Sunday, November 06, 2005
Drudge Retort: Indian Brides Killed over Dowry Disputes
Drudge Retort: Indian Brides Killed over Dowry Disputes: "Indian Brides Killed over Dowry Disputes"
Russert pulls a Sean Hannity
Crooks and Liars: "Did Harry Reid Hit Bill Frist This Week With The 'Smoking Gun'? "
the President will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new Treasury Secretary and maybe a new Defense Secretary.
TIME.com: A White House Without Rove? -- Nov. 14, 2005 -- Page 1: "Several well-wired Administration officials predict that within a year, the President will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new Treasury Secretary and maybe a new Defense Secretary. "
Outrageous disinfo from Toensing
OpinionJournal - Extra
THE PLAME KERFUFFLE
Investigate the CIA An "outing" was the result of either incompetence or an effort to undermine the White House. BY VICTORIA TOENSING Sunday, November 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
In a surprise, closed-door debate, Senate Democrats last week demanded an investigation of pre-Iraq War intelligence. Here's an issue for them: Assess the validity of the claim that Valerie Plame's status was "covert," or even properly classified, given the wretched tradecraft by the Central Intelligence Agency throughout the entire episode. It was, after all, the CIA that requested the "leak" investigation, alleging that one of its agents had been outed in Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column. Yet it was the CIA's bizarre conduct that led inexorably to Ms. Plame's unveiling.
When the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was being negotiated, Senate Select Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater was adamant: If the CIA desired a law making it illegal to expose one of its deep cover employees, then the agency must do a much better job of protecting their cover. That is why a criterion for any prosecution under the act is that the government was taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the protected person's relationship to the intelligence agency. Two decades later, the CIA, either purposely or with gross negligence, made a series of decisions that led to Ms. Plame becoming a household name:
• The CIA sent her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for unconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.
• Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or represent CIA clients.
• When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. If this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the "missionary," if for no other reason than to establish a record to refute any subsequent misrepresentation of that assessment? Because it was the vice president who initially inquired about Niger and the yellowcake (although he had nothing to do with Mr. Wilson being sent), it is curious that neither his office nor the president's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report.
• Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.
• More important than the inaccuracies is that, if the CIA truly, truly, truly had wanted Ms. Plame's identity to be secret, it never would have permitted her spouse to write the op-ed. Did no one at Langley think that her identity could be compromised if her spouse wrote a piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her expertise? The obvious question a sophisticated journalist such as Mr. Novak asked after "Why did the CIA send Wilson?" was "Who is Wilson?" After being told by a still-unnamed administration source that Mr. Wilson's "wife" suggested him for the assignment, Mr. Novak went to Who's Who, which reveals "Valerie Plame" as Mr. Wilson's spouse.
• CIA incompetence did not end there. When Mr. Novak called the agency to verify Ms. Plame's employment, it not only did so, but failed to go beyond the perfunctory request not to publish. Every experienced Washington journalist knows that when the CIA really does not want something public, there are serious requests from the top, usually the director. Only the press office talked to Mr. Novak.
• Although high-ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA had no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name "Wilson, Valerie E.," information publicly available at the Federal Elections Commission.
The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft. It is up to Congress to decide which.
Ms. Toensing, a Washington lawyer, is a former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration
THE PLAME KERFUFFLE
Investigate the CIA An "outing" was the result of either incompetence or an effort to undermine the White House. BY VICTORIA TOENSING Sunday, November 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
In a surprise, closed-door debate, Senate Democrats last week demanded an investigation of pre-Iraq War intelligence. Here's an issue for them: Assess the validity of the claim that Valerie Plame's status was "covert," or even properly classified, given the wretched tradecraft by the Central Intelligence Agency throughout the entire episode. It was, after all, the CIA that requested the "leak" investigation, alleging that one of its agents had been outed in Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column. Yet it was the CIA's bizarre conduct that led inexorably to Ms. Plame's unveiling.
When the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was being negotiated, Senate Select Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater was adamant: If the CIA desired a law making it illegal to expose one of its deep cover employees, then the agency must do a much better job of protecting their cover. That is why a criterion for any prosecution under the act is that the government was taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the protected person's relationship to the intelligence agency. Two decades later, the CIA, either purposely or with gross negligence, made a series of decisions that led to Ms. Plame becoming a household name:
• The CIA sent her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for unconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.
• Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or represent CIA clients.
• When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. If this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the "missionary," if for no other reason than to establish a record to refute any subsequent misrepresentation of that assessment? Because it was the vice president who initially inquired about Niger and the yellowcake (although he had nothing to do with Mr. Wilson being sent), it is curious that neither his office nor the president's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report.
• Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.
• More important than the inaccuracies is that, if the CIA truly, truly, truly had wanted Ms. Plame's identity to be secret, it never would have permitted her spouse to write the op-ed. Did no one at Langley think that her identity could be compromised if her spouse wrote a piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her expertise? The obvious question a sophisticated journalist such as Mr. Novak asked after "Why did the CIA send Wilson?" was "Who is Wilson?" After being told by a still-unnamed administration source that Mr. Wilson's "wife" suggested him for the assignment, Mr. Novak went to Who's Who, which reveals "Valerie Plame" as Mr. Wilson's spouse.
• CIA incompetence did not end there. When Mr. Novak called the agency to verify Ms. Plame's employment, it not only did so, but failed to go beyond the perfunctory request not to publish. Every experienced Washington journalist knows that when the CIA really does not want something public, there are serious requests from the top, usually the director. Only the press office talked to Mr. Novak.
• Although high-ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA had no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name "Wilson, Valerie E.," information publicly available at the Federal Elections Commission.
The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft. It is up to Congress to decide which.
Ms. Toensing, a Washington lawyer, is a former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration
lies about levees' controlled demolition
TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS: "lies about levees' controlled demolition"
The newest twist being peddled is that a contractor here or there used inferior materials, which then apparently spontaneously combusted and "heaved" in the hours following the Category 2 winds Katrina brought down upon the canal levees in New Orleans proper. From Los Angles Times November 3, 2005:
"The New Orleans levees that ruptured during Hurricane Katrina's storm surges two months ago were weakened by widespread structural flaws, and the construction of several floodwalls may have been undermined by possible corruption, engineering experts told a Senate committee Wednesday."We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who is heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation. "We're pursuing evidence of those stories."Seed would not detail the allegations....The officials declined to be identified because the investigation was still in an early stage and the allegations had not been verified."These levees should have been expected to perform adequately if they had been designed and constructed properly," Seed said.[...]-----A few weeks before, it was the native peat soil which spontaneously combusted. This Seed was pushing this angle. From Washington Post Sat, Oct. 08, 2005:
"At the 17th Street Canal, they said, a section of the levee embankment moved back 35 feet. There is evidence of a similar "soil mass movement" at one of two London Avenue sites. The engineers speculate that either the pressure on the walls pushed them back against the soft soil or water seeping beneath the walls softened the soil, weakening the wall's support."The soil moved," said Paul Mlakar of the Army Corps of Engineers. "The exact mechanism is not known at this time."The soil in the area, composed of sand, silt, clay and peat, is "compressible and not very strong," said Raymond Seed, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.[...]-----Seed has been spinning like a top with these undetailed, mysterious allegations, because there is simply no reasonable explanation for these "mass soil movements" beyond placed charges. It's no wonder that Seed's carefully-preared testimony to Congress avoided mentioning the explosive behavior of the soil, suddenly "heaving" up to 35 feet..Why would a scientist make his case on innuendo instead of basic physics? Follow the money. According to the UC-Berkely's Berkeleyan newspaper Oct. 20, Seed's team at Berkeley received "funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the campus's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) [and] joined teams mobilized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)."9/11 researchers know ASCE for its comical report on the destruction of the Pentagon.But what of this CITRIS. CITRIS has led the way in designing "smart dust," to track everything everywhere. And according to the academia watchdogs at UT Watch :
"CITRIS is administrated by UC Berkeley,and supports research on the Berkeley campus, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and the new UC Merced. Aside from the research conducted through CITRIS that actually does benefit society, there is a good deal which benefits the warfare state and its allies. In addition to the funding support CITRIS receives from DARPA and the ONR, the majority of support comes from corporations including weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, TRW, Raytheon, SRI, Hughes Aircraft, United Technologies, etc. One of the major focuses of the CITRIS center will now be "Homeland Defense." Homeland Defense research will revolve around surveillance and police technologies-----DARPA, of course, is the Pentagon's Defense Advance Research Project Agency.The UC Berkely team went in with a mision statement to find "why the levees failed," not whether or not the levees were sabotaged, as witness testimony and the physical evidence indicate.
The newest twist being peddled is that a contractor here or there used inferior materials, which then apparently spontaneously combusted and "heaved" in the hours following the Category 2 winds Katrina brought down upon the canal levees in New Orleans proper. From Los Angles Times November 3, 2005:
"The New Orleans levees that ruptured during Hurricane Katrina's storm surges two months ago were weakened by widespread structural flaws, and the construction of several floodwalls may have been undermined by possible corruption, engineering experts told a Senate committee Wednesday."We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who is heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation. "We're pursuing evidence of those stories."Seed would not detail the allegations....The officials declined to be identified because the investigation was still in an early stage and the allegations had not been verified."These levees should have been expected to perform adequately if they had been designed and constructed properly," Seed said.[...]-----A few weeks before, it was the native peat soil which spontaneously combusted. This Seed was pushing this angle. From Washington Post Sat, Oct. 08, 2005:
"At the 17th Street Canal, they said, a section of the levee embankment moved back 35 feet. There is evidence of a similar "soil mass movement" at one of two London Avenue sites. The engineers speculate that either the pressure on the walls pushed them back against the soft soil or water seeping beneath the walls softened the soil, weakening the wall's support."The soil moved," said Paul Mlakar of the Army Corps of Engineers. "The exact mechanism is not known at this time."The soil in the area, composed of sand, silt, clay and peat, is "compressible and not very strong," said Raymond Seed, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.[...]-----Seed has been spinning like a top with these undetailed, mysterious allegations, because there is simply no reasonable explanation for these "mass soil movements" beyond placed charges. It's no wonder that Seed's carefully-preared testimony to Congress avoided mentioning the explosive behavior of the soil, suddenly "heaving" up to 35 feet..Why would a scientist make his case on innuendo instead of basic physics? Follow the money. According to the UC-Berkely's Berkeleyan newspaper Oct. 20, Seed's team at Berkeley received "funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the campus's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) [and] joined teams mobilized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)."9/11 researchers know ASCE for its comical report on the destruction of the Pentagon.But what of this CITRIS. CITRIS has led the way in designing "smart dust," to track everything everywhere. And according to the academia watchdogs at UT Watch :
"CITRIS is administrated by UC Berkeley,and supports research on the Berkeley campus, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and the new UC Merced. Aside from the research conducted through CITRIS that actually does benefit society, there is a good deal which benefits the warfare state and its allies. In addition to the funding support CITRIS receives from DARPA and the ONR, the majority of support comes from corporations including weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, TRW, Raytheon, SRI, Hughes Aircraft, United Technologies, etc. One of the major focuses of the CITRIS center will now be "Homeland Defense." Homeland Defense research will revolve around surveillance and police technologies-----DARPA, of course, is the Pentagon's Defense Advance Research Project Agency.The UC Berkely team went in with a mision statement to find "why the levees failed," not whether or not the levees were sabotaged, as witness testimony and the physical evidence indicate.
Witnesses Describe Ballot Fraud in Nineveh :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch
Witnesses Describe Ballot Fraud in Nineveh :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch
Witnesses Describe Ballot Fraud in Nineveh
Gareth Porter
November 5, 2005Reports compiled by the U.S. military in Iraq from its informants and by non-governmental organizations from independent Iraqi sources provide the first detailed picture of a campaign of ballot fraud by Kurdish authorities in Nineveh province, the key to the outcome of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum.They show that officials of the Kurdish Democratic Party bused non-resident Kurds to vote in polling stations in various non-Kurdish areas of Nineveh and created a climate of fear and intimidation in the province that reduced the vote against the constitution on the Nineveh plain. They also support Sunni charges of fraudulent vote totals in the province.The constitution was formally adopted on Oct. 25 after the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) certified voting results for Nineveh in which the Sunnis mustered a 55 percent majority vote against the constitution – short of the two-thirds vote needed in three or more of Iraq's 18 provinces needed to defeat it.The accounts collected by the U.S. military in reports dated Oct. 15-19 were made available to IPS on condition that they would not be quoted directly and that the U.S. military unit forwarding them would not be identified.The first-person accounts gathered by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nineveh were obtained and translated by Michael Youash, executive director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project in Washington. The names of the NGOs were not provided in the document given to IPS because of fears of reprisals.None of the accounts reported by the military are from Sunnis. All of the sources quoted in those reports are either Kurds or trusted Assyrian Christians who have been advisors to the U.S. military on local developments and are generally favorable to the constitution. Thus they represent the view from those in the province least likely to have a political motive for depicting the referendum as rigged.The reports compiled by the U.S. military include an account of the voting in Mosul by an Assyrian Christian source which observes that Kurds voted for the constitution but represent only a small percentage of the estimated 1.7 million people in the capital – which holds roughly two-thirds the population of the province.That account contradicts both widely reported explanations for the alleged failure of the Sunnis to achieve a two-thirds majority against the constitution in Nineveh – that the Sunnis in Mosul were divided over the constitution, and that Kurds represent a very large proportion of the population of the city.The final official vote total for Nineveh was 395,000 "no" and 323,000 "yes." However the IECI in Nineveh had told the media on Oct. 16 and again on Oct. 17 that 327,000 people had voted for the constitution and only 90,000 against, with only 25 out of the 300 polling stations in the province remaining to be counted.Thus, between the two counts, 5,000 yes votes had apparently disappeared and 295,000 no votes had mysteriously materialized – all from only 25 polling places. No explanation has ever been provided by election authorities for those contradictory data. The U.S. military's informant supports the view that Kurdish and Sunni vote totals in Mosul were significantly altered.In the towns north and east of Mosul, the military's reporting suggests the main factor in distorting the vote was the use by Kurdish authorities of "flying voters" and voter intimidation.Two different Iraqi advisers to the U.S. military, including one who is identified as a local political figure and supporter of the U.S. occupation, testified that the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) transported 500 non-resident Kurdish voters in a convoy of buses into the town of Bartilla, east of Mosul, to vote.According to one of the accounts, election workers at the polling station were forced by a large group of Kurdish militiamen accompanying them to give the outsiders ballots to vote.Nineveh Deputy Governor Khasro Goran, a ranking member of the KDP, personally gave the orders that the 500 Kurds were to be allowed to vote, according to the second account to the military. The KDP was said to be planning to transport these 500 voters to other towns on the plain. Although the source said that the local mayor opposed that plan, the non-Kurdish mayors in the area have no military forces at their disposal.Bartilla was not the only instance of "flying voters" reported by eyewitnesses in Nineveh. According to an account from a local resident, collected by non-government organizations in Nineveh, a large number of Kurds were brought into the non-Kurdish town of Alqosh, north of Mosul, in more than 20 buses on the evening of Oct. 14 and the morning of Oct. 15.An adviser to the U.S. military who obtained information on the voting in towns north and east of Mosul reported that the vote in the city of Alqosh was 950 "yes" and 100 "no." Thus the imported Kurdish voters apparently represented the bulk of the votes counted in that town. Those reported results suggest that almost the entire population stayed away from the polls, either out of fear or in protest against the Kurdish vote fraud in the town.The same military source said 1,220 votes were recorded in the town of Telaskof, of which 90 percent were "yes" votes, even though he said the majority of the town did not approve of the constitution. Most eligible voters, according to the informant, boycotted the election.In Telkaif, where 70 percent of the votes were recorded as "yes" votes, according to the military's informant, a local eyewitness in the town told NGOs that the voting center in the town was staffed entirely by KDP personnel, including an employee known to the source as a KDP secret police agent.Elsewhere on the Nineveh plain, the KDP openly displayed its security presence at polling places. In the town of Sheikhan, according to an account obtained by NGOs, the KDP staffed the polling place with personnel wearing "Security Committee for Shaikan District" badges.The predominantly Assyrian Christian town of Qaraqosh, in which Kurds represent only about one percent, was recorded as delivering a vote favoring the constitution by a margin of six to one, according to the military's informant. The informant identified fear of the Kurdish militia in the town as a key factor in the outcome.Kurdish political leaders have made no secret of their intention to attach Qaraqosh and surrounding areas to Kurdistan, despite the small number of Kurds there. As the Washington Post reported last August, the local KDP leader said he hoped Qaraqosh would be ceded to the Kurds after the area "becomes normalized."The same article said Kurdish militia have beaten up anyone who refuses to go along with their plans, and individuals have been arrested and sent to jails in Kurdistan for activities that include "writing against the Kurds on the internet."Both U.S. military informants and testimony gathered by civil society leaders in Nineveh reported that the Kurds had spread the rumor in Nineveh province that voters who did not vote "yes" would lose their food ration cards. Many farmers and their families were said by the independent informant to have voted "yes" on the understanding that would ensure the renewal of their ration cards.The picture of voting irregularities and fear in Nineveh sketched out in these reports from non-Sunni sources collected by the U.S. military and civil society groups support the complaints about electoral fraud by Sunni political figures. And they belie the official portrayal of the referendum as a step toward political legitimacy and democratic development.(Inter Press Service):: Article nr. 17494 sent on 05-nov-2005 23:43 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=17494:: The incoming address of this article is : www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=7921
Witnesses Describe Ballot Fraud in Nineveh
Gareth Porter
November 5, 2005Reports compiled by the U.S. military in Iraq from its informants and by non-governmental organizations from independent Iraqi sources provide the first detailed picture of a campaign of ballot fraud by Kurdish authorities in Nineveh province, the key to the outcome of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum.They show that officials of the Kurdish Democratic Party bused non-resident Kurds to vote in polling stations in various non-Kurdish areas of Nineveh and created a climate of fear and intimidation in the province that reduced the vote against the constitution on the Nineveh plain. They also support Sunni charges of fraudulent vote totals in the province.The constitution was formally adopted on Oct. 25 after the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) certified voting results for Nineveh in which the Sunnis mustered a 55 percent majority vote against the constitution – short of the two-thirds vote needed in three or more of Iraq's 18 provinces needed to defeat it.The accounts collected by the U.S. military in reports dated Oct. 15-19 were made available to IPS on condition that they would not be quoted directly and that the U.S. military unit forwarding them would not be identified.The first-person accounts gathered by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nineveh were obtained and translated by Michael Youash, executive director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project in Washington. The names of the NGOs were not provided in the document given to IPS because of fears of reprisals.None of the accounts reported by the military are from Sunnis. All of the sources quoted in those reports are either Kurds or trusted Assyrian Christians who have been advisors to the U.S. military on local developments and are generally favorable to the constitution. Thus they represent the view from those in the province least likely to have a political motive for depicting the referendum as rigged.The reports compiled by the U.S. military include an account of the voting in Mosul by an Assyrian Christian source which observes that Kurds voted for the constitution but represent only a small percentage of the estimated 1.7 million people in the capital – which holds roughly two-thirds the population of the province.That account contradicts both widely reported explanations for the alleged failure of the Sunnis to achieve a two-thirds majority against the constitution in Nineveh – that the Sunnis in Mosul were divided over the constitution, and that Kurds represent a very large proportion of the population of the city.The final official vote total for Nineveh was 395,000 "no" and 323,000 "yes." However the IECI in Nineveh had told the media on Oct. 16 and again on Oct. 17 that 327,000 people had voted for the constitution and only 90,000 against, with only 25 out of the 300 polling stations in the province remaining to be counted.Thus, between the two counts, 5,000 yes votes had apparently disappeared and 295,000 no votes had mysteriously materialized – all from only 25 polling places. No explanation has ever been provided by election authorities for those contradictory data. The U.S. military's informant supports the view that Kurdish and Sunni vote totals in Mosul were significantly altered.In the towns north and east of Mosul, the military's reporting suggests the main factor in distorting the vote was the use by Kurdish authorities of "flying voters" and voter intimidation.Two different Iraqi advisers to the U.S. military, including one who is identified as a local political figure and supporter of the U.S. occupation, testified that the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) transported 500 non-resident Kurdish voters in a convoy of buses into the town of Bartilla, east of Mosul, to vote.According to one of the accounts, election workers at the polling station were forced by a large group of Kurdish militiamen accompanying them to give the outsiders ballots to vote.Nineveh Deputy Governor Khasro Goran, a ranking member of the KDP, personally gave the orders that the 500 Kurds were to be allowed to vote, according to the second account to the military. The KDP was said to be planning to transport these 500 voters to other towns on the plain. Although the source said that the local mayor opposed that plan, the non-Kurdish mayors in the area have no military forces at their disposal.Bartilla was not the only instance of "flying voters" reported by eyewitnesses in Nineveh. According to an account from a local resident, collected by non-government organizations in Nineveh, a large number of Kurds were brought into the non-Kurdish town of Alqosh, north of Mosul, in more than 20 buses on the evening of Oct. 14 and the morning of Oct. 15.An adviser to the U.S. military who obtained information on the voting in towns north and east of Mosul reported that the vote in the city of Alqosh was 950 "yes" and 100 "no." Thus the imported Kurdish voters apparently represented the bulk of the votes counted in that town. Those reported results suggest that almost the entire population stayed away from the polls, either out of fear or in protest against the Kurdish vote fraud in the town.The same military source said 1,220 votes were recorded in the town of Telaskof, of which 90 percent were "yes" votes, even though he said the majority of the town did not approve of the constitution. Most eligible voters, according to the informant, boycotted the election.In Telkaif, where 70 percent of the votes were recorded as "yes" votes, according to the military's informant, a local eyewitness in the town told NGOs that the voting center in the town was staffed entirely by KDP personnel, including an employee known to the source as a KDP secret police agent.Elsewhere on the Nineveh plain, the KDP openly displayed its security presence at polling places. In the town of Sheikhan, according to an account obtained by NGOs, the KDP staffed the polling place with personnel wearing "Security Committee for Shaikan District" badges.The predominantly Assyrian Christian town of Qaraqosh, in which Kurds represent only about one percent, was recorded as delivering a vote favoring the constitution by a margin of six to one, according to the military's informant. The informant identified fear of the Kurdish militia in the town as a key factor in the outcome.Kurdish political leaders have made no secret of their intention to attach Qaraqosh and surrounding areas to Kurdistan, despite the small number of Kurds there. As the Washington Post reported last August, the local KDP leader said he hoped Qaraqosh would be ceded to the Kurds after the area "becomes normalized."The same article said Kurdish militia have beaten up anyone who refuses to go along with their plans, and individuals have been arrested and sent to jails in Kurdistan for activities that include "writing against the Kurds on the internet."Both U.S. military informants and testimony gathered by civil society leaders in Nineveh reported that the Kurds had spread the rumor in Nineveh province that voters who did not vote "yes" would lose their food ration cards. Many farmers and their families were said by the independent informant to have voted "yes" on the understanding that would ensure the renewal of their ration cards.The picture of voting irregularities and fear in Nineveh sketched out in these reports from non-Sunni sources collected by the U.S. military and civil society groups support the complaints about electoral fraud by Sunni political figures. And they belie the official portrayal of the referendum as a step toward political legitimacy and democratic development.(Inter Press Service):: Article nr. 17494 sent on 05-nov-2005 23:43 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=17494:: The incoming address of this article is : www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=7921
xymphora: Republican thievery and Democrat hypocrisy
xymphora: Republican thievery and Democrat hypocrisy
Republican thievery and Democrat hypocrisy
Here is one of the very few smart things I've read on the current state of Republican politics, coming from the unlikely place of The Huffington Post (the only other recent non-crap from that source is this), Tom Gilroy's "'White House in Chaos' & Other Utter Horseshit". He is writing about the supposed demoralized state of the Republicans:
"Here's a little secret; they never reel because they are never demoralized. They don't measure success and failure they way you and I do, by analyzing public benefit or desire, or even legality, or ethics. They measure success by how much more money they feast on from the public trough. And by that measure, they hogs are literally drowning in shit.So while you fold your arms in the triumphant reassurance that Scooter's indictment and the GOP's plummeting ratings reveal the world to be what you've always had faith it was, think again. The pendulum you always talk about is not swinging back. The Truth has not come out. What has happened is what you've known all along has merely been reiterated. There is no new information, and so there will be no new consequences. And while you smirk and feel validated they'll go right along gobbling up more and more, laughing at you between belches.Because they don't care about your moral indignation, your ethical judgment, or what the public thinks. They don't care what's popular, legal, or good for the country. They want your money.So while the Democrats brunch and strategize about who to run in 2008 (choosing from the 3 frontrunners, all of whom want to INCREASE troop numbers in Iraq), the dozens of Rove wannabees over at the The Federalist Society are planning their fifth, sixth, seventh move from now in their uninterrupted plunder."My thesis is that Democrats never get anywhere because they secretly like the American Empire, but just want someone else to get covered in all the blood. Hence no real efforts to do anything about the crooked voting machines. Democrats can continue to vote with their consciences, secure in the knowledge that the Diebold machines will always reliably elect Republicans.
The proof? While the Democrats pretend to be outraged about the outing of Valerie Plame (something they would have cheered twenty years ago), and pretend to be outraged about all the lies that led to the war in Iraq, guess what's going on NOW? That's right: exactly the same plan leading to the attack on Syria. Seymour Hersh points out that they're even using exactly the same kind of lies that they used in the build-up to the attack on Iraq (although I disagree with Hersh's optimism about Fitzgerald, who has to play along to get along). Do I hear one Democrat complaining about this? Do I hear one Democrat trying to stop Bolton's plan to use UN sanctions and their supposed violations as the inevitable cause for the next war? No. More American soldiers are moving into Iraq NOW. The plan appears to be as stupid as the Iraq plan. They figure they can soften the place up with bombs, and then spare 40 thousand or so soldiers from Iraq for a few months to take care of Syria. They won't need to keep the place stable - in fact, Israel won't want a stable Syria - as they won't need to stay to protect American bases, so they can leave as soon as they've wrecked the joint. Two years from now, a bunch of Democrats will be outraged about the lies that led to the attack on Syria, but the neocons will have moved on to Saudi Arabia. In other words, all the folderol about Plame and Niger is just partisan political politics from a group which likes what the Republicans are doing, and is extra careful not to say anything until it is too late.
There's a certain refreshing honesty about just wanting to steal money.
Republican thievery and Democrat hypocrisy
Here is one of the very few smart things I've read on the current state of Republican politics, coming from the unlikely place of The Huffington Post (the only other recent non-crap from that source is this), Tom Gilroy's "'White House in Chaos' & Other Utter Horseshit". He is writing about the supposed demoralized state of the Republicans:
"Here's a little secret; they never reel because they are never demoralized. They don't measure success and failure they way you and I do, by analyzing public benefit or desire, or even legality, or ethics. They measure success by how much more money they feast on from the public trough. And by that measure, they hogs are literally drowning in shit.So while you fold your arms in the triumphant reassurance that Scooter's indictment and the GOP's plummeting ratings reveal the world to be what you've always had faith it was, think again. The pendulum you always talk about is not swinging back. The Truth has not come out. What has happened is what you've known all along has merely been reiterated. There is no new information, and so there will be no new consequences. And while you smirk and feel validated they'll go right along gobbling up more and more, laughing at you between belches.Because they don't care about your moral indignation, your ethical judgment, or what the public thinks. They don't care what's popular, legal, or good for the country. They want your money.So while the Democrats brunch and strategize about who to run in 2008 (choosing from the 3 frontrunners, all of whom want to INCREASE troop numbers in Iraq), the dozens of Rove wannabees over at the The Federalist Society are planning their fifth, sixth, seventh move from now in their uninterrupted plunder."My thesis is that Democrats never get anywhere because they secretly like the American Empire, but just want someone else to get covered in all the blood. Hence no real efforts to do anything about the crooked voting machines. Democrats can continue to vote with their consciences, secure in the knowledge that the Diebold machines will always reliably elect Republicans.
The proof? While the Democrats pretend to be outraged about the outing of Valerie Plame (something they would have cheered twenty years ago), and pretend to be outraged about all the lies that led to the war in Iraq, guess what's going on NOW? That's right: exactly the same plan leading to the attack on Syria. Seymour Hersh points out that they're even using exactly the same kind of lies that they used in the build-up to the attack on Iraq (although I disagree with Hersh's optimism about Fitzgerald, who has to play along to get along). Do I hear one Democrat complaining about this? Do I hear one Democrat trying to stop Bolton's plan to use UN sanctions and their supposed violations as the inevitable cause for the next war? No. More American soldiers are moving into Iraq NOW. The plan appears to be as stupid as the Iraq plan. They figure they can soften the place up with bombs, and then spare 40 thousand or so soldiers from Iraq for a few months to take care of Syria. They won't need to keep the place stable - in fact, Israel won't want a stable Syria - as they won't need to stay to protect American bases, so they can leave as soon as they've wrecked the joint. Two years from now, a bunch of Democrats will be outraged about the lies that led to the attack on Syria, but the neocons will have moved on to Saudi Arabia. In other words, all the folderol about Plame and Niger is just partisan political politics from a group which likes what the Republicans are doing, and is extra careful not to say anything until it is too late.
There's a certain refreshing honesty about just wanting to steal money.
Special Post: Judge in Libby Case Protects Classified Information
Big Brass Blog
The Washington Post and the New York Daily News are reporting that indicted White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby appeared before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton for arraignment on five felony charges of lying to a grand jury and to the FBI during an investigation into the public disclosure of the identity of non-official cover (NOC) operative Valerie Plame. The New York Daily News article describes Judge Walton—appointed to lower courts by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and appointed to his current seat by President George W. Bush—as a "'long-ball hitter' on sentencing [who] often cows defendants into copping pleas." The article goes on, however, to point out that Judge Walton has recently dismissed a case in which the FBI, itself, claimed that "classified information" would be revealed if the judge were to allow the complaint of official misconduct by a whistleblower within the agency to go to trial.The case involved former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who alleged that information related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, contained in communications in languages in which she was fluent, was not translated until after the attacks had occurred and that other translations were performed by either by individuals incapable of adequately understanding the nuances of the communiqués or by individuals she had already reported as giving evidence of having been compromised by interests possibly related to organizations and persons in the communiqués. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, through Justice Department lawyers, argued before Judge Walton that a "state secrets priviledge" precluded proceeding to trial and moved for dismissal. Judge Walton ruled in favor of the motion and noted in extension that "...the imminent threat of terrorism will not be eliminated any time in the foreseeable future, but is an endeavor that will consume our nation's attention indefinitely."With regard to the current matter of the charges against Mr. Libby, in a statement released by his attorney, Joseph Tate, Mr. Libby made representations that news analysts interpreted as being the outline of a defense that would involved simple memory lapses that created the impression of incompatibilities among statements made at various times to the grand jury and to FBI investigators. It appears, however, that such outside speculation about how Libby's defense team will proceed is wide of the mark: because the judge who will preside in the case has shown a marked willingness to dismiss cases when "classified information" might be revealed, it is highly likely—in fact, it is almost inevitable—that Libby's counsel will immediately subpoena, and represent as crucial to their defense, information that the White House will decline to disgorged on the grounds that it contains classified information. A motion to dismiss will then be forthcoming from the defense table, and it will then be in the hands of U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to decide whether or not, based upon his own previous assertions and precedent, he will rule in favor of the motion.Time will tell, though.
The Washington Post and the New York Daily News are reporting that indicted White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby appeared before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton for arraignment on five felony charges of lying to a grand jury and to the FBI during an investigation into the public disclosure of the identity of non-official cover (NOC) operative Valerie Plame. The New York Daily News article describes Judge Walton—appointed to lower courts by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and appointed to his current seat by President George W. Bush—as a "'long-ball hitter' on sentencing [who] often cows defendants into copping pleas." The article goes on, however, to point out that Judge Walton has recently dismissed a case in which the FBI, itself, claimed that "classified information" would be revealed if the judge were to allow the complaint of official misconduct by a whistleblower within the agency to go to trial.The case involved former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who alleged that information related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, contained in communications in languages in which she was fluent, was not translated until after the attacks had occurred and that other translations were performed by either by individuals incapable of adequately understanding the nuances of the communiqués or by individuals she had already reported as giving evidence of having been compromised by interests possibly related to organizations and persons in the communiqués. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, through Justice Department lawyers, argued before Judge Walton that a "state secrets priviledge" precluded proceeding to trial and moved for dismissal. Judge Walton ruled in favor of the motion and noted in extension that "...the imminent threat of terrorism will not be eliminated any time in the foreseeable future, but is an endeavor that will consume our nation's attention indefinitely."With regard to the current matter of the charges against Mr. Libby, in a statement released by his attorney, Joseph Tate, Mr. Libby made representations that news analysts interpreted as being the outline of a defense that would involved simple memory lapses that created the impression of incompatibilities among statements made at various times to the grand jury and to FBI investigators. It appears, however, that such outside speculation about how Libby's defense team will proceed is wide of the mark: because the judge who will preside in the case has shown a marked willingness to dismiss cases when "classified information" might be revealed, it is highly likely—in fact, it is almost inevitable—that Libby's counsel will immediately subpoena, and represent as crucial to their defense, information that the White House will decline to disgorged on the grounds that it contains classified information. A motion to dismiss will then be forthcoming from the defense table, and it will then be in the hands of U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to decide whether or not, based upon his own previous assertions and precedent, he will rule in favor of the motion.Time will tell, though.
Chomsky: Internet is a Hideous Time-Waster
Another Day in the Empire
Chomsky: Internet is a Hideous Time-Waster
Saturday November 05th 2005, 10:11 pm
Once upon a time, I read Noam Chomsky religiously. Even now, I admire his knack for detail, although reading his most recent book leads one down a meandering path (and I admit buying this book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, and reading it cover to cover, a rare thing these days). However, after reading Emma Brockes interview with Chomsky (published in the Guardian), my disenchantment with “the world’s top public intellectual” (according to Prospect magazine) has increased exponentially. For instance, consider the following:
His daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low opinion of the mainstream media (to summarize: it is undermined by a “systematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people”. I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get into it with Chomsky and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is “hunting for documents, or historical data. It’s a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions … There’s a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it’s true.”
I am amazed there is so much fodder for argumentation contained in one medium-sized paragraph. First and foremost, the corporate media does indeed conspire to present a biased view of politics and current events—a bias that serves the ruling corporate elite, who after all own most of the newspapers (and television news) in this country. Chomsky insists on a Marxist interpretation—which is of course, for the corporate ruling elite, harmless enough and directs attention away from the fact they are propagandizing in favor of world domination into abstract nonsense. Telling bald-faced lies about Iraq and allowing shills like Judith Miller to foment war hysteria is of course “structural,” although this may not be apparent to namby-pamby Marxists laboring away in the comfort of the ivy tower.
Second, the intelligence agencies do know what they are doing—liberals consistently think intelligence agencies are staffed with bumbling idiots—and they are stimulating “conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions,” for instance more serious questions about nine eleven and the role played by the aforementioned intelligence agencies. Chomsky is on record as saying he believes anything but the official nine eleven fairy tale is a baseless conspiracy theory. In an earlier interview, Chomsky said:
There’s by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I’ve looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There’s a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn’t try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you’ll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they’d have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they’d all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen.
Obviously, even though he is “the world’s top public intellectual,” Chomsky is unable or unwilling to comprehend the fact false flag operations are structured in such a way the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing—especially if both hands are outside the purview of government. As a Marxist with a rather antiquated and conventional view of the state—and apparently unaware of the privatization of intelligence and military operations, a process well under way for some time—Chomsky finds it inconceivable that nine eleven would occur without somebody on the inside leaking information to the corporate media. “We are dealing with state-sponsored, false flag terrorism,” Webster Tarpley told the International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11 in Toronto in May 2004. “I don’t mean state-sponsored in the sense that it has to be sponsored by the entire command structure of the country in question, but that it is carried forward by a private network ensconced and infesting decisive nodal points in the state apparatus of that country.”
Moreover, Chomsky believes nine eleven “would have had to involve a large number of people” and yet he buys into the nonsensical theory—endorsed and amplified by the Kean (whitewash) Commission and subsequently mythologized by the corporate media—that a small number of medieval Muslims holed up in Afghan caves pulled off the terrorist attacks. For “the world’s top public intellectual,” this is a seriously flawed line of reasoning.
According to Daniel L. Abrahamson, Chomsky is not advocating flawed reasoning so much as consciously acting as a “re-direct agent,” offering his many followers “dead-end solutions and alienating rhetoric.” In regard to nine eleven, it is worth quoting Abrahamson at length:
Noam Chomsky has acted as the premier Left gatekeeper in the aftermath of the 9-11 crimes, lashing out at the 9-11 truth movement and claiming any suggestions of government complicity are fabrications. The “radical” Chomsky takes a position so deeply rooted in denial that it makes the staged 9-11 whitewash commission look like an honest study. He belligerently refuses to discuss any of the massive evidence proving government foreknowledge and participation in the crimes, claiming it would destroy the activist movements worldwide.
“If the left spends its time on this, that’s the end of the left, in my opinion: the mainstream would be utterly delighted. It is highly likely that nothing significant will be found. And if—which I very greatly doubt—something isfound that would quickly send everyone in Washington to the death chamber, the left is unlikely to emerge triumphant.”
In other words, Chomsky is telling his followers to ignore the evidence because according to him, none exists. However even if there is massive evidence, responsible activists should ignore it because it would be “the end of the Left.”
(…)
Chomsky’s role as the chief 9-11 gatekeeper proves he is distracting his leftist followers from the truth. Instead of facing the clear facts, he claims that 19 hijackers did it and that al-Qaeda is a real terrorist enemy. When presented with documented evidence, from living hijacker patsies to the NORAD stand down, he simply claims it doesn’t exist. He resorts to emotional “they would never do it” appeals in order to deny the obvious.
Chomsky is exhibiting far more than logical skepticism, but instead is actively engaging in disinformation.
Finally, Chomsky disses the internet, deeming it a “hideous time-waster” and essentially stating the medium is rife with misinformation (and of course the New York Times is pure as driven snow and never tells a lie, especially when it comes to the government invading small countries). Of course, Chomsky is no fan of corporate media—or so we are led to believe—but he is strangely silent on offering informational alternatives (apparently we are expected to read the Progressive and the Nation and other magazines funded by the likes of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, venues where Chomsky is primarily published).
Of course, in his alleged role as gatekeeper or “re-direct agent,” it makes sense for Noam Chomsky to diss the internet, a vast and democratic medium not controlled by foundations and corporate overseers, although this may change soon. As a blogger and writer who self-publishes books, I take umbrage in Chomsky’s assertion that the material I post more or less daily is a waste of time and is little more than “nonsense.” But then I am but a lowly web designer and prolific blogger, not a world-renowned linguistics professor and successful author with a vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, valued in excess of $1.2 million (according to Peter Schweizer). Of course, I don’t deny Chomsky his fancy summer home. I simply wish he wouldn’t attack the only viable information medium in the world outside of the clutches of corporations, including “liberal” foundations such as the one formerly run by the Ford family.
Chomsky: Internet is a Hideous Time-Waster
Saturday November 05th 2005, 10:11 pm
Once upon a time, I read Noam Chomsky religiously. Even now, I admire his knack for detail, although reading his most recent book leads one down a meandering path (and I admit buying this book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, and reading it cover to cover, a rare thing these days). However, after reading Emma Brockes interview with Chomsky (published in the Guardian), my disenchantment with “the world’s top public intellectual” (according to Prospect magazine) has increased exponentially. For instance, consider the following:
His daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low opinion of the mainstream media (to summarize: it is undermined by a “systematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people”. I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get into it with Chomsky and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is “hunting for documents, or historical data. It’s a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions … There’s a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it’s true.”
I am amazed there is so much fodder for argumentation contained in one medium-sized paragraph. First and foremost, the corporate media does indeed conspire to present a biased view of politics and current events—a bias that serves the ruling corporate elite, who after all own most of the newspapers (and television news) in this country. Chomsky insists on a Marxist interpretation—which is of course, for the corporate ruling elite, harmless enough and directs attention away from the fact they are propagandizing in favor of world domination into abstract nonsense. Telling bald-faced lies about Iraq and allowing shills like Judith Miller to foment war hysteria is of course “structural,” although this may not be apparent to namby-pamby Marxists laboring away in the comfort of the ivy tower.
Second, the intelligence agencies do know what they are doing—liberals consistently think intelligence agencies are staffed with bumbling idiots—and they are stimulating “conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions,” for instance more serious questions about nine eleven and the role played by the aforementioned intelligence agencies. Chomsky is on record as saying he believes anything but the official nine eleven fairy tale is a baseless conspiracy theory. In an earlier interview, Chomsky said:
There’s by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I’ve looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There’s a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn’t try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you’ll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they’d have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they’d all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen.
Obviously, even though he is “the world’s top public intellectual,” Chomsky is unable or unwilling to comprehend the fact false flag operations are structured in such a way the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing—especially if both hands are outside the purview of government. As a Marxist with a rather antiquated and conventional view of the state—and apparently unaware of the privatization of intelligence and military operations, a process well under way for some time—Chomsky finds it inconceivable that nine eleven would occur without somebody on the inside leaking information to the corporate media. “We are dealing with state-sponsored, false flag terrorism,” Webster Tarpley told the International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11 in Toronto in May 2004. “I don’t mean state-sponsored in the sense that it has to be sponsored by the entire command structure of the country in question, but that it is carried forward by a private network ensconced and infesting decisive nodal points in the state apparatus of that country.”
Moreover, Chomsky believes nine eleven “would have had to involve a large number of people” and yet he buys into the nonsensical theory—endorsed and amplified by the Kean (whitewash) Commission and subsequently mythologized by the corporate media—that a small number of medieval Muslims holed up in Afghan caves pulled off the terrorist attacks. For “the world’s top public intellectual,” this is a seriously flawed line of reasoning.
According to Daniel L. Abrahamson, Chomsky is not advocating flawed reasoning so much as consciously acting as a “re-direct agent,” offering his many followers “dead-end solutions and alienating rhetoric.” In regard to nine eleven, it is worth quoting Abrahamson at length:
Noam Chomsky has acted as the premier Left gatekeeper in the aftermath of the 9-11 crimes, lashing out at the 9-11 truth movement and claiming any suggestions of government complicity are fabrications. The “radical” Chomsky takes a position so deeply rooted in denial that it makes the staged 9-11 whitewash commission look like an honest study. He belligerently refuses to discuss any of the massive evidence proving government foreknowledge and participation in the crimes, claiming it would destroy the activist movements worldwide.
“If the left spends its time on this, that’s the end of the left, in my opinion: the mainstream would be utterly delighted. It is highly likely that nothing significant will be found. And if—which I very greatly doubt—something isfound that would quickly send everyone in Washington to the death chamber, the left is unlikely to emerge triumphant.”
In other words, Chomsky is telling his followers to ignore the evidence because according to him, none exists. However even if there is massive evidence, responsible activists should ignore it because it would be “the end of the Left.”
(…)
Chomsky’s role as the chief 9-11 gatekeeper proves he is distracting his leftist followers from the truth. Instead of facing the clear facts, he claims that 19 hijackers did it and that al-Qaeda is a real terrorist enemy. When presented with documented evidence, from living hijacker patsies to the NORAD stand down, he simply claims it doesn’t exist. He resorts to emotional “they would never do it” appeals in order to deny the obvious.
Chomsky is exhibiting far more than logical skepticism, but instead is actively engaging in disinformation.
Finally, Chomsky disses the internet, deeming it a “hideous time-waster” and essentially stating the medium is rife with misinformation (and of course the New York Times is pure as driven snow and never tells a lie, especially when it comes to the government invading small countries). Of course, Chomsky is no fan of corporate media—or so we are led to believe—but he is strangely silent on offering informational alternatives (apparently we are expected to read the Progressive and the Nation and other magazines funded by the likes of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, venues where Chomsky is primarily published).
Of course, in his alleged role as gatekeeper or “re-direct agent,” it makes sense for Noam Chomsky to diss the internet, a vast and democratic medium not controlled by foundations and corporate overseers, although this may change soon. As a blogger and writer who self-publishes books, I take umbrage in Chomsky’s assertion that the material I post more or less daily is a waste of time and is little more than “nonsense.” But then I am but a lowly web designer and prolific blogger, not a world-renowned linguistics professor and successful author with a vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, valued in excess of $1.2 million (according to Peter Schweizer). Of course, I don’t deny Chomsky his fancy summer home. I simply wish he wouldn’t attack the only viable information medium in the world outside of the clutches of corporations, including “liberal” foundations such as the one formerly run by the Ford family.
The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
The FBI's Secret ScrutinyIn Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans
By Barton GellmanWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, November 6, 2005; A01
The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities -- still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit -- by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.
The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it gathers describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.
As it wrote the Patriot Act four years ago, Congress bought time and leverage for oversight by placing an expiration date on 16 provisions. The changes involving national security letters were not among them. In fact, as the Dec. 31 deadline approaches and Congress prepares to renew or make permanent the expiring provisions, House and Senate conferees are poised again to amplify the FBI's power to compel the secret production of private records.
The House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. The House would also impose a prison term for breach of secrecy.
Like many Patriot Act provisions, the ones involving national security letters have been debated in largely abstract terms. The Justice Department has offered Congress no concrete information, even in classified form, save for a partial count of the number of letters delivered. The statistics do not cover all forms of national security letters or all U.S. agencies making use of them.
"The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."'A Routine Tool'
Career investigators and Bush administration officials emphasized, in congressional testimony and interviews for this story, that national security letters are for hunting terrorists, not fishing through the private lives of the innocent. The distinction is not as clear in practice.
Under the old legal test, the FBI had to have "specific and articulable" reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or a spy. Now the bureau needs only to certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
That standard enables investigators to look for conspirators by sifting the records of nearly anyone who crosses a suspect's path.
"If you have a list of, say, 20 telephone numbers that have come up . . . on a bad guy's telephone," said Valerie E. Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, "you want to find out who he's in contact with." Investigators will say, " 'Okay, phone company, give us subscriber information and toll records on these 20 telephone numbers,' and that can easily be 100."
Bush administration officials compare national security letters to grand jury subpoenas, which are also based on "relevance" to an inquiry. There are differences. Grand juries tend to have a narrower focus because they investigate past conduct, not the speculative threat of unknown future attacks. Recipients of grand jury subpoenas are generally free to discuss the subpoenas publicly. And there are strict limits on sharing grand jury information with government agencies.
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors -- the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a "full field investigation." Agents commonly use the letters now in "preliminary investigations" and in the "threat assessments" that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
"Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports," said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. "The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn't bother me."
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. "It's all chicken and egg," he said. "We're trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn't."
Billy said he understands that "merely being in a government or FBI database . . . gives everybody, you know, neck hair standing up." Innocent Americans, he said, "should take comfort at least knowing that it is done under a great deal of investigative care, oversight, within the parameters of the law."
He added: "That's not going to satisfy a majority of people, but . . . I've had people say, you know, 'Hey, I don't care, I've done nothing to be concerned about. You can have me in your files and that's that.' Some people take that approach."'Don't Go Overboard'
In Room 7975 of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, around two corners from the director's suite, the chief of the FBI's national security law unit sat down at his keyboard about a month after the Patriot Act became law. Michael J. Woods had helped devise the FBI wish list for surveillance powers. Now he offered a caution.
"NSLs are powerful investigative tools, in that they can compel the production of substantial amounts of relevant information," he wrote in a Nov. 28, 2001, "electronic communication" to the FBI's 56 field offices. "However, they must be used judiciously." Standing guidelines, he wrote, "require that the FBI accomplish its investigations through the 'least intrusive' means. . . . The greater availability of NSLs does not mean that they should be used in every case."
Woods, who left government service in 2002, added a practical consideration. Legislators granted the new authority and could as easily take it back. When making that decision, he wrote, "Congress certainly will examine the manner in which the FBI exercised it."
Looking back last month, Woods was struck by how starkly he misjudged the climate. The FBI disregarded his warning, and no one noticed.
"This is not something that should be automatically done because it's easy," he said. "We need to be sure . . . we don't go overboard."
One thing Woods did not anticipate was then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's revision of Justice Department guidelines. On May 30, 2002, and Oct. 31, 2003, Ashcroft rewrote the playbooks for investigations of terrorist crimes and national security threats. He gave overriding priority to preventing attacks by any means available.
Ashcroft remained bound by Executive Order 12333, which requires the use of the "least intrusive means" in domestic intelligence investigations. But his new interpretation came close to upending the mandate. Three times in the new guidelines, Ashcroft wrote that the FBI "should consider . . . less intrusive means" but "should not hesitate to use any lawful techniques . . . even if intrusive" when investigators believe them to be more timely. "This point," he added, "is to be particularly observed in investigations relating to terrorist activities."'Why Do You Want to Know?'
As the Justice Department prepared congressional testimony this year, FBI headquarters searched for examples that would show how expanded surveillance powers made a difference. Michael Mason, who runs the Washington field office and has the rank of assistant FBI director, found no ready answer.
"I'd love to have a made-for-Hollywood story, but I don't have one," Mason said. "I am not even sure such an example exists."
What national security letters give his agents, Mason said, is speed.
"I have 675 terrorism cases," he said. "Every one of these is a potential threat. And anything I can do to get to the bottom of any one of them more quickly gets me closer to neutralizing a potential threat."
Because recipients are permanently barred from disclosing the letters, outsiders can make no assessment of their relevance to Mason's task.
Woods, the former FBI lawyer, said secrecy is essential when an investigation begins because "it would defeat the whole purpose" to tip off a suspected terrorist or spy, but national security seldom requires that the secret be kept forever. Even mobster "John Gotti finds out eventually that he was wiretapped" in a criminal probe, said Peter Swire, the federal government's chief privacy counselor until 2001. "Anyone caught up in an NSL investigation never gets notice."
To establish the "relevance" of the information they seek, agents face a test so basic it is hard to come up with a plausible way to fail. A model request for a supervisor's signature, according to internal FBI guidelines, offers this one-sentence suggestion: "This subscriber information is being requested to determine the individuals or entities that the subject has been in contact with during the past six months."
Edward L. Williams, the chief division counsel in Mason's office, said that supervisors, in practice, "aren't afraid to ask . . . 'Why do you want to know?' " He would not say how many requests, if any, are rejected.'The Abuse Is in the Power Itself'
Those who favor the new rules maintain -- as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put it in a prepared statement -- that "there has not been one substantiated allegation of abuse of these lawful intelligence tools."
What the Bush administration means by abuse is unauthorized use of surveillance data -- for example, to blackmail an enemy or track an estranged spouse. Critics are focused elsewhere. What troubles them is not unofficial abuse but the official and routine intrusion into private lives.
To Jeffrey Breinholt, deputy chief of the Justice Department's counterterrorism section, the civil liberties objections "are eccentric." Data collection on the innocent, he said, does no harm unless "someone [decides] to act on the information, put you on a no-fly list or something." Only a serious error, he said, could lead the government, based on nothing more than someone's bank or phone records, "to freeze your assets or go after you criminally and you suffer consequences that are irreparable." He added: "It's a pretty small chance."
"I don't necessarily want somebody knowing what videos I rent or the fact that I like cartoons," said Mason, the Washington field office chief. But if those records "are never used against a person, if they're never used to put him in jail, or deprive him of a vote, et cetera, then what is the argument?"
Barr, the former congressman, said that "the abuse is in the power itself."
"As a conservative," he said, "I really resent an administration that calls itself conservative taking the position that the burden is on the citizen to show the government has abused power, and otherwise shut up and comply."
At the ACLU, staff attorney Jameel Jaffer spoke of "the profound chilling effect" of this kind of surveillance: "If the government monitors the Web sites that people visit and the books that they read, people will stop visiting disfavored Web sites and stop reading disfavored books. The FBI should not have unchecked authority to keep track of who visits [al-Jazeera's Web site] or who visits the Web site of the Federalist Society."Links in a Chain
Ready access to national security letters allows investigators to employ them routinely for "contact chaining."
"Starting with your bad guy and his telephone number and looking at who he's calling, and [then] who they're calling," the number of people surveilled "goes up exponentially," acknowledged Caproni, the FBI's general counsel.
But Caproni said it would not be rational for the bureau to follow the chain too far. "Everybody's connected" if investigators keep tracing calls "far enough away from your targeted bad guy," she said. "What's the point of that?"
One point is to fill government data banks for another investigative technique. That one is called "link analysis," a practice Caproni would neither confirm nor deny.
Two years ago, Ashcroft rescinded a 1995 guideline directing that information obtained through a national security letter about a U.S. citizen or resident "shall be destroyed by the FBI and not further disseminated" if it proves "not relevant to the purposes for which it was collected." Ashcroft's new order was that "the FBI shall retain" all records it collects and "may disseminate" them freely among federal agencies.
The same order directed the FBI to develop "data mining" technology to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files. According to an FBI status report, the bureau's office of intelligence began operating in January 2004 a new Investigative Data Warehouse, based on the same Oracle technology used by the CIA. The CIA is generally forbidden to keep such files on Americans.
Data mining intensifies the impact of national security letters, because anyone's personal files can be scrutinized again and again without a fresh need to establish relevance.
"The composite picture of a person which emerges from transactional information is more telling than the direct content of your speech," said Woods, the former FBI lawyer. "That's certainly not been lost on the intelligence community and the FBI."
Ashcroft's new guidelines allowed the FBI for the first time to add to government files consumer data from commercial providers such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint Inc. Previous attorneys general had decided that such a move would violate the Privacy Act. In many field offices, agents said, they now have access to ChoicePoint in their squad rooms.
What national security letters add to government data banks is information that no commercial service can lawfully possess. Strict privacy laws, for example, govern financial and communications records. National security letters -- along with the more powerful but much less frequently used secret subpoenas from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- override them.'What Happens in Vegas'
The bureau displayed its ambition for data mining in an emergency operation at the end of 2003.
The Department of Homeland Security declared an orange alert on Dec. 21 of that year, in part because of intelligence that hinted at a New Year's Eve attack in Las Vegas. The identities of the plotters were unknown.
The FBI sent Gurvais Grigg, chief of the bureau's little-known Proactive Data Exploitation Unit, in an audacious effort to assemble a real-time census of every visitor in the nation's most-visited city. An average of about 300,000 tourists a day stayed an average of four days each, presenting Grigg's team with close to a million potential suspects in the ensuing two weeks.
A former stockbroker with a degree in biochemistry, Grigg declined to be interviewed. Government and private sector sources who followed the operation described epic efforts to vacuum up information.
An interagency task force began pulling together the records of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in the city. Grigg's unit filtered that population for leads. Any link to the known terrorist universe -- a shared address or utility account, a check deposited, a telephone call -- could give investigators a start.
"It was basically a manhunt, and in circumstances where there is a manhunt, the most effective way of doing that was to scoop up a lot of third party data and compare it to other data we were getting," Breinholt said.
Investigators began with emergency requests for help from the city's sprawling hospitality industry. "A lot of it was done voluntary at first," said Billy, the deputy assistant FBI director.
According to others directly involved, investigators turned to national security letters and grand jury subpoenas when friendly persuasion did not work.
Early in the operation, according to participants, the FBI gathered casino executives and asked for guest lists. The MGM Mirage company, followed by others, balked.
"Some casinos were saying no to consent [and said], 'You have to produce a piece of paper,' " said Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, who previously built data management systems for casino surveillance. "They don't just market 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' They want it to be true."
The operation remained secret for about a week. Then casino sources told Rod Smith, gaming editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that the FBI had served national security letters on them. In an interview for this article, one former casino executive confirmed the use of a national security letter. Details remain elusive. Some law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge particulars, said they relied primarily on grand jury subpoenas. One said in an interview that national security letters may eventually have been withdrawn. Agents encouraged voluntary disclosures, he said, by raising the prospect that the FBI would use the letters to gather something more sensitive: the gambling profiles of casino guests. Caproni declined to confirm or deny that account.
What happened in Vegas stayed in federal data banks. Under Ashcroft's revised policy, none of the information has been purged. For every visitor, Breinholt said, "the record of the Las Vegas hotel room would still exist."
Grigg's operation found no suspect, and the orange alert ended on Jan. 10, 2004."The whole thing washed out," one participant said.'Of Interest to President Bush'
At around the time the FBI found George Christian in Connecticut, agents from the bureau's Charlotte field office paid an urgent call on the chemical engineering department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. They were looking for information about a former student named Magdy Nashar, then suspected in the July 7 London subway bombing but since cleared of suspicion.
University officials said in interviews late last month that the FBI tried to use a national security letter to demand much more information than the law allows.
David T. Drooz, the university's senior associate counsel, said special authority is required for the surrender of records protected by educational and medical privacy. The FBI's first request, a July 14 grand jury subpoena, did not appear to supply that authority, Drooz said, and the university did not honor it. Referring to notes he took that day, Drooz said Eric Davis, the FBI's top lawyer in Charlotte, "was focused very much on the urgency" and "he even indicated the case was of interest to President Bush."
The next day, July 15, FBI agents arrived with a national security letter. Drooz said it demanded all records of Nashar's admission, housing, emergency contacts, use of health services and extracurricular activities. University lawyers "looked up what law we could on the fly," he said. They discovered that the FBI was demanding files that national security letters have no power to obtain. The statute the FBI cited that day covers only telephone and Internet records.
"We're very eager to comply with the authorities in this regard, but we needed to have what we felt was a legally valid procedure," said Larry A. Neilsen, the university provost.
Soon afterward, the FBI returned with a new subpoena. It was the same as the first one, Drooz said, and the university still had doubts about its legal sufficiency. This time, however, it came from New York and summoned Drooz to appear personally. The tactic was "a bit heavy-handed," Drooz said, "the implication being you're subject to contempt of court." Drooz surrendered the records.
The FBI's Charlotte office referred questions to headquarters. A high-ranking FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the field office erred in attempting to use a national security letter. Investigators, he said, "were in a big hurry for obvious reasons" and did not approach the university "in the exact right way."'Unreasonable' or 'Oppressive'
The electronic docket in the Connecticut case, as the New York Times first reported, briefly titled the lawsuit Library Connection Inc. v. Gonzales . Because identifying details were not supposed to be left in the public file, the court soon replaced the plaintiff's name with "John Doe."
George Christian, Library Connection's executive director, is identified in his affidavit as "John Doe 2." In that sworn statement, he said people often come to libraries for information that is "highly sensitive, embarrassing or personal." He wanted to fight the FBI but feared calling a lawyer because the letter said he could not disclose its existence to "any person." He consulted Peter Chase, vice president of Library Connection and chairman of a state intellectual freedom committee. Chase -- "John Doe 1" in his affidavit -- advised Christian to call the ACLU. Reached by telephone at their homes, both men declined to be interviewed.
U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall ruled in September that the FBI gag order violates Christian's, and Library Connection's, First Amendment rights. A three-judge panel heard oral argument on Wednesday in the government's appeal.
The central facts remain opaque, even to the judges, because the FBI is not obliged to describe what it is looking for, or why. During oral argument in open court on Aug. 31, Hall said one government explanation was so vague that "if I were to say it out loud, I would get quite a laugh here." After the government elaborated in a classified brief delivered for her eyes only, she wrote in her decision that it offered "nothing specific."
The Justice Department tried to conceal the existence of the first and only other known lawsuit against a national security letter, also brought by the ACLU's Jaffer and Ann Beeson. Government lawyers opposed its entry into the public docket of a New York federal judge. They have since tried to censor nearly all contents of the exhibits and briefs. They asked the judge, for example, to black out every line of the affidavit that describes the delivery of the national security letter to a New York Internet company, including, "I am a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ('FBI')."
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, in a ruling that is under appeal, held that the law authorizing national security letters violates the First and Fourth Amendments.
Resistance to national security letters is rare. Most of them are served on large companies in highly regulated industries, with business interests that favor cooperation. The in-house lawyers who handle such cases, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, "are often former prosecutors -- instinctively pro-government but also instinctively by-the-books." National security letters give them a shield against liability to their customers.
Kenneth M. Breen, a partner at the New York law firm Fulbright & Jaworski, held a seminar for corporate lawyers one recent evening to explain the "significant risks for the non-compliant" in government counterterrorism investigations. A former federal prosecutor, Breen said failure to provide the required information could create "the perception that your company didn't live up to its duty to fight terrorism" and could invite class-action lawsuits by families of terrorism victims. In extreme cases, he said, a business could face criminal prosecution, "a 'death sentence' for certain kinds of companies."
The volume of government information demands, even so, has provoked a backlash. Several major business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, complained in an Oct. 4 letter to senators that customer records can "too easily be obtained and disseminated" around the government. National security letters, they wrote, have begun to impose an "expensive and time-consuming burden" on business.
The House and Senate bills renewing the Patriot Act do not tighten privacy protections, but they offer a concession to business interests. In both bills, a judge may modify a national security letter if it imposes an "unreasonable" or "oppressive" burden on the company that is asked for information.'A Legitimate Question'
As national security letters have grown in number and importance, oversight has not kept up. In each house of Congress, jurisdiction is divided between the judiciary and intelligence committees. None of the four Republican chairmen agreed to be interviewed.
Roberts, the Senate intelligence chairman, said in a statement issued through his staff that "the committee is well aware of the intelligence value of the information that is lawfully collected under these national security letter authorities," which he described as "non-intrusive" and "crucial to tracking terrorist networks and detecting clandestine intelligence activities." Senators receive "valuable reporting by the FBI," he said, in "semi-annual reports [that] provide the committee with the information necessary to conduct effective oversight."
Roberts was referring to the Justice Department's classified statistics, which in fact have been delivered three times in four years. They include the following information: how many times the FBI issued national security letters; whether the letters sought financial, credit or communications records; and how many of the targets were "U.S. persons." The statistics omit one whole category of FBI national security letters and also do not count letters issued by the Defense Department and other agencies.
Committee members have occasionally asked to see a sampling of national security letters, a description of their fruits or examples of their contribution to a particular case. The Justice Department has not obliged.
In 2004, the conference report attached to the intelligence authorization bill asked the attorney general to "include in his next semiannual report" a description of "the scope of such letters" and the "process and standards for approving" them. More than a year has passed without a Justice Department reply.
"The committee chairman has the power to issue subpoenas" for information from the executive branch, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a House Judiciary Committee member. "The minority has no power to compel, and . . . Republicans are not going to push for oversight of the Republicans. That's the story of this Congress."
In the executive branch, no FBI or Justice Department official audits the use of national security letters to assess whether they are appropriately targeted, lawfully applied or contribute important facts to an investigation.
Justice Department officials noted frequently this year that Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reports twice a year on abuses of the Patriot Act and has yet to substantiate any complaint. (One investigation is pending.) Fine advertises his role, but there is a puzzle built into the mandate. Under what scenario could a person protest a search of his personal records if he is never notified?
"We do rely upon complaints coming in," Fine said in House testimony in May. He added: "To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that's a legitimate question."
Asked more recently whether Fine's office has conducted an independent examination of national security letters, Deputy Inspector General Paul K. Martin said in an interview: "We have not initiated a broad-based review that examines the use of specific provisions of the Patriot Act."
At the FBI, senior officials said the most important check on their power is that Congress is watching.
"People have to depend on their elected representatives to do the job of oversight they were elected to do," Caproni said. "And we think they do a fine job of it."
Researcher Julie Tate and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
The FBI's Secret ScrutinyIn Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans
By Barton GellmanWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, November 6, 2005; A01
The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities -- still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit -- by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.
The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it gathers describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.
As it wrote the Patriot Act four years ago, Congress bought time and leverage for oversight by placing an expiration date on 16 provisions. The changes involving national security letters were not among them. In fact, as the Dec. 31 deadline approaches and Congress prepares to renew or make permanent the expiring provisions, House and Senate conferees are poised again to amplify the FBI's power to compel the secret production of private records.
The House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. The House would also impose a prison term for breach of secrecy.
Like many Patriot Act provisions, the ones involving national security letters have been debated in largely abstract terms. The Justice Department has offered Congress no concrete information, even in classified form, save for a partial count of the number of letters delivered. The statistics do not cover all forms of national security letters or all U.S. agencies making use of them.
"The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."'A Routine Tool'
Career investigators and Bush administration officials emphasized, in congressional testimony and interviews for this story, that national security letters are for hunting terrorists, not fishing through the private lives of the innocent. The distinction is not as clear in practice.
Under the old legal test, the FBI had to have "specific and articulable" reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or a spy. Now the bureau needs only to certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
That standard enables investigators to look for conspirators by sifting the records of nearly anyone who crosses a suspect's path.
"If you have a list of, say, 20 telephone numbers that have come up . . . on a bad guy's telephone," said Valerie E. Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, "you want to find out who he's in contact with." Investigators will say, " 'Okay, phone company, give us subscriber information and toll records on these 20 telephone numbers,' and that can easily be 100."
Bush administration officials compare national security letters to grand jury subpoenas, which are also based on "relevance" to an inquiry. There are differences. Grand juries tend to have a narrower focus because they investigate past conduct, not the speculative threat of unknown future attacks. Recipients of grand jury subpoenas are generally free to discuss the subpoenas publicly. And there are strict limits on sharing grand jury information with government agencies.
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors -- the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a "full field investigation." Agents commonly use the letters now in "preliminary investigations" and in the "threat assessments" that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
"Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports," said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. "The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn't bother me."
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. "It's all chicken and egg," he said. "We're trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn't."
Billy said he understands that "merely being in a government or FBI database . . . gives everybody, you know, neck hair standing up." Innocent Americans, he said, "should take comfort at least knowing that it is done under a great deal of investigative care, oversight, within the parameters of the law."
He added: "That's not going to satisfy a majority of people, but . . . I've had people say, you know, 'Hey, I don't care, I've done nothing to be concerned about. You can have me in your files and that's that.' Some people take that approach."'Don't Go Overboard'
In Room 7975 of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, around two corners from the director's suite, the chief of the FBI's national security law unit sat down at his keyboard about a month after the Patriot Act became law. Michael J. Woods had helped devise the FBI wish list for surveillance powers. Now he offered a caution.
"NSLs are powerful investigative tools, in that they can compel the production of substantial amounts of relevant information," he wrote in a Nov. 28, 2001, "electronic communication" to the FBI's 56 field offices. "However, they must be used judiciously." Standing guidelines, he wrote, "require that the FBI accomplish its investigations through the 'least intrusive' means. . . . The greater availability of NSLs does not mean that they should be used in every case."
Woods, who left government service in 2002, added a practical consideration. Legislators granted the new authority and could as easily take it back. When making that decision, he wrote, "Congress certainly will examine the manner in which the FBI exercised it."
Looking back last month, Woods was struck by how starkly he misjudged the climate. The FBI disregarded his warning, and no one noticed.
"This is not something that should be automatically done because it's easy," he said. "We need to be sure . . . we don't go overboard."
One thing Woods did not anticipate was then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's revision of Justice Department guidelines. On May 30, 2002, and Oct. 31, 2003, Ashcroft rewrote the playbooks for investigations of terrorist crimes and national security threats. He gave overriding priority to preventing attacks by any means available.
Ashcroft remained bound by Executive Order 12333, which requires the use of the "least intrusive means" in domestic intelligence investigations. But his new interpretation came close to upending the mandate. Three times in the new guidelines, Ashcroft wrote that the FBI "should consider . . . less intrusive means" but "should not hesitate to use any lawful techniques . . . even if intrusive" when investigators believe them to be more timely. "This point," he added, "is to be particularly observed in investigations relating to terrorist activities."'Why Do You Want to Know?'
As the Justice Department prepared congressional testimony this year, FBI headquarters searched for examples that would show how expanded surveillance powers made a difference. Michael Mason, who runs the Washington field office and has the rank of assistant FBI director, found no ready answer.
"I'd love to have a made-for-Hollywood story, but I don't have one," Mason said. "I am not even sure such an example exists."
What national security letters give his agents, Mason said, is speed.
"I have 675 terrorism cases," he said. "Every one of these is a potential threat. And anything I can do to get to the bottom of any one of them more quickly gets me closer to neutralizing a potential threat."
Because recipients are permanently barred from disclosing the letters, outsiders can make no assessment of their relevance to Mason's task.
Woods, the former FBI lawyer, said secrecy is essential when an investigation begins because "it would defeat the whole purpose" to tip off a suspected terrorist or spy, but national security seldom requires that the secret be kept forever. Even mobster "John Gotti finds out eventually that he was wiretapped" in a criminal probe, said Peter Swire, the federal government's chief privacy counselor until 2001. "Anyone caught up in an NSL investigation never gets notice."
To establish the "relevance" of the information they seek, agents face a test so basic it is hard to come up with a plausible way to fail. A model request for a supervisor's signature, according to internal FBI guidelines, offers this one-sentence suggestion: "This subscriber information is being requested to determine the individuals or entities that the subject has been in contact with during the past six months."
Edward L. Williams, the chief division counsel in Mason's office, said that supervisors, in practice, "aren't afraid to ask . . . 'Why do you want to know?' " He would not say how many requests, if any, are rejected.'The Abuse Is in the Power Itself'
Those who favor the new rules maintain -- as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put it in a prepared statement -- that "there has not been one substantiated allegation of abuse of these lawful intelligence tools."
What the Bush administration means by abuse is unauthorized use of surveillance data -- for example, to blackmail an enemy or track an estranged spouse. Critics are focused elsewhere. What troubles them is not unofficial abuse but the official and routine intrusion into private lives.
To Jeffrey Breinholt, deputy chief of the Justice Department's counterterrorism section, the civil liberties objections "are eccentric." Data collection on the innocent, he said, does no harm unless "someone [decides] to act on the information, put you on a no-fly list or something." Only a serious error, he said, could lead the government, based on nothing more than someone's bank or phone records, "to freeze your assets or go after you criminally and you suffer consequences that are irreparable." He added: "It's a pretty small chance."
"I don't necessarily want somebody knowing what videos I rent or the fact that I like cartoons," said Mason, the Washington field office chief. But if those records "are never used against a person, if they're never used to put him in jail, or deprive him of a vote, et cetera, then what is the argument?"
Barr, the former congressman, said that "the abuse is in the power itself."
"As a conservative," he said, "I really resent an administration that calls itself conservative taking the position that the burden is on the citizen to show the government has abused power, and otherwise shut up and comply."
At the ACLU, staff attorney Jameel Jaffer spoke of "the profound chilling effect" of this kind of surveillance: "If the government monitors the Web sites that people visit and the books that they read, people will stop visiting disfavored Web sites and stop reading disfavored books. The FBI should not have unchecked authority to keep track of who visits [al-Jazeera's Web site] or who visits the Web site of the Federalist Society."Links in a Chain
Ready access to national security letters allows investigators to employ them routinely for "contact chaining."
"Starting with your bad guy and his telephone number and looking at who he's calling, and [then] who they're calling," the number of people surveilled "goes up exponentially," acknowledged Caproni, the FBI's general counsel.
But Caproni said it would not be rational for the bureau to follow the chain too far. "Everybody's connected" if investigators keep tracing calls "far enough away from your targeted bad guy," she said. "What's the point of that?"
One point is to fill government data banks for another investigative technique. That one is called "link analysis," a practice Caproni would neither confirm nor deny.
Two years ago, Ashcroft rescinded a 1995 guideline directing that information obtained through a national security letter about a U.S. citizen or resident "shall be destroyed by the FBI and not further disseminated" if it proves "not relevant to the purposes for which it was collected." Ashcroft's new order was that "the FBI shall retain" all records it collects and "may disseminate" them freely among federal agencies.
The same order directed the FBI to develop "data mining" technology to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files. According to an FBI status report, the bureau's office of intelligence began operating in January 2004 a new Investigative Data Warehouse, based on the same Oracle technology used by the CIA. The CIA is generally forbidden to keep such files on Americans.
Data mining intensifies the impact of national security letters, because anyone's personal files can be scrutinized again and again without a fresh need to establish relevance.
"The composite picture of a person which emerges from transactional information is more telling than the direct content of your speech," said Woods, the former FBI lawyer. "That's certainly not been lost on the intelligence community and the FBI."
Ashcroft's new guidelines allowed the FBI for the first time to add to government files consumer data from commercial providers such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint Inc. Previous attorneys general had decided that such a move would violate the Privacy Act. In many field offices, agents said, they now have access to ChoicePoint in their squad rooms.
What national security letters add to government data banks is information that no commercial service can lawfully possess. Strict privacy laws, for example, govern financial and communications records. National security letters -- along with the more powerful but much less frequently used secret subpoenas from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- override them.'What Happens in Vegas'
The bureau displayed its ambition for data mining in an emergency operation at the end of 2003.
The Department of Homeland Security declared an orange alert on Dec. 21 of that year, in part because of intelligence that hinted at a New Year's Eve attack in Las Vegas. The identities of the plotters were unknown.
The FBI sent Gurvais Grigg, chief of the bureau's little-known Proactive Data Exploitation Unit, in an audacious effort to assemble a real-time census of every visitor in the nation's most-visited city. An average of about 300,000 tourists a day stayed an average of four days each, presenting Grigg's team with close to a million potential suspects in the ensuing two weeks.
A former stockbroker with a degree in biochemistry, Grigg declined to be interviewed. Government and private sector sources who followed the operation described epic efforts to vacuum up information.
An interagency task force began pulling together the records of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in the city. Grigg's unit filtered that population for leads. Any link to the known terrorist universe -- a shared address or utility account, a check deposited, a telephone call -- could give investigators a start.
"It was basically a manhunt, and in circumstances where there is a manhunt, the most effective way of doing that was to scoop up a lot of third party data and compare it to other data we were getting," Breinholt said.
Investigators began with emergency requests for help from the city's sprawling hospitality industry. "A lot of it was done voluntary at first," said Billy, the deputy assistant FBI director.
According to others directly involved, investigators turned to national security letters and grand jury subpoenas when friendly persuasion did not work.
Early in the operation, according to participants, the FBI gathered casino executives and asked for guest lists. The MGM Mirage company, followed by others, balked.
"Some casinos were saying no to consent [and said], 'You have to produce a piece of paper,' " said Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, who previously built data management systems for casino surveillance. "They don't just market 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' They want it to be true."
The operation remained secret for about a week. Then casino sources told Rod Smith, gaming editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that the FBI had served national security letters on them. In an interview for this article, one former casino executive confirmed the use of a national security letter. Details remain elusive. Some law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge particulars, said they relied primarily on grand jury subpoenas. One said in an interview that national security letters may eventually have been withdrawn. Agents encouraged voluntary disclosures, he said, by raising the prospect that the FBI would use the letters to gather something more sensitive: the gambling profiles of casino guests. Caproni declined to confirm or deny that account.
What happened in Vegas stayed in federal data banks. Under Ashcroft's revised policy, none of the information has been purged. For every visitor, Breinholt said, "the record of the Las Vegas hotel room would still exist."
Grigg's operation found no suspect, and the orange alert ended on Jan. 10, 2004."The whole thing washed out," one participant said.'Of Interest to President Bush'
At around the time the FBI found George Christian in Connecticut, agents from the bureau's Charlotte field office paid an urgent call on the chemical engineering department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. They were looking for information about a former student named Magdy Nashar, then suspected in the July 7 London subway bombing but since cleared of suspicion.
University officials said in interviews late last month that the FBI tried to use a national security letter to demand much more information than the law allows.
David T. Drooz, the university's senior associate counsel, said special authority is required for the surrender of records protected by educational and medical privacy. The FBI's first request, a July 14 grand jury subpoena, did not appear to supply that authority, Drooz said, and the university did not honor it. Referring to notes he took that day, Drooz said Eric Davis, the FBI's top lawyer in Charlotte, "was focused very much on the urgency" and "he even indicated the case was of interest to President Bush."
The next day, July 15, FBI agents arrived with a national security letter. Drooz said it demanded all records of Nashar's admission, housing, emergency contacts, use of health services and extracurricular activities. University lawyers "looked up what law we could on the fly," he said. They discovered that the FBI was demanding files that national security letters have no power to obtain. The statute the FBI cited that day covers only telephone and Internet records.
"We're very eager to comply with the authorities in this regard, but we needed to have what we felt was a legally valid procedure," said Larry A. Neilsen, the university provost.
Soon afterward, the FBI returned with a new subpoena. It was the same as the first one, Drooz said, and the university still had doubts about its legal sufficiency. This time, however, it came from New York and summoned Drooz to appear personally. The tactic was "a bit heavy-handed," Drooz said, "the implication being you're subject to contempt of court." Drooz surrendered the records.
The FBI's Charlotte office referred questions to headquarters. A high-ranking FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the field office erred in attempting to use a national security letter. Investigators, he said, "were in a big hurry for obvious reasons" and did not approach the university "in the exact right way."'Unreasonable' or 'Oppressive'
The electronic docket in the Connecticut case, as the New York Times first reported, briefly titled the lawsuit Library Connection Inc. v. Gonzales . Because identifying details were not supposed to be left in the public file, the court soon replaced the plaintiff's name with "John Doe."
George Christian, Library Connection's executive director, is identified in his affidavit as "John Doe 2." In that sworn statement, he said people often come to libraries for information that is "highly sensitive, embarrassing or personal." He wanted to fight the FBI but feared calling a lawyer because the letter said he could not disclose its existence to "any person." He consulted Peter Chase, vice president of Library Connection and chairman of a state intellectual freedom committee. Chase -- "John Doe 1" in his affidavit -- advised Christian to call the ACLU. Reached by telephone at their homes, both men declined to be interviewed.
U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall ruled in September that the FBI gag order violates Christian's, and Library Connection's, First Amendment rights. A three-judge panel heard oral argument on Wednesday in the government's appeal.
The central facts remain opaque, even to the judges, because the FBI is not obliged to describe what it is looking for, or why. During oral argument in open court on Aug. 31, Hall said one government explanation was so vague that "if I were to say it out loud, I would get quite a laugh here." After the government elaborated in a classified brief delivered for her eyes only, she wrote in her decision that it offered "nothing specific."
The Justice Department tried to conceal the existence of the first and only other known lawsuit against a national security letter, also brought by the ACLU's Jaffer and Ann Beeson. Government lawyers opposed its entry into the public docket of a New York federal judge. They have since tried to censor nearly all contents of the exhibits and briefs. They asked the judge, for example, to black out every line of the affidavit that describes the delivery of the national security letter to a New York Internet company, including, "I am a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ('FBI')."
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, in a ruling that is under appeal, held that the law authorizing national security letters violates the First and Fourth Amendments.
Resistance to national security letters is rare. Most of them are served on large companies in highly regulated industries, with business interests that favor cooperation. The in-house lawyers who handle such cases, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, "are often former prosecutors -- instinctively pro-government but also instinctively by-the-books." National security letters give them a shield against liability to their customers.
Kenneth M. Breen, a partner at the New York law firm Fulbright & Jaworski, held a seminar for corporate lawyers one recent evening to explain the "significant risks for the non-compliant" in government counterterrorism investigations. A former federal prosecutor, Breen said failure to provide the required information could create "the perception that your company didn't live up to its duty to fight terrorism" and could invite class-action lawsuits by families of terrorism victims. In extreme cases, he said, a business could face criminal prosecution, "a 'death sentence' for certain kinds of companies."
The volume of government information demands, even so, has provoked a backlash. Several major business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, complained in an Oct. 4 letter to senators that customer records can "too easily be obtained and disseminated" around the government. National security letters, they wrote, have begun to impose an "expensive and time-consuming burden" on business.
The House and Senate bills renewing the Patriot Act do not tighten privacy protections, but they offer a concession to business interests. In both bills, a judge may modify a national security letter if it imposes an "unreasonable" or "oppressive" burden on the company that is asked for information.'A Legitimate Question'
As national security letters have grown in number and importance, oversight has not kept up. In each house of Congress, jurisdiction is divided between the judiciary and intelligence committees. None of the four Republican chairmen agreed to be interviewed.
Roberts, the Senate intelligence chairman, said in a statement issued through his staff that "the committee is well aware of the intelligence value of the information that is lawfully collected under these national security letter authorities," which he described as "non-intrusive" and "crucial to tracking terrorist networks and detecting clandestine intelligence activities." Senators receive "valuable reporting by the FBI," he said, in "semi-annual reports [that] provide the committee with the information necessary to conduct effective oversight."
Roberts was referring to the Justice Department's classified statistics, which in fact have been delivered three times in four years. They include the following information: how many times the FBI issued national security letters; whether the letters sought financial, credit or communications records; and how many of the targets were "U.S. persons." The statistics omit one whole category of FBI national security letters and also do not count letters issued by the Defense Department and other agencies.
Committee members have occasionally asked to see a sampling of national security letters, a description of their fruits or examples of their contribution to a particular case. The Justice Department has not obliged.
In 2004, the conference report attached to the intelligence authorization bill asked the attorney general to "include in his next semiannual report" a description of "the scope of such letters" and the "process and standards for approving" them. More than a year has passed without a Justice Department reply.
"The committee chairman has the power to issue subpoenas" for information from the executive branch, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a House Judiciary Committee member. "The minority has no power to compel, and . . . Republicans are not going to push for oversight of the Republicans. That's the story of this Congress."
In the executive branch, no FBI or Justice Department official audits the use of national security letters to assess whether they are appropriately targeted, lawfully applied or contribute important facts to an investigation.
Justice Department officials noted frequently this year that Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reports twice a year on abuses of the Patriot Act and has yet to substantiate any complaint. (One investigation is pending.) Fine advertises his role, but there is a puzzle built into the mandate. Under what scenario could a person protest a search of his personal records if he is never notified?
"We do rely upon complaints coming in," Fine said in House testimony in May. He added: "To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that's a legitimate question."
Asked more recently whether Fine's office has conducted an independent examination of national security letters, Deputy Inspector General Paul K. Martin said in an interview: "We have not initiated a broad-based review that examines the use of specific provisions of the Patriot Act."
At the FBI, senior officials said the most important check on their power is that Congress is watching.
"People have to depend on their elected representatives to do the job of oversight they were elected to do," Caproni said. "And we think they do a fine job of it."
Researcher Julie Tate and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Zion valley - Angel's Landing
A rather tortuous, if not too long, hike leads to this point and higher. Blended exposure.
Aube*
.*Aube:
French word for dawn. Did you know that In Western folkloristic tradition it is believed that evil spirits, demons, trolls, and even Satan are obliged to disappear at dawn, for being they creatures of Darkness they hate light, especially that of the Sun.
French word for dawn. Did you know that In Western folkloristic tradition it is believed that evil spirits, demons, trolls, and even Satan are obliged to disappear at dawn, for being they creatures of Darkness they hate light, especially that of the Sun.
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