Discourse.net

This Is Not a Big Deal

President Obama fired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal today.

This is not a big deal because Obama Says Afghan Policy Won’t Change. The policy is a big deal. The identity of the General implementing it isn't (much).

The 'War Is Making You Poor Act'

Here's a somewhat effective piece of agitprop from Rep. Grayson: War Is Making You Poor Act - NEWS RELEASE.

Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-08) introduced a landmark bill last night, called the “War Is Making You Poor Act”. The bipartisan bill does three things

1) It limits the amount of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2) It eliminates the federal income tax on the first $35,000 of every American’s income ($70,000 for married couples), and
3) It cuts the Federal deficit by $15.9 billion.
Congressman Grayson said, “All three of those things need to be done. This bill brings them all together.”

The bill attracted an eclectic group of supporters.

The terrible thing about it is that the math is true. But of course there's no way we're about to cut a third of the non-war-related defense budget. Not until long after we have to.

It's odd in a way that more members of Congress don't try stunts like this, though. If enough did there might in the end be some movement on the issue.

Pray for Us All

This is the real cost of terrorism — or rather, of a surrender to the fear of terrorsim: Bomb Scare Diverts Plane to Philly. Yes, making the world safe from tefillin.

Osama & Co must be laughing themselves sick over this one.

Is there a good recent estimate, anywhere of the full cost of airline 'security'? I don't mean just the TSA's running costs, but the remodeling of airports, the extra delays for passengers, the extra inconvenience caused by the moving of parking and cab ranks away from terminals, and so on?

FBI Wiretapping Scandal: Am I Reading this Right?

People who remember J. Edgar Hoover's FBI will not be surprised to read FBI broke law for years in phone record searches in today's Washington Post. The illegal searches were justified by fake emergencies. When an internal whistle blower started asking questions, they were justified by illegal (“blanket”) authorizations (the FBI used to accept that search authorizations, even retroactive emergency ones, must be justified in writing and particularized).

Nor will readers with any sense of history be surprised to learn that the FBI says there is nothing to worry about, move along:

FBI officials said they are confident that the safeguards enacted in 2007 have ended the problems.

However, readers who recall the Post when it was a newspaper will perhaps be a little startled that the Post keeps referring to the illegal requests and faked paperwork as “technical” violations of the law. Readers whose memory goes back to, oh, 1972, may also wonder how it is that this fact appears in the next-to-last paragraph of a fairly long story:

Among those whose phone records were searched improperly were journalists for The Washington Post and the New York Times, according to interviews with government officials.

And then there is this gem, which will startle all but the most harden cynic:

lawyers have now concluded there was no need for the after-the-fact approval process.

So, no paper trail next time! (Could this be the new procedures enacted in 2007?)

All that's left is the 5pm Friday night press release that an investigation has determined that no discipline is warranted … except maybe for the whistle blower.

TSA Fully-Body Scanners Have Approximately Zero Expected Saftey Value When Controlling for Minimal Extra Risk of Cancer Due to the Screenings

Hoisted from Dave Farber's mailing list:

From: Ethan Ackerman
Date: January 12, 2010 1:22:00 PM EST
To: dave[AT]farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Stop the panic on air security - err, no, irradiate it
Reply-To: eackerma[AT]u.washington.edu

Greetings Dave,
Since the Schneier editorial brings up the subject of thinking rationally about small risks…

IPers following the debate around TSA's whole body scanning might have noticed that not too much ink has been spilled over the fact that these imagers are a source of x-rays - ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation (at the right dose and probability) can cause or increase the likelihood of cancer and other ailments.

But one reason there's not been a big hullabaloo is because the risks from these machines are rather small, though not zero. How small a risk? About as (un)likely as a terrorist attack, it turns out.

The risk of being on a plane subject to a terrorist attack is ~1 in 10 million. [1]

Similarly, a single backscatter scan corresponds to a 5% increased risk of fatal cancer in ~1 in 10 million cases. ( While reliable studies suggest that a scan-level dose would result in a statistically verifiable increase in fatal cancer risk in about 1 scan in 100,000, the “5% increased risk at 1 in 10 million” conclusion is supported with more studies than the former, and more statistically sound.) [2]

So how many additional cases of fatal cancer (or just debilitating cancer, or just cataracts) is it worth for us as a society to cause an innocent traveler in order to possibly detect a drug smuggler or would-be-bomber?

In how many people are we ok with just increasing the likelihood of cancer for this kind of security?

Can you give a number? The TSA and FDA already have.



[1] http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html [www.fivethirtyeight.com]

[2] http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/AC/03/briefing/3987b1_pres-report.pdf [www.fda.gov]


-The dose-adjusted nominal risk estimate of fatal cancer associated with exposure from a single backscatter x-ray scan is 0.0000005% for a member of the general public, at a 5% increased risk of fatal cancer per Sievert dosed and a single scan dose of 0.1 microSieverts.

Although, I suppose, someone might argue that the risks are distributed slightly differently in that all of the cancer risk goes to the traveling public, while some of the terrorism risk is shared by people in the flightpath if a plane lands on them.

Mr. Obama's War -- And Ours

Addressing an audience of cadets barely older than my eldest son, President Obama took ownership of the war in Afghanistan and asked the people of the United States -- and our allies -- to give him a mulligan on the prosecution of that conflict.

We were, the President argued plausibly, doing well in a war forced on us until the Bush administration got distracted by an unnecessary and unwise war of choice in Iraq. But that was then, and then was a long time ago. Now, as we pull our military forces out of Iraq, albeit perhaps not as fully as the President made it seem, those forces are freed up (for there basically are no forces spare) to do a smaller surge in Afghanistan. Meanwhile much, although perhaps not all, has been squandered.

The neo-cons got more than half a loaf this past evening: they got almost all the escalation they have been baying for. Our forces in Afghanistan will double next year. The left is livid, despite that almost everything in President Obama's war plan is fully consistent with the Afghanistan hawkishness that Candidate Obama repeatedly deployed during the campaign, no doubt sincerely but thus also conveniently inoculating himself from fatal charges of doveishness or limp-wristedness for his lack of enthusiasm for the Iraqi front.

What the neo-cons didn't get is the promise they sought that the war could go on for ever.

[T]here are those who oppose identifying a timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort -- one that would commit us to a nation building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. Furthermore, the absence of a timeframe for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the Afghan government. It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.

The overt argument was that a deadline would sever our interests first by concentrating the minds of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government, second by reassuring the Afghan people that the US had no desire to stay. Unspoken, unmentioned, was the reality the that the domestic consensus for the war, so clear in the wake of 9/11, has frayed, is broken, and absent another terrorist tragedy could never be reassembled with the strength it once possessed. The causes include exhaustion after eight years of bleeding lives and treasure, distraction by seismic domestic upheavals in jobs and finance, and the lurking, seeping, caustic sense of deja vu in which endless foreign wars propping up corrupt third world governments against insurgents all start to look like the Vietnams they so often are.

Give the President credit for understanding the obstacles he faced:

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who -- in discussing our national security -- said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

If the national sense of unity and martial mission could not be created as adamantine, let it instead be forged as flawed steel by dragging along the waverers who can be comforted by the prospect of a timeline for withdrawal. That there is in fact no timeline for withdrawal, only the promise of a start without any word of speed or terminus (“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home”), will not perhaps dominate the first headlines but it will not escape the uncertain for long. It may, though, hold just long enough to get an appropriation through this budget cycle despite the quickly promised opposition not only of leaders of the Black Caucus in the House whose voters feel the Great Recession most strongly but also of weathervanes in the Senate such as Dianne Feinstein. The war may take Republican votes, but it likely will get them, and at last (huzzah!) we will have a truly bipartisan policy on something.

Give the President credit for facing some (but not all) of the strongest arguments against his policy:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now -- and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance -- would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

Thus, the President argued a limited moral case for the merits of the war, a projection of force in self-defense against those who would harbor, aid, and abet those who attacked us. Gone are the human rights claims about the Taliban. Gone in name is the idea of nation-building, replaced with a focus on programs in which US aid will be targeted for projects like 'agriculture' (read 'water') that promise short term and tangible benefits, all designed to win us the hearts and minds of Taliban-susceptible tribesmen and women. Use targeted aid to win the hears and minds! It's a brilliant plan, one only wishes someone had thought of it somewhere before.

To those who would draw an arbitrary line at current force levels, the President responded by saying more troops at a different, larger, arbitrary level still far too low to secure any but a fraction of the country would allow withdrawal sooner:

Second, there are those who acknowledge that we cannot leave Afghanistan in its current state, but suggest that we go forward with the troops that we have. But this would simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through, and permit a slow deterioration of conditions there. It would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan Security Forces and give them the space to take over.

And here is one of the two places where the speech was least convincing (the other was the kid-glove treatment of the role of Pakistan). How many people really believe that the Karzai government is prepared to turn over a new leaf, that it has or can rapidly acquire the competence to govern a nation that is not really a nation, and that is comprised of regions with hundreds if not thousands of years of breaking the hearts and backs of would-be governors. There indeed are signs that some people in some areas could be bought, and at prices we can afford to pay, but of the checkbook approach to pacification and security, a subject perhaps too raw for the tender audience there assembled, nothing was said.

Afghanistan is not, President Obama in effect assured us today, another Vietnam, because he will not let it be. The promise is that if Afghan events did not turn in America's favor, and if the trends of the world were not advantageous to us, we will pull out anyway, a decision that would have to be made in late in 2011, either in the thick of the next Presidential campaign or perhaps conveniently just after it. Perhaps it will work, perhaps the silence on the role of Pakistan's army is diplomatic and not a gaping hole in our plans. Perhaps Karzai not only says he is with the program but means it and can actually deliver. Perhaps. We either fight against this war or we take it on a faith that on this issue President Obama has valiantly striven for but not quite earned.

Meanwhile, 'Yes we can' is the plan.

The Rediscovery of the Need for An Exit Strategy

I asked previously why no one was asking about an exit strategy for Afghanistan.

Well, it seems that someone important is asking that hard question.

Enhancing Peace and Security

Bloomberg.com, Bush Preemptive Strike Doctrine Under Review, May Be Discarded.

As I said the other day in Obama Wins Nobel Prize for Not Being Bush,

Best case for the award I can come up: Obama has moved away from the Bush administration policy of pre-emptive self defense. That indeed does contribute significantly to world peace. But it's not noted in the citation, except maybe by implication. Plus, have we officially repudiated the unilateralist elements of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States yet?

Glad to see this is on the way.

Something to Think About During the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony

Four-year-old Paige Bennethum really, really didn't want her daddy to go to Iraq.

So much so, that when Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum lined up in formation at his deployment this July, she couldn't let go.

No one had the heart to pull her away.

Little Soldier Girl “Didn't Want to Let Go”, via The Reaction, Wet Eyes/Handkerchief Alert.

According to NBC Philly, Sgt. Bennethum, 30, is expected home next July.

The Threat Level Remains Unchanged

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has a book coming out in which he says the Bush administration politicized the terror alert system — Tom Ridge: I Fought Against Raising Security Threat Level On The Eve Of 2004 Election. Everyone is very excited about this revelation.

But this isn't really news, is it? Didn't Ridge say more or less the same thing in 2005:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

And Ridge did it anyway one way or another. He sat there and allowed the national security apparatus to be abused for political gain. He made the country less safe by allowing false alarms. He gave the terrorists free victories they didn't even have to work for. And then he and Cheney trashed Howard Dean and anyone else daring to say it was the unprincipled slimy political move it turns out to be.

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn't get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it's time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won't have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don't ever put anything their way. Don't give them a visiting gig. Don't invite them on TV. Don't buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won't happen. Not because there's always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won't happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I'm beyond angry. I'm tired of angry.

Nixon was a piker. He kept cash in a safe. These guys moved it by the airplane load.

Robert McNamara and Us

Robert McNamara is dead. Speak not unkindly and all that, but I'm having a hard time seeing what's wrong with Bob Herbert's fire-breathing column.

I suppose McNamara deserves some credit for admitting what he did after the fact, but that's not much to set aside the fact that he knew early the war was lost, or not winnable, and kept silent.

But are McNamara's successors any less to blame? They seem to have learned nothing from his errors.

Threat Models

Stewart Baker, ex-DHS guru, ex-NSA General Counsel, writes,

We're actually closer to 1984 than most people realize. Antidemocratic forces have the ability to turn on cameras in our homes and offices — to monitor our every action and every keystroke. That's the lesson of the ghostnet report.

The ghostnet report is about large-scale zombie computer networks. So there's the tiniest bit of hyperbole here, since the cameras being turned on in your home to which Baker refers are, so far, web cams. (The more interesting question to me is which cell phones can be turned on remotely, but the ghostnet report doesn't discuss that.)

Baker wants to sound like an optimist: he tells us he's confident that “the 1984ish powers aren't being exercised by the US government or NSA”. I actually share this confidence: Why zombie millions of computers, leave traces and create a host of fourth amendment issues, when the NSA can instead intercept all your packets at the switch?

Obama Eschews Cyber-Hysteria

Plenty to digest in Obama's new cyber-security policy statement, and I plan to do so after grading is finished.

Meanwhile, here's the very best part, from the President's remarks:

“Let me also be clear about what we will not do,” the president said during the announcement. “Our pursuit of cyber security will not — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to Net Neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be — open and free.”

No More Puffers

According to An Airport Screening Program Is Killed, the government is scrapping the airport “puffers” that were supposed to suck in air from your body and analyze for minute traces of Bad Things.

Seems they cost too much, don't really work, and break down all the time.

Post-Travel Thought

Obama has been President more than 100 days. Why do I still have to take my shoes off at the airport?

Cf. This interview with Bruce Shneier, Safe But Also Sorry from which I learn that the War on Shampoo will be over soon

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Roger Ailes:

Now that Navy forces have rescued Richard Phillips and killed three Somali pirates, President Obama's military accomplishments exceed those of Ronald Reagan.

Pentagon Media Strategy Document Decrypted Due to Weak Passphrase

RISKS Digest, Wikileaks cracks key NATO document on Afghan war

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption a key NATO document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the key facts and themes NATO representatives are to give—and to avoid giving—to the world press.

Among the revelations … is Jordan's presence as secret member of the US lead occupation force.

…

The password is “progress”, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Wikileaks identified four other documents on the Pentagon web site with the same password.

Remember: strong crypto isn't much use if you have a weak passphrase.

Presidential Blackberry Considered Dangerous

Chris Soghoian's Obama's BlackBerry brings personal safety risks is a fine example of the inspired paranoia of the true security professional.

And, you know…

MAD and Englishmen

Via rc3.org, a pointer to Slate's The Letter of Last Resort, an interesting and somewhat spooky meditation on the British approach to nuclear mutual assured destruction.

Bonus: Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of the Nonproliferation Review at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Deepti Choubey, deputy director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities. (Via Kos)

The Long Tail (the Other One)

Now here's an interesting heresy: Scrivener's Error says,

In every declared symmetric conflict in the gunpowder era, the side with the higher tail-to-teeth ratio has won the conflict. Not every battle; not every asymmetric or undeclared conflict, although even there it's statistically significant in favor of the big-tail forces. But every “war” has been won by the tail, not the teeth.

…

The short version of this is “Brave soldiers win battles; brave REMFs win wars.”

It just has to be the right sort of tail.

Spot the Outlier

Group News Blog: Legions of Imperial America:

The United States of America spends 56% of total government military spending on Planet Earth, with a published FY2008 military budget of $623 billion* (in 2008 dollars). China is a distant second at 6% with an estimated 2004 military budget of $65 billion. The entire “Axis of Evil” (with Pakistan thrown in for good measure) spends barely 1% at less than $15 billion.

More Evidence for the 'Carriers Are Obsolete' Theory

While they excel in force projection against weak third world nations, there have been increasing signs that aircraft carriers are also awfully big targets. Some suggested that in these days of cruise missiles, the carrier's days were numbered.

Now comes some suggestion in the UK Daily Mail that even old-tech submarines are too quiet for anti-sub technology: The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced.

Not from the world's most reliable source, and there seems very little about it in the newspapers as yet, although the blogs are all over it. The Agonist asks if this Daily Mail story (which gives neither the name nor the date of the US exercise) is actually old news being re-floated at budget time?

Paranoia By a Master of the Genre

Further evidence that I am insufficiently paranoid: Dispatches from the Frozen North runs with my post on the Swede who emailed the FBI that his son-in-law was a terrorist in order to scuttle a business trip (Foreigners Still Don't Realize How Dumb Our Government Is).

He has some great scary scenarios which are likely being adopted by al Queada right now, now that he's spelled them out (and the likely over-reactions) in such lovely detail.

Only problem is that the FBI is now interviewing the author. (This last part is, I think, a joke.)

Dumber than Fiction

I swear, if I saw this in a movie, I'd turn off the DVD on the grounds that it was just too stupid to be worth wasting my time.

Firedoglake, The Falafel Squad,

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails….

But I don't watch movies that dumb.

UPDATE (11/9): FBI Denies Data Mining Grocery Records

Conduct Unbecoming

Glenn Greenwald has an odd exchange with an Army Colonel.

There's a lot of evidence that the Army is politicized: after all, the senior officers are in the tank for GWB or they are forced out. The junior officers are leaving in droves as a result. The enlisted appear divided, with a very substantial group at least unhappy about the war with no end in sight.

This isn't good, but I wonder how different it really is from Vietnam. You know, that conflict from which the Colin Powell's Army said it learned so many lessons. Before it forgot them.

The Strange History of Bra Removal

Back in the day, well actually sorta kinda before my day, bra removal (and in the mythologized version of history, maybe even bra burning) was a countercultural pheonomenon. If not real hippies than at least radlibs and feminists rebelling against the hated symbol of the patriarchy.

Today, it's The Man (yes, the man), the TLAs the TSAs, behind “Taking off your bra for national security”:

… According to the Associated Press, [Lori] Plato set off security alarms when she and her husband were entering a federal courthouse in Coeur d’Alene. Plato told the AP that the U.S. Marshals Service not only asked Plato to remove her bra but gave her no viable options for doing so with any measure of privacy: “I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn’t have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available. They said, ‘No.’”

Does this count as progress?

Maybe it will after the lawsuit.

It's worth reading the AP version of the story to see just how weak the defense is:

McDonald acknowledged that security workers told Plato that she couldn't pass through security wearing the bra but said she wasn't ordered to remove it.

“She's inflating it,” U.S. Marshal Patrick McDonald said. “All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn't anything we wanted to happen and it wasn't anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”

I could do that cross-examination. I'd enjoy it.

Didn't We Used to Call This Bribery or a Slush Fund or Something?

Money for nothing, but it surely makes for 'friendships'.

Air Force Arranged No-Work Contract: While waiting to be confirmed by the White House for a top civilian post at the Air Force last year, Charles D. Riechers was out of work and wanted a paycheck. So the Air Force helped arrange a job through an intelligence contractor that required him to do no work for the company, according to documents and interviews.

For two months, Riechers held the title of senior technical adviser and received about $13,400 a month at Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, a nonprofit firm in Johnstown, Pa., according to his resume. But during that time he actually worked for Sue C. Payton, assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, on projects that had nothing to do with CRI, he said.

Riechers said in an interview that his interactions with Commonwealth Research were limited largely to a Christmas party, where he said he met company officials for the first time.

“I really didn't do anything for CRI,” said Riechers, now principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. “I got a paycheck from them.”

And how did Congress confirm him? Did they know about this? If not, why not?

Plus, it seems like Commonwealth is a GOP piggy bank.

Concurrent's top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier. Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.

It's a charity, it pays folks big bucks, and it lobbies too. And it's rewarded for all this with money from the black (secret) budget, plus 'faith-based' money which we know is a cover for the GOP feeding its base.

Speaking of which, is there any chance that a Democratic administration will cut off this 'faith-based' funding or will the GOP machine still be at the federal trough?

Faulty Intelligence

This error about FISA wasn't a little trivial slip of the tongue, but rather a fact going to the very heart of the political debate over whether our pre-existing FISA regime sufficed to fight terrorism.

Think Progress » DNI McConnell: I Lied To The Senate Earlier this week, in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.

A government official later told the New York Times that McConnell was wrong, and that the intelligence had been collected under the old FISA law which required warrants. A chorus of House Democrats immediately raised concerns about McConnell’s claims.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) demanded McConnell back up his sworn statement. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said the Protect America Act “played no role in uncovering the recent German terrorist plot.” House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes urge McConnell “to issue a public statement immediately” correcting his remarks.

In a statement released today, McConnell unapologetically acknowledged he lied to the Senate:

Either Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lied to the Senate or he believed what he said when he said it.

So either we have a liar or a dunce running our national intelligence service. No wonder he fits in with Bush, Rove and Gonzales.

POGO Asks If Marine Corps Lied to Senator Levin about MRAP Request?

Nick Schwellenbach of the Project On Government Oversight has a very interesting post at the POGO Blog asking whether the Marine Corps Lied to Senator Levin about MRAP Request:

Marine Corps claims described in congressional correspondence are at odds with the actual text of a February 2005 urgent needs request from Marines in Iraq.

In a letter Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) on June 26, 2007 (pdf), the following was written:

Press reports about the February 2005 Marine Corps Urgent Operational Needs Statement [pdf] that you referenced in your letter concerned me a great deal as well. Since learning of this needs statement, my Committee staff has met with the Marine Corps multiple times. The Marine Corps' answer to the Committee staff has been two-fold: 1) the Marine Corps has initiated its own internal review of how urgent operational needs statements are handled; and 2) the Marine Corps indicated that the request from theater called for more effective armor materiel, which came in the form of fragmentation kit upgrades, rather than a specialized vehicle like the MRAP. I have directed my Committee staff to continue meeting with the Marine Corps on this matter until the internal review is completed. [Emphasis added]

However, even the briefest look at the February 2005 request (pdf) shows otherwise; that is, that the Marines on the ground, in Iraq, requested MRAPs specifically.  The first lines in that document on the first page, under "Description of Need," are:

MINE RESISTANT AMBUSH PROTECTED (MRAP) VEHICLE. This is a Priority 1 Urgent UNS in support of OIF EDL. Total AO requirement is 1169.
There is an immediate need for an MRAP vehicle capability to increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in a hazardous fire area against known threats.

On its face, it seems that the Marine Corps engaged in telling the congressional staffers of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee a bold-faced lie.  The only other possibility is that Senator Levin's staffers misinterpreted or wrongly portrayed the Marine Corps' claims. 

If it's the former, Congress should consider prosecuting the responsible parties for making false statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  Congress cannot intelligently and adequately perform its legislative and oversight functions if the executive branch is not providing it with truthful information--hence the existence of 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  There need to be penalties for willfully misinforming Congress, especially on matters of life and death in wartime.  These requests were not made by bureaucrats at the Pentagon, but by Marines in Iraq regarding a vehicles which, if procured sooner, could possibly have saved the lives of hundreds. 

If Congress never penalizes or threatens to penalize those who lie to it, then it will only invite more dishonesty and a withering of its own stature.

I think the principle at stake is important. So too is the underlying factual issue: despite desperate pleas from the folks on the ground, the Pentagon decided not to send armored vehicles that could withstand IEDs in Iraq to US soldiers. At the same time, they made sending these vehicles to the Iraqi troops a priority. Why? Not clear -- kindest explanation is that they thought we'd be ought of there so quickly there would be no need for the improved armor; the stuff also makes the vehicles slow. Even so, that's no excuse for lying about it to Congress.

What He Said

The Carpetbagger Report points out the weird incongruity between two facts. On the one hand, the high (relative) degree of assimilation/economic opportunity of Arabs and other Muslims in the US, a fact likely correlated with the relatively lower rate of homegrown Muslim terrorism here. And on the other hand, the xenophobic right's attempt to make life so miserable for Muslim immigrants, a policy that seems designed to ensure that we start having problems like certain countries in Europe.

(I'd note that opportunity and assimilation isn't perfect inoculation, but even so, it surely helps.)

Do We Need the Trident Submarine?

William M. Arkin has a thought-provoking article today about the role of the Trident submarine (and also attack submarines) in the post-Cold-War world. Have a look at More Subs, Fewer Boots on the Ground.

I'm sure that if Trident were free it would be of some positive value to national security. But it's far from free, and I don't know enough about military strategy to have a confident view as to whether Trident is worth what we spend on it. (If I had to guess, I'd be tempted to suggest that we keep Trident and instead ramp down the land-based ICBMS and especially the potentially destabilizing bunker-busters.) I do know enough about politics to know that there is of course zero chance of anyone actually advocating abolishing an entire branch of one of the services — stopping a single weapon system is hard enough, even if tests demonstrate that it is useless — so it may be a waste of time to even think about Trident. Look at how long horse cavalry survived into the age of the machine gun and the tank.

It's interesting, though, to imagine some zero-based thinking about our armed forces. If we were starting with a blank slate, where would we put the resources?

In reality, of course, you never start with a blank slate, and it is very hard to walk away from sunk costs, especially when it would take so long to rebuild the program from scratch were it ever to be determined that closing down the program was a mistake. Trident has been a part of the national security blanket for a generation. Losing it would be too scary for anyone in power to even contemplate.

Dangerous People

It's true that the “common law court” movement includes a lot of nutty people and probably some dangerous ones. And it's true that some of the things they do overlap with legal activities (although they often take it waaay too far). So I have a little sympathy for the bureaucrats who produced the boneheaded leaflet and training materials being mercilessly skewered by Homeland Stupidity at You are the homegrown terrorist threat. But only a little.

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in Phoenix, Ariz., distributed a brochure (Images: 1, 2) to local law enforcement agencies a few years ago which defines terrorism as individuals or groups within the U.S. who engage in criminal activity to promote political or social changes. This is correct, as far as it goes, but the brochure then gives a listing of “suspicious” activities, telling law enforcement officers: “If you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Some of the things for which you should be reported as a suspected terrorist include the usual things, like weapons of mass destruction, and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis, but also includes people who “Make numerous references to US Constitution,” “Claim driving is a right, not a privilege” and “Attempt to ‘police the police.’”

As regular readers know, I make frequent references to the US Constitution, and believe that there is constitutional right to travel — although its application to cars is a bit of a mess. And I'm all for policing the police although other than going to traffic court I've not done much of that myself.

Please don't report me.

Loonie Indeed

You might recall this post, Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?, back from January. Basically, US security types got all excited about “bugged” Canadian coins. Here's a reminder of what they were saying:

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence. …

“On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors' employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons,” the report says. …

Well, several months later, we know the truth: they're nuts. 'Poppy Quarter' Behind Spy Coin Alert:

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.

The harmless “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

But, of course, they weren't anything of the kind.

And we wonder why they can't catch bin Laden?

NSA: World Citizens Need Not Apply

I've always thought of the NSA as the best of our spooks, so “I Was Recruited by the NSA” made me sad.

Other people linking to this make a fuss about the NSA objecting to excessive file sharing are a bar to employment. I'm not sure I agree. If the file sharing was known to be illegal, it suggests you are not a by-the-book kind of straight arrow. And I'm OK with the NSA wanting only the most punctiliously honest employees.

No, what made me sad was the “no Peace Corps veterans” rule. I understand that clearing anyone who has lived for a substantial time abroad is a challenge, but I would have thought that the NSA would be better off with the occasional Peace Corps idealist. And I would also have thought that the missions of the two agencies were not inimical. The NSA, sadly, seems to see it differently.

As most people who have done anything involving a clearance know, recent Peace Corps service is a definite bar to a clearance. During the first hour, the female recruiter couches it in terms of the Peace Corps and the NSA have conflicting missions. But later, she points out that the travel and the problems in doing background checks were a factor.

I'd have thought that the idealism and knowledge about the world were worth the effort.

Please Help Me Debunk Superbowl Tailgate Rumor

There's this rumor going around that I refuse to believe. Please help me debunk it.

The story -- related to me at dinner in all seriousness by a serious person who convinced me that he believed it-- is that Homeland Security have banned tailgate parties at the Super Bowl, which you may have heard is being held in Miami this year.

I've been somewhat distressed to see how meekly Americans put up with 'security theater' requirements that restrict their freedoms while adding at best minuscule amounts to actual security. But if the day comes when football fans will give up their tailgate parties due to some diktat from Homeland Security, well, that's the day that I'll have to admit beyond peradventure that the people who hate our freedoms have won.

I did a little google search and can't find anything which suggests such a limit might be in force, which strengthens my belief that this is an urban legend. (I did find some fun debunking of other Super Bowl related urban legends.)

I did find this long list of security restrictions on what you can bring into Dolphin Stadium but I don't read this as applying to the parking areas where the tailgate parties happen.

Full text of the somewhat Draconian security rules for entrance into the stadium reproduced below. I wonder if the rumor is based on these?

SUPER BOWL GAME DAY RESTRICTIONS

Every person attending Super Bowl XLI at Dolphin Stadium is required to have a ticket, regardless of age or size.

Screening Procedures for Those Attending Super Bowl XLI

Security screening at Dolphin Stadium will be significantly heightened for the Super Bowl. Many items usually permitted in NFL events will not be allowed into the Super Bowl. The National Football League and the Miami-Dade Police Department strongly recommend that spectators minimize the number and size of all items carried into the Stadium.

All items carried by spectators will be carefully inspected and potentially not allowed into the Stadium. Spectators are urged to bring nothing larger than a very small purse or bag. The NFL, Dolphin Stadium and the Miami-Dade Police Department will not hold prohibited or excluded items for spectators.

Safety and security of all fans is still at the forefront in preparation for Super Bowl XLI.

THE FOLLOWING ITEMS CANNOT BE BROUGHT INTO DOLPHIN STADIUM:

Weapons, Knives and Explosives
Fireworks
Camcorders
Laser Lights and Pointers
Strollers
Inflatables (Beach Balls, etc.)
Throwing Objects (Footballs, etc.)
Poles or Sticks
Banners
Animals (Except Service Animals)
Noisemakers and Horns
Food and Beverages
Containers of any type:

* Coolers (of any size)
* Bottles
* Cans, Hairspray
* Camera and Binocular Cases/Tripods
* Mace / Pepper Spray

Large Bags including:

* Backpacks
* Duffel and Grocery Bags
* Luggage

Umbrellas
Laptop Computers

Additional Information

Size Requirements -- All permissible items carried by spectators must measure no more then 12 inches x 12 inches x 12 inches.

Cameras and Binoculars -- Small cameras and binoculars will be allowed. Camera cases and binocular cases of any size are prohibited. No spectator cameras with lenses over six inches (6") long will be permitted. Again, camcorders will be prohibited.

Electronic devices -- Spectators are strongly urged not to bring electronic devices of any sort into the Stadium. Any electronic device will be thoroughly inspected causing delays of the individual spectator, as well as other patrons. Electronic devices include, but are not limited to, cellular telephones, pagers, miniature televisions and radios, and personal digital assistants (PDA's).

Prohibited items and items determined to be not appropriate for entry into the Stadium will be the responsibility of the ticket holder and cannot be accepted or checked by the NFL, Dolphin Stadium or the Miami-Dade Police Department. We urge spectators to secure these items in vehicles or hotel rooms.

The cooperation, patience and understanding of spectators is greatly appreciated by the National Football League, Dolphin Stadium and the Miami-Dade Police Department. The cooperation of all spectators will greatly aid in the level of security provided to all in attendance at these events.

Are We Starving Our Soldiers?

Meals for Marines in Afghanistan insufficient, report states. Apparently Marines trying to subsist on MREs are starving, losing so much weight that they need medical evacuation.

If there's any truth to this, Congress should get on top of it.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

TheStar.com - News - U.S. retracts spy coins claim

It seems there's no danger of your spare change spying on you after all.

A U.S. government defence agency has suddenly retracted its claim that Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters were planted on at least three American contractors who visited Canada.

It's the latest twist in an intriguing cash caper.

...

In a statement posted late Friday on its website, the Defense Security Service said the coin claims were based on a report provided to the agency.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the statement said, adding that "the 2006 annual report should not have contained this information."

The service's acting director has ordered an internal review of the circumstances leading up to publication of the information "to prevent incidents like this" from recurring.

A spokeswoman for the agency was unavailable Saturday.

As recently as Wednesday, the Defense Security Service insisted the risk was genuine.

"What's in the report is true," agency spokeswoman Martha Deutscher told The Associated Press. "This is indeed a sanitized version, which leaves a lot of questions."

Earlier item, Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?.

Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?

Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says: They say money talks, and a new report suggests Canadian currency is indeed chatting, at least electronically, on behalf of shadowy spies.

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence. ...

"On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors' employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons," the report says. ...

Bugging a coin with an RFID is a weird way to track people since they are likely to spend the coins.

Could this be a mad scientist economist doing a study on the velocity of money? Where's George on Canadian steroids?

Crow for Desert

Steve Clemons dines out with the Great and the Powerful and reports back Nightmare Confirmed: Things Are Soooo Bad. . .:

some of America's and Europe's leading current and former political personalities were there -- 60 people only -- and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.

And the conversations -- on the whole -- were about the crappy condition of America's national security position.

It seems that none of the people in charge have a clue how to improve what they consider to be the US's dismal national security situation. Which I take to mean Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the mid-East, the whole ball of wax.

But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.

Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said "don't hold your breath."

Maybe if they would just all quit in disgust we might get in a fresh team with an idea or two?

Or at least if there were enough resignations, Bush might get the message?

Time to Walk the Cat Back

This seems like rather a big deal: not only did the CIA admit the it has foreign prisons, but that there is a Presidential Order re: Foreign Detention Facilities which involves,

outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees, and a Justice Department legal analysis specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al-Qaeda members.

This will get interesting when Congress decides to resume its oversight duties.

Some 'Uniter'

The Post is good at stenography, so I guess he really said it.

Bush Says 'America Loses' Under Democrats: "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans packed in an arena at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, one of his stops Monday. "That's what's at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq."

Seven more days until the election, and the polls are still trending against the GOP in most (but not all races), so in all likelihood they haven't hit the bottom of their barrel yet.

What a thought.

Axis of Error

Remember the "Axis of evil"? That was what this administration called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Then it invaded one of them -- the one without atomic weapons. The other two, who while they may be crazed in other ways reacted quite rationally to the obvious implicit threat of invasion, put their nuclear programs into higher gear.

Now it seems as if the North Koreans have exploded a nuclear weapon. While this may lead to some strict sanctions, it seems fairly clear that possession of a nuclear weapon also reduces to nearly zero the chance of foreign invasion. The chance of that was already quite small in the case of the North Koreans, but one can understand why they may not have wished to risk being wrong about that.

The North Korean government is one of the less rational ones on earth, so one can't say with confidence that a sensible policy on the US side would have guaranteed success at keeping them from going nuclear. One can say, however, that the current administration's abandonment of the Clinton policy of multilateralism and engagement ensured this dire outcome.

Chalk up one more disaster for this administration's failures to focus on what matters, and its general incompetence.

William Arkin is Not a Happy Camper

In today's online column Washington Post military affairs blogger William Arkin writes about "Vigilant Shield" which is the latest military exercise being run by the Pentagon. He calls it "particularly childish, a massive waste of money and an insult to the country" because it focuses on nuclear war with Russia -- not exactly one of our main threats today -- rather than any of the very real problems we are more likely to face:

One might think that NORTHCOM would be focused like a laser on preparing for another Sept. 11 or another Katrina, working through the details of just dealing with the obvious. Alas, some bomb going off somewhere, some natural disaster, doesn't justify missile defenses or other big ticket items like submarines, nor satellites and "early warning," nor the new tricks of cyber-warfare.

Want to know why the armed forces are hurting for soldiers and Marines? The few on the front lines defend the freedom of the extravagant in the Pentagon, the consulting world and defense industry to make billions.

In Defense of Stewart Baker

Thanks to a recent speech by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) making fun of his (unofficial?) title at the Dept. of Homeland Security ("Director for Lessons Learned") even my favorite bloggers are are piling on to attack Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker. I understand why it's almost irresistible, but I think it's wrong.

I am no close friend of Stewart Baker's, but I have had dealings with him over a period of years starting when he was the General Counsel of the NSA. I have a great respect for his intelligence, integrity and for his legal skill -- three comments I would make about far too few members of the current administration. You want competence in government? This is your guy.

Stewart and I disagree on many many issues of substance, but unlike the man he currently serves, Stewart has always been willing to engage with his critics and indeed is a regular speaker at Computers, Freedom and Privacy -- a place where his views regularly put him in a minority of little more than one.

There's evidence for the proposition that the post-9/11 Baker is a lot more hard-line than the guy I got to know in the cryptography wars. I suspect our views today diverge even more than they did when I knew him better. Nevertheless, I would have far more confidence in this government, and sleep much better at night, if we had a government full of people of his caliber.

Leave off, guys.

UPDATE: Someone wrote in to say that the "director of lessons learned" is a Stuart Baker, who is not the Stewart Baker I know. Being in London with a very unreliable and slow wifi connection leeched off a nearby hotel, I lack the tools to verify/disprove this contention but thought I should mention it. Anyone who finds out more is invited to comment.

More Bush Admin Security Theater

Some Ships Get Coast Guard Tip Before Searches.
I would understand this better if someone were being bribed. But 24 hours notice before searching ships for bombs, terrorists, and contraband generally, as a policy?

Musings on the Hayden Appointment

The politics of the Hayden nomination to the CIA are an object lesson in why the historian's task is so very difficult. For a series of complex and highly contingent reasons, almost every position on this issue is confusing, and often at odds with long-run stances. It's pretty hard to understand what is going on today; it will be even harder to recapture it in the future, and almost impossible to explain it to people who are not well marinated in all the messy details.

Let's start with the Bush administration. The administration describes its motive for choosing Hayden as a reflection of his long experience and knowledge -- in short, competence. That's always possible, but hardly characteristic of this administration. And in fact the nominee's indisputable competence is in sigint, not in humint, which is the area that most establishment observers say is the CIA's current crisis.

More plausibly, several commentators have suggested that this is intended as a wedge appointment. By picking a technocrat with a strong c.v. who has also made public statements arguably calling into question his understanding of and commitment to the Fourth Amendment, the Rovians thought they were setting up the Democrats to oppose an indisputably qualified candidate which would then allow the opponents to be accused of being soft on terror or having an archaic and feminine pre-9/11 vision of freedom.

A third, highly cynical, version says that this appointment was designed to fail: that it exists to give vulnerable Republican legislators something to be against so that they can create the appearance distance from the administration. This is not a plausible story because losing this nomination would make the administration look so weak that it might never recover.

What gives the third version the shred of plausibility is the vocal opposition to this nomination from the Republican right. The issue there is being framed as civilian vs. military, with the subtext being a concern that Hayden would support or fail to fight the slide of authority to the spook shops in the Pentagon. While that's a very valid concern, it darned odd to see the GOP raising it now. Although they may have woken up to the danger that Rumsfeld is no longer in full command of his faculties, as a long-run matter they have no beef with the Pentagon. Yes, the military intel people winning the turf wars are Neo-Cons rather than paleoconservatives, and yes, they're not the brightest bulbs, and yes, the CIA was the traditional fief of the Yale establishment conservative, but even so. It's hard to tell who's serious and who is being disingenuous here. Interestingly, however, today the spinners suggest that Hayden will be an anti-Rumsfeld appointment -- although the bureaucratic horse may have already bolted.

Now consider the odd position that the Democrats find themselves in. The CIA has been known to be dangerous and stupid for going on 20 years. The NSA were the smart guys (and, until recently, we thought the straight-and-narrow guys too); the CIA were the loose cannons and the B/C+ students. The quality of the analysis during the cold war tended to be rather low, and the quality of the covert missions spotty at best, and quite dire at worst. So no great love lost there. Plus, as a matter of democratic theory, Democrats at least as much as Republicans are wired to want firm civilian control of the spooks, especially the covert action branch. The Church Commission would never have happened in a Republican Senate.

But recently the CIA has been at war with the administration. Part of it is a CYA exercise over WMDs. Part of it the Plame outing. Part of it probably has to do with the CIA's fear of prosecution for its killings, torture, renditions, and illegal activities on foreign soil, including several of our closest allies. On the one hand, Democrats are not in favor of rogue spies leaking to undermine their civilian masters. On the other hand, the Democrats are not for fake or cherry-picked or stovepiped intelligence, unnecessary wars, torture, outing agents, or George Bush. (Alas, the party is more split on the question of prosecuting criminal agents.) So it's hard to figure out who to root for. Plus Democrats tend to like it when Republicans nominate technocrats -- so long as they don't seem like closet partisans; after all it tends to better outcomes than the standard practice of appointing unqualified open partisans, even when they are not caught up in sex scandals and money scandals. Thus, I'm afraid that Democrats will find it very hard to unite on this one, even given Hayden's somewhat troubling statements about surveillance.

One would think, hope, that Hayden's involvement in the NSA's illegal wiretaps would suffice to make him unconfirmable. But the technocratic allure may yet carry the day, which is sort of sad, but not incomprehensible when the alternative -- total ineptitude -- is so dangerous and costly.

J. Edgar Would Be Proud

J. Edgar Hoover would be proud,

TPM Muckraker: This morning's newspapers are ablaze with the outrageous news that the FBI was trying to get its hands on over 200 boxes of files once belonging to legendary investigative journalist Jack Anderson.

What the papers didn't report was the truly ugly extent to which the bureau has gone to achieve their goal -- such as manipulating Anderson's elderly widow to sign a document she apparently didn't understand.

The rest of us should be ashamed.

Might I add that the administration's novel legal theory here is that it is illegal for any of us to possess a classified document.

How long until we see the first sting operations against reporters in which a "source" offers to pass them secret documents and then the FBI swoops down on them?

Let's Hear it for the Archivist

Secrecy News reports that the current Archivist of the United States is not only distancing himself from the secret re-classifications of his predecessor, but he's saying good stuff,

The resulting firestorm of criticism that has been directed at the National Archives is "absolutely fair," said Archivist Weinstein in a meeting with historians and public interest groups today.

He took responsibility for the affair (which originated prior to his appointment as Archivist). More significantly, he repudiated the underlying practice.

"There can never be a classified aspect to our mission," Weinstein said. "Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being."

"If records must be removed for reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when it occurs and how many records are affected."

Yay!

(Previous post on the re-classification of public materials: No Institution Left Behind.)

Halle and Farewell

Caroline writes,

I was stunned to read today that the Halle Orchestra, founded in 1858 and based in my home town (city) of Manchester, has canceled a planned US tour because it decided that the enormous cost of obtaining visas (because of lost work days due to the need to visit the US embassy in London for personal interviews) meant that the visit was not sensible from an economic point of view. I have heard similar stories about academics deciding not to try to come to the US because it is too complicated.

Manchester is four to five hours from London. And these same musicians could have tourist visas without question and without interviews. But if they're going to play for us (which I suppose involved some payment somewhere), they each have to have personal interviews.

And these idiotic visa policies make us better off how exactly?

Decreasingly Hypothetical Questions

Here are three genuine, not utterly hypothetical, questions inspired by the revelation that Libby fingered Cheney as the person who instructed him to leak information from a National Intelligence Estimate hyping Iraq's supposed efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. I really don't know the answers; all I have are guesses at best.

1. Does Vice-President Cheney have the legal authority to declassify material single-handedly?
2. And even if he does, if Cheney proved also to be the source of an instruction to leak information about Valerie Plame, does his legal authority extend to the exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent?
3. And if the answer to either question above is "no" does that amount to an impeachable offense?

My guesses--and they are only guesses--below. Make your own before peeking.

1. Does Vice-President Cheney have the legal authority to declassify material? I am certain that there is nothing inherent in the office of the Vice-Presidency that includes the authority to declassify information. (Conversely, I can imagine arguments that such authority might be an inherent Presidential power; I would also expect that there are such statutory powers.) I also rather doubt that there is any legislation giving him this power, although I don't actually know whether this is the case. I do know, however, that Presidents frequently delegate powers to the Veep, or appoint them to various administrative roles, e.g. chairs of intra-governmental committees, and it's entirely possible that one or more of these roles carries declassification authority. [Note also that the Washington Post article is careful to state that parts of the report had been declassified, so it's not certain that the leak actually included classified material.]

2. And even if he does, does this extend to the exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent? The Post article doesn't directly tie Cheney to ordering the Plame outing, but it's quite suggestive. Suppose, hypothetically, that further testimony ties him to the Plame leak more directly. Even if Cheney has the power to declassify documents, it doesn't follow that this includes the power to 'out' a covert agent, as those identities are jealously protected by a special statute. Furthermore, even if one argues via far-out theories like the unitary executive that the President has inherent authority to violate statutes that might restrict his speech -- and the argument is not wholly fanciful -- I fail to see how an argument premised on the unitary and unique role of the President should also encompass the vice-president. (Although in fairness I should note that the D.C. Circuit and to a lesser extent the Supreme Court flirted with the idea that the Veep enjoys some sort of derivative Presidential powers and immunities in the recent dust-up over access to Cheney's energy task force's records.)

3. And if the answer to either question above is "no" does that amount to an impeachable offense? For the straightforward leak of the NIE, I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no': So much stuff is classified that should not be; leaking it is a very standard part of DC culture; leaks even those with an agenda also often serve the public interest as they add information to the public debate. While technically this might be a serious crime, my instinct is that absent some special circumstances in which the information was actually particularly harmful to 'sources and methods' or other grave national interests when released a mere leak is not the sort of action for which impeachment is the politically, morally, or precedentially appropriate remedy. (Of course if some prosecutor wants to conduct a leak inquiry, that's fine with me.)

That doesn't mean I think that taking us to war on false pretenses might not be an impeachable offense. It just means that technical violations of the classification rules by leaking information of no great value to our enemies ought not to rise to that level on their own.

But the Plame leak is a much trickier issue. If it proved to be the case that Cheney ordered the outing of Plame without authority and with the knowledge that she was a covert operative then I think given that Congress has made clear by statute that this is a special circumstance, this leak does rise to the sort of 'high crime' that is an impeachable offense. It was something that directly weakened the US by exposing an agent, ruining her value to the CIA and also her career, and it was done for vile, partisan purposes, perhaps even in part as personal payback. [I also think Congress has the constitutional right to ignore impeachable offenses, so no duty arises from this.]

But suppose that the defense is that Cheney didn't know she was covert, a defense frequently raised in the media in relation to other suspects in the Plame case. Then I'm not so sure. Here we have a combination the intent to engage in garden-variety leaking combined with a negligent failure to find out the real facts. Bad. Very bad. But impeachable? I'm just not sure, and I suspect in case of doubt one probably shouldn't go forward.

Again, these are guesses, at most tentative, and not the product of research. More facts, research or thought that might produce a better more considered answer.

Values Clarification

Miami Herald, Groups unite to defy military recruiting efforts,

Over the last five years, schools such as Central, which is in a lower-income area, saw twice as many military recruiters as college recruiters.

I don't begrudge the military the chance to recruit (as long as there's no trickery); indeed, I'm still waiting for GW Bush to make a nationally televised speech banging the drum. But wouldn't it be nice if we as a society were as assiduous about promoting education as a means of upward mobility.

Of course, once upon a time, state college tuition was almost free; now it's much more expensive (Update: here are some stats on declining public funding of community colleges). And we're making loans more difficult too.

I suppose it helps military recruiting....

Time to Think the Unthinkable

It used to be that having the NSA spy domestically was one of the unthinkable acts that one believed administrations understood were out of bounds. Sort of like the indefinite detention of US citizens in military prisons, or the torturing and killing of prisoners, or 'rendering' them to countries that torture.

Well, all bets, gloves, illusions are off.

It is time, therefore, to start asking if this administration is doing other things that were previously 'unthinkable'.

Today brings suggestions that the administration spied on one or more journalists, and perhaps also on an occasional Democratic candidate and party operative. But don't stop there. For example, someone should ask whether the new 'anything goes without a warrant if it's important enough' standard for snooping extends to tax returns and to census data. It's hard, after all, to imagine a legal theory that would allow the NSA to ignore FISA that would not also apply to all that delicious data just sitting there, even if it is hedged with statutory protections. That's just Congress, after all, nothing serious.

Suggestions for other previously unthinkable questions that should be asked -- not that we can trust any statement we get from this administration -- painfully welcomed.

More Illegality & Cover-up at the FBI

Not only did the FBI bungle a terrorism investigation and drive the whistle-blower out of the agency, but the FBI is unable to determine who among its staff falsified a report with correction fluid. Is this incompetence, or willful ignorance, and does either answer mean anything less than a thorough house-cleaning is in order? (I mean, wouldn't SOP be to polygraph the lot of them?)

Report Finds Cover-Up in an F.B.I. Terror Case - New York Times: Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents in the case in an effort to cover repeated missteps and retaliated against an agent who first complained about the problems, Justice Department investigators have concluded.

In one instance, someone altered dates on three F.B.I. forms using correction fluid to conceal an apparent violation of federal wiretap law, according to a draft report of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general's office obtained by The New York Times. But investigators were unable to determine who altered the documents.

Big Lies

Marty Schwimmer is not a happy camper: The government has been lying to him. (It's not about the Plame affair despite the title)

William Arkin Pulls No Punches

William Arkin, pungently:

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers retired this week as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and received the usual platitudes from the President and others about his leadership of the military since September 2001. He's off to Kansas State University in his home state, according to some reports with a possible role with the school's Institute for Military History and 20th Century Studies. I'm not sure I could say, as a watcher of Myers for five years, what unique contribution he's made, or what philosophy he holds about military matters, or even what he has contributed. Two memories stick in my head: Myers' vociferous defense of the Iraq war plan -- he's not known for public expressions of emotion -- after others criticized the size of the U.S. ground force early in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The other memory is one of Myers standing next to or behind President Bush at various White House and Crawford events that just happened to occur during the 2004 Presidential campaign. His appearance in uniform with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell suggested that he was some kind of political appointee, and that the military somehow endorsed the President is his campaigning mode. Maybe the new Chairman could be a little more mindful of the fact that he is a military advisor to the President and not a member of the administration.

Arkin certainly calls 'em like I see 'em.

In fact, this Early Warning by William M. Arkin blog that the Washington Post is running reminds me why I read newspapers.

Except. Wait. You can't read Arkin's blog in your newspaper. It's only at Washingtonpost.com. (Kinda like this.) As Jay Rosen notes, Washingtonpost.com is much livelier than the online offering by the NYT. Plus the print NYT has other problems too these days.

News You didn't Read Last Week

The biggest US domestic news you didn't hear last week was that the Pentagon has decided to pour $50 billion -- maybe 20% of the money needed to rebuild New Orleans -- down a rat hole. Having already spent $19 billion over twenty years to build a prototype that doesn't work, the Pentagon is planning to start "full rate production" of the Opsrey V-22 tilt rotor aircarft. Unofficial estimated cost of the 458 craft planned? $100 million each, for a total just under $50 billion -- plus inflation, cost-overruns, and the usual.

And the @#$$#@ of it is, the V-22 doesn't work--if exposed to dirt. I'm told, however, that dirt is sometimes found in the places one might want to land it.

Adding insult to injury, the contractors ran an offensive anti-Muslim ad promoting the V-22, which incidentally shows an artist's conception of the plane doing what it was originally intended to do, but can't.

The good folks at the Project on Government Oversight are all over it at the POGO Blog.

[timestamp corrected]

Black Helicopter Contingency Plans

Seth Edenbaum points us to Granite Shadow, an expose by the Washington Post's William Arkin, inaugurating a very promising new blog, Early Warning. One the one hand, it's obviously good to have the federal government do disaster planning. On the other hand, having an off-the-shelf plan in place for a military takeover is not one of your warm and fuzzy developments.

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com: Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.

A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.

That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 0400 is a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that serves as the umbrella for military efforts to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It has extensively been updated and revised since 9/11.

Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.

...

My guess is that Power Geyser and CONPLAN 0300 refers to operations in support of a civil agency "lead"(most likely the Attorney General for a WMD attack) while Granite Shadow and CONPLAN 0400 lays out contingencies where the military is in the lead.  I'll wait to be corrected by someone in the know.

Both plans seem to live behind a veil of extraordinary secrecy because military forces operating under them have already been given a series of ''special authorities'' by the President and the secretary of defense. These special authorities include, presumably, military roles in civilian law enforcement and abrogation of State's powers in a declared or perceived emergency.

This sort of contingency plan may have a place, indeed probably has a place, but only in the context of carefully crafted legislation which spells out the circumstances under which the emergency plan can be activated -- and more importantly sets out the ways in which the emergency authority will end. (Was it really Robert Heinlein -- and not someone more like or Machiavelli or de Tocqueville -- who first said "There is nothing so permanent as a temporary emergency"?)

For the executive branch to draft secret plans for a military takeover of government, however laudable the motives and however extreme the circumstances for which they are intended, does not in the end best serve our long-term national interests.

1984: We're Behind Schedule

The first time I skimmed an online article about this Soviet-style poster that is now found on DC area trains, I thought it was a parody:

But it's real — or is it?

Wayne Madsen on the NSA Again

Wayne Madsen has another NSA leak that I really hope isn't true: NSA intercepts for Bolton masked as 'training missions':

According to National Security Agency insiders, outgoing NSA Director General Michael Hayden approved special communications intercepts of phone conversations made by past and present U.S. government officials. The intercepts are at the height of the current controversy surrounding the nomination of Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.

It was revealed by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) during Bolton's Senate Foreign Relations Committee nomination hearing that Bolton requested transcripts of 10 NSA intercepts of conversations between named U.S. government officials and foreign persons. However, NSA insiders report that Hayden approved special intercept operations on behalf of Bolton and had them masked as “training missions” in order to get around internal NSA regulations that normally prohibit such eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

Is it easier to believe that life is imitating “Enemy of the State,” or that NSA sources are workig to discredit Madsen by feeding him false info?

Two Sets of Leaks from the NSA

Speaking of the NSA, here are links to two stories about the NSA.

• James Ridgeway, Village Voice, Intelligence Whistleblower Canned
• Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, The unholy trinity of electronic snooping: Bolton, Negroponte and Hayden

There's stuff in the Wayne Masden article that seems all too plausible. And, as is so often the case, there's also some seriously tinfoily stuff in Madsen's report, notably the allegation that,

NSA has recorded tactical communications intelligence—overheard on a speaker system in the NSOC—that demonstrates that United Flight 93 was shot down by U.S. fighter planes over Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration concocted a phony “patriotic” cover story about the passengers and crew deliberately crashing the plane into the ground.

I am very dubious. I just don't think they could keep something that big under wraps so long. Consider how quickly the tissue of lies about the 'friendly fire' killing of Pat Tilman began to unravel. I suppose you could argue that if it took a year for the whole story to come out on a minor thing like that, a really major cover up would last longer. But surely someone would have talked?

From the 'Security Theater' Files

[IP] More Baggage Taboos, but Little Security Enhancement:

Everybody has a favorite story from what I think of as the T.S.A. Follies. Here's mine. A uniformed pilot waits impatiently at a checkpoint for 10 minutes while two screeners from the Transportation Security Administration scrutinize every item in his carry-on bag. After he was allowed to go on his way, he explained why it took so long. “They told me they had to make sure I wasn't carrying anything that would allow me to take over an airplane,” he said, rolling his eyes

CIA Stonewalls on Its Relations With Nazis

Here's a example of why, when the CIA squares off with its sleazy and dangerous new Director, Porter Goss, I find two sides I can root happily against.

C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files: For nearly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records, say Congressional officials and some members of the working group, who also contend that that stance seems to violate the law.

These officials say the agency has sometimes agreed to provide information about former Nazis, but not about the extent of the agency's dealings with them after World War II. In other cases, it has refused to provide information about individuals and their conduct during the war unless the working group can first provide evidence that they were complicit in war crimes. …

“I think that the C.I.A. has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and a member of the group. “We have bent over backward; we have given them every opportunity to comply.” …

“I can only say that the posture the C.I.A. has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept,” Mr. Ben-Veniste said. In a separate interview, [former prosecutor Thomas H.] Baer said: “Too much has been secret for too long. The C.I.A. has not complied with the statute.”

Hard to imagine how releasing this info could harm national security today. But it might not look so good for the CIA.

Update on TSA Metastasizing

Update to TSA Metastasizing, the item on American Airlines demanding intrusive personal info from EFF's Cory Doctorow at Heathrow, and then being unable to explain why they wanted it or how they would keep: Ryan Singel writes to AA and gets a reply. Trouble is, as Cory Doctorow explains, it's a pretty weaselly reply.

Homeland Security At Work

Cryptome has obtained and put on line Homeland Security Operations Morning Briefs - 27 September 2004 to 14 January 2005 (“FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY”). They detail a large number of security incidents ranging from the potentially serious to the puzzling or picayune.

Terror Warnings Used to Scare Electorate Now Inoperative

As Jan. 20 Nears, Terror Warnings Drop: In April, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that al Qaeda terrorists might strike during this week's presidential inauguration festivities in Washington. The warning was part of a drumbeat sounded by U.S. officials throughout 2004 that terrorists were seeking to launch attacks both during and after the election season.

Nine months later, the threat level has been lowered, and Ridge, speaking at a news conference last week, said there is no evidence of a plot to disrupt President Bush's inauguration. Previous warnings, Ridge explained, stemmed from threat reports tied to the elections — not to the inauguration more than two months later.

In other words, we lied to you then, and now we're lying to you about what we said then. And by the way Social Security is in crisis, and we're not thinking about invading Iran.

Bush Team Fights To Protect CIA Right to Torture

Waterboarding is torture. And the Administration wants to ensure that the CIA can keep doing it and its ilk.

White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say: At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

I suppose this answers the question 'Why isn't Congress doing something about the torture issue?' — the answer is 'Because Bush & Co are working hard to prevent it.'

Is there no one who will filibuster Gonzales — as a fundamental moral issue — by reading all the Pentagon (and FBI) reports on torture into the record? And the photos. And the secret photos and movies, which could be placed on the public record under Congressional privilege . (The latter may be asking too much; although Senators are Constitutionally protected from prosecution from declassifying material when they speak on the floor of the Senate, the consequence would be to lose the clearance that allows them future access to such materials. It might still be worth it.)

Update: Marty Lederman's reaction to this NYT article makes a number of important points including:

• The story confirms the hypothesis that he and I have both been pushing, that one of the engines driving the torture memos was a need to either legitimate, or at least fail to repudiate, ongoing CIA practices
• Once you allow waterboarding by the CIA against foreign persons held secretly abroad, it's not going to be limited to 'top terrorist leaders' but rather, “It's somewhat unrealistic to hope that the policy will not as a practical matter have ramifications far beyond the class of persons for whom the policy was designed.”
• This Administration has talked a great deal about how it is committed to treating detainees “humanely,” but all the while it has fought tooth and nail to be able to treat detainees inhumanely, i.e., in a manner that would be unconstitutional if done in the U.S.
• We'd all be better off if these issues were debated openly rather than having these fundamental moral choices — with, one may add, significant anti-US propaganda implications — made in the dark.

Stranger Than Demented Conspiracy Theories

Ken MacLeod, the wondrous science fiction writer, unearths something beyond the imagination of a lesser science fiction writer. In fact it's so demented that, given the source, I had some doubts as it its plausibility. But there it is:

The Early Days of a Better Nation: Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it's all a ridiculous hoax? Don't worry. It's meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax. According to American leftist James Petras's review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders,

[the]CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an “anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism” (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as “free enterprise painting.”) Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

So the whole hegemony of boring decadent rubbish art that has been inflicted on us for fifty years, from Jackson bloody Pollock to Damien fucking Hirst, has all along been a CIA plot.

Never could quite see the point of Robert Motherwell myself. This is certainly the most close-to-rational account I ever heard.

MacLeod's coda is biting:

Socialist Realist art now commands higher prices than that of the dissidents and the Western-imitative official art of perestroika. The market has taken an ironic revenge on its votaries.

How to Do Sarcasm

First Draft takes this quote from Tom Ridge:

Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that the government should reconsider how it warns people about security threats, saying that its color-coded scale has invited “questions and even occasional derision.”

And destroys it .

Inside the TSA at MIA

This account of the goings-on at the MIA TSA branch, brought to you by the feisty local Miami New Times, is worse than not pretty. It's pretty ugly: allegations of theft from passengers' bags, sexual harassment (of other TSA employees), massive featherbedding, internal racism, and general incompetence.

Your Safety, Their Punch Line: Internal mistakes and misjudgments in day-to-day operations are even harder to root out, since the rare fool employee who might criticize, even constructively, is immediately dispatched. From the TSA's earliest days, screeners have complained of ongoing breaches of security at their workplaces, the result of improper inspection procedures. I know of several instances, both here and at other airports, in which the employees responsible for violations were never corrected or reprimanded. But the whistleblowers — who committed the unpardonable sin of not just telling the truth, but of telling the truth about bosses or co-workers — were fired. Some have also asserted that in the weeks leading up to their dismissals, their personnel files suddenly began bristling with fabricated documentation of inappropriate or illegal activities.

Repressing criticism might be a way of streamlining operations, but it conceals security problems that sooner or later, one way or another, will be revealed. Even the greenest screener at MIA knows that an alert terrorist would have little trouble slipping past a checkpoint. And passing through deadly objects? Child's play. That's partly because humans err, but also because TSA rewards those who can look efficient and do nothing, all the while punishing honesty and diligence, which can complicate things. I have to keep reminding myself: TSA management is motivated by priorities that have nothing to do with our job performance.

…

Teeming with sexual intrigue and power plays, TSA is more dating service than disciplined “security administration.” So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised this past week to hear a manager cryptically refer to some “investigation” of TSA employees who've allegedly been offering money to airline employees in exchange for “sexual favors,” or of the departure of two more top managers, Paul Diener and William Morrison, owing to allegations of sexual harassment.

…

One screener describes her checkpoint: “There's a group who's always standing around talking or going on breaks whenever it's their time to [do certain tasks]. So a few screeners end up doing everything. Whenever we complain to supervisors, they say, 'Oh yeah, I'll have to talk to him or her.' But then nothing changes. … Nobody complains anymore — we just have to accept it.”

I've heard some screeners boast of purposely making mistakes on tasks they hate so they'll be taken off those jobs. Instead of ordering them to shape up, their superiors generally let them go back to standing around. A few months ago at one of our periodic Town Hall meetings, I was surprised to hear an offhand remark by FSD Richard Thomas (who must be praised for holding Town Hall meetings in the first place, even though everyone is too scared to tell him anything of substance). Thomas said Washington had authorized him to hire additional screeners but that he really needs to fill even more positions — “to take into account the sick and the lazy.”

…

Prosecutors had a flimsy case against Washington because TSA officials purportedly delayed and bungled a sting operation that should have been taken over by the FBI from the first day TSA learned of a possible theft ring. People on the scene told me that about three weeks before the arrests, a few screeners found the nerve to report that not just two but seven or eight of their co-workers had been stealing from suitcases for months.

The songbirds were told to carry on as usual and to ignore the plundering. TSA officials dallied for weeks while passengers continued to be ripped off. Finally the Miami-Dade Police Department airport detail came up with videotape of the ramp workers, and on June 23 officers swooped in. But why only two arrests? …

It's hard to figure how many screeners at MIA have actually been caught with diamond-studded watches or gold chains stuffed into their shirts or pants. Many times the screener will be fired but not arrested. “The TSA people usually tell us they prefer to handle it administratively,” says one Miami-Dade police officer stationed at the airport.

Kerik Has A Nanny Problem

Kerik Withdraws Name for Homeland Security Chief.

Does that mean we can expect the original to replace the copy? He did, after all, say,

We only see the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do.

Sounds like just the guy to run the Ministry of Internal Security in this administration.

Name the Country that Abuses Psychiatry to Silence Dissidents

One of the many horrifying things about the old Soviet Union was the use of psychiatry to silence dissidents. Anyone who dared suggest that the country wasn't a workers' paradise clearly had lost their grip on reality, right?

Fortunately, nothing like that could ever happen here, say to someone who claims that US troops torture captives.

Um.

Annals of Stupidity Dept

[IP] Latest in Security: This just in from BBC.

BBC World Service just told us that French airport security forces, in a security exercise to train and/or test explosive-sniffing dogs, planted plastic explosives in random pieces of real outgoing luggage, intending of course to remove them all before they were loaded on planes.

Unfortunately one of those pieces of luggage got away. French airport security has sent out an all-points alert to the world's airports that an unsuspecting passenger is carrying explosives he or she knows nothing about.

The luggage is blue.

Just amazingly dumb.

TSA Is Losing Its Grip (Or Overusing It)

My personal experiences with TSA vary from great to OK, and tend to be much better than my often not real good experiences with private cops doing airport security.

It seems, though, that other people are having bad experiences and terrible experiences with the TSA at the airport. Add this to the new pro-groping policy (“I'm from the government and I'm here to feel you up”?), plans for nude screening and the scene is set for popular push back against this multi-multi-million dollar exercise in bolting barn doors long after the entire menagerie has bolted.

CIA Under Goss: Train Wreck in the Making

In Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA, the Washington Post gives us a peek at the train wreck in the making at the CIA.

It's obvious that Bush has nominated a partisan hack. He brought with him four aides, people I don't know much about, but whom the CIA people depict as having much to be modest about.

I wish I could stop there, and just pen another Bush-administration-incompetence story (which this seems to be), but it's more complicated than that. I actually think that a significant fraction of what Goss says is wrong with the CIA is likely to be right.

The problems at the CIA are pervasive. They start with a general lack of brilliance among the people who've been promoted in the agency. They run through bloat and hide-bound ways of work. The agency never recovered from the last purge, so it lacks 'assets' in key parts of the world, and is still shaking off its cold-war-centered focus. The CIA tortures people, which is no trivial matter.

Thus, even though it was politically expedient I have not been real comfortable with the war between the spooks at the Agency and their nominal political masters. It's never good when the secret police or the get into politics.

The agency is a serious mess and nowhere more than the dark side, the clandestine service. It needs a cleanup; it's just not at all likely that the ham-handed methods being used by Goss and his merry henchmen are likely to improve matters much. They might even make things worse.

There Is A Limit to What People Will Do in the Name of Security

Having just done a lot of airporting, and removed my non-metalic sneakers to get through the security theater at National, I'm pleased to learn that there is a limit to the amount of nudity that people will tolerate in the name of security that and that people in the US are resisting the airport equivalent of x-ray specs. (spotted via W. David Stephenson)

I actually had a great picture produced by the promoters of a very similar device that I wanted to publish in my Death of Privacy? article, but they refused to give me permission to use it, and even took it off line shortly after I enquired about it.

Boom Goes the Last Shred of Bush's Reputation as a Terrorism-Fighter

The New York Times has more details about this stunning piece of incompetence in the keystone kops war on terror.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. “This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk,” one senior Bush administration official said.

“not necessarily” — that means “might or might not be depending on whether they have plutonium” — I feel so much better now given what one hears about the plutonium bazaar in the southern parts of the former Soviet Union….

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

This translates as “they screwed up bigtime”.

… One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives HMX and RDX were stored was listed as a “medium priority” site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. In the chaos that followed the invasion, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.

“Should we have gone there? Definitely,” said one senior administration official. “But there are a lot of things we should have done, and didn't.”

And what were the “high priority” sites, pray tell?

The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., frequently talked about it publicly as he investigated, in late 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was secretly renewing its pursuit of nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons inspectors to conduct an inventory, and publicly reported their findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9, 2003.

So there really is no excuse here.

Mistakes, Incompetence, and Coverup Beyond Fevered Imaginings

In my opinion, all you need to know to decide to vote against George Bush is that his administration has presided over a destruction of the rule of law unimagined since the Alien and Sedition Acts. I speak not of the Patriot Act, most and perhaps all of whose provisions (if not necessarily their uses) reasonable people might disagree about. Rather I mean the disregard for due process, basic human rights, and our treaty obligations. These actions are most visible in the torture memo scandal, the almost certainly related practice of torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the administration’s practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Recall also that Bush’s team recently lobbied Congress to change the law to allow the outsourcing of torture.

But perhaps you think this concern with fundamental legality and minimal human decency is some bleeding-heart luxury this nation can no longer afford now that 9/11 ‘changed everything’. So let’s agree to disagree as to the extent that the nation should pervert itself in its drive to teach others that we lack the guts to uphold our fundamental values when challenged. Instead, let’s work with that claim that all that matters in this election is which candidate will better preserve our physical safety.

If all that matters is our safety and security, then today’s news makes it clear beyond peradventure that the Bush administration is horribly dangerous to our national security.

Josh Marshall’s blog today runs an extensive quote from the Nelson Report regarding a staggering disaster which occurred in the early days of the US occupation of Iraq: someone stole 350 tons of RDX and HDX, highly specialized explosives. These materials are so powerful that only a few pounds suffices for a roadside bomb; do the math (2000 lbs to the ton) and that means the ‘insurgents’ in Iraq have got enough bomb power to carry them on basically forever.

But that’s not the really bad news. The really bad news is that these specialized explosives are what countries use to make nuclear bombs. It’s well known that there are three basic obstacles to making a small nuclear weapon: getting the fissionable material, getting the specialized explosives needed to implode it in order to compress the fissionable material to criticality, and calculating the right amount of explosives to use. The number of people who know how to solve the last problem is increasingly large, and it’s increasingly easy to work it out from published material. Getting the fissionable material still takes some apparatus…unless you are a rogue state or unless those guys in the former Soviet Union are really selling fissionable materials on the black market like the rumors say.

Perhaps you are thinking that it’s wrong to blame the Bush administration for letting 350 tons of material vanish in the fog of war. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff, but Iraq is a big place, and perhaps you think we can’t expect them to keep track of everything. But this wasn’t a secret stash: it was under IAEA seal, they would or should have known about it, and one would expect any competent planner to make securing it a priority. But they didn’t.

And that’s not all. What was the administration’s reaction to this debacle? It only gets worse. Having loosed this enormous stash of high explosive on the world, this enormous enabler of WMD-fueled terrorism, what did the administration do? It covered up. It didn’t even report the problem to the International Atomic Energy Association. And it pressured the Iraqi authorities to keep quiet, forestalling any disclosure by them until very recently, which means presumably that other countries were not on notice about this new threat any more than the American voter (unless, of course, word was slipped to our allies, but kept from the American voter).

Major-league disaster all around. And you have to wonder what else is lurking under the carpet.

Feeling safer with GW Bush yet?

Krugman Feels a Draft

One of Krugman's best columns ever (where's that Pulitzer?): Feeling the Draft, makes exactly the right analogy:

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush's budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security - which is clearly on his agenda for a second term - would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.

It's exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

Mr. Bush's assurances that this won't happen are based on a denial of reality.

The poignant part of this is that four years ago when Krugman pointed out that the Bush economic policies didn't add up, the GOP slime machine started calling him shrill and suggesting he was out of the mainstream (which is code for something like 'commie' or 'we don't have to listen to him').

But Krugman was right about the deficit.

Bring on the Fear!

Boing Boing: Law enforcement memo of “imminent” terror attack?

It's can't-lose politically. Scare some marginal voters to vote for Bush, CYA if there is an attack, claim credit for stopping it if there is not.

Of course a climate of fear plays right into the terrorists' hands, but who knows, maybe they vote too…

Beer Today, Gone Tomorrow

So much for beerforsoldiers.com:

US soldier ordered to shut beer site: A SOLDIER who created www.beerforsoldiers.com, a Web site that lets people buy a beer online for a US soldier, has been ordered by the top brass to stop running his site.

According to Stars and Stripes, Sgt Dale Rogers, in Iraq with Company C, 1st Battalion (air assault), 503rd Infantry Regiment was ordered to retreat from the site after the regimental briefs said it was unethical.

A regimental spokesman said that whatever his intentions, the Web site was illegal as Rogers seems to be using his association with the Army as a way to solicit funds for beer.

Undeterred, Rogers has handed the site over to his brother to run, although that might not be enough for the army who want it shut down.

So make up for it when they get home.

It's Called "CYA"

Someone at Homeland Security has decided that the very worst thing that can happen to the USA is that terrorists would strike and Democrats would accuse the administration of being unprepared. So we get hundreds of scary “warnings,” none based on any evidence, create daily propaganda victories for our enemies, contribute to a generalized climate of fear and insecurity (which helps Bush poll numbers), and all gradually become desensitized to government warnings.

Consider this SCARY WARNING reported by today's Wall St. Journal

Amid rising tensions over a long-anticipated al Qaeda attack to disrupt the November elections, the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau Investigation warned Florida law-enforcement officials that tomorrow's presidential debate at the University of Miami could be a terrorist target.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES. HIDE UNDER THE BEDS. WE'RE ALL DOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

“At this time, DHS and the FBI have not received any information regarding a specific terrorist threat to the first 2004 presidential debate,” the agencies told Florida's homeland-security adviser and the FBI's Miami field office.

Oh, never mind.

Cat Stevens Victim of Typo?

My high school classmate Sally Donnelly, or someone with the same name employed by TIME magazine, writes in You Say Yusuf, I Say Youssouf… that,

The Yusuf Islam incident earlier this week, in which the former Cat Stevens was denied entry into the U.S. when federal officials determined he was on the government's “no-fly” antiterror list, started with a simple spelling error. According to aviation sources with access to the list, there is no Yusuf Islam on the no-fly registry, though there is a “Youssouf Islam.” The incorrect name was added to the register this summer, but because Islam's name is spelled “Yusuf” on his British passport, he was allowed to board a plane in London bound for the U.S.

Homeland Security Dept. at work. Feel safer yet?

Historians' Committee for Fairness Calls Malkin Book "Biased"

The Historians' Committee for Fairness has issued a very strong letter condeming Michelle Malkin's latest book and those media outlets that promote it without at least giving some time for a contrary view. Which is what Fox wannabes do.

US Troops Under Foreign Command

I first heard about this on NPR yesterday and was startled that the announcer treated it as a routine fact. Placing US forces under foreign command is not IMHO inherently wrong, but it is assuredly controversial, and not something to be done lightly. Yet, here apparently, a whole lot of US troops are under the tactical command of Iraqi officials…at least officially.

First Draft, in the link above, wonders why the Freepers are not getting all hot and bothered about this, given their hostility to UN and other joint operations in which US troops might have to take foreign orders.

I think the reason is obvious, and it's not just that they don't want to make waves for Bush. Rather, it's that no one really believes that the Iraqi government sneezes without US permission. (Reminds me of South Vietnam, although they did exhibit independence from time to time.)

Correction: there is one group that believes in Iraqi self-determination. That would be the credulous press which no longer gives as much prominence to reports of US casualties in Iraq.

Did you know that US fatalities now stand at 996 966? And that total coalition forces have suffered almost 1100 dead? Not to mention contractor fatalities, or the many many wounded. Details on Iraq casualties at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

ABC Visits Cryptome

John Young, the owner of Cryptome, is notorious for many things, one of them being an encrypted neo-Joycean prose style. So it's something of a shock to have him prodcue a more Hemmingway-like account of ABC News's Visit to Cryptome.

And, here's ABC News's Report.

TSA On the Front Lines Against Kink

The New York Times's Frequent Flyer column today is buried on page C6 so it's easy to miss. That would be a shame, as Fur-Lined Handcuffs and Other Security No-No's is by and about Mark Hatfield, Jr., who is the head of PR for the TSA, and it has its weird moments. The story includes this tidbit:

…you know those little round plastic bowls in which your personal belongings go through the X-ray machine? They are actually dog-food dishes. Seriously. They are nonskid and don't tip over, so they're perfect for this purpose.

I was especially struck by this account of our tax dollars at work:

In the last year, Transportation Security Administration screeners have intercepted more than seven million prohibited items. Typically, it's knives, guns and scissors. But you would not believe how many recreational handcuffs I have seen in property rooms at airports around the country. I don't want to single out J.F.K., but the ones I've seen there were lined in everything from suede to fake fur.

At Least He Didn't Use a Truck

Just as I think lawyers should keep their law licenses current, or shouldn't be judges, so too I think that people who handle classified documents ought to play by the rules. Of course, the rules for classified documents in many cases are even sillier than the state bar system, since the government records system is rampant with over-classification.

So I'm not inclined to be all that charitable about Sandy Berger's admitted misdeeds, even as I think he's entitled to be presumed innocent of the ones he denies.

That said, just as there's a context in which every lawyer knows he's supposed to keep his bar membership current, so too there seems to be a context in which NCS types are sometimes a little fast and loose with the very same meaningless classifications they help create. And part of the context of the standard of this trade is the exploits of Henry Kissinger, who at the end of his government service made off with a truckload of secret documents (prepared by government workers at government expense) on the specious grounds that they were his personal property and had them conveyed to the David Rockefeller estate so that Kissinger could write his memoirs without fear of contradiction. (Kissinger also arranged for the illegal transfer of unique records to the National Archives in order to frustrate FOIA requests.) It took a lawsuit to make him give them back.

There's also a telling contrast between what Berger did when confronted (cooperate with the FBI to the best of his ability, it seems) and what Kissinger did when confronted by the National Security Archive (stonewall for all he was worth). And of course no one ever called the FBI on Kissinger, even though his purloining the documents (the only copies of the documents!) seemed criminal to me then, and seems criminal now.

Today's Quiz: Who Said It?

Who said this?

it “is beyond me” why the huge contract awarded to Brown and Root of Houston and other U.S. firms to build air fields and other facilities in [the war zone] “has not been and is not now being adequately audited. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial.”

Answer below.

According to Rodger A. Payne's, blog Government Executive Magazine (January 30, 2001) attributes it to one Representative Donald Rumsfeld, speaking on August 30, 1966, on the House floor in regards to contracts let in South Vietnam.

Brown and Root is now part of Halliburton, although they were not, I believe, linked then.

When 'Security Theater' Makes (Perverse) Sense

Bruce Schneier's latest Cryptogram has a thought-provoking story:

The other week I visited the corporate headquarters of a large financial institution on Wall Street; let's call them FinCorp. FinCorp had pretty elaborate building security. Everyone — employees and visitors — had to have their bags X-rayed.

Seemed silly to me, but I played along. There was a single guard watching the X-ray machine's monitor, and a line of people putting their bags onto the machine. The people themselves weren't searched at all. Even worse, no guard was watching the people. So when I walked with everyone else in line and just didn't put my bag onto the machine, no one noticed.

It was all good fun, and I very much enjoyed describing this to FinCorp's VP of Corporate Security. He explained to me that he got a $5 million rate reduction from his insurance company by installing that X-ray machine and having some dogs sniff around the building a couple of times a week.

I thought the building's security was a waste of money. It was actually a source of corporate profit.

The point of this story is one that I've made in “Beyond Fear” and many other places: security decisions are often made for non-security reasons. When you encounter a security risk that people worry about inordinately, a security countermeasure that doesn't counter the threat, or any security decision that makes no sense, you need to understand more of the context behind the decision. What is the agenda of the person who made the decision? What are the non-security considerations around the decision? Security decisions make sense, as long as you understand them properly.

There's loads more good stuff in Bruce's latest newsletter by the way.

'Security Theater' and the Hidden 'Bush Tax'

Ed Felton posts an annecdote that perfectly captures the absurdity of the Security Theater we all endure at airports.

I read once that if everyone has to go to the airport an hour earlier than they used to, the nation annually loses productivity equal to the amount of destruction that the 9/11 bombing cost. A little googling suggests that the number may be as low as half a World Trade Center bombing per year. [One estimate suggests that the annual value of time lost by business and leisure travelers because of airport delays in 1999 was $11.8 billion, while a different (2001) estimate put the cost of the of the WTC clearnup and reconstruction at $23 billion.] Even half a WTC per year is handing terrorists a major, continuing victory. Spending the money on useless show is handing terrorists a giant, continuing victory.

I call it the Bush tax.

Nation Faces Danger of Media Attention to Kerry

Yet another piece of scaremongering about terrorism from the Administration, based on “non-specific intelligence”: CNN.com - Ridge says al Qaeda planning attack. Have you noticed that these announcements happen whenever the Republicans feel they need a bounce in the polls, or when they want a distraction from something? (Today it's the Kerry-Edwards media honeymoon.)

It sure sounds scary…

Al Qaeda plans a large-scale attack on the United States “in an effort to disrupt the democratic process” before November's elections, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Thursday.

…but is it based on anything other than the usual background 'chatter'?…

Ridge cited “recent interdictions” for the new warning. He said U.S. officials have no precise knowledge of the time, place or method of attack, but said they are “actively working to gain that knowledge.”

…it wouldn't be a reastatement of the obvious by any chance?…

“We know they have the capability to succeed and they also hold the mistaken belief that their attacks will have an impact on America's resolve,” Ridge said.

…and of course if this were serious information, we'd raise the national 'threat level' above 'yellow' where it seems stuck…

Ridge did not raise the national color-coded threat level beyond its current yellow, or elevated, level.

…but of course going to 'orange' would cost large sums of money since it requires first responders to go into high gear. No, better save that for the Republican convention…

War On Foreign Journalists Continues

The United States is telling foreign journalists they have to go home to renew their passports.

It looks as though a lot of foreign journalists will have to go to through some new, tougher hoops to report on the United States.

Citing homeland security issues, the State Department will no longer allow foreign journalists visiting the U.S. or stationed here semi-permanently to easily renew their Visa's in-country.

That means 20,000 journalists who have been able to renew their visas without too much hassle will now be faced with a lot of additional time—from 4-6 weeks to up to six months—and some extra expense to renew them.

As of July 16, holders of class I Visas (foreign media representatives), as well as several other classes of nonimmigrant visas, will be required to reapply at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad when those visas expire.

I've mentioned before that the US is treating foreign reporters badly. No doubt many of them will attribute this latest madness to the mauling that Bush got from an Irish interviewer.

In fact, however, it's a logical outgrowth of the requirement for biometric passports a requirement that is going to kill the Florida tourist industry in an election year unless Congress delays it.

As a closing thought, have a look at this great post by Alex Halavais in which he proposes we post appropriate notices at the border:

Intelligence: the Raw and the Cooked

It makes a great headline, C.I.A. Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, U.S. Officials Say, and the first paragraph is a powerful one:

The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.

The New York Times article, however, fails to mention one little thing, and that failure makes me slightly skeptical about the rest. The interviews with the relatives of Iraqi scientists are so-called 'raw intelligence'; the CIA is not expected to give policy makers the text of every interview it conducts, nor even mention them all. It's supposed to triage, draw conclusions, weigh and summarize…fairly, without 'cooking' the results. Indeed, it's precisely the failure to distinguish between raw intelligence and nuanced thinking that is the chief rap against Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, and his neocon band of intelligence amateurs in the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans.

That said, I don't exclude the possibility that the CIA cooked the reports it fed higher-ups. And if it did, it's possible that the reason was incompetence, or it may have been pressure from the White House. But the existence of contrary raw intelligence, alone, is not a smoking gun—although it certainly raises questions about why the CIA chose to believe the people who lied to it.

If it turns out that the CIA's decision not to credit the people who said there were no WMD's was pivotal to the decision to go to war, does that make the Iraq War all the CIA's fault? Clearly not, since there was enormous pressure to attack Iraq from Cheney, Bush, and especially the neoconservative crazies at the Defense Department. But in light of George Tenet's quoted statement that the case for Iraqi WMD's was a 'slam dunk', it doesn't look good.

If it does turn out that the CIA got it wrong without reason, will anyone revive the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's peacetime suggestion that we abolish the C.I.A. and start over?

Update: Talking Points Memo sees this as a cynical leak, another round in the CIA vs. White House war. I'm sure that's right. But even so, I'm not sure the CIA is covered in virtue here. In other words, sure it's an evil partisan leak. Yes, the article is poor journalism as it lacks both relevant contextual information and also any reaction from neutrals (and little from CIA partisans). But that, even plus the ample evidence of Admnistration misdeads, doesn't prove there's also nothing to worry about in how the CIA behaved.

Why Lawyers Are a Lousy Attack Weapon

Being

• late to the party
• many time zones away
• seriously jet-lagged
• somewhat inebriated (2 beers will do that to me on an empty stomach when jet lagged)

it is probably unwise to post anything at all, but I'm so happy with the quality of the free wireless link in at the waag here in Amsterdam, provided by the waag society, I can't resist joining in to the debate over Eugene Volokh's suggestion

Say that we're fighting a World War II-like war, but against insurgent forces in various allied countries, and not against national governments. (You'll see in a moment why this proviso is important). We capture 50,000 alleged enemy soldiers, partly because some of the enemy forces have surrendered en masse; apparently we had captured millions that way towards the end of World War II. The allied countries don't have strong enough militaries to effectively detain these people themselves (think France in early 1945), so we detain them instead. This is actually quite normal for large-scale wars, consider again World War II, except that the war is a modern war against insurgents and not a traditional war against governments.

Now, the detainees file 50,000 petitions for habeas corpus, all claiming that they aren't actually enemy soldiers. This means civilian courts would have to process all those cases, and the military would have to respond to all the petitions, and get affidavits or even live testimony from various soldiers in the field whose testimony is relevant for this purpose.

Would this tactic be allowed? Well, let's consider this under the four elements (see below) that the Court pointed to when it distinguished the Guantanamo detainees (who get their habeas petitions considered) from the German detainees in Johnson v. Eisentrager (who didn't get their petitions considered).

Like the detainees at Guantanamo, our hypothetical detainees (1) “are not nationals of countries at war with the United States” — our war isn't with their countries, but with insurgencies in those countries. They (2) “deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against the United States”; it costs them nothing to deny that. They (3) haven't “been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged with and convicted of wrongdoing,” partly because there's nothing to charge them with or convict them — we just want to detain them as enemy combatants, not try them for unlawful combat. They are held (4) “in territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control” — imagine that for security reasons, we need to keep them at a base that's at least as controlled by us as Guantanamo is.

It sounds like they'll probably get to file their petitions, strain our courts, impose more burdens on our soldiers, and possibly even risk the disclosure of secret material.

Litigation will become a tactic of warfare.

First off, the hypo is highly unrealistic. The opinions do not say that foreign soldiers being held as POWs have a right to habeas relief. To my reading, they don't say anything about classic POWs. POWs' rights during a conflict are covered by the Geneva Conventions, and I do not see anything in the current court's opinions that would require additional judicial intervention during the war with the possible exception of a violation of jus cogens (eg. torture)…although that's just my gloss on it, since of course the opinions don't deal with that issue. Indeed, that is one of the critical distinction between the current cases and past ones. [I'm hazier on what happens after the war ends. Could a POW bring a claim alleging unduly delayed repatriation? To answer that I'd need to know how post-war repatriation usually works.]

What this week's opinions say that people whom the administration alleges are connected with hostilities but nonetheless LACK Geneva Convention rights (i.e. the so-called “enemy combatants”), and whom it then wishes to lock up without process or recourse, have a right to some kind of hearing to adjudicate their status and in which they can make the claim that they are being held wrongly. This seems to me like an essential element of basic deceny: if the Red Cross is not there to ensure humane treatment, someone, the courts, has to be. Given recent events, I'm somewhat mystified that this even needs to be said.

It seems to me there is so much less here than meets the eye. As Eugene notes in his third response to his own hypo, in most cases involving people who are not being held either as POWs or as criminal in conformity with the law of the jurisdiction in which they were captured (a class the should include most people who actually commit a violent act), the requirement of a hearing will be met by a military tribunal holding the very status hearing required by the Geneva Conventions themselves, hearings that the Administration has, inexplicably to my mind, refused to hold for the Guantanamo detainees. Once this tribunal reaches a result, we can deal with subsequent attempts to litigate much like we deal with prisoner habeas today—and that's not real friendly to the petitioners.

The US routinely held in-the-field initial hearings during both the Vietnam War and the first Iraqi war, and I have yet to read a single suggestion that doing so impacted the war effort. These hearings were not held in Iraq II, presumably because the muscular Bush faction didn't want any of that namby-pamby lawyer stuff. That was an error.

Congress has a role here too. In the unlikely event that a future administration feels a need to hold 50,000 people as “enemy combatants” and we think that this alone isn't a sign that the executive has gone nuts, then Congress can provide a system by which any cases they might bring will be adjudicated.

Last, although I hate making this argument, I have to note that the Mathews test that the Supreme Court relied in the Hamdi case itself supplies an inelegant answer to the mass-litigation-as-war-tactic hypo. The Mathews test explicitly considers the cost of providing additional process. If there is a danger that there will be mass recourse, swamping the hearing-provider, this itself weighs against the additional process. (Which is why Mathews has no place being used to define the extent of human rights — it's too weighted by its nature in favor of the government interest, too willing to buy into the idea that “the government” has independent interests other than its role as agent of “We, the People”, and that those government interests can be asserted against the People, but that's a different debate…).

I trust if the beer and the time shift has addled my wits, the wonderful commenters who have recently frequented this blog will set things straight.

Subtext of Bush Overture to Korea

The Bush administration has made an offer to North Korea on the nuclear issue that sounds suspiciously, no exactly, like the offers they derided Clinton for making. See The Poor Man: Steady Leadership Watch for details, necessary flip-flop comments, general and earned snark.

I want to highlight a slightly different aspect of this development. The Bush offer is likely to be seen by N. Korea — more importantly, by other US adversaries (think, “militant Iraqis”) — as a sign of weakness: the Bush administration, sagging in the polls, goes shopping for foreign policy deals that can be marketed domestically as “victories'.

A foreign perception of a weak, anxious, maybe desperate, Administration eager to make deals for short term political gain means that our adversaries will drive the hardest bargains they can, thinking that the deals on offer will never be this good again. As a general matter, that's bad for the US whether this foreign perception is right or not, as we'll either have to give up more, or won't be able to come to agreement.

It's not just strong Presidents who are dangerous; weak Presidents are dangerous too, just in different ways.

Imagine if This Had Happened in the Clinton Administration

Since it is Clinton nostalgia week in the US, join me in a little game. (Before tenure we called these “thought experiments”.) Imagine how the press would have played it if this story had broken during the Clinton administration:

How secure is the Department of Homeland Security?:

The policy director for the Department of Homeland Security's intelligence division was briefly removed from his job in March when the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered he had failed to disclose his association with Abdurahman Alamoudi, a jailed American Muslim leader. Alamoudi was indicted last year on terrorism-related money-laundering charges and now claims to have been part of a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah.

After a flurry of interagency meetings, however, Homeland Security decided to leave the policy director, Faisal Gill, in place, according to two government officials with knowledge of the Alamoudi investigation. A White House political appointee with close ties to Republican power broker Grover Norquist and no apparent background in intelligence, Gill has access to top-secret information on the vulnerability of America's seaports, aviation facilities and nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks.

I bet the rest is good too, but you have to register or watch ads or something to read it.

An Account of an NSA Job Application

Via Majikthise (nice blog), I find Interviewing with the National Security Agency, which purports to be an inside account of the lengthy process required to get hired by the NSA.

While my opinion of the CIA is pretyy low, my opinion of the NSA is much higher. It's not just that they have good taste in lawyers or that the folks they send to meetings seem smart and sensible, but that from what one hears their work contributes to US security, and maybe even world peace. (Unlike the CIA, for which I have my doubts about both.)

I Agree With Lynn Nofziger (About Cheney Giving Orders)

It isn't often I agree with Lynn Nofziger, but today is one of those days. Well, mostly. Nofziger muses,

I keep wondering. Was it constitutionally proper for Vice President Cheney to order Air Force jets to shoot down high-jacked passenger planes? Or was he exercising authority that belongs solely to the president.

Yes, the president apparently gave him permission to issue the order. But how did the Air Force generals know? The fact is, they didn't. they had to accept Cheney’s word.

In this instance and under those particular circumstances it was probably all right. But it seems to me that this sets a dangerous precedent.

In the future what is to prevent an overly ambitious vice president or one who is at odds with the president from picking up the phone and issuing orders which, if carried out could result in the death of the president.

Not possible, you say. Who would have thought the events of nine/eleven were possible? Not likely is better. But not likely events occur every day.

It seems to me that the person who should have issued the order was the commander in chief, President George W. Bush. If he could talk to Cheney he could talk directly to the military, leaving no doubt who was in charge.

I think that was the voice of inexperience at work. I don’t think it will happen again.

The last paragraph strikes me as too charitable, but otherwise, I pretty much agree.

Please, No US Gulag

Back in May we learned of allegations of excessive violence in a CIA-run secret prison and about the CIA's successful move to exempt itself from any restraints on questioning methods that might apply to the armed forces. (Then we learned about the various Torture Memos, which cast doubt on whether those restraints existed….)

Just yesterday we learned about one, then another, Rumsfeld-approved 'ghost' detainee, unpersons, hidden from the Red Cross, in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. Oh, wait, it's today now, make that 13 ghost detainees.

It remains unclear how many of CIA prisons exist, how many prisoners they hold or have held, what the casualty rate is, and whether it’s a one-way trip or if people are ever released from them. Until now I had not seen an attempt to list the military prisons either.

Thanks to a report released yesterday, we now have a start on some numbers.

In Ending Secret Detention (.pdf), Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights), compile a list of the US world-wide prison empire, a list dominated by military-run camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Consider it a first approximation. It's still a long list:

AFGHANISTAN

Disclosed

• Collection Center at the U.S. Air Force Base in Bagram.
• Detention facility in Kandahar (an "intermediate" site, where detainees await transport to Bagram).
• Approximately 20 "outlying transient sites" (used to hold detainees until they may be evacuated either to Kandahar or Bagram).

Suspected

Detention facilities in:

• Asadabad*
• Kabul*
• Jalalabad*
• Gardez*
• Khost*
• CIA interrogation facility at Bagram
• CIA interrogation facility in Kabul (known as "the Pit")

*These sites may be part of the approximately 20 "outlying transient sites."

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA

Disclosed

• U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay

IRAQ

Disclosed

• Abu Ghraib (near Baghdad)
• Camp Cropper (near the Baghdad Airport)
• Camp Bucca (near Basra)
• Nine facilities under division or brigade command

Facilities run by military divisions:
• 1st Infantry Division DIF (Tikrit)
• 1st Marine Expeditionary Force DIF (Al Fallujah)
• 1st Cavalry Division DIF (Baghdad)
• 1st Armored Division DIF (Baghdad)
• Multi-National Division-South East (Az Zubayr)


Facilities run by military brigades:
• Dayyarah West (Multi-National Brigade - North)
• Tal Afar (Multi-National Brigade - North)
• Al Hillah (Multi-National Division - Center South)
• Wasit (Multi-National Division - Center South)

In addition, there are a number of "brigade holding areas in division sectors" where detainees may be held up to 72 hours before transfer to Division facilities.

Ashraf Camp. Ashraf Camp is a detention facility for Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK), an Iraqi based organization seeking to overthrow the government in Iran. Ashraf Camp was disclosed as a detention site for MEK detainees in February 2004, but as of June 11, 2004, the Coalition Press Information Center (CPIC) refused to discuss the status or location of the MEK detainees.

PAKISTAN

Suspected

• Kohat (near the border of Afghanistan) Alizai

DIEGO GARCIA

Suspected

• United States and United Kingdom officials deny repeated news reports indicating that at least some individuals are being detained on the British possession of Diego Garcia, including, at one time, the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin).

JORDAN

Suspected

• Al Jafr Prison (CIA interrogation facility)

UNITED STATES

Disclosed

• Naval Consolidated Brig (Charleston, South Carolina). This facility is where the U.S. Government is detaining at least three individuals as "enemy combatants": two U.S. citizens, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, as well as a Qatari national residing in the United States, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri.

Suspected

• U.S. Naval Ships: USS Bataan and USS Peleliu.

The Report — which is really excellent by the way — also takes a stab at estimating how many people are being detained in these camps. Big numbers in Iraq, Guantanamo, and several hundreds here and there as well.

The Report concludes with some sensible recommendations to the Administration, although there's not a bat's chance in hell it will adopt them:

Human Rights First … calls on the Bush Administration to take the following critical steps:

1. Disclose to Congress and the ICRC the location of all U.S.-controlled detention facilities worldwide, and provide a regular accounting of: the number of detainees, their, nationality, and the legal basis on which they are being held.

2. Order a thorough, comprehensive, and independent investigation of all U.S.- controlled detention facilities, and submit the findings of the investigation to Congress.

3. Take all necessary steps to inform the immediate families of those detained of their loved ones' capture, location, legal status, and condition of health.

4. Immediately grant the ICRC unrestricted access to all detainees being held by the United States in the course of the global “war on terrorism.”

5. Publicly reject assertions by administration lawyers that domestic and international prohibitions on torture and cruelty do not apply to the President in the exercise of his commander-in-chief authority.

6. Investigate and prosecute all those who carried out acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in violation of U.S. and international law, as well as those officials who ordered, approved or tolerated these acts.

7. Publicly disclose the status of all pending investigations into allegations of mistreatment of detainees and detainee deaths in custody.

(News account of the report spotted via the Yin blog.)

Pride Goeth Before A Fall

Fellow Citizens: Are you proud of the way your government treats foreign reporters? Or, like me, are you angry and ashamed by this disgrace to our nation, and this offense to our allies? [Update: Link fixed!]

Not Just Liars. Bad Ones.

Eric Muller is justifiably outraged at the Administration's two-faced, political, logically inconsistent approach to information releases. See IsThatLegal?.

Indeed, how is that letting 9/11 families discuss the contents of their family members' last words would help the terrorists, so it has to be secret, but it's ok to release lots of info about Padilla, disclosing sources and methods, and not incidentally smearing him while the Supreme Court deliberates?

I'm sure the answer is related to why it is that losing a CIA director at a time when there won't be a real replacement named until after the election is harmless, but losing Rumsfeld would be a terrorist victory.

Playing the Fear Card

Lots of people have been suggesting cynically that the Administration's warning that there are terrorists under the bed might have been an attempt to distract people from Iraq and other news displeasing to the Bush re-election machine.

The cartoonists in particular have had a field day with that one. A New York Times columnist cited the doubtful reaction in his column as a sign that the press might be rising from its dormancy.

Well, don't get your hopes up too high quite yet. Consider this Newsday item (Newsday hardly being a shrinking violet) reprinted in the LA Times, Threat Warning Called a Surprise to Agency:

The Homeland Security Department was surprised by the announcement by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that a terrorist attack was increasingly likely in coming months, officials said Thursday.

The department, created a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is charged with issuing terrorism warnings to the public, and tension arose when Ashcroft and Mueller effectively took over that role at a news conference Wednesday when they said Al Qaeda is preparing a powerful attack.

Officials said the Homeland Security Department knew in advance about the news conference but expected it to focus on seven suspects with ties to Al Qaeda who were wanted for arrest or questioning. Department officials said they were caught off guard when Ashcroft went further and warned that Al Qaeda “is ready to attack the United States.”

The news conference, which excluded Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, raised concerns in Washington that his department was not coordinating the domestic fight against terrorism, which was confusing the message for the public and for local authorities.

Talk about missing the point! What this set of facts loudly suggests is NOT that Homeland Security is a useless agency with a confusing message (although it is), but rather that Ashcroft was doing political spear-carrying. The threat level wasn't changed because the non-evidence Ashcroft presented wasn't enough to warrant raising it (raising the 'threat level' above yellow imposes millions of dollars of extra policing and security costs on states, localities and airports).

The anonymous author of this story is fatally infected with the idea that the administration would not make an announcement about a heightened terror threat unless (a) it believed it and (b) was doing something about it. Yet the story itself suggests strongly that neither of these are in fact the case, since if there really were a domestic threat and plans to do something about it, Homeland Security would be involved, if only in an inter-agency way. As the Washington Post reminds us

Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and Bush administration rules, only the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can publicly issue threat warnings, and they must be approved in a complex interagency process involving the White House. Administration officials sympathetic to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said he was not informed Ashcroft was going to characterize the threat in that way — an assertion that Justice officials deny.

The failure to even pick up the phone and call Ridge's office is nearly conclusive evidence that Ashcroft's press conference was just a stunt—based on facts that the Post reports may be “six weeks old”.

Ted Koppel Predicts US Will Be Under Martial Law

Over at the Poynter Foundation, they have the transcribed text of Ted Koppel's address to UC Berkeley grads (you have to page down a bit to get to it). It is riveting, especially this part, in which Koppel predicts the US will be hit with a WMD terrorist attack “in the next few years” which will “more than likely” lead to the imposition of martial law. Koppel warns, “For how long and under what circumstances it would be lifted again has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been publicly addressed” and he calls for an urgent debate about “What we will do after the next terrorist attack”.

[Note: The Poynter web site seems to be set up to redirect internal links to Romenesko's Misc. Forum to their front page. If this happens to you, to find the Koppel speech, click here; you'll still have to page down to find it, but (for now at least) that's the right page. Or you can just read the extended quote below.]

We have become so embroiled in the distaste we have for one another's ideologies that we are losing sight of the real peril that confronts us. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11, and invoking the war against terrorism for the U.S. invasion of Iraq invites skepticism. Still, terrorism is not a figment of this administration's imagination. It doesn't matter what you believe the United States is doing or may have done to earn the enmity of so many people around the world; someone has to be thinking about the consequences of that hatred, even as we consider what can reasonably done to address it. It now appears that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time that U.S. forces invaded. But chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons do exist, and some do exist in the hands of our enemies. Do not doubt for a moment that at some point in the next few years that one or another of those weapons will almost surely be used in an act of terrorism against the United States in the United States. Then the time for discussing our civil liberties will be over. More than likely the use of a chemical or biological weapon in a terrorist attack against the U.S. homeland would lead to the imposition of martial law. For how long and under what circumstances it would be lifted again has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been publicly addressed. But understand that the most implacable enemy of our civil liberties is fear: What we will do after the next terrorist attack is not a conversation that should be deferred. The time for that national debate is now. As important as it may be to argue over the rights of Iraqi prisoners of war, those horrific photographs have largely obscured the context in which the abuses took place. The perceived need to obtain more and better intelligence in the face of a mounting Iraqi insurgency late last fall created the environment in which those human-rights abuses took place. It is quite extraordinary that so much attention is being focused on the culpability of a bunch of young military police when they in fact were clearly operating under guidelines that had been set much, much further up the command chain. [Applause] It is the legitimacy of those guidelines that require public discussion. And yet, what have we been debating for these past few months? The nature of George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard more than 30 years ago, while he was working on a senatorial campaign in Alabama? The value of John Kerry's military service in Vietnam once he'd appeared at the same antiwar rally as Jane Fonda? What madness! Do we really believe we can rise to the great challenges that confront us by endlessly questioning one another's motives and patriotism? There are decisions that will be addressed or ignored over the next few months that will set the course of human and civil rights in this country for years to come. There is a direct correlation between the perception of threats to America's security and the contraction of our rights and freedoms. We need to critically examine the nature and scope of those threats, and where they exist we must be prepared to calibrate our rights, and even our freedoms. If we fail to do that now, in a time of relative sanity when it is still possible for voices of moderation to be heard, then we will have condemned ourselves to having those choices made in a climate of national hysteria.

There's a strong temptation to resist this sort of thinking as tin-foil-hat stuff, but Koppel has always seemed like a serious person… So here are my initial questions:

• Is Koppel right, or is this the voice of someone conditioned to expect WMD attacks by repetition of duck and cover exercises in his youth?

• Even if Koppel is right, is this a conversation we would want to have, or would it legitimate the extra-constitutional governance?

• Can anyone seriously believe that if Congress legislates on this (1) it would produce anything helpful; (2) some President won't abuse the authority? (Think, 'War Powers Act'.)

• If we can't trust Congress to take up this challenge, what other mechanisms are there?

Why Are We Shuffling Commanders in Iraq?

The blogosphere is buzzing about the news that Gen. Sanchez is being relieved of command in Iraq, but not getting the plum reassignment and promotion that he was expecting, apparently because giving him another star would require Congressional approval. That's usually a formality, but in his case might lead to actual hearings.

But something else about the story caught my eye:

At the same time, other officials noted that Sanchez has served in Iraq for just over a year and that Army and Marine Corps division commanders all have rotated out of the country during that time.

Why are we rotating commanders? Are they incompetent? If not, is this back to the Vietnam era where everyone wants a turn as commander in order to get their ticket punched for promotion? And are the people ordering these rotations the same people who were just a few days ago explaining that Rumsfeld shouldn't resign because it's so important to have continuity in leadership during wartime?

The Curious Case of the Surprisingly Quiet Campuses

Rumors, some documented by Nick Confessore, abound that the US government has advanced plans to reinstate the draft shortly after the November election. It's always good when our government does serious contingency planning — had they done more of it (and listened to those who did it) before the invasion of Iraq we might not be in this mess. And contingency plans don't always mean an actual policy. But these rumors suggest something beyond the ordinary 'maybe' scenarios. Plus, they fit in with the Army's obvious serious shortage of troops.

As a colleague of mine pointed out the other day — amidst a discussion of how to ensure that his draft-age son gets into the sort of unit that doesn't take casualties — the really weird thing is how little we've been hearing about this on campuses. It may be that the news happened to trickle out just as students were buckling down to exams (lucky accident or does Karl Rove still have some of the magic?), and now they are scattering to the four winds for the summer. If so, it could be a very noisy September.

The Disconnect

On my flight home from Boston yesterday, I sat next to a pleasant young couple. He's the entrepreneurial son of a family that runs a restaurant and has other businesses. She's going to business school part time and running his family's ice cream shop. They were going to Miami for a week's vacation.

As I dozed off — I've gotten very good at sleeping on planes — I heard the pleasant young lady explaining to her partner that she couldn't vote for Kerry because he would surrender to the terrorists. Later in the flight, the nice young man explained to me that he thought people were making too much of the pictures of prisoner abuse, since the people over there are basically animals.

It shakes your faith in the basic decency of people, it does.

Here, meanwhile, is an account of the great GW Bush's efforts to help us be safe and secure in the War on Terror™ — so great that everyone put in charge quits in disgust within a few months. One writes a book, another goes to work for the Kerry campaign:

The New Republic Online: Campaign Journal: A couple of Friday afternoons ago, the White House quietly announced that an NSC staffer named Frances Fragos Townsend was leaving her post as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism, the job also known as the White House counterterrorism czar. She is leaving to replace General John A. Gordon as Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor, the White House job that Tom Ridge had before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Why would this staff change qualify for a late Friday dump? Two reasons. One is that Gordon, a retired Air Force general and 36-year public servant, was apparently none too pleased with the Bush approach to homeland security. He hasn't spoken publicly, but that's what the national security grapevine in Washington is buzzing about.

Secondly, Townsend's move was a reminder that the White House counterterrorism job is the bureaucratic equivalent of the drummer in Spinal Tap. Bush has now gone through five of them since 9/11. (Clinton had one.) Like Spinal Tap's drummers, who often choked on their own vomit or spontaneously combusted, Bush's counterterrorism aides all seem to disappear under unusual circumstances.

First there was Richard Clarke. We all know what happened to him. He left his post in disgust and wrote a book arguing that Bush paid no attention to terrorism before 9/11 and that the war in Iraq was a monumental diversion from the fight against al Qaeda and a gift to jihadist recruiters across the Muslim world. Clarke was replaced by General Wayne Downing, a pro-Iraq war hawk. Nonetheless, he had a similar experience, lasting a total of 10 months before abruptly resigning in frustration at how the White House bureaucracy was responding to the terrorist threat. Downing was replaced by two men, General Gordon, who lasted ten months before moving on to his homeland security job, and Rand Beers, who resigned in disgust over the Iraq war after seven months in his post. His experience was searing enough that he immediately joined the Kerry campaign. Beers was replaced by Townsend, who has now been tapped to replace Gordon, who is apparently resigning under circumstances similar to Clarke and Beers.

(spotted via Dan, who also points to this)

Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?

It seems heretical to even suggest it, but could it be that 9/11 was preventable?

'Homeland' 'Security'--Dancing Banana Version

I run a link to the official 'threat level', reproducing the silly color-coding run by the dept of excuse-the-term Homeland excuse-the-term Security. But I worry that readers don't see it as being semi-satirical, since I think the terror alert system is not only stupid but actually dangerous. Were it not for my belief that moving gifs are too irritating to have as a permanent feature, I'd switch to the terror alert banana, which makes the point rather well.

Clarke Ripples

So far the best comment on the Clarke fallout I've seen is Billmon, who points out how bad it looks for Dr. Rice to refuse to testify to the 9/11 commission. Even if there is a valid separation of powers argument, isn't it the case the “9/11 changes everything”? Or so we've been told… [A commentator on the Billmon site says that not only did the NYT assign Judith Miller to the story, a very weird choice indeed, but it apparently buried the story on page 17! Surely not? The Post, at least, front-paged it.]

Apparently there's also a great 9/11 article in the Wall St. Journal, showing all the inconsistencies in the administration's story about what it did on 9/11, but that's subscription only online so I'll have to chase up a hardcopy…

And, White House Reels From Insider Expose.

And, today's event, the Center for American Progress website publishes newly revealed internal FBI and Justice Department documents that it says substantiate several of Clarke's charges of Bush administration inattention to terrorism in the face of “repeated warnings”.

Want to Know What's Wrong With US Intelligence?

Here's a little item deep inside Barton Gellman's story on Richard Clarke that encapsulates so much of what's wrong with the Bush administration:

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, “We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.” In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

So either unless Clarke and two other anonymous witnesses are lying, the folks in charge of our intelligence and national security apparatus are either (A) completely incompetent, or (B) complete liars. Does it really matter which?

Richard Clarke Goes for the Bush Jugular

Richard Clarke is going to get his 15 minutes, and more, before he either falls into the Memory Hole, or holes the Bush Administration below the waterline.

In reading him, and about him, please keep a few things in mind:

1. Clarke's a Scoop Jackson Democrcat — that is, the right-wing kind;
2. He's served both Deomcratic and Republican Presidents, and very ably by all accounts
3. He's a smart man, and a patriot, and widely considered one of the best nuts and bolts guys around on national security.

That doesn't make what he says true, but it ought to buy him a respectful hearing.

Correction: According to this Washington Post article by Barton Gellman, Clarke says he was registered as a Republican in 2000. Relevant only to Republican claims that he's 'auditioning for the Kerry campaign'.

Grunts Don't Expect Pre-Election Osama Capture

INTEL DUMP reports on a survey of army soldiers on when/whether they think Osam bin Laden will be captured. The majority says soon, but not real soon. Of course, if there really were a Secret Plot to capture him in October — an article of faith in conspiracy-minded circles — then presumably almost no one would know about it…

Move Over Doctor Draft, Meet the Geek Draft

Well, there's no danger of this before the election…

'Special skills draft' on drawing board / Computer experts, foreign language specialists lead list of military's needs

The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages.

The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request.

Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said planning for a possible draft of linguists and computer experts had begun last fall after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more people with skills in those areas.

Spotted via Brian Leiter

Bush Flip-Flops (Again) on 9/11 Commission

This zinger:

“If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence,” Mr. Kerry told hundreds of supporters at a rally in West Palm Beach on Monday afternoon.

Produced this:

White House: Bush will take all questions of 9/11 panel: President Bush will privately answer all questions raised by a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House said Tuesday, apparently dropping a one-hour limit on the president's testimony.

The shift came on the heels of accusations by presumed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry that Bush was “stonewalling” investigations of the terrorist attacks and U.S. intelligence failures.

This is Bush's second flip-flop on the 9/11 commission issue alone. And you wonder why — when faced with such a strong, resolute negotiator — the North Koreans are suddenly saying they have a new condition for scrapping their nukes?

North Korea's government said it will make the pullout of U.S. forces from South Korea a condition of a nuclear agreement, unless the U.S. stops insisting that an accord require the North to dismantle its weapons program first.

North Korea also will demand a “complete, verifiable, irreversible security assurance'' from the U.S. in exchange for American insistence the nuclear program be dismantled on those terms, the official Korea Central News Agency said in a release.

Of course, the two situations are not parallel: the Bush position on the 9/11 commission was absurd, while taking a tough line with North Korea is not. But will the North Koreans understand the difference? I think this Adminstration is starting to look weak abroad. I trust this doesn't mean we are in for a new round of foreign adventurism, if only because there are no ground troops left to spare to conduct it.

Update: Well, is it a flip-flop or not? The NYT version of the story suggests an administration artfullly trying to have it both ways:

He's going to answer all the questions they want to raise,” the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters today. When pressed, Mr. McClellan repeated this statement but did not clarify whether the time restriction had been dropped.

“That's what it's scheduled for, an hour, but look, he's going to answer all the questions that they want to raise,” Mr. McClellan said.

The spokesman said the president still planned to meet only with the panel's top two officials.

Whassamater, he's afraid of witnesses?

Another update: Actually, if this press gaggle is the source of the story quoted above, then it seems like the adminstration is not able to bring itself to say it will answer all the questions. Presumably, after about 68 minutes Bush will leave, and announce he answered an unprecedented number of questions. And the Republican chair won't contradict him.

Independent Commissions Come In Many Flavors

Bush to Seek Intelligence Failures Probe. AP reports that faced with pressure from his own party, Bush is going to try to head off a real independent commission with statutory oomph by setting up his own via executive order.

Things to look out for:

• Terms of reference. Is the mandate stacked to pin blame on the CIA's conclusions, or do the terms of reference allow the commission to include what almost every report suggests was a major part of the problem—the rogue intelligence-massaging operation run out of the Vice President's office, with the connivance of the civilians in the Pentagon.
• Powers. Will it have subpoena power? The power to get what it needs regardless of classification level?
• Timing. Is the commission going to conveniently report after the election?
• Membership. Is it bi-partisan? Is the chair or co-chairs really independent of the White House and the Republican establishment (e.g. NOT Henry Kissinger, but maybe someone like Richard Clarke)?
• Staffing. Do Democrats get to have a say in hiring the staff or are they just window-dressing?
• Track Record/Baggage. To the extent that there are politicians rather than technocrats, how many opposed the war?
• Public Report Details. How much control does the White House get over the final report? Assuming there will be both public and classified versions, is there a mechanism by which the Commission can contest decisions to keep certain things classified?
• Spin Preservation. Does the White House get to look at a draft report and append its reply? How much more warning does the White House get about the contents/final draft than Clinton got from Ken Starr?

I bet I know the answer to most of these questions already….

War Profiteering (Halliburton Dept.): Following An Ancient if Not Honorable Tradition

You might think that amidst all this 'we support our troops' rhetoric emanating from secure locations in Washington D.C. that someone in the white house or the Pentagon would be making sure that our troops get fed decent food.

Nope. Think again. According to Heather Yarbrough, what we've got is a system in which someone whose job is monitoring the quality and safety of food served to soldiers on U.S. military bases in Iraq gets fired for doing her job.

Talk about history repeating itself. President Abraham Lincoln secured passage of the False Claims Act in 1863 in order to combat similar frauds against the Union Army, including the sale of rancid food for the troops.

Did Heather Yarbrough run afoul of a rush for profits, a system which depends on paying third-world workers pittances and of course no benefits, and gets third-world sanitation practices in return? Or did she just rile an old boy network? Either way, if her charges regarding the way soldiers' food is stored and prepared are correct, it's a scandal.

Freezers and refrigerators weren't working. Food was spoiling. The kitchen workers were exhausted, and some of them weren't following basic sanitation practices. “It became apparent to me that much of the food served at the banquet the night before was … possibly dangerous,” she wrote.

At 2 a.m. Yarbrough saw a lone kitchen worker spreading mayonnaise onto several thousand slices of bread for the next day's sandwiches. He was halfway through the job, and the mayonnaise had sat in open bowls for hours.

The kitchen's air conditioner had moderated the desert heat somewhat, but it had also spewed dust over the worker, the mayonnaise and the bread. Yarbrough conferred with a kitchen supervisor, and they agreed that the mayonnaise and partially made sandwiches should be thrown away.

Yarbrough logged the incident in the journal that she kept for her Halliburton KBR supervisor, and the next day the supervisor applauded her decision to discard the suspect food.

On her second night on duty, Yarbrough met with kitchen staff — all third-country nationals working for ESS — and wrote down a list of supplies needed for sanitary purposes: thermometers to check the heat in steam trays, test strips to measure chlorine in sanitizing water, rubber gloves and other items.

She noted that the day shift had left the dining facility a mess: dirty tables, overflowing trash, no sodas stocked. And she took some feedback from a sergeant who represented Halliburton's client, the Army. “The cream[ed] beef was greasy. Dessert table is messy with crumbs. Stock juices earlier in the morning because they want the products to be cold,” she wrote in her journal.

…

Over the next few days, Yarbrough trained kitchen workers in sanitation methods and taught seminars on botulism, E. coli and other dangerous bacteria. The kitchen crews seemed to be paying more attention to safety. “Overall, this is much better,” she wrote Aug. 10 in her journal.

…

The next day, Yarbrough recorded another confrontation with Ray, but she went on with her job. “I gave a short brief on salmonella, likely sources, mode of contamination, toxicity and symptoms of infection,” she wrote. “Cooks seem pleased with this nightly entertainment.”

She planned to give the same talk to day cooks, but she was suspended the next day, relieved of duty and told to pack up and be ready to take the next convoy back to Kuwait.

Yarbrough's supervisor told her she was being fired for wearing a dirty shirt, leaving work early once and other infractions. But Yarbrough felt certain these were bogus charges. The supervisor seemed “eaten up with guilt,” she recalled in an interview. “He wouldn't look me in the eye.”

While waiting for the convoy, Yarbrough appealed to a Halliburton district manager. She told him Ray was compromising food safety, and she believed he'd used his influence to get her fired.

“He told me that I was a danger to myself if I remained at Tikrit,” said Yarbrough. “He wouldn't tell me why, but I thought it was that somebody would have been sent to do me harm.”

…Yarbrough fears that what she saw at Camp Iron Horse is being repeated at other bases. “I am concerned that the quality of work under these contracts is compromised by the friendships between contractors and military personnel,” she said.

She also suspects that risks are being taken with food-safety and other issues so that Halliburton and ESS can meet deadlines and qualify for millions of dollars in performance bonuses.

“I first thought that my situation was just an unfortunate set of relationships at one location,” she said. But during her trip from Camp Iron Horse back to Kuwait, she met Halliburton staffers moving between bases, and they all seemed to know Ray. “Every Halliburton employee I met in Iraq and Kuwait was ex-military,” she said, adding that she wonders how many of them had friends on active duty and were using their influence as she believes Ray did.

Yarbrough also has concerns about the working and living conditions of the third-country nationals who serve in dining facilities and other capacities at bases throughout Iraq and Kuwait. “Third-country nationals have no rights, no papers and no access to medical care,” said Yarbrough.

“They are allowed no communication with their families and cannot leave the gravel surrounding the dining facilities where they work,” she said.

“I am amazed that Americans don't know anything about the TCNs [third-country nationals] doing all the work over there,” she said. “CNN is in Tikrit right now, eating at that dining facility. Why haven't TCNs been interviewed? Indians speak English.”

Aside from her humanitarian concerns, Yarbrough worries that desperate and alienated third-country nationals could pose a security risk to U.S. soldiers.

How the FBI Treats Whistleblowers? Very Badly

Gail Sheehy (presumably the Gail Sheehy, author of Passages and many other books that don't inspire faith in her reportorial skills….) writes a confusing but disturbing article in the New York Observer (the right-wingish newspaper trying to be an alternative to the far-from-left New York Times-)[As noted by the astute Patrick Nielsen Hayden, I confused the iconoclastic Observer with the bombastic NY Sun; at least that explains why Gail Sheehy would be writing for it!]

In Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I. Ms. Sheehy tries to tell four stories in small space:

(1) the “Penttbom” moms who prodded the government into having a panel look into 9/11 failures, only to have the investigation deftly thrown into bureaucratic quicksand by Republicans who saw no profit in a report that might make the nation safer at their political expense.

(2) The story of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator turned whistleblower and allegedly target for crude FBI harassment. [More on this below.]

(3) The substantive story alleged by Ms. Edmunds about an FBI translation department careless about security and penetrated by some people who, like Robert Hanssen before them, were not real subtle about what they were doing.

(4) The aftermath: While Senator Grassley champions her cause, Senator Hatch is the obstacle to further Senate hearings. Meanwhile Ms. Edmonds's lawsuit has run into the government's assertion of state secrets privilege.

If nothing else, the article has certainly whetted my appetite for more information. And I'd like to know whether Senator Hatch cares enough about national security to convene a followup hearing, if he thinks there's nothing to be worried about, or if another Republican will play politics with national security.

During her six months of work for the Bureau, Ms. Edmonds said she grew increasingly horrified by the lack of internal security she saw inside the very agency tasked with protecting our national security.

In papers filed with the F.B.I.’s internal investigative office, the Department of Justice, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and most recently with the 9/11 Commission, she has reported serious ongoing failures in the language division of the F.B.I. Washington Field Office. They include security lapses in hiring and monitoring of translators, investigations that have been compromised by incorrect or misleading translations sent to field agents; and thousands of pages of translations falsely labeled “not pertinent” by Middle Eastern linguists who were either not qualified in the target language or English, or, worse, protecting targets of investigation.

Nothing happened. Undaunted, Ms. Edmonds took her concerns to upper management. Soon afterward she was fired. The only cause given was “for the convenience of the government.” The F.B.I. has not refuted any of Ms. Edmonds’ allegations, yet they have accounted for none of them.

On the morning Ms. Edmonds was terminated, she said, she was escorted from the building by an agent she remembered saying: “We will be watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney who is not approved by the F.B.I., or if you take this issue outside the F.B.I. to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in jail.” Two other agents were present.

“I know about my constitutional rights, but do you know how many translators would be intimidated?”

Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up at the door of the Ms. Edmonds’ townhouse to seize her home computer. She was then called in to be polygraphed—a test which, she found out later, she passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied by her lawyer on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms. Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As her high heels glanced off the marble steps of Congress she sensed two men ascending right behind her. Turning, she recognized the agent walk, the Ray-Bans, the outline of a weapon, and the deadest giveaway of all—a cell phone pointed straight at her, transmitting. “They weren’t secretive about it, they wanted me to know they’re there,” she said. After being shadowed in plain sight many more times, she said with dark humor, “I call them my escorts.”

After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee to whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his investigators check her out. Then they, along with staffers for Senator Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the summer of 2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the language division and an internal security official.

In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as bizarre, the windows fogged up as the session finished; it was that tense, “None of the F.B.I. officials’ answers washed, and they could tell we didn’t believe them.” He chuckles remembering one of the Congressional investigators saying, “You basically admitted almost all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there’s no problem here. What’s wrong with this picture?”

The Bureau briefers shrugged, put on their coats, and left. There was no way the F.B.I. was going to admit to another spy scandal only months after being scorched by the Webster Report on one of the most dangerous double agents in F.B.I. history, Robert Hanssen.

“I think the F.B.I. is ignoring a very major internal security breach,” said Grassley, “and a potential espionage breach.”

… “The culture of the F.B.I. is to worry about their own public relations. If you’re going to change that culture, somebody’s got to get fired.” He is not optimistic, however, that Congress will act aggressively. “Nobody wants to take on the F.B.I.”

The translator had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on March 7, 2002. She was told then that an investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. And a Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I. for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after the November election.

When Ms. Edmonds wouldn’t go away or keep still, F.B.I. Director Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Mr. Ashcroft obliged.