to figure out that the government of the United States is not limiting its collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' daily telephone records to those served by Verizon. There can be no doubt that the feds are collecting and analyzing what's known as “metadata” from just about everyone's carrier, have been for many years and will continue to do so. And, on its face, it's supposedly perfectly legal, per the Patriot Act (though an author of the act disputes that).

Funny how when this story broke:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

In May of 2006 - a story accompanied by this picture (included so we know who we're talking about here):

Our friends on the Scaife Braintrust had this to say:

There's lots of heat and woefully little light regarding the news that the National Security Agency has been compiling a "massive database of Americans' phone calls," aided by three of the four-largest telecoms.

The NSA is collecting records of -- not listening to -- tens of millions of telephone calls made domestically. Running the calls through a database, the intent is to look for patterns that might signal terrorist planning activities.

But this is not illegal.

Not only does the recently renewed Patriot Act provide for such activity, there is case law that upholds it as constitutional (ironically in a case involving the media). [Italics in original.]

Indeed when Bush signed that reauthorization in 2006, he issued a signing statement that read (in part):

The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

Yea, the funny thing about section 106A.  The that section of the law reads:

The Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall perform a comprehensive audit of the effectiveness and use, including any improper or illegal use, of the investigative authority provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation under title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978...

And the signing statement just said, "...yea, but only if we think so."

Funny how a change of party in the White House can color (such an interesting pun in this context, huh?) the braintrust's whole outlook on the NSA data-mining.

And for the record, I am not a fan of the NSA data-mining, the Patriot Act or any of the other distasteful (at the very least) anti-terror projects started by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration.

But Obama let Bush get away with war crimes - so what's a little harmless data-mining between friends?

City Council Hearing Today on Ravenstahl's Honoring of Bush's NSA/CIA Dir. Michael Hayden (Updated 1x)

Michael Hayden seated at the center of the table
Of all the boneheaded moves by Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, this may be the most inexplicable and easily avoidable.

Here's a clue, Lil Mayor Luke: You don't honor a man who has a record of condoning torture, destroying evidence and misleading Congress about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program which Hayden himself helped to implement.

Pretty simple, huh?

But that's precisely what Ravenstahl has done.

From WDUQ News:

A small nameplate honoring Gen. Michael V. Hayden at the corner of Allegheny Avenue and North Shore Drive will be the subject of what could be a big public hearing today before Pittsburgh Council. Greg Barnhisel of Pittsburgh’s Park Place neighborhood noticed the nameplate while visiting the Carnegie Science Center. Barnhisel says he does not question the debt of gratitude owed to the general for his service in the U.S. Air Force but he does question the wisdom of honoring him for his work after leaving the military. Hayden left the Air Force as a four-star general to become the Director of the National Security Agency and then the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. While in those post Hayden became a lightening rod for the left when he helped to implement the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program and then helped defined the CIA’s interrogation program that many have equated to torture. Hayden is a native of Pittsburgh and Mayor Luke Ravenstahl honored him with the plaque but did not get it approved by the city council. Something he did not have to do but is customary. Barnhisel Gathered the needed signatures on a petition to get the hearing scheduled. He says the way the mayor posted the nameplate should be part of the debate at today’s public hearing and so should an examination of the appropriateness of honoring Hayden. What he does not want is to have the public hearing devolve into a debate about Bush era policies. The hearing begins at 9:00am in Council Chambers.

And, if you're wondering about the illustration at the top, I created it back in 2006 for a post entitled Bush's Made Men. In that post, I quoted Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, on Hayden's nomination to CIA Director by George W. Bush:

As these shadowy figures multiply, you can understand why civil libertarians increasingly see the White House like a gathering at Tony Soprano's Bada Bing! club. In Soprano's world, you cannot become a "made man" unless you first earn your bones by "doing" some guy or showing blind loyalty. Only when you have proven unquestioning loyalty does Tony "open the books" for a new guy.

Hayden earned his bones by implementing the NSA operation despite clear federal law declaring such surveillance to be a criminal act. He can now join the rest of the made men of the Bush administration.

Heck of a job, Lukey!

*********************************************************

UPDATE:

WPXI coverage here.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette coverage here.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review coverage here.
.

Maybe NOW...Investigate?

From the New York Times:

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

Though it seems there is some scrutiny:

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.

Here's the kicker to the story:

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said. [emphasis added]

There's more to this:

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones says of this:

Jesus. If a member of Congress isn't a "United States person" protected from warrantless surveillance by every version of FISA that's ever been on the books, who is? Shouldn't this have set off alarm bells at every possible level at NSA, rather than merely being "ultimately blocked" because "some" officials had "concerns" about it?

SILVER LINING UPDATE: Looking on the bright side, maybe this will finally motivate Congress to take NSA surveillance more seriously. Having one of their own members come within a hair's breadth of being an NSA target ought to concentrate their minds wonderfully, if anything will.

Some more details from the Times:

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic.

And:

Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program.

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

Your tax dollars at work.

Fact-Checking The Trib Editorial Board

Today they wrote:

In other news: Perhaps lost in the transition of presidential administrations is word that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review has affirmed the government's constitutional authority to use wiretaps to collect national-security intelligence from foreign sources. And we'll bet -- and we pray -- that President Obama will employ this fully legal tool in pursuit of protecting us.

Always interested in pointing out what they left out. Despite the awful headline, the AP said this about the ruling:

In a ruling released Thursday, the court embraced the Protect America Act of 2007, which required telecommunications providers to assist the government for national security purposes in intercepting international phone calls and e-mails to and from points overseas.

The decision, which involves the gathering of foreign intelligence, was made last August but only released Thursday after it had been edited to omit classified information.

Note: It was about the Protect America Act of 2007. The AP even goes on with a quotation and some details:

"Our decision does not constitute an endorsement of broad-based, indiscriminate executive power," the court said. "Rather, our decision recognizes that where the government has instituted several layers of serviceable safeguards ... its efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts."

The decision does not address the legality of an earlier warrantless surveillance program that the Bush administration secretly put in place without legislation from Congress, and which The New York Times exposed in 2005. The 2007 law that was the focus of the court ruling expired in 2008, but intelligence gathering efforts that it authorized remained in effect.

As Glenn Grenwald rhetorically asks:

Is it really that hard -- especially for people who pretend to be experts in this controversy -- to tell the difference between (a) whether the President had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of a Congressional statute and (b) whether the Congress is constitutionally permitted to enact a statute authorizing warrantless eavesdropping? Apparently it is hard, because hordes of right-wing advocates, including those who claim to be "legal experts," are falsely claiming today that the FISA court did (a) (namely: found that the President had the power to order warrantless eavesdropping in violation of a statute), rather than what the court actually did: (b) (found that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit Congress from legalizing warrantless eavesdropping).

He goes on:

[A] copy of the actual decision became available (here - .pdf). The only question it addresses -- as I explained earlier today -- (here) is whether the Protect America Act is constitutional under the Fourth Amendment (see also Anonymous Liberal's update here). That's the only issue it addresses. It has nothing to do with the core of the NSA scandal: whether George Bush acted properly by ordering eavesdropping in violation of the law.

Now go back and read the Trib's blurb. Changes things, huh?

More Illegal NSA Spying

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

According to Tice, they spied on reporters.

Transcript (via mediabistro):

OLBERMANN: It has taken less than 24 hours after the Bush presidency ended for a former analyst at the National Security Agency to come forward to reveal new allegations about how this nation was spied on by its own government, exclusively here on COUNTDOWN.

Our third story tonight, Russell Tice has already stood up for truth before this evening as one source for the revelation in 2005 by the "New York Times" that President Bush was eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants. Tonight, the next chapter for Mr. Tice, a chapter he feared to reveal while George Bush occupied the Oval Office, that under the collar of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration was also targeting specific groups of Americans for surveillance, non-terrorist Americans if you will.

Mr. Tice prepared to name one of those groups tonight. The NSA was already estimated to have collected millions of transmissions, e-mails and phone calls of average Americans simply by patching into the networks of cooperative telecommunications companies. You will recall the infamous room 641A at the AT&T Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, in which the whole of AT&T's portion of the Internet was duplicated inside a room accessible only to the NSA.

Mr. Tice, however, was also involved in another program and told us that he was first directed to focus on these specific groups in order to weed them out from legitimate surveillance targets, but ultimately concluded that the weeding out was actually an internal NSA cover story for a real goal, which was simply spying on those Americans.

Initially, Mr. Bush told the nation all his surveillance was legal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Anytime you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires a -- a wiretap requires a court order.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: After the "New York Times" revealed that to be a lie, Mr. Bush claimed his surveillance circumvented the constitutionally required process of obtaining a court-ordered warrant only in cases of clear links to terrorism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.

Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Joining me now in his first public revelation of these charges is Russell Tice, former analyst with the National Security Agency. Thank you for your time, sir.

RUSSELL TICE, FORMER ANALYST, NSA: Thanks for having me.

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

OLBERMANN: To what degree is that likely to mean actual eavesdropping and actual inspection? In other words, if not actually read or monitored by the NSA, everything was collected by the NSA, recorded, archived? Do you have any idea to what degree the information was ever looked at, per se?

TICE: Well, it's actually, even for the NSA, it's impossible to literally collect all communications. Americans tend to be a chatty group. We have the best computers at the agency, but certainly not that good.

But what was done was a sort of an ability to look at the meta data, the signaling data for communications, and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected. Basically, filtering out sort of like sweeping everything with that meta data, and then cutting down ultimately what you are going to look at and what is going to be collected, and in the long run have an analyst look at, you know, needles in a haystack for what might be of interest.

OLBERMANN: I mention that you say specific groups were targeted.
What group or groups can you tell us about?

TICE: Well, there's sort of two avenues to look at this. What I just mentioned was sort of the low-tech dragnet look at this. The things that I specifically were involved with were more on the high-tech side. And try to envision, you know, the dragnets are out there, collecting all the fish and then ferreting out what they may. And my technical angle was to try to harpoon fish from an airplane kind of thing. So it's two separate worlds.

But in the world that I was in, as to not harpoon the wrong people in some -- in one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations just supposedly so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were, so as not to have a problem with them.

Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. And that's -- I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me, to fire me. But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

OLBERMANN: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the "New York Times?" Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

TICE: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

OLBERMANN: Do you have a sense of why, as you discovered this? I mean, do you have a sense of what this was, if it was used, to what end?

TICE: I do not know. I do not know what was done with the collection. I'm sure the information -- the collection was digitized and put on databases somewhere. I don't know what was done with it from that point.

OLBERMANN: And this bait-and-switch sort of idea, that this -- this is the discard pile, we are not going to look at the media, and then it becomes apparent to you that the discard pile is in fact the save pile.
How did that become apparent to you?

TICE: Well, as I was going for support for this particular organization, it sort of was dropped to me that, you know, this is 24/7. Because I was saying, you know, I need collection at this time, at this point for, you know, for a window of time. And I would say, will we have the capability at this particular point? And positioning assets, and I was ultimately told we don't have to worry about that, because we've got it covered all the time. And that's when it clicked in my head, this is not something that's being done on a onesy basis, onesy-twosie. This is something that's happening all the time.

OLBERMANN: In a broad sense, and I imagine this question could be asked a hundred times with much more specificity, but what other kinds of information are you aware of that was collected by the NSA on ordinary Americans?

TICE: On ordinary Americans? I don't know. The parameters that were set for how to filter that -- now we are back to the low-tech side
-- were things like looking for parameters like if a terrorist normally would only make a phone call for one or two minutes, then you look for communications that are only one or two minutes long. Now, that also could be someone ordering a pizza and asking their significant other what sort of toppings that they wanted on their pizza. That is about a one- to two-minute phone call.

OLBERMANN: We mentioned this idea of bait-and-switch, of this is the discard, no, it's not; this is actually the target. Can you explain the maneuver, another sort of bait-and-switch that was worked with the congressional committees that would have had to be asking questions about stuff exactly like this?

TICE: Well, the agency would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive for -- whether it be, you know, a congressional committee or someone they really didn't want to know exactly what was going on. So there would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing, and quite often, you know, the meat of the briefing was deceptive.

One of the things that could be done was you could take something that was part of the Department of Defense, make it part of the intelligence community, and put a caveat to that, and make that whatever the intelligence community is doing for support will ultimately be given a different caveat. So when the defense committees on the Hill come calling, you say, you can't look at that because that's an intelligence program.

OLBERMANN: Right.

TICE: But when the intelligence program comes calling, you say you can't look at that because it is a Department of Defense program.

OLBERMANN: Right.

TICE: So you basically have a little shell game that you are playing back and forth.

OLBERMANN: It's brilliant in its simplicity. It's wonderful in its simplicity in a different context.

Last question here, what happens now? Can the Obama administration stop this? That is the first part. And, secondly, has anybody from the Obama administration been in touch with you about this?

TICE: No. Well, I've been in touch with -- basically, I volunteered for the Obama administration to act as a, you know, if they needed a consultant for intelligence. And this was last February. And they said they knew who I was, you know, my background with the agency, but they never really utilized me. I helped out as a volunteer yesterday in the inauguration, but certainly not in that capacity.

OLBERMANN: Right.

TICE: So, you know, I even said I would go on camera for them if they wanted a commercial, but they really didn't utilize that.

But I did send a letter to -- I think it's Mr. Brennan -- a handwritten letter, because I knew all my communications were tapped -- my phones, my computer, and I have had the FBI on me sort of like flies on you know what. And so I made sure it was handwritten. And I'm assuming that he gave the note to our current president, that I intended to say a little bit more than I had in the past.

OLBERMANN: And you have done that. I think, if it's all right with you, I think we are going to have to do another interview tomorrow.

TICE: Certainly.

OLBERMANN: There is much -- there are only about twice as many questions left.

Russell Tice, former NSA intelligence analyst. It sounds corny, thank you for doing this for the country.

TICE: Well, you know, I raised my hand, just like the president, and my oath was to support and defend the Constitution, not a director of an agency, not a classification on a piece of paper, but ultimately the Constitution. And these things were against the law that were happening. So I was just doing my job, really.

OLBERMANN: Well, yes, but doing your job sometimes earns you the lapel pin, the flag pin. Thank you, sir.

TICE: Thank you.

DOJ Investigation Into Warrantless Domestic Surveillance Reopens

From the AP:

The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances to investigators.

"We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey. A copy of the letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press.

It's been said that there are no coincidences in politics. I wonder where this story will go.

Bush, FISA, and More Deceptions

First - were you at all curious about the timing of the new FISA discussions in Congress? Me too. Reuters has a possible explanation:

A U.S. intelligence court earlier this year secretly struck down a key element of President George W. Bush's warrantless spying program, The Washington Post reported in its Friday edition.

The decision is one reason Congress is trying to give legal authorization to the spying program in fevered negotiations with the Bush administration this week, the Post reported.

The intelligence-court judge, who remains anonymous, concluded that the government had overstepped its authority by monitoring overseas communications that pass through the United States, the Post said, citing anonymous government and congressional sources.

But wait - it was a secret? How did we find out about it then? Check out today's Washington Post:

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

What is it with these Republicans leaking classified information for political gain? Don't they know that it's a dangerous world? Leaking classified information is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or so I'm told.

So the secret, classified FISA court struck down part of dubya's domestic surveillance plan (in secret, of course) and yet when a Repulican member of the House discloses that information on the Republican "news" channel, it's somehow not "revealing classified information."

Yea, and Valerie Plame wasn't covert, either.

But beyond that - what would this new FISA scenario look like? This is from the AP:

The law generally requires court review of government surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States. It does not specifically address the government's ability to intercept messages believed to come from suspects who are overseas, opening what the White House considers a significant gap in protecting against attacks by foreigners targeting the U.S.

Democrats, who control Congress, would allow the messages from foreign targets to be intercepted, but only after a review by the special FISA court to make sure the surveillance does not focus on communications that might be sent to and from Americans.

They reject the Bush administration's proposal to give Gonzales speedy authority to decide if the surveillance properly targets people overseas _ and not in the United States.

The Bush Administration wanted to give more authority to AG Gonzales?

This AG Gonzales?

Senators in both parties concede they don't have enough evidence to make a perjury charge stick against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But that doesn't mean they're going to quit trying to pry him from office.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is considering asking the Justice Department's inspector general to examine whether Gonzales' answers to questions from lawmakers amount to misconduct.

"I am deeply concerned about the seriousness of his misleading testimony and the pattern that has developed with regards to the attorney general's testimony over the years," Leahy said Thursday. "At the very least, I am considering sending his answers as they stand to the inspector general for review."

Ranking committee Republican Arlen Specter doesn't sound like he'd stand in the way.

"I think we need to finish this (the committee's) investigation and find a way to end the tenure of Attorney General Gonzales," Pennsylvania Sen. Specter said Thursday at a hearing.

End the tenure of Alberto Gonzales. IMPEACH.

So it was Data Mining!

This weekend, the NYTimes reported:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

Later on in the article, there's some interesting stuff.

The Justice Department announced in January that eavesdropping without warrants under the Terrorist Surveillance Program had been halted, and that a special intelligence court was again overseeing the wiretapping. The N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, generally eavesdrops on communications in foreign countries. Since the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, any eavesdropping to gather intelligence on American soil has required a warrant from the special court.

In that it's a felony (an "offense") to eavesdrop in any way other than what's allowed by FISA. And:

In addition, court approval is required for the N.S.A. to search the databases of telephone calls or e-mail records, usually compiled by American phone and Internet companies and including phone numbers or e-mail addresses, as well as dates, times and duration of calls and messages. Sometimes called metadata, such databases do not include the content of the calls and e-mail messages — the actual words spoken or written.

Now look at this part:

The first known assertion by administration officials that there had been no serious disagreement within the government about the legality of the N.S.A. program came in talks with New York Times editors in 2004. In an effort to persuade the editors not to disclose the eavesdropping program, senior officials repeatedly cited the lack of dissent as evidence of the program’s lawfulness.

I seem to recall that the Times took some heat because it knew about the warrantless domestic surveillance before the 2004 election - and yet didn't say anything. Do you think dubya's administration was lying then about the "lack of dissent" in order to bolster the Republicans' chances in November of that year? For an administration that politicizes everything, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Mr. Gonzales defended the surveillance in an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2006, saying there had been no internal dispute about its legality. He told the senators: “There has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

By limiting his remarks to “the program the president has confirmed,” Mr. Gonzales skirted any acknowledgment of the heated arguments over the data mining. He said the Justice Department had issued a legal analysis justifying the eavesdropping program.

The dispute, it seems, was not about the program itself, but the data that the program sifted through. Yea, that makes sense.

But even the Times misses one:

On Tuesday, to respond to Mr. Comey’s account, Mr. Gonzales testified in a Senate appearance that he went to the hospital only after meeting with Congressional leaders about the impending deadline for the reauthorization. He said the consensus was that the program should go on, so he felt he had no choice but to seek Mr. Ashcroft’s approval.

Where's the mention that this is also completely wrong? Take a look:

Tom Daschle. Jay Rockefeller. And now Nancy Pelosi.

That makes three members of the Gang of Eight -- the bipartisan congressional leadership briefed about President Bush's warrantless surveillance -- to dispute Alberto Gonzales's testimony that the Gang demanded the surveillance continue after a March 2004 briefing telling them that acting Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize the program.

Perhaps it depends on what the definition of "consensus" is.

One Spy Program or Two?

That's what they're asking over at TPMCafe.

Alberto Gonzales' testimony that there was "no serious disagreement" within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general's apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales' testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales's careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that "the president described" was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we'll call it, for convenience's sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials -- James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally -- balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the "Terrorist Surveillance Program' in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.

It's always nice to see Hamlet referenced in the news. In the play, Polonius notices a certain rationality in Hamlet's seeming insanity:

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't. (Hamlet II, ii, 206)

But let's get back to the current madness, this administration.

It's an interesting article. The main point being that the domestic surveillance program as originally conceived and put into operation is very different from the one dubya described in Dec, 2005.

In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.

I don't think I'm following this, however as there seems to be a contradiction. If Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee there is a distinction between the programs (pre- and post- Comey's intervention), then he will possibly be preserving the administrations strategy of concealing the scope of the program as originally implemented and keeping up the appearance that the two programs (pre- and post-Comey's intervention) are the same?

Am I reading it wrong? Am I reading too deeply? Should I just drink the kool-aid and blame it all on Clinton (doesn't matter which - Hill or Bill) and the "Democrat Congress" instead?

More Trouble For AG Gonzales

From the AP:

Documents show that eight congressional leaders were briefed about the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program on the eve of its expiration in 2004, contradicting sworn Senate testimony this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, come as senators consider whether a perjury investigation should be opened into conflicting accounts about the program and a dramatic March 2004 confrontation leading up to its potentially illegal reauthorization.

A Gonzales spokesman maintained Wednesday that the attorney general stands by his testimony.

I saw this on Olbermann last night. More details:

At a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Gonzales repeatedly testified that the issue at hand was not about the terrorist surveillance program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspects in the United States without receiving court approval.

Instead, Gonzales said, the emergency meetings on March 10, 2004, focused on an intelligence program that he would not describe.

But if the document, a four page memo from the Director of National Intelligence, is right, then AG Gonzales is lying. If the memo is incorrect then there's some other intelligence gathering program out there.

Looks like it's the first one. I guess an AG who's perjured himself is better than another illegal domestic surveillance program, right?

Right?

Subpoenas

The AP, BBC, Boston Globe, The Hill, New York Times, and the Washington Post are all reporting that the Senate Judiciary Committee (by 13-3 vote) has subpoenaed the White House.

Oddly enough, at this point I can not find any coverage of this story over at Fox "News." If it's there, someone please send in the URL. I did find this from June 26, but it's an AP story - not original reporting from Fox.

Anyway, remember the vote? The committee is made up of 10 Democrats and 9 Republicans. On the vote, The Hill reports:

Senate Judiciary members authorized the subpoenas last week on a 13-3 vote, with ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) backing [Senator Patrick] Leahy. The chairman urged the White House that it should not view the investigation as driven by partisanship.

And of course, that's exactly what they did. From the AP:

"We're aware of the committee's action and will respond appropriately," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. "It's unfortunate that congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation."

But "confrontation" (while perhaps too strong a word to use) might be necessary, considering this from the Washington Post:

Mr. Leahy said Wednesday at a news conference that the committee had issued the subpoenas because the administration had followed a “consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection” in dealing with Congressional efforts to scrutinize the program.

“It’s unacceptable,” Mr. Leahy said. “It is stonewalling of the worst kind.”

Again, as of this writing, I could find nothing about this on Foxnews.com. Again, if it's there please e-mail me the link.

Ashcroft, Gonzales and The Domestic Surveillance Program

I can't speak for the OPJ, but my main reason for having the big word IMPEACH plastered above this blog's logo can be described in three words: warrantless domestic surveillance.

If memory serves, we hoisted the banner just after learning that George W. Bush ok-ed the warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens. It was already possible to surveil citizens if necessary via the FISA court. But for some reason, that wasn't good enough for dubya.

I understand (though I can't condone) the decisions of the Congressional Democrats NOT to pursue Impeachment, but the insult to the Constitution is so great that someone has to be punished for it.

One curiously distasteful aspect of the story has bubbled up recently - the trip to AG Ashcroft's hospital bedside in March 2004.

According to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Congress wants speak to Ashcroft about it.

The Nation has a good description of what happened (sub. req):

The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey's foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller's startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens's being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.

Some telling details:

• According to Comey's testimony, for two years the White House had endorsed still unspecified secret wiretaps by the National Security Agency without a warrant or authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In other words, for two years the NSA and telephone companies had been committing a federal crime with the full endorsement of the Oval Office.

And:

• In spring 2004, when Ashcroft, Comey and every other responsible official in the Justice Department had reviewed the program and declared that the taps blatantly violated the surveillance law, Card, Gonzales and Bush himself all indicated their intention to go forward anyhow. In plain English, that is a conspiracy.

The Nation continues with a further charge. Since Comey had already been assigned the duties of the AG, while Ashcroft was in the hospital, Ashcroft had no authority to sign off on the program. Whatever "authority" they were looking to present would have been fraudulent. They add:

That is how determined the President was to continue an illegal program.

Now perhaps Impeachment doesn't seem too strong a reaction.

In Case You Missed It

Within the larger context of the administration seeking to "revise" the rules for domestic surveillance in front of a very skeptical the Senate Intelligence Committee, The New York Times is reporting this morning that:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

Looks like we're back to someplace before square one. What is says is that basically while dubya's domestic surveillance had been brought under the legal structure of FISA as of January 2007, there's no guarantee that it will continue to be. Oh yea, and dubya still claims the Constitutional authority to ignore the law, even if he's not Constitutionally ignoring it now.

Here's the letter AG Gonzales sent to Congress outlining the change last January 17. His first paragraph:

I am writing to inform you that on January 10, 2007, a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing the Government to target for collection internal communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization. As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

But on whether the rules are "revised" the New York Times editorial board has an opinion. It's less of a revision, they write, than a gutting. They also lay out the reason dubya's pushing for it:

Mr. Bush’s motivations for submitting this bill now seem obvious. The courts have rejected his claim that 9/11 gave him virtually unchecked powers, and he faces a Democratic majority in Congress that is willing to exercise its oversight responsibilities. That, presumably, is why his bill grants immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated in five years of illegal eavesdropping. It also strips the power to hear claims against the spying program from all courts except the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret.

In case you missed it.