Your tax dollars at work- on you!

Washington Post:

The director of national intelligence will disclose today that national intelligence activities amounting to roughly 80 percent of all U.S. intelligence spending for the year cost more than $40 billion, according to sources on Capitol Hill and inside the administration.

The disclosure means that when military spending is added, aggregate U.S. intelligence spending for fiscal 2007 exceeded $50 billion, according to these sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the total remains classified.

Adm. Mike McConnell will announce that the fiscal 2007 national intelligence program figure, classified up to now, is being made public at the urging of the Sept. 11 commission and the insistence of Congress, which turned the commission's recommendation into law. The commission's plan was to have the president make the figure public each year.

Laugh or cry?

At Daily Kos, diarist blueness has a terrific post. Go read.

Democrats: Stop Being Defensive on Security and Defense, Part 1

The capitulation on the FISA bill is only the latest manifestation of Democrats being ruled by political fear rather than pragmatics and sound policy. This clearly wasn't about fear of terrorism; it was about fear of a political backlash. Beyond the obvious absurdity of being afraid to confront one of the most unpopular "presidents" ever, there is something much more insidiously dangerous at play. This is about a stereotype that has kept Democrats on their political heels for decades: Democrats are weak on defense, soft on national security, the "mommy" party, focused on nurturing and comforting, but not much use when a strong "daddy" is needed. If we're working to shatter such asinine sexual stereotypes, it's time we also shattered this partisan one.

The facts speak for themselves. I've been hammering on this issue for some time, and this is part of the reason why. If Democrats can, as they should, claim the mantle as the party of national security and defense, the Republicans will be without any issue on which to fall back. Beyond that, Democrats will not have to be so reflexively defensive, blustering about their own toughness, while enabling those who want to shred the Constitution and destroy what makes this nation great, supposedly in order to save it.

This will probably be a three-part series, because there is just too much evidence to compile. The three parts will be as follows:

1) The Bush Administration's narrow ideological focus, negligence, and just plain incompetence, enabled the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This is not about Conspiracy Theories, it's about easily demonstrable facts, that are already on record, even in the corporate media. For the purposes of this series, the only thing that matters about Bush and September 11 is that he could have prevented it. For the purposes of this series, it is not about conscious complicity, it is about ineptitude.

2) Bush is undermining our national security from without, by making the United States more hated, around the world, which is emboldening and facilitating terrorists.

3) Bush is undermining our national security from within, by destroying our military.

So, let's begin by looking at the evidence, and reviewing some facts about the Bush Administration's inattention to screaming warnings, before the September 11 attacks. Bush's political strength was built on the media's hyperventilating support, after September 11; but even though they have since reported his failures before September 11, those latter reports have not been sufficiently publicized to overcome that ridiculously inaccurate image they originally helped create.

Right from the start, the Bush Administration was warned of the dangers of terrorism and al Qaeda, and right from the start, they ignored it. As Joe Conason wrote, for
Salon, in August 2003:

Departing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and the National Security Council's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who was held over by Bush, gave Condoleezza Rice a series of urgent briefings on terrorism during the presidential transition in January 2001. "You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al-Qaida specifically than any issue," Berger told his successor. Clarke delivered similar emphatic briefings to Vice President Cheney and to Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy. But the supposedly competent national security managers in the new administration, including Rice, Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were too preoccupied with other matters (such as national missile defense) to pay heed to the most serious threat since the end of the Cold War.

As CNN reported, in 2004:

President Bush's former counterterrorism chief (Richard Clarke) testified Wednesday that the administration did not consider terrorism an urgent priority before the September 11, 2001, attacks, despite his repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden's terror network.

In fact, the Administration ended or ignored President Clinton's counterterrorism efforts. From the Associated Press, in June 2003:

Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.

Of course, President Clinton had appointed a commission to study terrorism. Led by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, the commission made its final report shortly after Bush took office. As Jake Tapper reported, in Salon, the day after September 11:

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

As the Washington Post reported, in January 2002:

Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.

Why?

Bush and his top aides had higher priorities – above all, ballistic missile defense.

In April 2001, Judy Woodruff reported,on CNN that the Bush Administration thought it was wrong to even focus on Osama bin Laden:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there's no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and "personalizing terrorism."

Because, in the post-Cold War world, nothing could have possibly been more important. And, of course, "missile defense" would have worked wonders in stopping a gang of terrorists armed with boxcutters.

As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, in April 2004, that disastrous summer of 2001 had been replete with warnings:

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

Even Joe Klein reported on the Administration's incompetence. As he wrote for Time Magazine:

And now, with Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, and subsequent Washington Post reports, we've been reminded that CIA Director George Tenet warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that "the system was blinking red," meaning that there could be "multiple, simultaneous" al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months.

And then, of course, there was the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, which Bush received while on a month-long vacation. CNN has the transcript. The title, alone, should have been enough:

Bin Laden determined to strike in US.

As Ron Suskind wrote, in his book The One Percent Doctrine, Bush's response to that day's CIA briefer was the following:

All right. You've covered your ass, now.

And the ignorance and incompetence continued, literally right up to the day of the attack.

As Newsweek reported:

At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism.

And, according to that January, 2002 Washington Post article:

That threat came Sept. 9.

Not to be outdone, Attorney General John Ashcroft demonstrated his own incompetence, just a day later- a day before the attacks. According to the New York Times:

In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism. Upgrading the F.B.I.'s computer system, one of the areas in which he sought an increase, is relevant to combating terrorism, though Mr. Ashcroft did not defend it on that ground.

But in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.

Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.

That 2002 Washington Post article also lists the following facts:

*President Clinton kept submarines and gunships with cruise missile capabilities covertly deployed "on six-hour alert near Afghanistan's borders." Bush did not.

*Despite having twice warned the Taliban that they would be held accountable for any al Qaeda attacks, when Cheney was briefed, on February 9, 2001, that al Qaeda had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Bush did nothing.

*In the spring of 2001, CIA officers made a first-hand assessment of Afghan rebel commander Ahmed Shah Massoud's forces, and although they concluded those forces were in worse shape than they had been the previous summer, they only gave Massoud money and small amounts of supplies; they were not authorized to help Massoud's combat capability against the Taliban.

*Bush did not speak to the public about the threat of terrorism, except to promote "missile defense": "At least three times he mentioned "terrorist threats that face us" to explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty."

*Interagency disputes "left the administration without a position on legislative initiatives to combat money laundering. And until the summer, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill suspended U.S. participation in allied efforts to penetrate offshore banking havens, whose secrecy protects the cash flows of drug traffickers, tax evaders and terrorists."

Add it all up, and there is only one conclusion: we didn't need a police state, we didn't need a "Patriot Act", and we didn't need unfettered domestic spying to prevent the September 11 attacks. We only needed an administration that was paying attention. Instead, we had one that was so dogmatic and ideological that it was obsessed with worthless boondoggle gifts to the military industrial complex- like "missile defense", while all around them sirens were screaming about an impending attack.

Any other administration would have been forced from office, for this alone. It's too late for that to happen for this, but it's not too late for Democrats to begin reframing the now standard presumptions about Bush, Republicans, and national security. The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history happened during a Republican administration. It happened because that Republican administration ignored abundant evidence that it was going to happen. The Republicans are not the party of national security and defense, and it's time for the Democrats to start making that clear. Not by assisting their every abuse of power, but by simply repeating the facts, over and over and over. And by offering a better way.

Inexcusable

Associated Press:

he Senate, in a high-stakes showdown over national security, voted late Friday to temporarily give President Bush expanded authority to eavesdrop on suspected foreign terrorists without court warrants.

The House, meanwhile, rejected a Democratic version of the bill.

Democratic leaders there were working on a plan to bring up the Senate-passed measure and vote on it Saturday in response to Bush's demand that Congress give him expanded powers before leaving for vacation this weekend.

It's essentially the version Bush wanted.

Spies "R" Us

Washington Post:

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

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

The administration breaks the law. So, what should we do about it? Change the law. It's good to be the king.

Associated Press:

President Bush said Friday that Congress must stay in session until it approves legislation modernizing a U.S. law governing eavesdropping on foreigners.

“So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign,” Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. “We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short.”

The president, who has the power under the Constitution to keep Congress in session, said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they “pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.”

Earlier Friday, the White House offered an eleventh-hour accord to Democrats in the negotiations over the matter, saying it would agree to a court review of its foreign intelligence activities instead of leaving certification up to the attorney general and director of national intelligence.

Well, that's nice. Big olive branch, that. Especially given all that we now know about the partisan criminality of that attorney general.

More Domestic Spying?

Washington Post:

The Bush administration's chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.

The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.

Warrants Are Too Much Hard Work

TPM Muckraker:

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) grilled Mueller on the FBI's mishandling of National Security Letter authorities, in which FBI agents obtain data without warrants about individuals "relevant" to terrorism investigations. Mueller emphasized the need for speed in terrorism cases, but Scott had a hard time understanding one thing: Why does the FBI need NSLs if the bureau can obtain warrants after the fact for records under FISA?

Mueller's response? If not for the NSLs, the post-facto warrants mean agents will get bogged down in "paperwork" up to "a quarter-inch thick"

More Domestic Spying?

Abu Gonzales's testimony before Congress, yesterday, raised some interesting questions. Glenn Greenwald explains. Think Progress has the video.

The FBI Is Watching

Two new reports ought to make us all feel more secure. Or something. The FBI is watching. It's really watching.

The first report is from ABC News:

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified.

Half a million names? Here's a clue: if they need to watch a half a million people, they're probably not doing a very good job of figuring out who to watch. Either that, or we're pretty much all suspect; and if that's the case, someone's probably just a little too mentally unstable to be running a national security agency. And they say Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorists are nuts!

The second report is from the Washington Post:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

Several thousand mistakes? And I'm assuming those don't include the monitoring of those half a million people that the FBI seems to think should be monitored. So, it's probably not a stretch to presume that that half a million figure should be revised. Upward.

Just as interesting, is this part of the Post article:

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

Isn't that reassuring? While the FBI is out of control, spying on more than a half a million people, breaking laws and their own rules, telephone conpanies and internet providers are handing over private data that no one even asked for! Might this not be worth a Congressional investigation? Wouldn't it be nice to know if your phone company or internet provider is so blithely dismissive of your privacy rights?

Meanwhile, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III knows how to spend your tax dollars. As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday:

When the FBI asked Congress this spring to provide $3.6 million in the war spending bill for its Gulfstream V jet, it said the money was needed to ensure that the aircraft, packed with state-of-the-art security and communications gear, could continue to fly counterterrorism agents on "crucial missions" into Iraq.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has made similar annual requests to maintain and fuel the $40 million jet on grounds that it had a "tremendous impact" on combating terrorism by rapidly deploying FBI agents to "fast-moving investigations and crisis situations" in places such as Afghanistan.

But the jet that the FBI originally sold to lawmakers in the late 1990s as an essential tool for battling terrorism is now routinely used to ferry FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to speeches, public appearances and field office visits.

Not that anyone in the Bush Administration would ever politicize federal agencies of intelligence or justice.

Time for yet another in a seemingly endless series of rhetorical questions: what do the words "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" mean?

Cheney Placed At Center Of Domestic Spying Scandal!

Yesterday's Washington Post reports:

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

So, the Vice President was personally involved in authorizing Domestic Spying; and if you don't recall the macabre story about White House efforts to force ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to override DOJ objections, and also sign off on this baltantly illegal program, the Washington Post's editorial board had this to say:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.

Yesterday's Post article states that this disclosure places Cheney more at the center of this scandal than had been known. For the first time, Cheney is shown to have been personally involved in attempting to override the Department of Justice's own ruling that Domestic Spying was illegal; and it indicates that the urgency of the White House's attempt to bully Ashcroft into authorizing the spying was directly linked.

It's now very clear: the White House knew they were breaking the law. The Vice President knew he was breaking the law. They wanted to use Ashcroft to provide political cover for their knowingly breaking the law. They were so desperate to use Ashcroft as political coverage for their knowingly breaking the law, that they attempted to storm into his hospital room and force him to sign something he might not have even been coherent enough to know he was signing!

And, as all Bush Administration scandals do, it gets even worse. Also from today's Post article:

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

In other words, a career professional whose professional opinion didn't accord with the White House's desire to break the law was punished for wanting the White House to do so.

Alberto Gonzales, Andrew Card, and Dick Cheney are criminals. They know it. We know it. It's time for Congress to act like they know it!

Even The Washington Post Is Outraged!

Washington Post:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.

When even the Washington Post is outraged at Bush's abuses, you know this is big. Here's the money quote:

That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all.

I'll go a step farther: Comey's testimony makes clear that Bush was directly involved. Think about what that means.

GAO: Department of Homeland Security Breaks Privacy Laws!

Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security is breaking privacy laws by failing to tell the public all the ways it uses personal information to target passengers boarding flights entering or leaving the United States, according to a draft government report.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report to be released tomorrow, says DHS's Customs and Border Protection agency has never publicly disclosed all the sources of data such as name, credit card number and travel history that it uses to detect passengers who may pose a security risk.

"CBP's current disclosures do not fully inform the public about all of its systems for prescreening aviation passenger information, nor do they explain how CBP combines data in the prescreening process, as required by law," the report says. "As a result, passengers are not assured that their privacy is protected during the international prescreening process."

If you fly overseas, they're watching you.