Category ►►► Terrorism Intelligence

December 14, 2006

That Was Thener; This Is Even Nower

Congressional Corruption , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

This is an update to our previous post a couple of weeks ago, That Was Then, This Is Now. In that post, we linked to a Washington Post story about the Democrats rejecting the most important congressional reform of intelligence that the 9/11 Commission recommended. Oddly, however, I notice now that I forgot to quote from it! I can only plead premature senility and correct the oversight now:

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. Instead, Democratic leaders may create a panel to look at the issue and produce recommendations, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

Well that Democratic panel has now produced its recommendations... and sure enough, the panel's only recommendation is -- to create another panel!

If you parse through the Clintonspeak, they're not accepting the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to remove control of the funding of intelligence agencies from the Appropriations committees and give it instead to the Intelligence committees:

[Rep. Nancy] Pelosi, D-Calif. [100%], also said that one of the first tasks of the Democratic-controlled House she will lead beginning in January will be approving the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, including taking steps to make intelligence decisions more transparent.

The Select Intelligence Oversight Panel proposed by Pelosi would be made up by members of the Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and would work within the Appropriations Committee.

Simply put, if the panel works "within the Appropriations committee," then it's controlled by that committee -- and that means Appropriations will still control the budget that will be "overseen" by the panel that it also controls:

[The panel] would examine, through hearings, the president's intelligence budget, prepare the classified annex to the annual defense spending bill and conduct oversight of the use of appropriated funds by intelligence agencies.

In other words, it will not itself appropriate the funds or even (it appears) recommend to the Appropriations committees how much to appropriate or how to use those appropriations. And it goes without saying (though I'm going to say it anyway) that nowhere in this statement does Pelosi or anyone else say that Appropriations will lose budgetary control over the clandestine and intelligence agencies, as the 9/11 Commission recommended, nor that the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence will gain that budgetary authority.

In fact, they don't even pledge to create a new Appropriations subcommittee devoted to intelligence... the bare minimum recommendation of the commission, which they offered if Congress couldn't bring itself to strip Appropriations of the least little bit of control.

Rather than actually accept the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission -- which are very clear (see our previous post) -- the Democrats plan only to create a PR stunt instead: a "panel" that is controlled by the Appropriations committees and will simply ensure that the administration actually uses the money as Appropriations directs.

Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Wynn Las Vegas, 100%) believe they can get away with creating a committee to study the committee, rather than actually implement the recommended change.

But you know what I think? I believe that this time, they may not get away with it: if the Washington Post, of all liberal media outlets, is already publishing a major story chastising them for blowing off the Commission (after campaigning obsessively on "fully implementing" those same recommendations)... then the incoming Democratic 110th may find it's no longer immune from harsh criticism -- in any medium.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2006, at the time of 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 01, 2006

That Was Then; This Is Now

Congressional Calamities , Global War on Terrorism , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The headline says it all: Democrats Reject Key 9/11 Panel Suggestion.

Not that that could stop me from saying even more!

Specifically, one of the most important findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (a.k.a., the 9-11 Commission), from chapter 13 of the final report, is that appropriations for the clandestine agencies -- the CIA and the "national agencies," comprising the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) -- should be separated out from the normal Defense Department appropriations and handled via a special committee, or else by the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence.

Currently, intelligence-agency appropriations are under the purview of the Defense subcommittees of the Appropriations committees. But here is the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission:

Recommendation: Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret. Congress should pass a separate appropriations act for intelligence, defending the broad allocation of how these tens of billions of dollars have been assigned among the varieties of intelligence work.

Earlier in the chapter, the Commission explained the problem quite clearly:

The current DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] is responsible for community performance but lacks the three authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel. [The DCI position was terminated in April of last year in response to another recommendation of the 9-11 Commission; the head of the CIA now reverts to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who is under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence]....

When Congress passes an appropriations bill to allocate money to intelligence agencies, most of their funding is hidden in the Defense Department in order to keep intelligence spending secret. Therefore, although the House and Senate Intelligence committees are the authorizing committees for funding of the intelligence community, the final budget review is handled in the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations committees. Those committees have no subcommittees just for intelligence, and only a few members and staff review the requests.

The appropriations for the CIA and the national intelligence agencies- NSA, NGA, and NRO-are then given to the secretary of defense. The secretary transfers the CIA's money to the DCI but disburses the national agencies' money directly. Money for the FBI's national security components falls within the appropriations for Commerce, Justice, and State and goes to the attorney general.

This is absurdly cumbersome, hence dangerous to national security: in Congress, the committees that are supposed to control and provide oversight for the intelligence agencies, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, have no say over the budgets of the agencies they supposedly control.

While many recommendations of the 9-11 Commission were controversial, there is virtually no controversy among intelligence officers over this aspect: appropriations for intelligence agencies should be made by committees or subcommittees that are exclusively devoted to intelligence, not a wart on the behind of the Department of Defense. That means appropriations should either by handled by the Intelligence committees themselves (best) or at least by dedicated Intelligence subcommittees of the Appropriations committees (adequate).

There is, however, enormous controversy about this recommendation in Congress: on a nutshell, they just don't want to do it.

Robert Novak was on Hannity and Colmes yesterday, and he explained the problem succinctly:

  1. The Republicans never took up rearranging Congressional appropriations for the intelligence agencies, so they hardly have clean thumbs themselves;
  2. The Democrats campaigned on the promise -- it was one of only three they made -- to "fully implement the 9-11 Commission's recommendations." That would especially include this one, as the higgledy-piggledy nature of intelligence funding undermines the most important aspect of the GWOT;
  3. Yet now that the Democrats will be the majority, incoming Squeaker Nancy Pelosi is completely unwilling to take any appropriations authority away from her pal and loyal ally, Rep. John "Mad Jack" Murtha (D-PA, 75%), who is pegged to be Chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee of the Appropriations committee. [Yow!]

    (This is especially true after Pelosi's fiasco, trying to install the ethically challenged Mad Jack as Majority Leader, instead of Steny Hoyer -- who trounced Murtha in the caucus vote.)

So... what is the upshot of this "lame duck" period, leading up to the ascension of the Reality-Based Party to the petal-throne of Congressional control? Let's review the bidding:

  • The Democrats more or less campaigned on a promise to "redeploy" American troops out of Iraq and into next-door Okinawa before June 2007; in reality, they probably cannot even get a majority of the caucus to vote for that.
  • The Democrats absolutely, emphatically, almost hysterically campaigned on the promise to clean up "the Republican culture of corruption," leading to "the most ethical Congress in history;" but they have suddenly decided -- now that they will have the lion's share of power and attract the lion's share of funding from lobbyists -- that the most widely abused "legalized corruption" in Congress -- earmarks -- are just fine as they are and don't need any reform... not even the House rule enacted in the 109th Congress to open all earmarks to the light of day (a rule we predict will "softly and suddenly vanish away" when the 110th Congress convenes on January 4th, 2007).
  • The Democrats made virtually a fetish of campaigning on the promise to "fully implement" the 9-11 Commission's recommendations; but as soon as they won, they decided they would follow the lead of the outgoing GOP and refuse to implement the only remaining major recommendation that related to Congress -- because Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to take away any of Jack Murtha's consolation prize. I can't say what the excuse in the Senate will be; but rest assured, there will be one.

So in the three weeks since winning the midterm election, the Democratic majority has managed to betray their voters on all three of their major platform planks. That's even better than Bill Clinton managed!

Not a bad month's work; they may as well knock off now and go on holiday for the next 34 days. Or, heck, the next two years; America won't mind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 01, 2006, at the time of 04:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Weak Leak Soup, Ctd: Evolution of a Punk Job

Global War on Terrorism , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I was going to put a post up here noting that the president saw fit Tuesday to declassify the "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate from April (the one we discussed here too early Tuesday morn, before the announcement). If you'll recall, on Saturday, the New York Times published a story that claimed -- falsely, we now discover -- that the NIE concluded that the Iraq War had "worsened" the threat from terrorism:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

But when the document itself was released Tuesday, it turns out the key findings were far more mixed and balanced; and nowhere did the NIE say that the Iraq War had made terrorism worse: to use the phrase Hugh Hewitt used all afternoon, the Times got punked. Its sources sold it a bill of goods; and like the Sy Hersh travesty on Abu Ghraib, its reputation (heh) lies in tatters. Tatters.

So the MSM came out swinging, here, here, and here: with grim determination, as soon as the document was made available by the NID, they slapped up their stories saying: it confirms eveything we said before! Don't look! Just take our word for it! We wouldn't lie to you 365 days in a single year, would we? (They're nothing if not persistent!)

So I was going to write a post quoting from AP, Reuters, and the New York Tombs, then quoting from the NIE itself, to make them all look like the farkakte macacas they are. Alas, I spent too long on my hobby of painting extra zeros on all my $10 bills... and you-know-who slithered in ahead of me, posting exactly the article that I was going to post (except mine would have been better; no, really). If only I posted it. Or wrote it. Or came out of my digestive torpor soon enough.

So I'm just posting to let you know I won't be posting on this topic. I think, where one's friends are concerned, it's only polite to keep them apprised of one's good intentions, for future reference.

Well... maybe just a little. This is a brief sketch of what I might have said, if I'd said anything (which I didn't, and I'm not).

Prior to the release, the elite media tried to play the Sy Hersh game of creatively (and tendentiously) misinterpreting classified intelligence someone leaked to them, confident that the "secretive" Bush administration would never dare declassify and release it... thus proving them liars. When Bush double-crossed them, they found themselves like a Wile E. Coyote, when he runs off a cliff but doesn't fall... until he looks down.

For God's sake, don't look down! The MSM's instinctive reaction was to double-down and pretend that the law of gravity had indeed been repealed. Here is how AP began their first story after the publication of the NIE showed the entire world that they had relied upon sources who lied to them (the first link in the "so the MSM came out swinging" paragraph above); this was from late Tuesday morning, shortly after the release:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations.

Note the specific word "bleak," which they used in their story before the release. In fact, this by and large is the same story they ran before the release; all they did was pop the hood and install an aftermarket clause noting that the report had been "declassified and released."

Don't look down!

By early Wednesday, the AP had added a bit more to their article, softening the hard line that the full document completely vindicated their clumsy hit job:

White House release of a previously secret intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat gives both political parties new ammunition in the election-season fight over the Iraq war.

For Republicans, the excerpts of the document - declassified under orders from President Bush on Tuesday - are more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and can't be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory.

For Democrats, the report furthers their argument that the 2003 Iraq invasion has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiments in the Muslim world and left the U.S. less safe.

In a bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

For the first time, AP recognized that there were points on the side of those supporting the Iraq War; but they refused to get all radical on us and actually quote any of those findings. That would have been asking too much.

And note that the NIE is still characterized as "bleak," which is interesting; throughout these permutations, they cling to that word as a liferaft... despite the fact that it never appears in the NIE key conclusions themselves, and the fact -- easily ascertainable by reading them -- that they present a picture that is neither bleak nor rosey but simply a list of challenges and assessments.

Later on Wednesday afternoon, AP put up this story -- still written by the same reporter, Katherine Shrader. It begins thus:

The White House refused Wednesday to release the rest of a secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat, as the Bush administration tried to quell election-season criticism that its anti-terror policies are seriously off track.

Note the counterattack; AP begins to lay the groundwork here for an infamous argument made popular in the days of bulletin-board systems: the lurkers support me in e-mail. (I think it even became a "filk song" -- not a typo.) That is, the Bush administration is suppressing secret evidence that would actually prove we were right all along. Over the next few days (or weeks), this argument will take shape within other branches of the Democratic Party besides the antique media:

Oh, sure, the portion that Bush chose to release doesn't explicitly say that the Iraq War was a fiasco that made the world more dangerous for America... that part is in the sections he deliberately chose to leave classified! We demand he release every section, every paragraph, every line -- including the names of all the sources, all the top-secret intel we got from foreign spy agencies, and the names of every intelligence analyst who worked on this report... and if Bush refuses, then you know he's got something he's still hiding!

After a few paragraphs wasted arguing with Tony Snow over the release of the really heavily classified portions of the report, AP continues:

In the bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

Peppered with questions Wednesday about the report, he [Snow, we presume] said the NIE report was "not designed to draw judgments about success or failure, it's an intelligence document, it's a snapshot."

Snow said the report confirms the importance of the war in Iraq as a bulwark against terrorists. "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground," he said. "If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit."

He said that a bleak intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat was only a "snapshot" - not a conclusion

The last line I quote above is especially illuminating; no, I didn't accidentally cut off the period; it's missing in the original. It's clearly an editing mistake; she rewrote the line and separated "bleak" and "snapshot" onto two different lines, then forgot to go back and erase the original (so much for the vaunted "multiple layers of editing!") But note how important it was for Shrader, hence AP, to keep that word "bleak" prominently in the story. She was only dithering whether to place it lower or higher -- and she chose the latter.

AP picks up the Tony Snow argument again:

"The American people deserve the full story, not those parts of it that the Bush administration selects," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned, however, that releasing more of the intelligence assessment could aid terrorists. "We are very cautious and very restrained about the kind of information we want to give al-Qaida," Hoekstra said....

A separate high-level assessment focused solely on Iraq may be coming soon. At least two House Democrats - Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Jane Harman of California - have questioned whether that report has been stamped "draft" and shelved until after the Nov. 7 elections.

An intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the process, said National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told lawmakers in writing only one month ago that he ordered a new Iraq estimate to be assembled. The estimate on terrorism released Tuesday took about a year to produce.

AP rejects that obviously concocted explanation that an intelligence assessment might take longer than a month to prepare; it's patently obvious to Ms. Shrader that this is just a dodge to avoid releasing a report that would completely vindicate her -- oops, I mean vindicate the Associated Press -- along with the happy side-effect of bringing about the downfall, ah, defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 election. (Secret evidence that would support me...)

It ends with a couple of rollicking quotes from Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%), savaging the president and the war without allowing supporters to confuse matters by participating in the discussion. And once again, AP does not quote those paragraphs that actually make Bush's case about the war -- the complete quotation from which the snippet "cause celebre" was cherry-picked:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

  • The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

By contrast, here is how the Iraq War's effect was described in the original New York Times story about it that was published when the elite media still thought the NIE would remain forever classified and uncheckable:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Clearly, the Times' source is describing an earlier section before the "key judgments" that come later; but equally clearly, that earlier section cannot have concluded that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," as the anonymous source smirked; because if it had, then the corresponding key judgment would not have been so supportive of continued fighting in Iraq.

At worst, the early sections might have quoted one official saying such a thing (possibly Jay "100%" Rockefeller). But that is why we don't release the entire NIE: it's like a packet of court filings that contain arguments from both the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney... you can't just grab a claim from one and act as if it's been proven in court.

If there were such an assessment by one specific person -- and we don't even know that much -- clearly it was not accepted in the final analysis, not even for a candid document that none of the principals thought would ever be released.

So far, most of the mainstream news stories about the released NIE have shied away from quoting this paragraph in full... likely because it so clearly argues the case for the Bush policy: if, at the end of the day, the jihadis are seen to be winner in Iraq, they will be emboldened and their recuitment will soar; contrariwise, if they are seen as failures -- if Iraq remains as a democratic state in control of its own destiny, rather than a Somalia-like failed state full of terrorist training camps -- then the jihadis will suffer a terrible blow, and their recruitment will drop off.

So the real conclusion of the NIE anent Iraq is that we must win at any cost; cutting and running is not a viable option, no matter what Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller -- or Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francsico, 95%) and John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) -- say.

Eventually, the media will be forced to admit this; it's been widely quoted in blogs and on the radio, and even in a few television programs. It's possible they've already snuck it into a few stories, buried deep.

But it won't help: they've been exposed, as Hersh was, not only as rampant partisans... but as DNC house organs so partisan they're willing, even eager, to lie, or at least pass along lies in reckless disregard for the truth, to further the political ambitions of their Democratic friends in Congress.

In Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare wrote:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

How much poorer then is a person, an entire organization, that throws its own century-old reputation into the sewer, merely to help elect its favored party into power?

I actually feel sorry for them. What must it be like to live behind those eyes?

Anyway, that's more or less what I would have written. Except I'm not going to post on this topic.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2006, at the time of 03:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2006

Weak Leak Soup

Global War on Terrorism , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

In keeping with the madly egotistical Big Lizards motto -- Never first, always final -- I've been pondering Saturday's New York Times story about the impact of the Iraq War on the global war on terrorism (GWOT) ever since, er, Saturday. (Maybe Sunday; Saturday, I think I was pondering whether to raise the pot on the strength of a king and a trey with a queen-jack-eight on the flop.)

There is a powerful lot that the Times failed to tell us about that story; my idol, John Hinderaker at Power Line, has a great story up quoting several other passages from that same national intelligence estimate (NIE) (enough with the alphabet soup already!) that tend to undercut, to say the least, the spin put on the thing by the Times, as well as their sidekick and pale shadow, the Washington Post.

But craven that I am, I shrink from duking it out with Power Line, who has the actual factual response pretty well covered. Oh, I could think of better arguments to make against the bizarre claims in the media; but I'd just be making them up, so I'd better not.

Let's instead focus on the problems and deficiencies in the two main antique-media stories... by an amazing coincidence, the two I already linked above. Slither on, dude.

Journalistic clairvoyance

Let's start with a startling admission against interest on the part of the "elite" media:

  1. Neither the New York Times reporters nor the Washington Post reporters have actually seen the NIE. Or any portion of it; they rely entirely upon their various sources' characterization of the NIE.

In other words, they do not actually know if the report "has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks," as the Times puts it in a traditionally quaint run-on sentence; they have absolutely no idea. All they know is that one or more of their (anonymous and undescribable) sources claims that's what it says.

Von Unaussprechlichen Külten

Here's another good one:

  1. Neither the Times nor the Post deigns to name even a single source. Not one. O, for the good old days of Watergate, when Ben Bradlee demanded at least two sources for every claim -- only one of which could be anonymous! (Were that rule in effect today, both the Times and the Post would have to shut down and convert operations to printing vacation brochures and cereal boxes.)

They don't even characterize these sources; for all we know, they could be Oompa-Loompas. Here is how the Times introduces the presumed humans upon whom the entire shebang depends, which they finally get 'round to doing in paragraph 6:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

So let's see... a senior CIA analyst would count, but so would a junior-grade employee of the Department of Agriculture. An "official" might be an aide to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%) or Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), both of whom sit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (hence could have access) -- or for that matter, an aide to the disgraced, corrupt liar, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL, 90%), who sits on the House equivalent.

But we do know one thing about some of them, courtesy of the Washington Post; we know that some, at least, of these "officials" have a partisan axe to grind:

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

If this source begins with the idea that it's "obvious" that the Iraq War has caused us to be less safe, then he's hardly an unbiased source for relaying what the NIE has to say about that subject.

Past the expiry date

  1. The assessment was begun in 2002, before the Iraq War began -- and it was completed back in April of this year... five months ago.

An awful lot has changed in the past five months... much of it for the better, including the increasing tempo of turning provinces over to the Iraqis, the stunning buildup of the Iraqi military and national police forces, and of course the death of Musab Zarqawi. But this NIE cannot have taken those changes into account, because they hadn't happened yet when it was written.

The school for wives

Here is a minor point that is emblematic of how easy it is to get so lost, you can't see the forest for the weeds:

The Times notes, in a paragraph notable mainly for being oddly out of place in the article, that one danger is that jihadis fighting in Iraq can learn techniques that they subsequently pass along to others:

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

The implication is clear, if rather unbalanced:

  1. The Times frets that all we're doing in Iraq is training the next generation of jihadis, who will be faster, stronger, and more deadly because of the skill they learn from encounters with American forces.

But this discounts two very important points:

First, that it's the United States, not the jihadis, which has learnt the most from the Iraq War. The American military of 2003 was the most powerful and effective that had ever existed... but that is no longer the case: today, they could get their butts kicked -- by the American military of 2006. We have learned from every encounter, every battle, every victory, and even from the occasional defeat.

Our own effectiveness has grown much faster than that of the jihadis... that's why the death rate of our troops has dropped by nearly 1/3 from "period 3" (from the turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis to the first set of elections) to "period 5" (from the last set of general elections to today) -- and dropped even further in the last year.

Second, this argument presumes that large numbers of Iraq-based jihadis survive their encounters with the Americans, so that they can pass their experience along to others. In fact, most of those who leave Iraq and head back to their home countries never actually engaged American forces, because we kill or capture a very high percentage of all the terrorists we engage.

In hock to post hoc

Finally, here is the most glaring omission -- whether from the NIE itself or merely from its mischaracterization by the elite media's "sources," we cannot possibly say without seeing the document itself:

  1. The storyline does not consider what might have happened had we not invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

A lot would have happened: most analysts believe that Hussein was on the verge of cutting a deal with the Europeans (via the corrupt U.N. "Oil for Fraud" program of direct and indirect bribery) to end the sanctions and inspections. As Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG... more letters, I'm afraid) assessed in its final report:

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise.

Instead of considering this possibility and exploring which American action would have been better for the terrorists -- attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq -- the argument of both these articles is strictly "post hoc ergo propter hoc": after the fact, therefore because of the fact. The Leftist, anti-war leakers in the CIA or NSA argue (through their sock puppets in the Times and Post) thus:

  1. We invaded Iraq, deposed Hussein, and occupied the country;
  2. Jihadi websites now cite the war to try to drum up recruits;
  3. Therefore, the Iraq War was a boon to jihadis!

But this is logical gibberish: if, after ranting on and on about Hussein, we had let him stay and even lifted sanctions, then that would be cited by jihadi websites to drum up recruits... just as they cite our failures in Somalia and Sudan, our refusal to retaliate for the Cole bombing, and so forth. The jihadis cite anything that shows us either running away or standing and fighting: either way, they'll spin it to their advantage.

If this is the central conceit of the NIE, as opposed to the media's misinterpretation, then this signals a fatal flaw still extant in the raciocination of our top intelligence services: they are still thinking linearally, as if al-Qaeda and its spinoffs and wannabes are really just funny-looking Europeans in headscarves, using Western two-value logic and classical game-theory analysis of their own actions and our responses.

If we keep thinking that way, Western civ will fall.

Moslems in general, and especially Middle-East Moslems, and most especially Middle-Eastern jihadis, think in very different, apocalyptic terms. They don't perform a rational calculus to decide whether, say, to try to explode a nuclear weapon in the middle of a Western city: in fact, the "Hidden Imam" theory of players like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Mohammed al-Mahdi will arise when the jihadis have precipitated the final battle -- and are losing it badly!

In other words, Ahmadinejad expects to start World War III (or IV, if you count the Cold War), and he expects his side to lose; after which the Mahdi will come, leading the heavenly host of Allah, and wipe away all the infidel armies, ushering in the age of Islam. How do we threaten a man who believes that? Should we threaten not to fight, allowing them to win, and thereby failing to fulfill the conditions that will activate the 12th Imam's return?

If the media's understanding of this not-very-momentous NIE is accurate, then the CIA is still fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War; and we're in desperate trouble indeed!

As the Bangles sang, we've got to "Walk Like an Egyptian" (or a jihadi) to have a prayer of winning this last crusade. Doesn't mean we have to act like they; only that we must be able to think like they, lest we be surprised again and again by their unconventional and unexpected moves.

So nu?

What's wrong with this "report," at least as recounted in the mainstream media? Virtually everything. It's vague, unsourced, unbalanced, and shows clear signs of mental sclerosis.

But if this is not the NIE's real view, then how low the American media has sunk, if this is the best hit piece on the president and the GOP that they can muster in the last weeks before the election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 05:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

September 23, 2006

VegasBlogging 2: Bin Laden Is Either Dead - Or He's Alive

Global War on Terrorism , Terrorism Intelligence , Unnatural Disasters
Hatched by Dafydd

Open post:

So is he is, or is he ain't?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 23, 2006, at the time of 02:53 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 21, 2006

Scion of Hopeful News: Frist Was Right

Congressional Calamities , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

So Bill Frist did indeed have inside information, and President Bush and his crickets in the Senate did indeed craft a compromise on interrogating captured terrorists.

But it's still unclear just exactly what was won and what lost.

The president is claiming victory:

The White House said the deal would allow the CIA's questioning of foreign terrorist suspects to continue.

"We got what the president asked for," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "The CIA program to question detainees to get important information about al Qaeda, to foil plots and save American lives -- this program is going forward."

Reuters flatly states that Bush made concessions but doesn't give any examples:

Bush, who wanted authority for tough interrogations that critics said bordered on torture, was forced to make concessions after three leading Senate Republicans challenged his plan last week and offered a rival bill that drew more Senate support.

The Bush administration denies that prisoners are tortured.

So... is he is or is he ain't? Did the turncoats blink, or did the White House give away the farm? Or did they actually come up with some astonishing, real, hitherto unguessed-at compromise?

I find the one detail in the New York Times story very disturbing and worrisome:

The central sticking point had involved a demand from McCain, Sen. John Warner of Virginia and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for a provision making it clear that torture of suspects would be barred.

One official said that under the agreement, the administration agreed to drop language that would have stated an existing ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment was enough to meet Geneva Convention obligations.

Convention standards are much broader and include a prohibition on ''outrages'' against ''personal dignity.''

In turn, this official said, negotiators agreed to clarify what acts constitute a war crime. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he had not been authorized to discuss the details.

First, we don't know whether this "official" really knows what he's talking about, or for that matter who -- or what -- he is; second, we don't know what rules Congress will enact in place of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004.

It's great to have clarity... but if Congress "clarifies" interrogation by saying waterboarding shall now constitute a war crime; a belly-slap, attention-grab, and harsh language shall now constitute war crimes; and continuing to interrogate a detainee after he has demanded a lawyer shall now constitute a war crime -- well, that's considerably worse than the situation of "uncertainty" we have now.

So the stink of sulphur is in the details (not the U.N.); who caved and by how much?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2006, at the time of 03:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 20, 2006

Hopeful News: Frist Still Expects Interrogation, Wiretap Bills

Congressional Calamities , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The bill to put Congress and the White House on the same page anent interrogating high-value terrorist targets, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (hence KSM), seemed on life support just yesterday: the four Republican turncoats on the Armed Services Committee -- John McCain (AZ, 80%), Lindsay Graham (NC, 96%), Susan Collins (ME, 32%), and even Chairman John Warner (VA, 88%) -- had rejected the president's plan the first time, and they reportedly rejected Bush's revised plan.

Similarly, a bill to put Congress behind the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program was nearly derailed yesterday when Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM, 75%) proposed the main "wiretapping" bill for the House... and in her version, the president would only be able to order intercepts without a warrant after a devastating attack had occurred! She didn't quite seem to get the point, which is to prevent such attacks from occurring, not develop a legal case to prosecute, post facto, those responsible.

But today, things look perhaps just a little brighter. We're not at the dawn yet, but the East is brightening -- if Majority Leader Bill Frist (TN, 92%) can be believed:

President Bush's embattled anti-terrorism agenda got a boost Wednesday when a wiretap bill was revised and a Senate Republican leader said he was hopeful a deal was near on treatment of detainees.

But prospects for the two critical pieces of legislation remained unclear; Congress is speeding toward a recess next week as Republicans fight to retain majority control in the midterm elections.

First, Heather Wilson has now rewritten her bill to allow for such communications intercepts when the president believes an attack is imminent, not only after it's already occurred. Frankly, I still consider that a second-best: I believe the president has the inherent authority to order such warrantless intercepts of foreign intelligence with or without a finding of imminence of attack; he only has to find that national security is at stake.

But it's a heck of a lot better now than yesterday! And the "quo" she extracted for this "quid" is very positive in pointing the way forward:

Wilson's bill initially would have given legal status to Bush's domestic surveillance program only after an attack. Instead, her bill now would grant the administration's plea to allow wiretapping against Americans without warrants when it is believed a terrorist attack is "imminent."

But that concession carried a price for the president, according to a draft.

Under the measure, the administration would be required to share more details of the nature of the threat with the House and Senate leaders and the chairmen of both intelligence committees, who then would decide without administration input which lawmakers would receive the classified information.

"Excesses are best prevented when intelligence activities are operated within a framework that controls government power by using checks and balances among the three branches of government," Wilson, R-N.M., said in a statement.

Great Scott, is that all it takes? The critics in Congress will be satisfied with the "wiretapping" if a few more of them get to hear about it, so they can brag to their buddies? Of course that increases the risk that somebody will blab and the terrorists will figure it out; but that slim chance is to be weighed against not being able to intercept at all. I would happily trade congressional approval of the communications intercepts for that small increase in the number of those who know about each incident.

This may even help find compromise on the interrogations issue I discuss below. None of the turncoat Republicans is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; maybe all it will take to reel them in is to commit to brief the chair and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee at the same time as the Intelligence chair and ranking are briefed, and then allow both chairs and both ranking members to brief whomever they choose.

It might be something as stupid and childish as three grumpy, old men (and one grumpy, old woman) having a fit of pique that they weren't "in the loop."

So much is my own speculation. The hopeful news in the AP story about the interrogations policy is more inchoate; it comprises the majority leader offering his prediction:

Despite the stalemate, Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist sought to reassure the GOP troops that a deal still was possible.

" I am hopeful that very soon agreement can be reached with the president and with the majority of Republicans," Frist, R-Ky., said in a statement. "But we need to do it in a way that were not sharing classified information with those terrorists who clearly will pass it on to others around the world to be used against us."

Take it for what it is: a prediction, not necessarily inside information about how senators will vote.

Here is the interrogation dilemma on a nutshell:

  • The Supreme Court, in Hamdan, held that we must follow Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, to which we are signatories;
  • Common Article 3 bans a number of offenses against civilians under enemy control (including captured terrorists); among those offenses are:

    • Cruel treatment
    • Torture
    • Outrages upon personal dignity
    • Humiliating and degrading treatment

    At their most restrictive, these prohibitions could stop CIA interrogators from asking any questions of KSM at all after he refused to answer;

  • In addition, the article requires that if such civilians are tried for offenses, it must be by "a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." At its most restrictive, this rule would allow KSM to see all classified information in any way related to his trial -- including sources, means, and methods. This could be passed along to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to hone their attacks and make them less detectable, hence deadlier. The danger of this would likely lead to the charges being dropped... and it's an open question whether we could continue to hold him under those circumstances; we might have to let him go....
  • If enforcement of the Geneva Conventions is going to become a part of the police power of the United States, as the Court ordered, then all of these terms must be legally defined in a way that a court or military tribunal can pass judgment on members of the U.S. armed services and on civilians (such as CIA interrogators) accused of violating them; similarly, the interrogators themselves must know what they can and cannot do during an interrogation -- without worrying that a court will come along later and second-guess everything (from the comfort of their chambers), with the interrogator possibly finding himself up on criminal charges or being sued.
  • However, these terms did not arise from American law and their legal meanings are not inherently obvious (such as a prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" would be, since that's well defined by caselaw);
  • Thus, the terms must be defined by law now, in order to implement the Court's Hamdan decision, or our personnel will be under constant threat of criminal prosecution or civil litigation, merely for doing their jobs.

Curiously, as others have reported (John on Power Line, e.g.), all these terms were already defined in law: they were defined by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004... the specific definitions in that act authored by none other than Sen. John McCain!

So McCain already defined these terms in a bill, and President Bush signed McCain's bill into law -- and now relies upon that exact definition (by name) in his bill to clarify detainee treatment following Hamdan... and McCain and three other Democratic senators say that's not good enough. We have to treat the terrorists even better than McCain himself wanted to treat them two years ago.

But Bill Frist still thinks he sees movement on both sides that could lead to an acceptable compromise. Most likely, nobody at AP bothered asking him what cause he had to say that. They probably weren't even listening; it's pro-forma to get a quote from the majority leader... if he happens to be a Republican, the journalist holds his nose and does it anyway. But he doesn't have to like it; and he doesn't have to listen to the reply.

So let's keep our collective digits crossed that both these two go through... along with the House-enacted bill that requires voters to show picture-proof of citizenship before they can vote in any federal election, regardless of any state laws to the contrary -- though I suspect this goes nowhere in the Senate; it's off-topic, but I thought I'd throw it in as something to watch as it goes through the sausage mill.

Happy days aren't yet here again, but at least the corners of my mouth are beginning to twitch upward.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2006, at the time of 06:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 14, 2006

Mr. Graham Regrets He's Unable to Lunch Today

Congressional Calamities , Global War on Terrorism , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC, 96%), one fourth of the Lynne Stewart Quartet, was just on Hugh Hewitt's show, frantically trying to spin away his vote on the Senate Armed Services Committee (see below).

From what I could gather, what he thinks he was trying to do was not to allow al-Qaeda personnel to see all of our classified information... he only demands they be allowed to see any classified information that the prosecution wants to use against them.

If President Bush doesn't want them to discover sources, methods, and personnel... why, he has only to instruct the military prosecutor not to introduce any of the voluminous classified evidence at trial. Just allow KSM to walk for lack of evidence, and all will be well.

It's interesting to know that even under the rules rammed through committee by the Lynne Stewart Quartet, a terrorist on trial for mass murder in Iraq will not be able to demand a list of all our covert agents in Venezuela. But I am not reassured.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 04:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 10, 2006

No Difference Between Democrats and Republicans? Think Again

Elections , Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

According to CBS News, Democratic Senator John D. "Jay" Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%) -- who has announced to the world that he's a dimwitted "dupe" of the idiot evil genius George W. Bush -- still thinks that we'd be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in charge of Iraq:

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'" [Say, that's pretty hard to refute!]

Does Rockefeller stands [sic] by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

It's almost as if Karl Rove has been sending his mind-control beam directly into Jay Rockefeller's head, the latter having forgotten to wear his tinfoil hat. Are the Democrats actually trying to lose the election? If so, I certainly don't want to get in their way; but isn't if awfully precipitous for Rockefeller to rip the mask off before November 7th?

And is Rockefeller the only bloke in the Senate who doesn't understand that if we hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003, then today, in 2006, there wouldn't be any sanctions anymore?

Hussein would not be "isolated;" au contraire, he would be more powerful than at any time in the past fifteen years: he would have restarted his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs; both the Iraq Survey Group and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report say that was Hussein's intent all along. And European and Latin American representatives would be beetling to Baghdad to genuflect to the great man, hands out for oil allocations.

This is what Rockefeller considers "a better scenario, and a safer scenario" for America. And you want to know the worst part? If the Democrats win the Senate in the upcoming election, Jay Rockefeller will be the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Stick that in your pipe and step on it.

So Jay Rockefeller, nutty as a Froot Loop, would chair the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and spend the next two years investigating Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld... rather than al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran. All because some Republicans insist there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Republicans and Democrats, which means between Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS, 88%) and Chairman Jay Rockefeller.

Yeah, stay home and sulk instead of voting. Better yet, vote for a third-party candidate to "teach the Republicans a lesson." Great idea!

I'm sure hard-core conservative Republicans will be elected in droves in 2008. And their first order of business will be to begin the task of rebuilding half a dozen major American cities that were destroyed by al-Qaeda, while Congress was busy impeaching Bush for intercepting al-Qaeda phone calls.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 10, 2006, at the time of 05:11 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 08, 2006

Senate Report: Iraq and al-Qaeda

Congressional Calamities , Elections , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The first in a series of continuing, relatively short posts on the September 2006 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee comparing prewar and postwar intelligence on Iraq.

~

In contrast to the good news from Iraq, which the elite media bury in a dark editing room, in a locked closet, inside a filing cabinet, and stuffed into an old sardine tin, every headline today screams a wildly misleading characterization of what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare to Prewar Assessments actually reports. Viz., this Associated Press story:

Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq. The report also newly faults intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

Democrats contended that the administration continues to use faulty intelligence, including assertions of a link between Saddam's government and the recently killed al-Zarqawi, to justify the war in Iraq.

The way that AP carefully parses their sentences, it's hard to argue; they imply rather than demonstrate, making it difficult to refute. But having just finished reading the entire Senate Intelligence Committee's report, I have to say that it's far more tentative than AP makes it out to be.

And even the report itself fails to draw obvious conclusions from physical evidence, often relying instead upon what actors in the drama say during interrogations... actors with interests of their own.

The Senate report is a marvel of missing the forest for the trees: the senators spend too much time in the weeds; they never take a step back, a deep breath, and look at the whole picture. This leads them into folly again and again... and the Zarqawi-connection section is a perfect example.

I am utterly persuaded that Saddam Hussein saw al-Qaeda, and especially Musab Zarqawi up in Ansar al-Islam, as a "threat" to his regime. But that does not mean Hussein made any attempt to remove Zarqawi, nor that he did not harbor Zarqawi, nor even that he did not have an operational relationship with Zarqawi.

For heaven's sake, many Americans in the 1940s saw Communism as a threat to the United States (though the president did not)... but that did not stop FDR, with the support of the entire political establishment, from allying with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. There is an old proverb: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Thus, the central dichotomy of the AP story is a canard: there is no inherent conflict between fearing an enemy and allying with that same enemy.

So let's get to specifics.

It's absolutely correct that in October 2005, the CIA issued a report with that quotation, that "the regime did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates." AP's style in this endeavor (attempting to "prove" that Bush lied us into war) will not be one of overt, bald-faced lying, but rather subtle inueno that allows the reader to leap to a false conclusion.

The CIA in 2005 thus reversed its earlier assessment (in 2002) that Hussein did tolerate Zarqawi's presence in the Kurdish north. However, what AP omits is that other facts cited in that same section of the Senate report belie that mysterious reassessment by the CIA.

Notably this, covered on pages 93-96 of the pdf linked above (pp. 90-93 of the actual document): in October 2002, an unidentified foreign government -- probably acting as an Iraq-United States go-between -- demanded that Iraq arrest Zarqawi and four associates and extradite them to the U.S. Hussein -- desperately trying to stave off the pending American invasion, issued a written order to the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to arrest the five, who were up in Ansar al-Islam.

However, there is no indication that there was any serious attempt to act on these orders... which most likely means the written orders were for show and were countermanded by oral orders not to be vigorous about it. Instead, some low-level IIS agents were tasked with the job; but there's no indication they even went to Ansar al-Islam.

However, had Hussein really wanted to get Zarqawi -- thinking him such a danger to Iraq and having absolutely no connections to Zarqawi's group -- why didn't he use the IIS agents who had already infiltrated Ansar al-Islam? These infiltrators, discussed in the same passage of the Senate report, played no role in the supposed manhunt for Zarqawi.

Or for that matter, why didn't the Iraqis send troops into Ansar al-Islam itself to hunt for Zarqawi and his cabal? If Saddam Hussein really saw them as a threat, why not expend at least as much military force removing them as he expended massacring, relocating, and brutalizing his own people?

Eventually, Zarqawi left northeastern Iraq for Iran, transited Iran, and reentered Iraq in the south. But one of his associates named in the demand, Abu Yasim Sayyem, was captured. The Iraqis determined that he was indeed a member of (or contractor to) al-Qaeda, just as Zarqawi was. But rather than extradite him to the United States, they released him -- on direct orders from Saddam Hussein.

If we can pull our heads out of the weeds of specific bits and dribbles of intel for a moment, here is the big picture: Hussein's actions are not those of a brutal dictator who really wants to get rid of Musab Zarqawi or his band of merry men at Ansar al-Islam.

They are instead the actions of a brutal dictator who still thinks he can stave off a U.S. invasion and get sanctions lifted, especially "with a little help from his friends," the French, the Russians, and the Chinese. So he issues an order never intended to be obeyed, but which he can point to in order to show "good faith."

It turns out that the CIA's reassessment above was almost entirely based upon interviews with captured IIS agents and al-Qaeda members at Ansar al-Islam: each side denied there was any cooperation or treaty. Again, however, a little bit of common sense:

  1. Why would low-level flunkies in either the Iraqi Intelligence Service or Ansar al-Islam have any idea of a secret concordance between Hussein and Zarqawi? How many people do you think would be told about this?

    Is Zarqawi going to tell his fanatical Wahabbi followers that he's made a deal with that secular devil who outlawed Wahabbism? Is Hussein going to tell junior IIS officers that he has a cooperative agreement with the world's number-one terrorist, when that connection is already being used by the United States to push for war? This is silly; people at that level have no "need to know" and every reason to be kept in the dark.

  2. Even assuming that some of the detainees that the CIA interviewed were high enough up -- and trusted enough by Hussein or by Zarqawi -- to be privy to this information... why would they tell the truth to the CIA? What's in it for some fanatical Baathist or al-Qaeda jihadi? Answer: nothing!

So most detainees wouldn't even know, and those who did know have no incentive to tell the truth. Thus, the evidence upon which the CIA based its conclusion that there was no connection is utterly non-dispositive. So we're left with Hussein's actions: making no serious effort to capture them, and even turning loose the only Zarqawi affilliate he had.

At the very least, this is "turning a blind eye;" and it's equally consistent with "harboring" and having a "relationship." Once again, the CIA does yeoman work in muddying up the intel waters, casting vague aspersions on the Bush administration while never really coming out and alleging any specific crime, exaggeration, or moral failing... just a vague whiff of the "Bush lied" meme.

This first piece is important: for if the Senate report is faulty, vague, and misleading on the simple question of Saddam Hussein's relationship with Musab Zarqawi -- and if the pedestrian and non-specific "conclusions" of the report are mischaracterized into flat accusations by the elite media -- then how can anyone imagine they're dispositive on the much more complex questions of WMD programs, Saddam Hussein's intentions, his possible future relationship to terrorist groups, and indeed, the entire rationale of the war: that Hussein's Iraq represented a serious enough threat to the United States to warrant the invasion.

It cannot. This report is not, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, ) alleges,

A devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts” to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.

There is as much in this bipolar report to support such links as to refute them. Rather, Tony Snow is absolutely correct:

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told The Associated Press there was “nothing new” in the report, and that members of both political parties had agreed before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States.

“In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had, and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on,” Mr. Snow said.

Keep that in mind as we move on to other sections of the report over the next few days.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 08, 2006, at the time of 07:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 17, 2006

Anna Katherine Diggs Deep

Global War on Terrorism , Injudicious Judiciary , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

"The game is afoot," as Sherlock Holmes said. (Oh yes he did; in "the Adventure of the Abbey Grange," for example.)

The first federal judge has struck down President Bush's NSA al-Qaeda intercept program as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Anna Katherine Johnston Diggs Taylor ruled for the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs. They believe many of their overseas contacts are likely targets of the program, monitoring phone calls and e-mails between people in the U.S. and people in other countries when a link to terrorism is suspected.

I can only suppose that the ACLU's argument is similar to the well-known constitutional doctrine that police may not tail a reporter they believe may be meeting with a wanted serial killer for for purpose of writing a book about him, as the police action might make it more difficult in future for that reporter to arrange interviews with other wanted felons.

The White House reacted quickly and predictably. Tony Snow said:

"United States intelligence officials have confirmed that the program has helped stop terrorist attacks and saved American lives," he said. "The program is carefully administered and only targets international phone calls coming into or out of the United States where one of the parties on the call is a suspected al-Qaida or affiliated terrorist."

The ACLU reacted quickly and predictably. Anthony Romero said:

"At its core, today's ruling addresses the abuse of presidential power and reaffirms the system of checks and balances that's necessary to our democracy," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told reporters after the ruling.

He called the opinion "another nail in the coffin in the Bush administration's legal strategy in the war on terror."

Thank God for the Associated Press, or we would never guess how each party viewed the decision.

Interestingly, Judge Taylor was not appointed by Bill Clinton.

She was appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979 (type Taylor,Anna in the text box and click Go, then click on her name when it pops up). Thus, her decision was not only quick but also predictable.

Having such a high predictability factor makes the decision itself meaningless -- except as a starter's gun to tell us that the game... but I repeat myself.

I see this as more grist for my argument that it would indeed matter tremendously whether a Democrat or a Republican is elected president in 2008: even if their foreign policy goals would be more or less the same, I believe Democrats are allergic to decisive presidential authority in the collection of intelligence information on our enemies, when that requires tapping phones within the U.S., and its dissemination to the military (or even law enforcement), when that requires breaching Gorelick's Wall.

Since I also believe that Congress and the courts are lagging indicators in the war against jihadi terrorism, and that we can only win with robust use of the military authority of the executive branch, I conclude that electing a Democrat in 2008 would have profoundly bad consequences in the war -- as in, we would be much more likely to lose, or at least suffer terrible attacks that dwarf 9/11, while en route to the next Republican president.

Taylor's decision is not the final word, of course; we always knew this would eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. The next step will be a stay of the judge's order pending review by a circus court; then that court's decision will be stayed pending review by the Supreme Court (which will definitely accept the writ of certiorari).

As John Hinderaker of Power Line has pointed out in a number of posts, Judge Taylor's decision flies in the face of repeated rulings by various federal appellate courts, including the FISA court so much beloved by the Democrats -- today, that is, when they fantasize it might stand in Bush's way while he tries to defend the nation. Those rulings held uniformly that the president does indeed have such broad authority. More than likely, the Sixth Circuit will overturn Judge Taylor's decision, and it will be the ACLU that files for Supreme Court review.

But let's keep a sharp weather eye on this case; or, to quote Mr. Holmes once more, in an analogous context, "I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 17, 2006, at the time of 01:49 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 11, 2006

Article 3

Global War on Terrorism , Injudicious Judiciary , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

So today's media-driven episode of Bush Derangement Syndrome is the fallacious claim that, in some dramatic turnaround, the Bush administration now finally "admits" that terrorists are prisoners of war, entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Conventions as POWs -- including the right never to be interrogated. For example:

  • AP: U.S. Will Give Detainees Geneva Rights

    The Bush administration, called to account by Congress after the Supreme Court blocked military tribunals, said Tuesday all detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions....

    The policy, described in a memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, appears to change the administration's earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus not subject to the Geneva protections.

  • Reuters: US applies Geneva Convention to military detainees

    The Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that all detainees held by the U.S. military are covered by the protections of an article of the Geneva Conventions that bars inhumane treatment, according to a memo made public on Tuesday.
  • New York Times: In Big Shift, U.S. to Follow Geneva Treaty for Detainees

    The Bush administration called today for Congress to fix, rather than scrap, the system of military tribunals that was struck down by the Supreme Court last month, while the Pentagon pledged to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Conventions as the court required.

But as Ryan Sager [whoops, make that Jed Babbin... sorry, Jed!] at Real Clear Politics noted (I thought the same thing, but Babbin was there first), this is being completely -- and I (not Babbin) claim deliberately and with malice aforethought -- misreported by the antique media... because in fact, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who wrote the memo on July 7th, did not make any "shift" in U.S. policy; he quite openly proclaimed that this has been administration policy from the beginning: to apply specific elements of Article 3 to detainees in the war against jihadi terrorism.

There is certainly a danger, which Big Lizards recognized earlier, that subsequent and iterative federal court rulings may lunge further than the Hamdan decision and try to declare the detainees full-blown "prisoners of war." In fact, it appears that Justice John Paul Stevens, leading the pack of braying liberals on the Court, tried to do exactly that. If this happens, it will have catastrophic results in the GWOT.

But that is not what this memo does.

So we don't proceed in a vacuum, here is the relevant text:

The Supreme Court has determined that Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al Qaeda. The Court found that the military commissions as constituted by the Department of Defense are not consistent with Common Article 3.

It is my understanding that, aside from the military commission procedures, existing DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders, and doctrine comply with the standards of Common Article 3 and, therefore, actions by DoD personnel that comply with such issuances would comply with the standards of Common Article 3. For example, the following are consistent with the standards of Common Article 3: U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52, “Intelligence Interrogation,” September 28, 1992; DoD directive 3115.09, “DoD Intelligence Interrogation, Detainee Debriefings and Tactical Questioning,” November 3, 2005; DoD Directive 2311.01E, “DoD Law of War Program,” May 9, 2006; and DoD Instruction 2310.08E, “Medical Program Support for Detainee Operations,” June 6, 2006. In addition, you will recall the President’s prior directive that “the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely,” humane treatment being the overarching requirement of Common Article 3.

You will ensure that all DoD personnel adhere to these standards. In this regard, I request that you promptly review all relevant directives, regulations, policies, practices, and procedures under your purview to ensure that they comply with the standards of Common Article 3.

This is followed by a quotation of Article 3 of the 1947 conventions, which you may read for yourself here.

The most relevant sentence in the entire memo is the first sentence of the second paragraph, in which England makes plain that the administration's position is that currently existing DoD procedures already comply with Article 3; thus, except for the rules of military tribunals, there is no reason to change policy. Far from being a "big shift," England argues that this is what President Bush has been doing all along.

Note also how he answers the specific worry that Big Lizards enunciated earlier: that this ruling might lead to further rulings banning any interrogation at all of al-Qaeda "POWs," in accordance with other articles of the Geneva Conventions. For example, from Article 17 of those same conventions:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

If the courts were ever to rule that terrorist detainees were to be given all the rights and privileges of POWs, then Article 17 would apply -- and all interrogation of al-Qaeda detainees of any kind would have to cease the moment the detainee said "I refuse to answer." Instead, all we would be allowed to insist upon was his "surname, first names and rank, date of birth, and army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information."

In England's memo, he makes as crystal the administration's position that detainees are not "prisoners of war." The AP story is flatly wrong. If, as AP claims, the memo "appears to change the administration's earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus not subject to the Geneva protections," then how does AP read the next sentence in the second paragraph -- where England specifically notes that the DoD's policies anent "Intelligence Interrogations" are legal?

In addition, Article 21 begins thus:

The Detaining Power may subject prisoners of war to internment. It may impose on them the obligation of not leaving, beyond certain limits, the camp where they are interned, or if the said camp is fenced in, of not going outside its perimeter. Subject to the provisions of the present Convention relative to penal and disciplinary sanctions, prisoners of war may not be held in close confinement except where necessary to safeguard their health and then only during the continuation of the circumstances which make such confinement necessary.

That means, I believe, that they cannot be held in separate cages or prevented from assembling together and speaking privately -- as we currently do at Guantánamo Bay and likely every other terrorist detainment facility we operate. Again, if the courts started holding that terrorists were POWs, we would have to release them internally within Guantánamo to roam around freely within the camp, conspire together, and coordinate false answers to intelligence interrogations we wouldn't be allowed to conduct in the first place.

You cannot in the same breath say that al-Qaeda detainees are "prisoners of war" and also that we can engage in lengthy interrogations of them, treat them harshly to break them down, and deprive them of privileges if they don't answer or if they lie. There is no rational way that the reporters for the elite media could possibly have read the memo and actually come away with the misunderstanding that from now on, terrorists were POWs. Thus, any reporter who says such a thing is simply lying, as is the editor who allows him to publish.

Some people argue we should "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity." But in many venues, the precise opposite is more true: never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice.

Though it may comfort some to think so, reporters and editors at top media sources are not imbeciles. Bill Keller and Dean Baquey did not blow the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program and the terrorist-finance tracking program because they were ignorant; they, along with the reporters they edit, blew those programs (in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, respectively) because they hate those programs, they hate the war, they hate Bush, and they want America to lose.

Don't get me wrong, I do not question their patriotism; I nakedly say they have none. They hate Republicans and the president so intensely, it becomes an exquisite experience. It easily overwhelms whatever feeble love for country still remains after decades of relentless liberal brainwashing. As Churchill (Winston, not Ward) said, they swim in currents of hatred so strong, it sears their very souls.

So lying about some sort of flip-flop on the part of George W. Bush is a mere trifle, a bagatelle to the MSM. That's the one they do "twice on Sundays."

Thus, when you read the inevitable flood of stories sneering that Bush has surrendered, that he's been made to eat crow, that the administration has undertaken a "big shift," a turnaround, a 180 -- just bear in mind what you already know about the "lies and the lying liars who tell them" in the nation's newspapers, on television, and especially in the liberal blogs.

There is no policy change here: Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has simply reiterated that administration policy already complies with the specific demands of Geneva that apply to non-POWs... with the one exception of the specific procedures to be followed by the military tribunals.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 11, 2006, at the time of 02:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 29, 2006

Privacy? What Privacy?

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Sachi

The recent leak by the New York Times and other news organizations, disclosing how the government tracks the money of terrorists, is quite a little puzzle to me: the Times acts as if this government program somehow violates our financial privacy.

But if they think the feds never looked into our bank accounts prior to this program, they're dreaming! The FBI has been monitoring our private banking transactions, in far more intrusive ways, for literally decades.

I used to work at Sanwa bank, and every morning we received a report of "suspicious transactions," sent us by the central office. In addition, we constantly monitored transactions looking for certain patterns that might indicate check kiting (large deposit quickly followed by a large withdrawal, low average balance, all timed around a check's "floating" period).

If we decided a crime might be occurring, we reported all this information to the FBI... including records of the account transactions (without any warrant). Besides that, we also reported to the FBI anyone who deposited or withdrew a large amount of cash. Overseas wire transfers with certain characteristics were also reported to the feds.

All this intrusive monitoring and information-sharing with law enforcement was mostly to track money laundering by drug runners. All banks in the United States are still required by the federal government to follow these monitoring and reporting rules. If the Timeses (New York and Los Angeles) ever complained about this Orwellian violation of "privacy" by the FBI, I must have missed the article.

It seems these newspapers can tolerate incredible penetration into our personal bank account information just to catch check kiters and drug dealers... but they cannot abide the much smaller intrusions, looking only at the transactions of large businesses, governments, and NGOs, in order to catch terrorists who have killed our fellow citizens and plot to destroy the rest of us!

It's beyond me. Maybe someone can explain how it's "totally different."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 29, 2006, at the time of 03:03 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 25, 2006

The InSpecter General

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 63%) announced on Fox News Sunday that he and la Casablanca were nearing "agreement" on a bill to gift the president with the power he already has via the Constitution.

That's mighty big of him.

Bush and senior officials in his administration have said they did not think changes were needed to empower the National Security Agency to eavesdrop - without court approval - on communications between people in the U.S. and overseas when terrorism is suspected.

But Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and other critics contend the program skirted a 1978 law that required the government to get approval from a secretive federal court before Americans could be monitored.

"We're getting close with the discussions with the White House, I think, to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Specter told "Fox New Sunday."

My first question is -- has Specter even bothered to look at the voluminous case history on this subject... including a case already decided by the FISA court? As John Hinderaker has discussed (repeatedly) on Power Line, the FISA court decided Sealed Case No. 02-001 in 2002; in the opinion, the court wrote:

The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

John himself concludes,

That is the current state of the law. The federal appellate courts have unanimously held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless searches for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence information, which includes information about terrorist threats. Furthermore, since this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution, the FISA Review Court has specifically recognized that it cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional action.

That being the case, the NSA intercept program, which consists of warrantless electronic intercepts for purposes of foreign intelligence gathering, is legal.

So did Arlen Specter really look at any of this before proclaiming that "the program skirted a 1978 law that required the government to get approval from a secretive federal court before Americans could be monitored?" I have never heard a single word from the InSpecter General to indicate he has inspected the case histories, or in fact, that he even knows case histories exist.

I have always thought Arlen Specter is a doofus. He is a self-important, narcissistic pinhead with delusions of adequacy. Viz:

Specter has said that the president "does not have a blank check"....

"We're having a lot of conversations about that," Specter said Sunday. He added that he and Vice President Dick Cheney have exchanged letters and that Cheney has indicated that he was serious about discussing the issue.

"I've talked to ranking officials in the White House, and we're close," Specter said. "I'm not making any predictions until we have it all nailed down, but I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for the protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties."

What did Specter do, swallow a copy of Jane's All the World's Platitudes? This is vacuity on parade.

Thank God we have Specter washing our backs, that's what I say; so let's put it out on the stoop and see if anyone salutes. Let's give it the old college cry -- to the bottlemints! But we can't expect to make a silk purse out of a mole hole: sooner or later, we'll have to bite the bulletin, so it's time to fish or get off the pot. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen sink.

I'm with Arlen: it's time to drain the fever pitch. If wishes were horses, beggars would be a different color. Lie down with pigs, get up smelling like gazpacho.

Does anybody in Pennsylvania ever listen to this guy?

In the Danny Kaye move The Inspector General, Kaye plays Georgi, an illiterate shill in a snake-oil medicine show who impersonates an important government official (hijinks ensue). Considering the similarities between him and Arlen Specter, I think Sen. Georgi would be better for the country.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 25, 2006, at the time of 07:27 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

May 11, 2006

Excavating For Bones of a Scandal

CIA CYA , Congressional Calamities , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The scandal du jour is that the National Security Agency (NSA) has evidently been data-mining records of phone calls, which has every Democrat and a few hand-wringing Republicans in an uproar. (And does anyone doubt that USA Today chose yesterday, of all days, to release their original story in an effort to torpedo the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to head up the CIA?)

Alas, but hardly unexpectedly, many medioids and politicians appear to be conflating this story with the unrelated NSA al-Qaeda intercept story (Reuters most obviously, which I'll highlight below). But I'm way ahead of myself; let's first describe what is actually going on, assuming USAToday can be believed.

Journalistic archeology

The first point to make is that this is not a new story. The New York Times first published a story about this back in December, 2005, just a week after the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program was blown. It is thus quite clear that the USA Today story is recycled old scandal-mongering from last year... and the only NSA-related story recently that could have sparked this renewed interest is (quite obviously) the nomination of Gen. Hayden. From the December NYT story:

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

Sounds strangely familiar, yes? This is clearly the exact, same story as the one USA Today "broke" yesterday. Nowhere does yesterday's USA Today article divulge that the Times scooped them by four and a half months, and neither AP nor Reuters seems to be able to remember back that far.

Today's Times story credits USA Today with the story in paragraph two; but it does not mention that this is old stuff, long ago reported by the Times itself, until the twelfth paragraph. Even then, it mentions its own earlier story in such an oblique, laconic fashion -- followed by a lurid charge supported only by Mr. Anonymous -- that readers could easily be excused for missing the point that this is old, dessicated outrage:

The New York Times reported last December that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

But Democrats reacted angrily to the USA Today article and its description of the program's vast size, including an assertion by one unnamed source that its goal was the creation of a database of every phone call ever made within the United States' borders.

(I find it more than a little surprising that the Times would be more interested in pushing this as Today's scandal than claiming their own primacy from yesteryear. But then, there is the urgent task of preventing George W. Bush from naming a new CIA chief... at least, anyone other than, oh, Francis Fargo Townsend -- whom I discussed in dire, sepulchral tones, and not without some boxing about the ears, some months ago on Captain's Quarters.)

So with all this as prelude, what exactly is the NSA doing? What's the hoo-hah all about?

How it works

The Times (today's) has a succinct description:

The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by "tens of millions of Americans" and used it for "data mining" — computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity.... [The quotation "tens of millions" is from Patrick Leahy. -- the Mgt.]

"It's not a wiretapping program, it's simply a compilation, according to the report here, of numbers that phone companies maintain," said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who is also on the judiciary panel.

He compared it to "mail covers" and "pen registers," techniques long used by law-enforcement authorities to record the addresses on letters or calls made by individuals under investigation. No warrant is needed for such efforts, but the government must certify with a court that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing investigation....

The Times article disclosing the data mining program last December quoted officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program as saying the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

So the discussion is not about "surveillance," it's about traffic analysis; and it has nothing to do with the al-Qaeda intercept program -- except that both are conducted by the NSA and the administration argues (and caselaw seems to agree) that neither requires a court order.

But note how the antique media conflate the two cases, either foolishly or with malice aforethought. Reuters has the clearest example:

Bush said last year the eavesdropping only targeted communications between a person inside the United States and a person overseas. But USA Today said calls originating and terminating within the United States had also been included in the database.

Note the 'Bush said, but we've discovered' formula here, designed to make it appear as though Bush has been caught out in a lie. In fact, the president said that the eavesdropping was only on international calls; this is a completely different program that doesn't include any eavesdropping at all.

So Bush is telling the truth, and it's Reuters who is indirectly lying -- or else acting in reckless disregard for the truth. The other media articles I read more or less conflated the two "scandals" as well (it's a scandal we weren't doing them before 9/11), though more subtlely.

Why it works

I would guess that the NSA notes suspicious surges of traffic: for example, suppose there is a bulge of phone calls from all over the country to some obscure number in Afghanistan... and then the calls abruptly cease. Two days later, there is some major al-Qaeda attack in Afghanistan or Packistan. If I were a judge, I think that would be probable cause for me to issue a warrant to let the CIA or FBI find out who owns the telephone numbers that called Afghanistan just before the bombing, particularly if the NSA could demonstrate that this same pattern had happened before.

What is the point? If indeed various people not previously of interest to lawn forcement were consistently calling suspected al-Qaeda affilliates shortly before attacks, they may well be al-Qaeda agents here in the United States: under the al-Qaeda intercept program, their calls could be tapped.

But what about purely domestic? Suppose there were a major al-Qaeda attack somewhere in the world. It might be very valuable to backtrack through the record to find any calls made to some Islamic charity -- even if America-based -- that's linked to the group that carried out the attack, looking for calls that didn't fit the usual pattern: for example, a large burst of calls from specific (domestic) numbers just a week before the attack. Then you'd want to backtrack on those numbers, perhaps finding a similar bulge in telephone traffic to the first numbers from a small number of other domestic phone numbers.

Finally, you might find that the second group of domestic numbers got a number of calls from the city where the attack took place. Again, if I'm a judge, that's certainly good enough for me to issue a warrant, for those domestic numbers can certainly be reasonably suspected of being in the al-Qaeda daisy chain.

Bear in mind that these databases of phone calls already exist; the NSA just wants to consolidate them in an NSA database. This makes the search a matter of moments, rather than days or even weeks, as they try to figure out which carrier each call uses and subpoena the records from that carrier for that specific number.

There are some civil-liberties concerns; with all those numbers at their fingerends, it's possible the NSA might go romping through them, just "for the heck of it" (Leahy's words), including numbers that show no unusual traffic. But why? Why would they waste their time and resources? In any event, without showing some rational reason for having done so, they certainly couldn't produce any such findings in court.

I suppose the Democrats are frantic that the administration will somehow use this database to round up all Democratic dissidents and throw them into Gitmo. But that seems even more farfetched than the nutty claims by conspiracy theorists that Bill Clinton was systematically assassinating anyone who had evidence against him.

Democratic eruptions

Another difference: only wackos ever waved around the "Clinton death list;" but the equally insane conspiracy mongering against President Bush has gone mainstream. From today's Times:

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking minority member, asked angrily. [Asked who? The empty air? The Senate J-Com hasn't called any witnesses on this allegation, so far as the Times reports.]

Like Mr. Specter, Mr. Leahy made a link between the new charge and the administration's refusal to answer the many of the committee's questions about the security agency's warrantless wiretaps of calls between the United States and overseas in which one person is suspected of terrorist ties.

[They certainly briefed the intelligence committees; the administration did refuse to answer questions from Patrick Leahy -- who was forced to leave the Senate Intelligence Committee some years ago after being caught leaking classified information. Hm....]

"It's our government, our government!" he said, turning red in the face and waving a copy of USA Today. "It's not one party's government, it's America's government!"

Good heavens, I hope Sen. "Leaky" Leahy has a good cardiologist.

If anything, Sen. Charles Schumer's (D-NY) response was even more humorous, albeit in a refined way. Monday morning Schumer:

I think Hayden's a fine man, but I think keeping the agency independent is really important so the president gets truthful and unvarnished information and I worry that having someone so close to the Defense Department could jeopardize that independence.

Wednesday afternoon Schumer (from the Times story today):

"I want to ask General Hayden about these programs before we move forward with his nomination, which I was inclined to be supportive of, if he showed the requisite independence," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee.

All right -- how exactly did Schumer teleport from being "worried" to being "inclined to be supportive of," with no movement visible to the naked eye?

Finally, let's hear from a Democrat who is actually on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee that oversees the CIA and NSA and which President Bush claims was fully briefed. Here is Dianne Feinstein, hardly a Bush cheerleader:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee, appeared to confirm at least the gist of the article, while stressing that what was under discussion was not wiretapping. "It's fair to say that what is in the news this morning is not content collection," she said.

Regardless of her opinion on the policy, it is quite clear from the fact that she could "confirm" the story that Sen. Feinstein was, in fact, familiar with it. In other words, Bush is telling the truth, and the relevant congressional committees were kept informed and up to date.

Taking stock

So let's summarize where we stand now:

  • There is no new scandal; this was thoroughly reported and discussed last year;
  • The only reason it's bubbling up now is that former NSA head Michael Hayden was nominated to be Director of the CIA;
  • It's purpose and relation to defending the nation from terrorist attack is absolutely clear;
  • The Senate and presumptively the House Intelligence Committees have were thoroughly briefed on the NSA pattern-analysis program, just as they were on the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program;
  • Some Republicans not on the intelligence committees -- such as perennial pain Arlen Specter -- appear miffed that they weren't in the loop;
  • There are some civil-liberties concerns about which we should proceed cautiously; but they would require actual lawbreaking on the part of some administration for there to be a serious problem. Those who believe the Bush administration is constantly breaking the law, throwing people in secret prisons, and spying on them just "for the heck of it" will doubtless be even more frightened now;
  • Many Democrats are reacting with chair-jumping, skirt lifting hysteria at this little mouse of a "scandal;"
  • The Democrats plan to use this to try to sabotage Hayden's appointment, the war on jihadi terrorism, and (much more important) Bush's legacy.

Does that about cover it?

The deadly danger of incessant leaking

Well, not quite. There is this rather jaw-dropping point made in every, single story about this program, which appears to be the only original contribution from USA Today. From yesterday's Today:

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest.

Talk about giving jihadis a road map for getting around the NSA program...! I'm sure there will be a surge of people signing up for Qwest phone service now -- mostly paranoid liberals who believe they're so important that "the Man" is constantly trying to surveil them (I've known several such folks). But I wonder how many terrorists will rush to grab Qwest-based cell phones, now that they know?

Thanks, NSA leakers, for violating your oath and putting the country at risk, just to damage George Bush. I'm sure Americans across the nation appreciate the tradeoff.

And a hearty handshake to phone provider Qwest, for offering the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a safe haven for his "privacy rights." Evidently, it's no violation for Qwest to maintain that same database for its own commercial purposes (or to sell to other companies for advertising)... but letting the NSA use it to track terrorist attacks is just beyond the pale.

Of course, Qwest's non-cooperation was also leaked to USA Today by some helpful saint within the NSA. To paraphrase Travis Bickle, we need a big rain to come and wash all the trash out of our clandestine services.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 11, 2006, at the time of 04:12 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

March 09, 2006

Captain Ed's Gitmo Project, Tribunal Set 28

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Captain Ed has been collecting victims to review -- I'm sorry, requesting volunteers to review the unclassified case files of various detainee tribunal hearings. He wants us to determine if there is good reason in these files to still be holding these people in Guantanamo Bay, or whether it appears as though a miscarriage of military justice has occurred.

This post will be cross-posted to Captain's Quarters; abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The first point to make -- and it's a biggie -- is that we only get to see the unclassified information. The tribunals are also given access to classified evidence from the case files. Clearly, the most damning evidence would most likely be present only in the classified evidence, as that is where all the intel from American and Coalition agents, witness identifications, and classified documentary evidence is kept.

So I cannot really answer whether any of these detainees is wrongly held; I can only give a partial answer there. I can, however, state if I think there is good reason, even in the unclassified evidence, to continue to hold that detainee.

So it's a little one-sided, but there's nothing I can do about that.

Set 28 of the tribunal hearings comprises six distinct detainee cases. Some are identified by name, but as this is irrelevant, I'll just refer to them by the order in which they appear in the pdf. Here are my quick summaries and first-impression conclusions (from the 52-page pdf):

  1. The first detainee admits he served with the Taliban, but he says they drafted him. Other than this allegation, I found nothing in the unclassified section that would justify continued detention.
  2. This detainee admits he obtained a fake Chadian passport with a false name. He is accused of consorting with known al-Qaeda agents and engaging in military operations against the United States and the Coalition. If these charges are well sourced (the evidence would be in the classified section), then certainly he should be held.
  3. This one was captured in Pakistan in the company of known al-Qaeda agents. He was wearing a Casio F-91W watch, which is commonly used by al-Qaeda in timing devices used for explosives. He is also accused of taking training at the al-Qaeda run Khalden Camp.

    He gave evasive and contradictory answers during questioning. For example, he claims he "flew" from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, but the trip took him a week. He says he went to get medical treatment for his back; he says his back is hurt by cold weather. And he claims to have emigrated from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan because the weather in Pakistan is "warmer." There is ample reason, even in the unclassified section, to hold this detainee.
  4. There is nothing even alleged in the unclassified portion that would justify holding this one.
  5. This one stayed for months in a camp run by a known al-Qaeda front organization, but he says he didn't notice. He was IDed as an al-Qaeda agent. He gave inconsistent answers during questioning: for example, he said that while in Yemen, he decided he wanted to go to Europe as a political refugee, because of the way North Yemens treated South Yemens... so he toddled off to Pakistan. I am looking at a map of the Middle East, and by golly, Yemen to Pakistan appears to be travel in the opposite direction from Europe.

    He admits he illegally entered Iran. There is plenty of reason to hold this detainee.
  6. The last case is a detainee accused of being a commander in Hezb-i-Islami, under the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. When the accusation was read to the detainee, he claimed that HIG was fighting on the side of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. But when I looked them up, it turns out they were actually allied with Mullah Omar and the Taliban, and they are still fighting against American soldiers today. I'm suspicious that this was an attempt at disinformation by the detainee.

    He was also IDed as an al-Qaeda member; and he was so evasive during questioning that even I felt like slapping him around some. For example, he couldn't or wouldn't answer the question of whether he was in the Taliban until the fifth time he was asked. He was asked what documents he had with him, and he went into a Vinnie Barbarino routine: where? with you. in my pockets? yes, in your pockets. Where? This guy should absolutely be held; he has something he's hiding, in my opinion.

And that's it. I'm not sure how useful all this will be, but I've done my bit for "the cause." ("Cause" Captain Ed asked me to, that's what cause!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 09, 2006, at the time of 04:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 08, 2006

At Last - Intelligence In the Intelligence War

Military Machinations , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Frustrated by repeated leaks and contrarian policies, the Bush administration must be wondering how it can fight a two-front war: one front abroad, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere in the world, fighting against jihadis... and the other domestically, against the Central Intelligence Agency, which has consistently demonstrated its determination not only to support but to control foreign policy.

Now, the New York Times reports that more and more battlefield intelligence, even strategic intel, is going to come from Special Ops military intelligence forces -- not the compromised and untrustworthy CIA.

The new mission could become a major responsibility for the military's fast-growing Special Operations Command, which was authorized by President Bush in March 2004 to take the lead in military operations against terrorists. Its new task could give the command considerable clout in organizing the nation's overall intelligence efforts.

The Special Operations command reports to Mr. Rumsfeld, and falls outside the orbit controlled by John D. Negroponte, the newly established director of national intelligence, who oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies.

These new teams, called Military Liaison Elements, are not just tasked with gathering intel but with acting upon it:

Special Operations forces include the Army Green Berets and Rangers, the Navy Seals, the Marines and special Air Force crews that carry out the most specialized or secret military missions. Their skills range from quick strikes to long-range reconnaissance in hostile territory, military training and medical care.

Needless to say, the CIA is fuming about this. They are outraged that for no apparent reason, apart from their five-year war against President Bush, the commander in chief is cutting their turf out from under them.

"The Department of Defense is very eager to step up its involvement in counterterrorism activities, and it has set its sights on traditional C.I.A. operational responsibilities and authorities," said John O. Brennan, a 25-year C.I.A. officer who headed the National Counterterrorism Center before retiring last year. "Quite unfortunately, the C.I.A.'s important lead role in many of these areas is being steadily eroded, and the current militarization of many of the nation's intelligence functions and responsibilities will be viewed as a major mistake in the very near future."

Mr. Brennan, now president of the Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contractor in Virginia, said that if Socom operations were closely coordinated with host countries and American ambassadors, "U.S. interests could be very well served."

But, he added, "if the planned Socom presence in U.S. embassies abroad is an effort to pave the way for unilateral U.S. military operations or to enable defense elements to engage in covert action activities separate from the C.I.A., U.S. problems abroad will be certain to increase significantly."

I think this is an excellent idea. The CIA has proven itself to be not only disloyal but extraordinarily fumble-footed... missing such big stories as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the nuclear detonations by Pakistan and India, the A.Q. Khan WMD-of-the-month club... and then first assuring the president that finding "large stockpiles of WMD" in Iraq was a "slam dunk"... and then eagerly participating in covering up the massive quantities of dual-use WMD we did find, labeling it "civilian" -- when quite clearly Iraq had no conceivable peaceful purpose for, e.g., massive quantities of Cyclosarin-based pesticides stored in camouflaged ammunition bunkers, right next to chemical-ready but unloaded munitions.

And they're still at it:

The Special Operations Command has not publicly disclosed the Military Liaison Element mission, and answered questions about the effort only after it was described by officials in other parts of the government who oppose the program.

We must undertake every opportunity to shift intel responsibility from an agency that wants peace at any cost to one that is at least willing to consider that sometimes, war really is the answer.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 08, 2006, at the time of 05:50 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 18, 2006

FISA or Congress Should Oversee NSA Program

Congressional Calamities , Constitutional Maunderings , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Really, I have no problem with what Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, just said:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, breaking ranks with the president on domestic eavesdropping, says he wants a special court to oversee the program.

But less than a day later, a top aide to Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., sought to clarify his position.

Roberts told The New York Times that he is concerned that the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act could not issue warrants as quickly as the monitoring program requires. But he is optimistic that the problem could be worked out.

"You don't want to have a situation where you have capability that doesn't work well with the FISA court, in terms of speed and agility and hot pursuit," Roberts said Friday.

So is Roberts being inconsistent? Incoherent? Is it flip-flopping? Not at all... this perception only exists because most people in the Antique Media talked themselves into believing that "oversight" is synonymous with "complete day-to-day control." That is, they think that any sort of court oversight must necessarily require a warrant prior to every act of surveillance by the National Security Agency.

In fact, oversight works very differently. Roberts' own committe, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has "oversight" over the CIA; but that doesn't mean that CIA officials must get committee approval before engaging in any spying. Rather, it means that the committee periodically reviews what the CIA is doing and has done; and if there is a problem, the committee can summon CIA officials to explain what happened (in secret session).

This model could work fine with the FISA court and the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program: the program would continue as before, with all decisions made by the National Security Agency, the national intelligence director, and up the chain to the president. Then periodically -- let's say every three months -- the NSA submits a quarterly review to the FISA court of what surveillance it has conducted, how it obtained those telephone numbers or e-mail accounts, whether Americans were involved, and if so, what steps the NSA took to safeguard the constitutional rights of those Americans caught up in this program.

The FISA court could review this report. Of all federal courts, the one set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is best at keeping secrets -- as the recent reference to "Sealed Case No. 02-001," decided in 2002 by the FISA Court of Review, should make clear.

Even the Supreme Court's Hamdi decision in 2004 allowed for some sort of judicial review of the executive's actions during wartime, albeit in the more normal judiciary mode of examining specific cases brought by specific defendants. But I don't know if there is precedent for (or against) a court more generally overseeing a program's constitutionality, as Roberts evidently proposes here.

It is more natural and fitting for those quarterly NSA reports to go to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- since Congress, not the courts, is charged with overseeing the executive on a regular basis. I'm less pleased at a plan that would put such oversight in the hands of the judiciary, though I'm not radically opposed to the idea.

Captain Ed makes somewhat the same point in a post of his today -- though he seems skeptical that even Congress has any role here:

Due to the current political climate and a desire to move on with the program, the White House has signalled that it will respect reasonable oversight conditions of Congress. Now, however, Congress has decided that the political cost of owning the surveillance program might be too high and has decided to punt the entire responsibility to a group of appointed secret judges instead.

After quoting from a story similar to the one I linked above, Cap continues:

I still think either approach is superfluous; the executive has always had the ability to perform warrantless searches for those who cross international borders, including luggage and persons, and that's in peacetime. Where FISA demands that the executive bow to Congress in wartime espionage, the statute is clearly not only unconstitutional but also defies 200 years of precedent in the allocation of war powers. [Emphasis added]

But this is not what Roberts suggested. What Captain Ed means is that Congress cannot remove the president's Article II power to wage war. But certainly there is nothing in the Constitution barring Congress from overseeing the executive's conduct in that war. Congress can defund the war, for example; it must consent to the president's appointment of the secretary of defense and the service secretaries, even during wartime; and clearly it can choose to impeach a president -- even right in the middle of a war (that last may be unwise, but it's not unconstitutional). Each of these duties might require Congress to investigate the executive's actions... hence the need for committee oversight.

As to the courts, Hamdi gave great latitude to the president and implicitly noted his inherent powers... though it stopped short of formally endorsing them, as John Hinderaker explains, since it found the Authorization for the Use of Military Force sufficient to justify the capture and detention of even American citizens as enemy combatants during wartime. But it also clearly established that courts could and would review individual cases.

Would we really want it otherwise? Would we really want a future President Hillary Rodham to be allowed to arrest and detain as an "enemy combatant" the future Sen. Michael Steele, her Republican opponent for re-election? The balance the Court struck in Hamdi was correct.

And a balance can be struck here which would reassure the people that the NSA program is not trampling over anybody's civil liberties, would assuage the wounded feelings of a Congress that correctly believes it has some oversight authority over the program, yet still leave the day to day operation of the program completely in the hands of the executive -- that branch best suited to instant action, precisely because it is neither democratic nor deliberative in operation. Cabinet members may advise, but they get no vote in what the president decides to do.

If that's what Roberts means by "oversight," and I think it is, then the president will have no objection to signing such a bill, and it will not in any way impair his inherent and completely constitutional authority to conduct the war as he sees fit -- subject only to post-hoc review by the relevant branch, whichever that turns out to be.

(And if he wants to make it clear, he can always include a signing statement.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 18, 2006, at the time of 06:04 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 16, 2006

Follow-Up to Wait -- Erase, Erase, Erase...

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Following up on an earlier Big Lizards post, it appears as though we were correct: a deal is in the works to abort the politically stupid fight against the NSA al-Qaeda-communications intercept program. According to CBS:

Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts said he has worked out an agreement with the White House to change U.S. law regarding the National Security Agency's warrantless telephone surveillance program and provide more information about it to Congress.

"We are trying to get some movement, and we have a clear indication of that movement," Roberts said.

Without offering specifics, Roberts said the agreement with the White House provides "a fix" to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and offers more briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The portent is self evident, though that doesn't stop us from pointing it out anyway: the Senate is backing hurriedly away from an investigation in a strategic rearward advance. The "more briefings" is just so they don't lose their entire face.

The deal comes as the committee was set to have a meeting Thursday about whether to open an investigation into the hotly disputed program. Roberts indicated the deal may eliminate the need for such an inquiry.

Finally, in a brazen and likely desperate rewrite of history, CBS (the "fake but accurate" network) produces its own version of the political dynamic:

Democrats have been demanding an investigation but some Republicans don't want to tangle the panel in a testy election-year probe. [!]

Yeah, that's it... the Democrats were poised to destroy the Bush administration, probably forcing the president to resign; but the Republicans -- who have so much to lose in this year's election by the Democrats attacking a vital national-security program to intercept al-Qaeda communications -- are the ones who will kill the probe. Yep, the Democrats were just itching, itching to have three months of prime-time, broadcast hearings demanding to know why the administration has finally begun connecting the dots.

No matter how the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence vote, I suspect they're all breathing a sigh of relief, much like a condemned man already strapped to the table when the phone call from the governor finally arrives.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 16, 2006, at the time of 06:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Extra! Judge Orders US to Lose War on Terrorism

Court Decisions , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

And the "free press" fails to notice or care. (Hat tip to commenter MTF.)

A Clinton-appointed judge, Henry Kennedy (Harvard Law, Washington D.C. practice and judgeship), has abruptly ordered the Department of Justice to hand over a huge bunch of critical and highly classified documents to a "civil liberties" organization, the Electronic Privacy Information Center... a group so radical, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation is leery of them.

Records sought by the group include an audit of the program, a “checklist” guide used to determine whether an individual’s phone or e-mail messages could be monitored, documents showing how information gleaned through eavesdropping had been used, and other legal opinions about the program.

In addition to these documents, the judge ordered the DoJ to give EPIC "a document index and declaration stating its justification for withholding any documents within 30 days," just in case the "privacy" group wants to rummage around to see if there are any cool docs they missed asking for the first time.

~

Instant Update Department: CBS disagrees with NBC about whether the judge actually ordered the documents released:

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen says that while this is a victory for the plaintiffs, it is by no means a major ruling that will instantly lift the lid of secrecy from the spying program.

"The judge didn't order the feds to suddenly release all sorts of classified or secret information. All the judge did was to tell the Justice Department that it has to speed up its response to a request for information about the National Security Agency program," said Cohen. "And the information that initially will be released will be very unspecific. The big battles are yet to come over how much of this stuff eventually is made public."

However, the MSNBC article quotes Judge Kennedy:

“Given the great public and media attention that the government’s warrantless surveillance program has garnered and the recent hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the public interest is particularly well served by the timely release of the requested documents,” he said.

Let 'em duke it out.

~

Two other groups joined in the lawsuit, the ACLU and the National Security Archive -- which, despite its official sounding name, is actually a radical-Left private group obsessed with opposing any American foreign policy that involves confronting evil. Thus, they deeply oppose the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program and equate it with cold-war "domestic" surveillance programs that they believe are already discredited. (The ACLU's interests and motivations I think we all know about already.) However, the lead counsel in the case before Judge Kennedy is David Sobel, who is one of the founders of EPIC.

EPIC itself appears to be a radical-libertarian organization much in the mold of the EFF, but much less willing to accept that anything at all should be secret. There is a certain breed of libertarian which I run into all the time: freedom of information becomes such an overwhelming, almost religious cause, that they completely lose all perspective and (for example) demand an end to copyright, full release of all national-security documents without exception or redaction, the release of all personal and private information about government officials -- all under the mantra "information wants to be free."

Then they will turn around and demand complete protection of any and all private information of any private person, again without exception, not even for criminal suspects served with search warrants... presumably on the theory that "some information wants to be withheld." Eventually, it dawns on one that what they really are is simply anti-government: they want to pull down any and all regulation... but they haven't the slightest interest in coming up with anything to replace it. (Even Thomas Jefferson wanted some form of central organization.)

In this case, of course, EPIC, the ACLU, and the National Security Archive completely dismiss (if they've even thought about it) the possibility that details of the NSA program might be secret for good reason; and there is no indication that Judge Kennedy considered that possibility, either -- how could it possibly be vital for national security to keep secret details of all that "domestic surveillance without a warrant?"

I can understand wacky, ultra-libertarian, "information freedom" folks being willing to publish anything without regard to consequences. But a federal judge? Even a Clinton appointee? I assume this will be swiftly overturned on appeal (District of Columbia circuit), because if it isn't, the effect will be catastrophic. The courts may as well order the release of all technical information on building nuclear warheads.

What is most telling is that neither MSNBC nor the Washington Post so much as addresses the possibility that some secrets are worth keeping. MSNBC doesn't even mention it, while the Post has the following deep examination of the conflict between liberty and security:

Given the highly classified nature of the program, the Bush administration is likely to withhold all information about it.

That's it; question resolved. Neither bothers interviewing anybody at the DoJ about whether it's a good idea to publish enough information to allow al-Qaeda to completely bypass our attempts to monitor them; remember, one of the documents the groups requested (that the judge ordered released) is "a 'checklist' guide used to determine whether an individual’s phone or e-mail messages could be monitored." Clearly, if al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups know the criteria by which we decide which communications to monitor, they can tailor their communications not to trigger the monitoring... is that really a reach?

This is completely mad. The purpose of this program is to intercept communications of a terrorist organization sworn to destroy us; Surely this argument must be faced even by those who oppose the program. They should say, "no, it won't damage national security, because..." and provide some sort of reason, no matter how half-baked. To ignore it completely is mystifying and overtly suspicious.

But if one doesn't accept the idea that national security is an important consideration at all, it follows that the non-existent national-security issue can't possibly trump the Public's Right to Know™; there's no reason even to mull the question. And that, alas, is the sorry state to which the Antique Media has sunk under the weight of so much left-liberal ballast.

(On the all-important diction watch, on the WaPo story, they do manage to refer to "warrantless surveillance;" but the body of the article fails to include the word "domestic." The headline does, but that's generally written by someone other than the reporter; hence we cannot award the Post full points. The MSNBC story fails to disappoint: they refer to "President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program," and then quote Judge Kennedy calling it "warrantless surveillance," hitting both required moves for full credit.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 16, 2006, at the time of 05:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Wait -- Erase, Erase, Erase...

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

This story, while brand new in the press, is already ancient (dare I say antique?) in the blogosphere: evidently, the Democrats (and RINOs) have just now discovered that their whole attack on the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program isn't going very well for them... and it appears they're about to drop the punitive probe without apology or even a backward glance.

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.

(Hat tip to Captain Ed.)

There is not yet evidence from the MSM that the Democrats are ready to stop gnawing on this bone; no Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has publicly come out and said he will vote against the inquiry. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

(Of course, we now learn from the media that, by making us wait until tomorrow, the Democrats are engaging in a cover-up -- just as the MSM decreed that making the White House press gang wait eighteen hours to find out "Dead-Eye" Dick shot a lawyer means Cheney was trying to "cover up" the accident.)

I really just wanted to highlight the "two-fer" above: both warrantless and domestic surveillance in the same sentence above -- in two successive paragraphs!

Somebody's aiming for an Olympic record.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 15, 2006, at the time of 07:55 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 13, 2006

Operation "Pinch"

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The noose slowly tightens... around New York Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, jr.?

Let's jump into the great news right away:

Federal agents have interviewed officials at several of the country's law enforcement and national security agencies in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program, according to government officials.

The investigation, which appears to cover the case from 2004, when the newspaper began reporting the story, is being closely coordinated with criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, the officials said. People who have been interviewed and others in the government who have been briefed on the interviews said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry that could lead to criminal charges.

That news alone would be great news -- that Bush is not just paying lip service to investigating who is doing all this leaking, but is vigorously pursuing the inquiry. But it has become increasingly obvious that this time, the grand jury proceedings will not be limited to the government leakers... the criminal investigation will include those who knowingly received and passed along classified information: the reporters and editors of the New York Times.

An upcoming article in Commentary magazine suggests that the newspaper may be prosecuted for violations of the Espionage Act and says, "What The New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism...."

Recently, federal authorities have used espionage statutes to move beyond prosecutions of government officials who disclose classified information to indict private citizens who receive it. In the case of a former Pentagon analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, who pleaded guilty to disclosing defense secrets, federal authorities have charged Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.

The two men have been indicted on charges of turning over information obtained from Mr. Franklin to a foreign government, which has been identified as Israel, and to journalists. At Mr. Franklin's sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Va., Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court said he believed that private citizens and government employees must obey laws against illegally disseminating classified information.

"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law," Judge Ellis said. "That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."

I have believed for a long time that the real reason we have so many leaks of highly classified materials is that so many journalists are now willing, even eager, to publish it without the faintest regard for the damage it may cause to the United States -- or even worse, happy to cause such damage, if they think the Democrats might gain a political advantage from it.

The fact that the Left is usually dead wrong in its assessment how the story will play with real America is completely irrelevant: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, the authors of the original December 16th, 2005 Times article disclosing the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program (and most of the subsequent pieces), either couldn't care less about the damage they caused or else they actually desired to cause that damage. And their (always anonymous) sources certainly desired to cause that damage... an aspect that Risen and Lichtblau made it a point not to investigate too deeply: take away the instant gratification of seeing the leak in the newspapers, and you take away 90% of the joy of leaking in the first place.

I believe both reporters should go to prison for what they did... both as a just punishment for their crime, which has severely damaged American national security, and also as a deterrant to others. If the only consequence of smearing vital national-security secrets across the front page of America's premier newspaper is a Pulitzer and a lucrative book contract, what do you think the next reporter will do when he's approached by someone with equally precious intelligence information?

The Times pretends it withheld the story for a year because they were soberly and patriotically weighing the damage it might cause to national security against "the public's right to know" about ongoing classified intelligence-gathering operations (which is itself an absurdity; does the public also have a "right to know" our troop movements?)

"Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration's contention that disclosing the program would damage the country's counterterrorism efforts," Mr. [Bill] Keller [executive editor of the Times] said. "We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security.

"What our reporting has done is set off an intense national debate about the proper balance between security and liberty — a debate that many government officials of both parties, and in all three branches of government, seem to regard as in the national interest."

(Is that the new legal standard now, by the way? That it's only a crime if the defendant himself is "convinced" that he compromised national security? Is this the "I don't believe it" defense?)

But it has since come out that the real reason the Times delayed publication was not a patriotic desire to avoid damaging national security but a contractual and commercial desire not to anticipate the publication of James Risen's book on the subject, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration (only $17.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25!) What the editors and writers really gave "long and sober consideration to" was probably whether the Times' own reporter might sue them if they revealed the anonymously sourced secrets he had gathered for his tendentious book.

I eagerly anticipate a grand jury proceeding with spooks, politicos, and journalists all hauled up and forced to name names -- or else be sentenced to "Miller time" until they do -- and all run by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales... which the Times evidently considers yet another scandal:

The administration's chief legal defender of the program is Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who is also the senior official responsible for the leak investigation.

Yeah, funny that: the nation's chief prosecutor is actually in charge of the nation's most urgent prosecution. The Democrats have evidently forgotten that prosecuting malefactors is rightly the job of the attorney general (rather than, say, ordering inconvenient religious cults slain or sending small children off to the loving arms of Uncle Fidel); after all, for eight years, from 1993 through 2000, the biggest federal criminal cases were prosecuted by "independent counsels," because they all involved top members of the president's administration.

I can see how one might get out of the habit of thinking of the attorney general as the prosecutor, rather than a potential defendant.

~

Evidently, the answer is Yes, reporters really do think that Americans have a "right to know" our exact troop movements in combat: witness the absolute outrage when General Norman Schwartzkopf intentionally misled reporters at a briefing during the Gulf War about where our major offensive would aim. He told them this was desperately secret information that they were forbidden from revealing, knowing that they could barely contain themselves until the end of the briefing itself before calling it in to their networks and newspapers -- which they did! Saddam Hussein foolishly believed the soon-to-be Antique Media, and he was totally wrong-footed by the real invasion of Kuwait... which of course was on the opposite side of the country.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 13, 2006, at the time of 04:15 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 12, 2006

Zoning Torture

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Apropos no stunning new information or front-page articles on the subject, I've been thinking much about the Democrats' charge that President Bush's policy of "extraordinary rendition" (ER) is really just outsourcing torture to countries that are less scrupulous about such matters.

Without passing judgment on whether the charge is accurate, let's take it as read for purposes of this debate: resolved, outsourcing torture is a legitimate and necessary practice in a civilized society.

Defining our terms

First, let's make the terms more precise:

  • We're not talking about torturing ordinary criminal suspects for domestic criminal acts.
  • Nor do we discuss torturing people to obtain confessions to be used against them at trial.
  • We don't mean torturing people for punishment (as in Communist and Islamic countries) or abusing them for fun (as Charles Graner and his then-girlfriend Lynndie England did at Abu Ghraib).
  • Finally, we do not mean torturing (or abusing) ordinary prisoners of war who have no extraordinary intelligence for us to gather.

And we're not concerned here with defining "torture" and distinguishing it from mere abuse; that's a subject for a different post.

Rather, we are discussing one thing only: torture of "high value targets" (HVTs) -- top-ranking enemies or enemies who possess extraordinary information that could prevent a serious attack on American civilians or allies -- in order to obtain that intelligence and thwart the attack.

The dilemma

The arguments against torture basically boil down to two, one moral (absolute right and wrong) and one affectional (how it affects us, individually and as a culture):

  1. Moral: It is unjust to the "victim" of the torture to inflict cruel and unusual pain, suffering, or lasting damage on a person who is already in custody.
  2. Affectional: It is dehumanizing to the torturer, making him (and the society that employs him) more cruel, more vicious, and more nasty and brutish (but probably no shorter).

The moral argument

The first argument is interesting but beside the point: the torture discussed here is not done as an act of justice but rather to save lives. This boils down to a variation on the question discussed in Ursula K. LeGuin's seminal short story "the Ones That Walk Away From Omelas," and Shirley Jackson's story "the Lottery": under what circumstances is it justified to torment one innocent (in the LeGuin and Jackson stories) in order to make life better for a great many other innocents?

The variation here is that the one being tormented is almost certainly not an innocent; he is far more guilty -- unless there has been a huge mistake -- than the many. And the torture is not simply to make life better for the many but to save them from death at the hands of the guilty one who is being tortured and his co-conspirators.

I won't waste much time on this one. The argument for torturing him (to gain critical intelligence) is structurally the same as the argument for killing him to protect those he would destroy: by acting so unjustly himself, has he given up any claim to rights he might once have had?

That is, do the unjust retain a legitimate demand for justice? I argue that thousands of years of Western culture answer No, they do not: it would be unjust to imprison an innocent man, but we have no qualms imprisoning a guilty man. Even those who argue against capital punishment don't claim that execution is too harsh a punishment for murder; they fall back on the second argument, saying it dehumanizes society, and to argument by fear of error: what if we accidentally execute an innocent person? (See below.)

We do not tolerate the intolerant, and we need not give moral justice to the morally unjust. Besides, what is justice? Is it really morally unjust to torture someone who is participating in a conspiracy to commit mass murder -- and may well have helped carry out such horrific crimes in the past? It's hard to say in a specific case, but in my universe, as a general rule, there are some crimes so dreadful, not even the death penalty is sufficient punishment -- though of course, we're not now talking about torture administrated as punishment.

The argument changes if the victim of the torture is in fact an innocent we have mistaken for an enemy, but only to the extent that it would if we killed him. Either way, it's not a crime then so much as a tragic blunder. So we move on to number two, that torture dehumanizes the torturer.

The affectional argument

This claim may well be true; it certainly desensitizes him to the suffering of others... if he were not insensitive, how could he do what he has to do?

(Alternatively, perhaps torture does not dehumanize; perhaps it's only that the inhuman naturally gravitate towards such careers. But if torture does not dehumanize anyway, then ER is a legitimate practice, and the resolution succeeds by default. I personally believe it does dehumanize, however.)

Social dehumanization seems to follow any official sanction of torture, just as it dehumanizes society to officially tolerate the deliberate killing of the innocent. Because of our deep-seated repugnance at the idea of deliberate torture, this same argument becomes much more intense in the latter case.

Too, because of the "emotional multiplier" of the target being a specific, named individual instead of a mass crowd -- "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," as Stalin is reputed to have said -- most people would feel far worse hearing that one terrorist was tortured for his information than hearing that a hundred terrorists were killed by a military attack.

Thus we have the dilemma: if we desperately need intel that we strongly suspect a captive enemy has, do we torture him to get it, saving lives but "losing out souls?" Or do we keep our souls lily white, but only at the cost of thousands of other people's children, wives, husbands, and parents?

Enter extraordinary rendition

Under ER, we cut the Gordian Knot by choosing neither to torture nor to let the intelligence remain unrevealed; instead, we "outsource" the torture to some other country that doesn't scruple to carry out such activities routinely.

The moral argument in that case is unchanged: murder is murder even if you hire a hit man to do it; and by the same token, killing to defend innocent life is just as moral if the shooter is a hired bodyguard as it is if the shooter is the person whose own life is in danger: separating the action from the actor by hiring an agent can't change the morality of the action. It's either just or unjust, standing on its own, regardless of how personally involved was the ultimate decision-maker.

However, the affectional argument is very much altered: being an executioner might very well desensitize a person to human life, even if one he believes the executions are all perfectly just. But I don't see any such desensitization in merely being a member of a society that hires executioners to execute the guilty, no matter how much death-penalty opponents claim that it does. We have the death penalty and France does not, for example; yet America would never have allowed 15,000 old people to die in their homes for lack of air conditioning during a heat wave; and even if some did, we certainly would have condemned the adult children who refused to break off their August vacations to come home and bury their father's or mother's body.

This and many other examples indicates that we have at least as much regard for innocent human life as do the Europeans, despite the fact that we allow executions and they do not. Wanting to keep murderers alive is not the same sentiment as wanting to preserve the life of innocents, and neither implies the other.

So to the extent that personally engaging in torture might dehumanize someone, the farther removed it is from the actor, the less dehumanizing is the action.

This should be fairly obvious: which would callous and embitter a person more -- dropping a bomb from an airplane that he knew would probably kill some innocent children, or actually pointing his rifle at a child who is holding a live grenade and squeezing off a round? Even though morally, the latter is probably more defensible than the former -- nevertheless, I would much rather be the first guy than the second.

The reckoning

So let's tote up the damages:

  • Morally, ER is no better or worse than carrying out such torture ourselves; it stands or falls on the morality of the action, not the specific agent.
  • But in terms of the dehumanizing nature of torture, the farther removed from the United States, the less will Americans, civilian and military, be dehumanized.
  • And clearly if a non-American is the actual torturer, then no American suffers the psychological consequences of that job. The closest people will merely be observers -- worse for the soul, perhaps, than not being there at all, but not as bad as the people actually conducting it.

The only thing that remains is the question of how it affects the other country involved. And there, the answer is fairly easy: in each case, we pick countries that customarily and regularly engage in such torture anyway... so any dehumanization that might occur has already happened. One more terrorist being tortured won't change the character of a country that tortures criminal suspects and prisoners of war as a matter of course.

America should outsource torture -- limited to extraordinary circumstances -- for the same reason neighborhoods "outsource" animal slaughter to slaughterhouses, factories to industrial areas (or even other countries), and the holding of prisoners to established prisons.

It's really just an example of zoning: America is not zoned for torture, so we rendite certain special captives to a country that is. We outsource polluting industries to places where the natural byproducts won't cause us as much harm -- and the same practice makes just as much sense for torture.

It may sound odd, but it's really no different than what every city council in America does every day.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 12, 2006, at the time of 09:13 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 10, 2006

With Poor King Charles' Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm...

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE February 11th, 2006: See below.

All right, let's see if you can solve this conundrum. What is wrong with this picture?

Bush Reveals Rationale Behind Surveillance
by Jennifer Loven
Associated Press
Feb 10, 2006

President Bush defended his warrantless eavesdropping program Friday, saying during what he thought were private remarks that he concluded that spying on Americans was necessary to fill a gap in the United States' security.

Seems fairly innocuous, right? That is because we have become so innured to poor King Charles' head that we don't even notice it anymore.

Let's try this again:

President Bush defended his warrantless eavesdropping program Friday, saying during what he thought were private remarks that he concluded that spying on Americans was necessary to fill a gap in the United States' security.

Here is my point: what on earth makes Ms. Loven think that the subjects of the spying are Americans?

The NSA program is intended to "to monitor the international e-mails and phone calls of people inside the United States with suspected ties to terrorists overseas," in Loven's own words. Does she really believe that all -- or even the majority -- or even a substantial fraction of al-Qaeda agents inside the United States are American citizens... or even legally permanently resident aliens?

Remember, to be a legal green-card holder, you cannot have lied about the purpose of your immigration to the United States: if you really came here to conduct terrorism, you're not legal -- just as yet undetected.

Henceforth, you should notice that virtually every story about the NSA program uses two phrases: "without a warrant" and "spying on Americans."

And you should realize that this is a complete and utter canard: the vast majority of people whose communications are intercepted are non-U.S. persons... particularly since the administrative rules for this exact NSA al-Qaeda intercept program require obtaining a warrant from the FISA court in order to eavesdrop on U.S. persons (which includes both citizens and legal green-card holders), if that person is the target of the intercept.

Perhaps we should begin demanding to know from the Antique Media where this false meme -- "spying on Americans" -- began... and whether it was spread by accident or deliberately.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that (via John Hinderaker at Power Line) Jennifer Loven is well-known as a Democratic Party flack who has misrepresented facts about Bush on more than one previous occasion. I didn't mean to imply that she was supid; just venal. She sold her soul to the Democrats and betrayed her supposed calling -- just like so many others.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 10, 2006, at the time of 06:41 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 06, 2006

Moments Only

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The dreariness of the Senate hearing on the NSA al-Qaeda eavesdropping program was broken by a few moments of amusement -- or at least clarity.

First, since the story itself appears in the New York Times, the creakiest of the Antique Media (I love the phrase -- is it Hewitt's?), we can expect some whoppers in the way its presented. The Times does not disappoint.

First, the little summary on the Excite link-page entry that leads you to the NYT story makes it sound as if Democrats and Republicans are unloading both barrels on embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

The attorney general's assertion that the program was legal immediately drew harsh reactions from leaders from both parties.

(You won't find this line in the story itself, and within hours, the above snippet will probably be gone from the link page.)

But in fact, there are three Republicans and four Democrats quoted in the story; of the three Republicans, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) both hotly defended the program, the president, and the attorney general. Only one Republican -- Arlen Specter (R-PA)... surprise! -- and all four Democrats (Sens. Charles Schumer of New York, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin) attacked the program as "illegal domestic wiretapping."

Yes, Specter is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (though why that committee should investigate an intelligence matter, when we have a separate Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I don't understand); but he is well known as a rabid critic of the administration on many issues, mostly relating to the war on terrorism, about which he appears quite skeptical. So, far from being a bipartisan lynch mob, in fact there was only a single liberal Republican who was on the Leahy-Kennedy-Schumer-Feingold side.

Second, the Times felt compelled to toss in the obligatory positive claim of illegality even while acknowledging that there is a strong argument to the contrary. They still act as if the illegality is a given:

The 1978 FISA Act, passed in response to surveillance abuses during the cold war and Vietnam eras and by the Nixon administration, requires the N.S.A. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain warrants from a special secret court before conducting electronic surveillance of people suspected of being terrorists or spies.

This is of course flatly tendentious: the Times assumes what they hope the Democrats will prove. But let's move on, to coin a phrase.

This is, I think, my favorite quotation:

Democrats emphasized again and again that regardless of their reservations about the administration's eavesdropping operation, they were as committed as their Republican colleagues to national security. "We all support a strong, robust and vigorous national security program," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "According to the rule of law."

...Which "rule of law" they believe forbids the exact "strong, robust, and vigorous national-security program" that the president ordered!

Other cheers and jeers....

Jeer: Sen. Feingold demanded (unsuccessfully) that General Gonzales be sworn in before testifying:

"Mr. Chairman, I just say that the reason that anyone would want him sworn has to do with the fact that certain statements were made under oath at the confirmation hearing," Mr. Feingold said. "So, it seems to me, logical that since we're going to be asking about similar things, that he should be sworn in this occasion as well."

(Unstated conclusion to the last sentence: ...so we can impeach him for perjury if what he says today differs in the slightest from what he said last time!)

Another fine, golden moment to jeer:

Mr. Feingold was clearly angry when his turn came to question Mr. Gonzales. "You wanted this committee and the American people to think that this kind of program wasn't going on," he said. "But it was." [Gee, why would the incoming attorney general not want to broadcast to the world that we were intercepting al-Qaeda communications? That's a real puzzler! -- the Mgt.]

Not so, Mr. Gonzales insisted. Last year, he said, Mr. Feingold asked him whether he thought the president could authorize eavesdropping "in violation of the law," and that the question was therefore hypothetical.

Those wacky Democrats, always asking just one question too many! There is a wonderful Abraham Lincoln story about asking the "one question too many," but the margin here is too small to contain it.

And a cheer for Sen. Cornyn:

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said he found it odd that the United States could capture terrorists, "kill if necessary," but that according to some of the reasoning he had heard, "we can't listen to their phone calls."

What a great line; I hope Bush appropriates it for this year's elections.

And all the rest is dicta, as those egghead lawyers would say. These hearings are not going to do a darned thing to help the Democrats and Specter. The reality-based party strangely cannot feel the hand of political pragmatism tugging harder and harder on their trouser cuff.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 06, 2006, at the time of 11:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 03, 2006

The Deeply Unbiased and Fair-Minded Antique Media

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Here are a pair of paragraphs from the Reuters story on Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, declaring that the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program is "legal, necessary, reasonable and within the president's powers." (The quote is Reuters', not Roberts'.)

The administration, which refers to the eavesdropping as a limited "terrorist surveillance program," says it is justified by Bush's constitutional authority as commander in chief and by the authorization of military force that Congress granted the president after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Democrats and other critics say the NSA program could violate constitutional protections against unreasonable searches, as well as the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to seek wiretap warrants from a secret court even during times of war.

What a difference a verb makes!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 03, 2006, at the time of 02:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

Hillary Comes Crawling Back

Elections , Politics - National , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

After tacking far to the right of the Democratic Party by supporting (however limply) the Iraq War, Hillary is now trying to tack back leftward by lambasting Bush for the NSA international surveillance program. Yet she manages to demonstrate some of the same incoherence her husband used to do.

Here is her main complaint:

"Obviously, I support tracking down terrorists. I think that's our obligation. But I think it can be done in a lawful way," the New York Democrat said.

All right; so her objection is that Bush should have followed the law. But wait....

Clinton, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, told reporters she did not yet know whether the administration's warrantless eavesdropping broke any laws. But the senator said she did not buy the White House's main justifications for the tactic.

Say, that's a pretty tricky balancing act: eavesdropping on al-Qaeda is bad because Bush didn't follow the law, but she's not actually sure whether Bush followed the law.

Here is another curious argument, referring to the attorney general's argument that Article II of the Constitution gives the president the authority to conduct surveillance for national-security purposes:

"Their argument that it's rooted in the Constitution inherently is kind of strange because we have FISA and FISA operated very effectively and it wasn't that hard to get their permission," she said. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established by Congress to approve eavesdropping warrants, even retroactively, but Bush has argued that the process often takes too long.

The existence of FISA may well be an argument against the policy (a bad argument against the policy), but it certainly has nothing to do with the question of whether "the Constitution inherently" gives that authority to the commander in chief. This is logical gibberish... it's like saying that the argument that the right to bear arms is inherently rooted in the Second Amendment is "kind of strange" because we also have federal laws allowing the FBI to carry guns. It's a non-sequitur.

She buttresses her claim that the Article II argument is "kind of strange" by adding that the argument that the congressional Authorization of Miliary Force also confers that authority is "far-fetched." Under such withering legal reasoning, I'm not sure Bush has any alternative but to end the program immediately! Oh, wait... after she "blast[ed]" Bush for the program, she mysteriously failed to call for him to end it. Like the rest of the Democratic Party.

Clinton also demonstrated her Criswell impersonation:

Clinton talked to reporters after addressing the mayors in a speech that criticized Bush's health care, economic and anti-terrorism policies.

Pointing the Democratic-leaning crowd to the president's State of the Union address on Jan. 31, she said his message amounts to "You're on your own."

Hm. Isn't that speech about six days in the future? I know the White House hands out advance copies -- but isn't that usually earlier on speech day, or at most the night before? I'm a little skeptical that Bush is actually going to stand up on Tuesday and announce, "mayors -- you're on your own!"

The fact that Clinton now finds it necessary to reassure the Democratic base that she does too suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome -- evidently a litmus test for nomination -- tells me that she is starting to get nervous about 2008, despite her likely easy win in her reelection this year. Look for the bipartisan "Sunday morning Hillary" to go MIA, and the shrill and screechy "Saturday night Hillary" to reappear from whatever limbo she has been banished to these last few years.

I don't think it will help; it will only solidify the belief, among both Left and Right, that she is just an opportunist who will say or do anything to get elected... and not even as good a one as her husband.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2006, at the time of 02:49 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 23, 2006

Even Atlas Shrugs

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

In a rare faux pas from John Hinderaker at Power Line, he draws a conclusion about the NSA surveillance controversy that is both paralogical and unwarranted (er, sorry about that; it was irresistable).

In another excellent Power Line post discussing today's speech by former National Security Agency director LG Michael Hayden, John picks up on some of the Q&A that followed. Here is one in particular:

QUESTION: Yes, Wayne Madsen, syndicated columnist. General, how do you explain the fact that there were several rare spectacles of whistleblowers coming forward at NSA, especially after 9/11, something that hasn't really happened in the past, who have complained about violations of FISA and United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which implements the law at the agency?

GEN. HAYDEN: I talked to the NSA staff on Friday. The NSA inspector general reports to me, as of last Friday, from the inception of this program through last Friday night, not a single employee of the National Security Agency has addressed a concern about this program to the NSA IG. I should also add that no member of the NSA workforce who has been asked to be included in this program has responded to that request with anything except enthusiasm. I don't know what you're talking about.

So whoever the NY Times sources were, they didn't work for NSA.

But how does this follow? Madsen asks Hayden about the NSA (or former NSA) whistleblowers -- Russell Tice, for example, who has actually come forward and admitted he was one of the New York Times' sources -- and Hayden responds that nobody in the NSA complained about the program to the inspector general, and that everyone involved was enthusiastic about the program when he was invited to participate.

Alas, neither of these facts (taking Hayden's answer at face value) implies the conclusion that John draws, that none of the "whistleblowers" -- that is, the media sources -- worked for the NSA. In fact, we know that at least one did (Tice was subsequently fired, but nobody denies that he did work for the NSA during a time when these intercepts were occurring, though he was not on that program).

All that Hayden's answer implies is that if there were critics of the program within the Agency, they did not make their objections known in the proper way but instead took them straight to the New York Times.

(Hayden's other statement is truly a non-issue, as even if the sources were actual whistleblowers, in the proper meaning of the word -- which I doubt -- it would still be plausible that they would come to the program enthusiastic, only becoming disenchanted when they hypothetically saw rampant illegality.)

Sorry, but neither of these two statements by LG Hayden is dispositive on the question of whether the leakers were NSA members, former members, or never members. That question is as open today as it was yesterday.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 23, 2006, at the time of 05:39 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

No Bout Adoubt It - I Mean No Doubt About It

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Intel gathering is so much easier when the subjects "out" themselves!

American analysts have dithered for a couple of years now whether Moqtada Sadr, the buffoonish son of an honored Shiite cleric, was in fact in bed with the mullahs of Iran... or whether he just happened to have a lot of friends east of the border (who all happened, by merest chance, to join the same private army together). Well, waffle no longer, chums, because here comes Sadr himself to clarify things:

The Iraqi cleric who once led two uprisings against U.S. forces said Sunday that his militia would help to defend Iran if it is attacked, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Any questions?

Of course, there will always be wiggle-room for the intentionally blind:

Muqtada al-Sadr, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting with the top Iranian nuclear negotiator, said his Mahdi Army was formed to defend Islam.

"If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them," al-Sadr was quoted as saying. "The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi army. It was established to defend Islam."

But in a curious slip-up for the Associated Press, more commonly found declaring "on the other hand, on the third hand, on the twenty-third hand," they appear to admit that this is a risible fiction:

The comments could be seen as a message that Tehran has allies who could make things difficult for U.S. forces in the region if Iran's nuclear facilities are attacked.

Finally, in the Famous Last Words category, we have this nominee:

Al-Sadr's backing of Iran, a Shiite majority nation, follows a hint from Israel's defense minister that the Jewish state was preparing for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program. A few days earlier, French President Jacques Chirac said France could respond with nuclear weapons against any state-sponsored terror attack. The comments were seen by some as a reference to Iran.

"I don't see any threat against Iran," Iran's nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said after meeting with al-Sadr. "Iran is big and strong and it is a hard target."

Of course. Almost as big, strong, and hard as Iraq.

In any event, I think we can now deposit the burning question of Sadr's actual loyalty into the box of "known knowns," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might put it. And that, at least, is "helpful."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 23, 2006, at the time of 03:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 20, 2006

Al Gore Fiddles While Intercepts Burn

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Victoria Toensing has an illuminating commentary in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (who says day-old news is stale?) that vindicates one of our own prominent bloggers, though I don't know if she -- or he -- realizes it yet.

In "Terrorists on Tap" (available to WSJ subscribers only, but you can find it here, though I don't know for how long... read it quick! I'll wait), Toensing addresses the failings of FISA, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which she describes as "technologically antediluvian."

It was drafted by legislators who had no concept of how terrorists could communicate in the 21st century or the technology that would be invented to intercept those communications. The rules regulating the acquisition of foreign intelligence communications were drafted when the targets to be monitored had one telephone number per residence and all the phones were plugged into the wall. Critics like Al Gore and especially critics in Congress, rather than carp, should address the gaps created by a law that governs peacetime communications-monitoring but does not address computers, cell phones or fiber optics in the midst of war.

The "killer arg" that Democrats keep raising, each time as if it were brand new and had never before occurred to anyone, is best exemplified by our erstwhile vice president and pretender to the throne, Albert J. Gore, jr. In his speech before the Liberty Coalition on Martin Luther King Day (January 16th, 2006), Gore began pitching curve balls at the administration. But his pitches simply pinwheeled into the stands or burrowed into the dirt as if trying to bowl over a cricket wicket:

The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And one result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, often called FISA, which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance.

It included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as desired. [This emphasis, and indeed all emphasis in this post, is added by Big Lizards]

Gore, of course, has never actually had to fill out a FISA warrant application nor deal with the problems of obtaining "sufficient cause" to maintain an electronic intercept, or any other activity that an actual law-enforcement official would understand. Naturally, he believes this makes him an expert on the subject.

But I want to focus on the last line of that excerpt above -- that the FISA process allows "the executive to move with as much speed as desired." I'll take it as read that we all understand how important speed is in electronic surveillance of terrorists: the moment the terrorists know or even suspect that a phone number has been burned, they will drop it in the nearest trash can and break out a new disposable cell phone with a different number. So the only time available to gain useful information are those scant hours between capturing a live cell phone and other terrorists realizing what has happened.

Hours, even minutes may make the difference.

Let me first turn the mike over to John Hinderaker, who analyzed the "72 hour exception" of the FISA rules so oft cited by Democrats as the reason why there was "no need" to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance of phone calls and e-mails from al-Qaeda to persons in the United States. (Hinderaker aptly framed the point with his paraphrase of a George Bush quotation: "if al-Qaeda is calling you, we want to know why.")

John had earlier discussed the legality of the National Security Agency electronic intercept program here, here, and again here. But in a subsequent post -- 72 Hours: Who Could Ask For More? -- John takes on the Democratic claim that Bush could simply have used the "72-hour [emergency] provision of FISA" instead of issuing a presidential directive to surveil without passing through the FISA court.

Hinderaker begins:

We've been getting emails from liberals demanding to know why we haven't written about the 72-hour provision of FISA, which, they say, definitively proves that there couldn't possibly have been any need to go outside the FISA structure for purposes of speed. Actually, there are quite a number of FISA provisions that we haven't written about, but, since the left seems to be putting so much emphasis on this one, here goes: why the 72-hour clause doesn't eliminate the problem of FISA delay.

John then quotes extensively from FISA itself; long boring legalese snipped to avoid brains turning to tapioca.

[A] FISA application is no simple document, and Sec. 1805(f), notwithstanding that it contemplates an "emergency," provides no relief from the full filing requirement of Sec. 1804. The government has 72 hours from the time when a telephone is found in, say, Afghanistan, and the Attorney General gives the order to begin surveillance, until a FISA judge actually signs the order based on the government's application. How does that compare to the length of time it normally takes to obtain a FISA order? ...

Byron York wrote on ths subject last month: ...

People familiar with the process say the problem is not so much with the court itself as with the process required to bring a case before the court. "It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court. Even after the Patriot Act, it's still a very cumbersome process. It is not built for speed, it is not built to be efficient. It is built with an eye to keeping [investigators] in check...."

If it takes "days, sometimes weeks" to assemble a FISA application, then 72 hours is not long enough to be confident the process can be completed. Anyone who thinks that it is easy for multiple lawyers and officials to collaborate on a set of documents, present them to a federal judge and have the judge sign the order within 72 hours has, I'm afraid, no experience whatever at obtaining orders from federal judges.

And note what happens if the 72 hour deadline is missed. Suppose that the government gets the FISA application to a judge on time, but the judge has not yet signed the order when the 72nd hour expires. At that point, there is a forfeiture: the surveillance is to be terminated immediately, and information gained from the surveillance during that key 72 hour period cannot be used for any purpose--not even communicated to federal anti-terror employees--without a certification that it "indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm to any person."

Given the complexity of the process, and the uncertainty whether a judge will actually sign an order on short notice even if it is presented to him in a timely fashion, the 72 hour "emergency" provision is completely inadequate to assure that surveillance can be initiated promptly, approved in a timely fashion, and continue without interruption.

With that in mind, compare what Victoria Toensing wrote -- remember her? her column is actually the subject of this convoluted post! -- about the physical reality of obtaining a FISA warrant, which she often had to do in her capacity as deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration with the "terrorism portfolio."

And to correct an oft-cited misconception, there are no five-minute "emergency" taps. FISA still requires extensive time-consuming procedures. To prepare the two-to-three-inch thick applications for non-emergency warrants takes months. The so-called emergency procedure cannot be done in a few hours, let alone minutes. The attorney general is not going to approve even an emergency FISA intercept based on a breathless call from NSA.

For example, al Qaeda agent X, having a phone under FISA foreign surveillance, travels from Pakistan to New York. The FBI checks airline records and determines he is returning to Pakistan in three hours. Background information must be prepared and the document delivered to the attorney general. By that time, agent X has done his business and is back on the plane to Pakistan, where NSA can resume its warrantless foreign surveillance. Because of the antiquated requirements of FISA, the surveillance of agent X has to cease only during the critical hours he is on U.S. soil, presumably planning the next attack.

I am very impressed that Hinderaker's analysis of the actual statute itself, and his personal knowledge of how long it takes judges to shift themselves, dovetails perfectly with Victoria Toensing's real-world experience filling out such FISA applications in actual terrorism cases. As Hannibal Smith says, "I love it when a plan comes together." Or in this case, when legal analysis and practical application buttress each other.

But John Hinderaker continues:

There is a second, even more fundamental reason why FISA's 72-hour provision does not solve the "speed" problem. Note that even under a 72-hour "emergency" application, the government must certify that "factual basis for issuance of an order under this subchapter to approve such surveillance exists...."

Now let's apply that standard to what must be a common situation where electronic surveillance is important: our forces capture a terrorist overseas who has a cell phone. Let's pretend that there are no procedural problems with the 72-hour provision, and that our soldiers can immediately begin intercepting communications to that cell phone in expectation of a warrant to be issued later. That won't do them a lot of good. There may be some incoming calls, but there will be no conversations to monitor since presumably our soldiers won't be answering the phone. So what they will be able to obtain is a list of phone numbers--numbers taken from incoming calls, and numbers recorded on the cell phone as having been called by the terrorist before he was captured. What we really need to do, to roll up the cell of which the captured terrorist was a member, it to begin monitoring those other phone numbers. Those are the telephones on which the other terrorists will be talking; among other things, they will be wondering what happened to their comrade.

But, as far as I know, the fact that a particular phone called a terrorist's (or suspected terrorist's) phone does not provide probable cause to believe that the owner of that phone is the agent of a foreign power. It could be the terrorist's mother; it could be his tentmaker or his landlord, dunning him for rent.

And, like a tennis ball, back we fly to Ms. Toensing:

Even if time were not an issue, any emergency FISA application must still establish the required probable cause within 72 hours of placing the tap. So al Qaeda agent A is captured in Afghanistan and has agent B's number in his cell phone, which is monitored by NSA overseas. Agent B makes two or three calls every day to agent C, who flies to New York. That chain of facts, without further evidence, does not establish probable cause for a court to believe that C is an agent of a foreign power with information about terrorism. Yet, post 9/11, do the critics want NSA to cease monitoring agent C just because he landed on U.S. soil?

So much for Al Gore's risible claim that the FISA rules allow "ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as desired." Once again, Hinderaker and Toensing are perfectly in synch, despite writing separately more than a week apart; and only the man who would be king is left twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.



Rantin' Al

Simply put, the NSA electronic surveillance is not just the law, it's also a good idea. It is, in fact, a necessary, urgent, and irreplaceable arrow in the quiver of intelligence-gathering to thwart terrorist attacks.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 20, 2006, at the time of 03:22 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

Don't Harsh My Jihad, Dude

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I think I've written ad nauseum about the obsession the American Left has with the National Security Agency intercept program (i.e., "if al-Qaeda is calling you, we want to know why," as John Hinderaker of Power Line put it):

  • How they have convinced themselves it's a political winner ("the Republicans will do anything it takes to protect America, so vote Democratic!");
  • How they dismisss as irrelevant trivia whether the president may actually have the constitutional authority, apart from any act passed by Congress, to order intercepts of foreign terrorists communicating with their American agents;
  • How they bray like donkeys at the very idea that a law authorizing the use of military force might likewise authorize such intercepts of foreign intelligence;
  • How they dismiss out of hand the difficulties of trying to run a war with a federal court (however friendly) having to sign off on every military decision...
  • And of course, the biggie: the fact that no major Democrat who screams and complains about the NSA electronically peeking at e-mails and phone calls from al-Qaeda is actually calling for it to stop: they want so very much to have their peek and beat on it, too.

But at the risk of inducing seasickness, I want to note that someone, at least, is finally doing something to stop this terrible depradation of our most fundamental civil liberty, the right to clandestinely communicate with terrorist groups abroad: the ACLU, CAIR, Greenpeace, and the Center For Constitutional Rights (plus some individual plaintiffs, including one celebrity, of a sort) have gone to federal court to shut down the NSA intercept program:

Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an "illegal and unconstitutional program" of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.

The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.

(Not that the Associated Press would ever pre-judge a case, of course.)

One surprising side point is the identity of one of the plaintiffs:

At a news conference, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Goodman portrayed the president as a man on an unprecedented power grab at the expense of basic democratic principles.

He said the public was starting to understand the assertion that the erosion of individual rights is a slippery slope that lets the government "brand anyone a terrorist with no right to counsel, no right to be brought before a judge and no right to privacy in communications...."

Plaintiff Rachel Meeropol, an attorney at the center, said she believes she has been targeted. "I'm personally outraged that my confidential communication with my clients may have been listened to by the U.S. government," she said.

And who is Rachel Meeropol? Well, Law.com mentions only that she's "at the forefront of national civil rights litigation," mentions some of her lawsuits against America, and notes that:

In addition, Meeropol is the co-vice president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; a co-editor and primary author of the Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook, a reference guide for prisoners without an attorney to learn their rights; and the editor of America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the "War on Terror."

Her profile from Equal Justice Works adds one tantalizing hint to the above:

Rachel's interest in prisoners' rights work stems from her family's firsthand experience with the destructive impact of the criminal "justice" system on communities and individuals.

But you only find out Rachel Meeropol's actual claim to fame by turning to the ultra-leftist groups that have no interest in dissembling such a fine pedigree as hers. For example, a broadcast by Democracy Now:

The Rosenberg Execution 50 Years Later

A Democracy Now! special with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's sons Robert and Michael Meeropol, granddaughter Rachel Meeropol and co-defendant Morton Sobell.

(Hat tip to the blog Sweetness and Light, and to my friend Lee Porter for calling it to my attention.)

So "her family's firsthand experience with the destructive impact of the criminal 'justice' system on communities and individuals" consists of being tried for, convicted of, and executed for passing the secret of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. Yes, I can definitely see how that might tend to have a "destructive impact."

Apart from such celebrity plaintiffs, the organizations behind these lawsuits make for some odd bedfellows (or perhaps not so odd, if one isn't obliged to accept at face value their descriptions of themselves): side by side with the American Civil Liberties Union is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a radical Arabist group that has many members who have been suspected, indicted, and even convicted of abetting jihadi terrorism; Greenpeace, which in fact engages in aggressive "action directe," such as trying to ram Navy vessels attempting to test defensive anti-missile systems.

And of course, let's not forget the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that is probably further to the left than Michael Moore, having been co-founded by Communist and radical lawyer William Kunstler; having defended in court terrorists such as El Sayyid Nosair, a member of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's terrorist group which attacked the World Trade Centers in 1993; and supporting such other radical notables as Lynne Stewart, who was indicted and recently convicted of several terrorism-related charges:

On 10 February 2005, Stewart was convicted of providing material support, through a press conference and allowing access by her translator, to a terrorist conspiracy to kill persons outside of the United States and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government when acting as counsel to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1996 of plotting terrorist attacks against various sites in the New York City area.

(An engaging but rather biased-to-the-right profile of the Center can be found on the Wikipedia, here.)

To be blunt, we have a number of radical, pro-terrorist, anti-American groups allying with what purports to be a civil-liberties group -- running to the courts to remake American military policy in the middle of a war.

I expect two things:

  • The original district court that hears this case will rule in favor of the radicals and will order the president to shut down the NSA program; I'm sure the plaintiff have shopped very carefully for exactly the right Clinton- or Carter-appointed judge to decide this case.
  • The appellate court will overturn the decision, and the Supreme Court will either deny certiorari or will take the case and affirm the appellate court... because the Court is going to be very reluctant to dive into a case that obviously infringes on the power of the executive -- excuse me, the dreaded unitary executive -- to function as commander in chief.

But we'll see. Perhaps they'll misjudge their first judge, and he'll actually dismiss the case outright, as he should... on standing (can any of these people show he was actually among those recorded?) or else on the basis of the earlier decisions cited by, e.g., John Hinderaker at Power Line.

In any event, this is definitely one case to watch!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 17, 2006, at the time of 03:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

Blow That Whistle, Beat That Drum!

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

One of the New York Times "official sources" on the NSA intercept story has outed himself in an ABC interview, turning out to be (as expected) a disgruntled employee of the National Security Agency -- currently an ex-employee, but evidently still working for the agency when he spoke to the Times more than a year ago, as he was not fired until May.

Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet....

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

ABC tries desperately to resurrect this dead horse for another trot around the track by making it appear as though Tice will testify that the intercept program was huge and indiscriminate:

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants. [Tendentiousness alert! That the warrants were "requisite" is a fact to be proven -- not a stipulation. -- the Mgt.]

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said. [Emphasis added]

Sure, it "could be," if. But that's not the question, is it? The question is whether it was so huge and indiscriminate... not whether the NSA has the technological capability: recording every international conversation that used any of a list of key words is completely unworkable, since there are too many times that innocent conversations include those words, each of which must be analyzed... and because it's easy for spies and terrorists to use code words instead: "from now on, Achmed, when I say jack in the box, Junior Mints, or jellyfish, I really mean that other J-word."

So sure, the NSA could have ensnared millions indiscriminately to no avail, wasting the agency's own time and producing hundreds of thousands of hours of audiotape that not even the NSA has sufficient personnel to review. But did they? We certainly don't know from ABC.

Many commenters seem focused on the last paragraph of the article; and admittedly, it's a doozy that puts everything Tice says into a different context:

The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had "no information to provide."

They call me mad, mad I tell you!

If in fact it's true that Tice was having psychological problems, then it's hard to know how much of his accusation is accurate, and how much is, to put it bluntly, delusional or at least the result of a paranoid personality disorder, hence not reliable.

But the mere fact that Tice was discharged on the NSA equivalent of a "Section 8" is not proof that he is crazy, because that would happen in either case: whether he's paranoid, or whether they really are trying to silence a whistleblower. It's not dispositive.

Instead, I want to focus like a laser beam (as Bill Clinton used to say) on a different sentence, one that explains, all by itself, why this story, which the Democrats still cling to like a sick kitten to a warm brick, is the biggest possible loser for them politically:

[Tice] is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.

There it is on a nutshell: "We're going to do whatever it takes to get [the terrorists]." So long as that is how the NSA "scandal" is framed, it can only help the Republicans and President Bush; and the longer it runs, the more it helps the GOP and Bush.

It's my bet that Americans want us to do "whatever it takes to get them." And the fact that the Democrats, by and large, still haven't figured that out reconfirms every bad thing we've heard about the inability of Democrats and liberals to get serious about the war in Iraq, the war on jihadi terrorism, and national security in general.

They simply don't get it. Even now!

The Bush administration should adopt the Tice accusation as its mantra. Bush should say the following in his next speech, and every speech thereafter:

One of those who says he leaked the details of the al-Qaeda telephone intercept program, Russell Tice, made an accusation against this administration. He said, in an interview with ABC, that where we went wrong in our war against al-Qaeds was when we decided, and I quote, "we're going to do whatever it takes to get them."

My fellow Americans, to this charge, I plead guilty, guilty, guilty! Those who leaked this program were absolutely wrong to do what they did; they compromised national security because of personal objections to communications intercepts.

But if what bothered them was the idea that my administration was going to do, quote, "whatever it takes" to stop al-Qaeda and other terrorists who plan to attack America... then in that belief, they were absolutely right: we are -- and we will.

Now it's up to you: do you want a government full of people who will do whatever it takes to protect the American people from attack? Or do you want a government full of people who will stop short of that standard because they're more worried about the civil liberties of al-Qaeda spies inside the United States? In November of this year, you'll get your chance to answer that question.

The fact that the Democrats are still, to this very moment, licking their chops in anticipation of Congressional hearings on the NSA program and demanding to know where Judge Samuel Alito stands on this terrible "scandal" tells me that the penny still hasn't dropped... they still think they're going to win by pointing at Osama bin Laden and Musab Zarqawi and saying "those poor victims of American imperialism and tyranny!"

All right. Old saying: never interfere with your enemy when he's in the process of destroying himself. I'll just stand over here and hum.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2006, at the time of 01:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 07, 2006

About That Wiretapping Poll...

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The Associated Press is touting its own AP-Ipsos poll purporting to show a significant majority of Americans opposes the Bush administration on warrantless tapping of al-Qaeda phone calls originated abroad to their terrorist agents in the United States. But as typical these days, there is much less here than meets the eye.

The poll in today's story is very similar to the "generic congressional poll" results announced yesterday purporting to show a massive shift in Americans' support for Democratic control of Congress, a seismic shift that would signal that the Democrats are poised to seize back the House; that poll found that if the mid-term election were held today, 49% of Americans would want to see the Democrats win, while only 36% would want to see the Republicans win. Besides both polls showing a big surge towards Democrats, they have other similarities:

  • They have exactly the same age breakdown;
  • They have exactly the same employment breakdown;
  • Same educational breakdown;
  • Same marriage breakdown;
  • In fact, every, single demographic question is identical on the "two" surveys.
  • And oddly enough, they were even conducted over the same days, by the same pollsters, with the exact same number of respondents.

One might almost conclude that this was really the very same poll -- just mendaciously reported twice, in two different contexts, to make it appear as though there were a trend moving in the Democratic direction, a rising crescendo of criticism of George W. Bush. But of course, it would be dishonest for AP to do that without noting the fact, so it can't be true. It must simply be an eerie coincidence.

Another point the "two" polls share: they both wildly overpolled Democrats -- 52% of the respondents were Democrats, 40% were Republicans, and 8% were independents; that is, they polled almost a third more Democrats than Republicans.

How can this affect results? Well, it's hardly surprising that there would be a very significant difference between the responses of Democrats and Republicans to a question put so clearly in the context of partisan politics as this:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

In the first place, why mention the name of the current president if you really want to know what the respondent thinks of presidential power in general? The answer is fairly clear: to make it a party issue. Democrats will immediately understand the context is Bush's Fascist depredations against civil liberties and answer accordingly.

For example, if the respondents took their cue from the reference to Bush, and if 75% of Democrats answered that Bush should have to get a warrant, while 66% of Republicans said he should not, and the paltry few independents they polled split 50-50, you would get a result strikingly similar to what they got. This doesn't prove that is how it fell out; but it's certainly not an unreasonable guess.

Second, notice the tendentious phrasing of the fact situation: the administration has repeatedly noted that the monitoring is done on al-Qaeda phone calls coming from outside the United States to persons typically not American citizens or even American persons. Occasionally, the recipient of the phone call (or e-mail) might be an American person; but the communication still originates abroad... and it is that foreign communication that is intercepted without need for a warrant. In order to monitor communications between two phone numbers both in America, a warrant is still needed... which may explain why the Bush administration has requested more than 5,600 warrants from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court since 9/11.

As John Hinderaker put it some days ago, "if al-Qaeda is calling you, we want to know why."

That makes the NSA program not a "domestic wiretapping" case, as the Democrats and the mainstream media have repeatly and falsely claimed, but a foreign intelligence operation, for which very different legal and constitutional rules apply. Yet in this same question, respondents are asked about warrantless surveillance of electronic communications between "American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists," which implies a completely different fact situation: tapping the phones, without warrant, of American citizens making calls that originate and terminate in the United States. Heck, even I would probably say No to that suggestion.

  • So the question is tendentious, in that its purpose is to elicit a negative response rather than probe the actual beliefs of Americans; in fact, it is very close to being a "push-poll," a sleazy campaign activity in which one party conducts a false poll whose purpose is to insinuate certain erroneous facts with the goal of changing people's opinions, rather than measuring them.
  • It is partisan, in that is clearly signals that this is a "party vote" question.
  • And it is argumentative, in that it subtlely alters the fact situation from what is actually happening to a different circumstance that is much less justifiable, legally and morally.

Against that backdrop, it matters very much indeed that it also significantly overpolled Democrats -- and that the respondents comprised "adults," rather than "registered voters" or "likely voters." That last is especially relevant to the other component of the same poll, the generic congressional vote. Whoops, I mean that "other" poll that has no relation to this one, despite being taken at the same time by the same pollsters of the exact same pool of respondents, of course. My bad.

This is just a longwinded way of echoing John Hinderaker's point yesterday in a post discussing the Minnesota Republican delegation to Congress joining the bandwagon calling for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) to step down as Majority Leader; at the end of the brief post, John added:

By the way, the AP/Ipsos poll referred to in this article, which gives the Democrats a 13-point lead on the generic Congressional preference question, is worthless. The poll included 52 percent Democrats and only 40 percent Republicans, so it's hardly a shock that respondents favored Democrats by the same margin.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 07, 2006, at the time of 01:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 05, 2006

The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, in the endless game of Whack-a-Mole plaguing America's intelligence war against al-Qaeda, yet another former NSA official wants to play "whistleblower," revealing code-word classified operations to a breathless (and gormless) Congress. From a Washington Times story by the inestimable Bill Gertz:

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

Tice had nothing to do with the particular intercept program revealed by the New York Times; this is a different urgent program that disgruntled ex-NSA folks want to destroy.

The [supposedly illegal] activities involved the NSA director, the NSA deputies chief of staff for air and space operations and the secretary of defense, he stated.

"These ... acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs," Mr. Tice said.

Highly sensitive programs Tice now feels compelled to blow.

Tice relies upon the "1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which makes it legal for intelligence officials to disclose wrongdoing without being punished." Perhaps it's time to revisit that act and make clear that outing a legitimate program simply because a liberal agent disagrees with the president's policy does not qualify.

If not, we'll continue to play this game until our hand falls off, and al-Qaeda is able to declare "all your base are belong to us."

(The title of this post refers to one of a series of stories by Reginald Bretnor starring Papa Schimmelhorn, the most unlikely inventor ever invented.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 05, 2006, at the time of 12:55 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 01, 2006

Reaching For the Scars

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

"There you go again."

Coming back to the well of paranoia for the 537th sip, the New York Times now reports, with ominous, minor-key music in the background, that the Bush administration had to suspend some parts of the NSA intercept program for a few months due to concerns of legality raised by Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. This is presented by the Times as yet more evidence of the perfidy of Bush and his tyrannical, Dick-Durbinesque Gestapo.

According to the story,

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

That "top Justice Department official" was Comey, according to those officials -- who evidently were not even named at birth:

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

But let's take a deep breath and ask what this really means. First, it's pretty clear that Comey is just not comfortable with 9/11 thinking. Reading his farewell address (he left in August 2005, probably because Alberto Gonzales, not James Comey, had been named attorney general to replace John Ashcroft), it's very clear that Comey is a "9/10 guy."

He describes the various duties of the Department of Justice, mentioning every sort of crime they investigate and task they're responsible for... but he only brings up terrorism twice: once en passant, the other time merely to commiserate with the victims of 9/11. He never says even a single word about the Justice Department's role in the actual war against terrorism. My sense is that he doesn't see it as a war but just one more law-enforcement operation, like investigating bank robbers and Social-Security defrauders.

Feeling the pain of victims is nice, and I'm glad there are nice people at Justice; but it has nothing to do with combatting terrorism... and that is what the NSA program is designed to do. I'm really not surprised that such a nice guy as Mr. Comey was uncomfortable with it.

But much more important is the part that the Times just glosses over in a glib three paragraphs. I suppose the writers might just have missed it... but considering that one of them is Eric Lichtblau, who has had his paw prints on nearly every anti-Bush story to burst out of the paper recently, I have a bit of a hard time believing the "coincidence" excuse. Again.

What was the president's response to the concerns of Comey? He sought the blessings of Comey's boss, Attorney General Ashcroft. And regardless of the outcome of that hospital conversation -- which even the Times admits its informants don't know -- Bush suspended the controversial parts of the NSA program for "several months" to reexamine it:

What is known is that in early 2004, about the time of the hospital visit, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses....

The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the security agency was running the program. Among other things, it looked at how agency officials went about determining that they had probable cause to believe that people in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of abuses.

After noting this, Messrs. Lichtblau and Risen immediately return to the central theme of all of the stories about the NSA intercepts: that it was a "warrantless domestic eavesdropping program." (Say, Bush is just like Nixon, and the Iraq War is just like Vietnam! Do we detect a nostalgic pattern here?)

Initially, it was focused on communications into and out of Afghanistan, including calls between Afghanistan and the United States, people familiar with the operation said. But the program quickly expanded.

As in previous stories, the Times fails to disclose exactly how it "expanded"... to what? Intercepting purely domestic phone calls from one American citizen to another? From one citizen to the local Pizza Hut? White House plumbers planting hidden microphones in DNC headquarters? That appears to be the conclusion they want readers to draw, but they've never actually specified what they mean, beyond the already-reported fact that by tapping some terrorist's cell phone, the NSA occasionally picks up a conversation between two U.S. persons within the United States.

As yet, I do not recall "America's newspaper of record" coughing up a single physical person whose rights have been abused. One would expect that if this program were as indiscriminate as the Times would have us believe, they should be able to produce victims by the sackful.

Thus, yet again we're left with a vaguely disquieted feeling, some nervous anxiety, an increased fretting about Big Brother watching us -- but without the Times' fingerprints being found on any actual, specific claims of abuse that can be verified by anyone... even by Sen. Arlen Specter's upcoming inquisition. The New York Times may not be able to define "warrantless domestic eavesdropping," but they sure know it when they manufacture it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 01, 2006, at the time of 07:01 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 31, 2005

The LA Times Needs a "Special Journalist" More Than We Need a Special Counsel

Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I was reading Hugh Hewit, as I'm wont to do, and he quoted from a story by Josh Meyer in that bastion of incisive new analysis, the Los Angeles Times, on the just-announced Justice Department investigation of those who leaked details of the NSA progam that intercepted international phone calls among al-Qaeda members:

Unlike the ongoing investigation into disclosures about Plame's CIA status, this probe is not being run by an independent special prosecutor who is immune to political pressure but by Justice Department officials who work at the discretion of a presidential appointee, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales.

That prompted some critics Friday to call the probe an attempt to silence internal critics of the administration when they were most needed to bring controversial counter-terrorism programs and policies to light.

Let's see if we can't come up with an alternative reason that that offered by those unnamed "critics," shall we?

  • The leak of Valerie Plame's identity (though not her name) was widely thought to have originated within the Bush administration, possibly within the Department of Justice itself, and definitely with the aim of promoting the Bush administration's position.
  • Thus, if the Justice Department investigated, it would in essence be investigating itself or its boss -- creating at the very least the appearance of impropriety.
  • Also, since it would be in the interests of the Bush administration were the leakers never identified (he wouldn't want a Scooter Libby or a Karl Rove to be in jeopardy), there would also be a conflict of interest: pressure to investigate vigorously opposed by potential pressure to back off the investigation.
  • Hence, an independent Special Counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, was selected to conduct the investigation instead.

By contrast, these NSA leakers must have either worked in the National Security Agency (not the Justice Department, which knew nothing about this program) or else on the staff of some senator or representative on the Intelligence Committee... possibly for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who admitted saving a letter discussing the program (and his opposition to it) in the Senate Intelligence Committe's vault for some unspecified future use. And the leakers certainly opposed the president's policies.

Thus, there is no problem with the Justice Department investigating, and there is no conflict of interest: they have the interest of catching the lawbreakers, precisely as they ought; and they would not be investigating themselves.

And therefore, no special counsel is needed or warranted, pardon the pun.

If we were to follow the advice of these "critics" consistently, we would need to bring in a special counsel every time we needed to investigate any crime by any member of the federal bureaucracy; and we may as well disband the Department of Justice entirely and send its lawyers out to litigate international fishing rights and trademark infringement cases.

The distinction seems pretty clear to me. Any questions, Mr. Meyer?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 31, 2005, at the time of 02:34 PM | Comments (26) | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

NSA = "No Such Agency?"

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I think I've been running off at the fingers lately; all my posts have been re-e-e-e-e-ea-a-al lo-o-o-ong. So I hope y'all don't mind if I write a few short and pithy ones.

My old blog-boss, Captain Ed, has a primo post on the conjunction of the two major stories of the day and the one major story of the post-9/11 world: the Patriot Act plus the SigInt spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) together help explain the big story for the past four years: not one, single attack on the American homeland since October 2001, when the Anthrax attacks occurred.

All I have to add is this: I've been scratching my head in puzzlement so hard that folks will think I have pediculosis. Let's review the bidding... senators, including some renegade Republicans, are getting in a lather because the NSA was caught red-handed intercepting electronic communications that cross the American border (in either direction) and analyzing them -- without the knowledge of the parties whose eaves were being dropped.

In other words, the NSA has been discovered in the act of doing its job.

Somebody correct me if I've got this wrong, but isn't electronic eavesdropping the actual mission for which the NSA was created? Didn't it grow out of the old Army Signal Corps -- which (among other things) "tapped" into telegraph wires to spy on bad guys? Am I hallucinating again? (Darn that Blue-Star acid!)

What the heck did everybody think the NSA was doing the last four years... its nails?

It's as if the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the MSM had never even heard of the NSA before, and now they're shocked, shocked that a federal intelligence agency exists to monitor telephone and e-mail communications. Doesn't seem sporting, somehow. Not cricket. If you asked the New York Times and Sen. Harry Reid yesterday what the NSA stood for, they would have said "no such agency."

I understand that after years of observing the CIA, it might seem weird and freaky to stumble across an intelligence agency that quietly and efficiently does its job, and without tooting its own horn or leaking damaging intelligence all over the joint. I note that the sources of this leak to the New York Times are not even identified as working for the NSA:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

Officials of what agency? We are never told.

So while we're cursing the CIA, let's raise a glass to the silent and effective men and women at the National Security Agency.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 16, 2005, at the time of 11:57 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

Reforming the CIA

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm not an expert in intelligence. I don't even play one on the internet. But that's never stopped me from tossing in my 2.38 ¥ worth... just so long as you understand I'm a complete ignoramus in this area, and my opinion is literally worthless. In fact, you're probably wasting your time reading this -- stop playing on the internet and get back to work!

Overview

What I would really like to see is the CIA broken up. All analysts should be split between realtime military-intelligence analysts (people who say "shoot this target now"), who would be transferred to the Pentagon; and longer term, strategic-intelligence analysts. The latter should be shifted to a special Intelligence Analysis Directorate, which would receive input from the CIA Provisionals (see below), the NSA, and all the military intelligence agencies, which would copy the Intel Directorate on all received intel -- other than specific targetting intelligence.

Much of the money currently spent on the CIA should go into the CIA Provisionals, to be spent recruiting, training, equipping, and supporting American citizens to infiltrate other countries' militaries, governments, businesses, universities, think tanks, and (ideally) intelligence services. Most of the remainder of the current CIA budget should follow the personnel, either into the Pentagon, the Intel Directorate, or wherever else functionality went.

The CIA Provisionals

The CIA Provisionals would consist almost entirely of undercover agents -- human-intelligence officers with no official cover. Nobody who works for an embassy, or any other job where the host country would routinely assume them to be CIA. The Provisionals would comprise only those agents whom nobody knows as agents: these will be our James Bonds.

Besides foreign-country intelligence agents, the Provisionals would also include our frontline agents for infiltrating non-state actors: terrorist organizations, multinational corporations, NGOs, the UN, and everything else that seems a likely source of intelligence. They would need some administrative personnel and some managers; but other than that, the rest are "secret agents."

The Provisionals would be organized as 4-, 6-, or 12-person teams in a classic cell structure (size determined by mission). Each person would know only a handful of other people, and then only by nickname. By and large, these would be unmarried men and women who have shown extraordinary reliability, loyalty, and courage. Every such agent would be given a $1 million life insurance policy -- and like in Mission: Impossible, everyone is told that if he is captured or killed the CIA will deny all knowledge of his existence.

The Intel Directorate

All the official-cover personnel (and we'll still need such) will be under the Intel Directorate -- which would therefore comprise all civilian intelligence analysts and openly known contact points... the people who can proudly drive their cars, with CIA stickers, into the Langley facility in full view of God and everyone. They would be organized into teams (about platoon sized) and would report up the chain; but on a rotating basis, each team lead would be taken in turn to the White House and/or a joint meeting of the House and Senate intelligence committees and questioned in secret.

This last is just to avoid the problem of the "disinformation pyramid," where each underling tells his boss only what he thinks the boss wants to hear, and tells his own subordinates only what will benefit his power. During these secret meetings, the team leads will be asked what they have been seeing, what they speculate it might all mean, what they told their supervisors, and so forth. The White House and Congress use this as a check to ensure that what the low-level analysis teams are seeing actually makes its way into the National Intelligence Estimate.

Data mining will be actively encouraged. Anybody in Congress or among the public who objects will be formally told to get stuffed.

Budgeting, Monitoring, and Recruitment

Of the $45 billion or so currently spent on the CIA budget, I would love to see at least $15 billion directed entirely to the Provisionals: salary, insurance, medical, and support activities, including insertions, extractions, satellite communications time, satellite launches if necessary (so the covert op can use a sat-phone), bribes, exotic weaponry and spyware, money for establishing unofficial cover, and so forth. Even military activities to serve as distractions or cover for a mission. This should be plenty enough money to recruit as many people as we could actually find who fit the profile.

In turn, Provisional cell-teams will have budgets to hire local thugs, terrorists, turncoats, traitors -- or technical support personnel, and so forth. Who they hire is entirely up to the team. How the team makes tactical decisions is entirely up to the team, though the team lead will be responsible for reporting up the chain. The team will be judged by the quality of its intel, not by how savory are the contacts it hires.

Obviously, there has to be someone in the Intel Directorate monitoring the Provisional teams, to make sure they don't go rogue (like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now). I'm not sure how one goes about this, but I'm sure there are experts who specialize in such areas.

Especially heavily recruit from special-forces soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines; but the Provisionals should not be confined to big, buff men. We need women and more normal looking people too, all in good shape, but not necessarily built like the Rock.

Bonuses should be structured such that a Provisional can retire (or shift into a more open lifestyle in the Directorate) in ten or fifteen years; but they will be offered an annual stipend if they remain in the region even after retirement. If an agent opts instead to go into the Directorate, he cannot remain in the region (for obvious reasons).

Long-Term Geographical Stability

The idea is that the Provisionals settle into a geographical region and become one with their surroundings. They must know in advance that they will likely spend the rest of their careers in that one place -- unless their cover is blown. In which case, they're extracted post-haste and must leave the Provisionals. They can go into some other intelligence area or leave the agency entirely... but once blown, I think that's it. Too much danger of being recognized.

The point of remaining in a single spot is to get to know the area almost as well as a local, and also to become well-known and trusted by the locals. They will be trained in the local language so that accent is reduced to the absolute minimum necessary. Special bonuses for recruits who already speak the language, especially as a native. But every Provisional, without exception, must be an American citizen, must have no irregularities in his or her background, and must pass a background check at the highest level.

Well, anyway, those are my thoughts -- for whatever little they may be worth!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 22, 2005, at the time of 03:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Maybe Not So PATRIOTic After All

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

So just hours after agreeing to a compromise extension of the USA Patriot Act, Democrats abruptly balked, giving no reason why they would pull out now after having agreed early this same morning.

A tentative agreement to renew the Patriot Act this week teetered late Wednesday without explicit support of the lead Senate negotiator, as Democrats complained that the draft wouldn't sufficiently curb the FBI's power to probe the most private aspects of people's lives.

Hours after House and Senate negotiators said they had reached a tentative pre-dawn agreement, Democrats and civil libertarians complained that it didn't address their chief concern: the curbing of FBI power to gather certain information by requiring the investigators to prove the subject's records are connected to a foreign agent or government.

So the biggest problem is that the FBI is still inexplicably able to gather information; evidently, the Democrats and "civil libertarians" thought the agreement would be that the Patriot Act was made permanent, but only if all its investigative teeth were first pulled! In other words, the Democrats will agree to pursue terrorists IF AND ONLY IF we agree in advance not to catch any.

But why didn't they voice these objections earlier? What could have changed in those few hours? The key is in the very next paragraph, in which we find out that the Senate failed to consult with the most important Senate negotiator of all:

"It gives a nod toward checks and balances without fixing the most fundamental flaws in the Patriot Act," said Lisa Graves of the Americans Civil Liberties Union.

Whoops! I guess next time the Republicans should just save time by going over the heads of the Senate Democrats directly to the real power on the Left, the infamous "shadow senate."

Somebody page Nina Totenberg!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2005, at the time of 09:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Still PATRIOTic After All These Years

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

This deal is probably the best we can get to extend and make permanent the PATRIOT Act, and I think Bush ought to grab it and sign as soon as it's on his desk, lest the whole thing fall apart.

My only real regret is that they didn't seize the opportunity to change the absurd acronymic name, which reads in full "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act," or the USA PATRIOT Act. Yeesh!

House and Senate negotiators struck a tentative deal on the expiring Patriot Act that would curb FBI subpoena power and require the Justice Department to more fully report its secret requests for information about ordinary people, according to officials involved in the talks.

The agreement, which would make most provisions of the existing law permanent, was reached just before dawn Wednesday. But by midmorning GOP leaders had already made plans for a House vote on Thursday and a Senate vote by the end of the week. That would put the centerpiece of President Bush's war on terror on his desk before Thanksgiving, a month before more than a dozen provisions were set to expire.

Here are the basic provisions, at least according to the Associated Press's Laurie Kellman:

  • All existing provisions of the PATRIOT Act become permanent except those listed in the next bullet point.
  • The exceptions are rules on wiretapping and obtaining records from businesses under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA -- this is the infamous "library records" provision), which sunset after seven years unless renewed by Congress.
  • The deal enacts new rules allowing for better monitoring of "lone wolf" terrorists.

Examples of lone wolves include the Beltway snipers, John Allen Muhammed and Lee Malvo, and Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport on Uly 4th, 2002: none of these people had contact with al-Qaeda or other known terrorist organizations, but they nevertheless "took up the sword" on their own nut to "kill the infidel." These new rules also sunset in seven years unless renewed.

  • The Justice Department must "report to Congress" each year about how many "national security letters" they have sent out.

These are letters demanding various business and phone records and imposing a legal requirement of silence on the recipient about having received such a letter. Currently, before submitting such a letter, law-enforcement officers must first apply to the FISA Court -- a special, secret court set up specifically to issue subpoenas and warrants related to cases involving espionage, foreign sabotage, and other actions of foreign agents; the original PATRIOT Act added terrorist investigations to the list of those handled by the FISA Court, whose warrants and subpoenas are kept secret. (Of course, once a person is arrested, he is tried by an ordinary federal court.)

I hope there is enough wiggle room in the agreement to restrict notification to those members of Congress who sit on the House or Senate Intelligence Committees; otherwise, all this classified information will instantly be leaked to the press by Democrats for political advantage.

  • Before sending national-security letters, law-enforcement officials would have to submit a new "statement of facts" to the FISA Court showing "reasonable grounds to believe the records are relevant to an investigation."

They would also need to show that the individual whose records are sought is in contact with an agent of a foreign power or known terrorist organization. (I suppose if the DOJ cannot show this, they would have to operate under the "lone wolf" rules instead.)

  • The deal places "modest new requirements on so-called roving wiretaps."

The AP articles does not say specifically what those requirements are. I tried to Google for more information, but every article was simply an exact reprint of this AP story. We'll probably know more later this week, when the House and Senate votes occur.

The deal does not cover several ancillary provisions that had been sought by Republicans via amendment but to which the Democrats objected, including limitations on federal appeals of state court decisions, tightening of sex-offender registration laws, and better courthouse security. Presumably those will have to be brought up separately later.

All in all, this is a pretty darned good compromise, and it's likely the best we can possibly get. It's also proof that rumors of President Bush's political expiry are greatly exaggerated: he's still got it!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2005, at the time of 02:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

Off With the Gloves!

Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The demigods over at Power Line are just going to be ecstatic about this. John Hinderaker worried that Bush's speech a few days ago, defending himself and his administration from the destructive and absurdist "Bush lied, people died" meme was just a one-off, and that the president might decide that, since he had "answered" the charge, he could then just "move on to other things."

This is a pretty good beginning, but it means nothing unless Bush and his surrogates keep up the counter-attack. My fear is that Bush will think that now that he has responded, he can move on to other things. This would be a serious mistake. I think Bush and his surrogates should give the same speech more or less every day for the next month or two. The administration has a lot of catching up to do, and a single speech, or a handful of speeches, won't have any impact.

But today, AP calms our fears:

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) - President Bush, heading to Asia with hopes of improving his image on the world stage, hurled a parting shot at Iraq war critics on Monday, accusing some Democrats of "sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

"That is irresponsible," Bush said in prepared remarks he planned to deliver to U.S. forces during a refueling stop in Alaska. Excerpts from the remarks were released by the White House as Bush flew to Elemendorf Air Force Base on the initial leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said in his prepared remarks.

"Only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world - and that person was Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

The president continues the powerful centerpunching he finally began last week:

In his prepared Alaska remarks, Bush noted that some elected Democrats in Congress "have opposed this war all along.

"I disagree with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand," he said. "Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

Rem acu tetigisti, as the Romans said; Bush has touched the point with a needle. Congress does not have access to every jot and tittle of intelligence information that the president does; but the Senate and House Intelligence Committees did, in fact, have access to all of the major conclusions -- and all of the disagreements and caveats -- available to the White House.

Yet twenty-nine Democrats in the Senate (and most Democrats in the House, though that was a voice vote, not a roll call) voted on October 11th, 2002, to authorize the use of force in Iraq, including all of the presidential candidates of 2004 in Congress except for Bob Graham of Florida -- then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Edwards (D-NC), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), and nominee John Kerry (D-MA) -- and several expected candidates for 2008, including Joe Biden (D-DE) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Despite supporting the war in 2002, Edwards, Kerry, Biden and other Democrats (such as Charles Schumer) are leading the pack charging that Bush "lied us into the war." I suppose what they're really claiming is that they voted to send America to war without even having read the relevant intelligence. I don't believe it, but that's what they must be saying.

The minority Republicans (except for Lincoln Chafee) read the intelligence reports and concluded that Saddam Hussein had to go. Some Democrats read the same intelligence reports (or didn't bother) and decided it wasn't enough to go to war; these folks -- Dick Durbin (D-IL), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), for example -- at the very least have the virtue of consistency: they were agin' it then, they're agin' it now.

But the Democratic Party has a terrible problem: they desperately want to paint Bush as a mindless warmonger who was in possession of credible intelligence that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (despite the fact that we actually found those "large stockpiles" that were promised -- see here and here, most recently), but who "lied" about it just to get us into that war. But they have no answer for the large number of very big-profile Democrats who either looked at the intel and agreed with Bush -- or who couldn't even trouble themselves to look at the intel before voting.

I visualize John Hinderaker standing atop his desk and doing the "Dilbert dance" at the thought that Bush has finally awaked from his year-and-a-half slumber and picked a fight with the lying slime who have done him and the Republican Party -- and the country -- so much damage already.

If John has room up there, I'd like to join him. Now if only Bush would also finally take on the numbskulls who insist that a chemical rocket isn't a chemical weapon if the chemicals are not actually loaded, just sitting alongside in a 55-gallon drum inside the same camouflaged bunker.

Yup. And a gun isn't a gun if you just unload it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 14, 2005, at the time of 04:25 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 10, 2005

Why Congress Should Not "Ban Torture"

Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I made the mistake of reading an editorial in the Hololulu Advertiser this morning; it perfectly encapsulates why we must not allow Congress to charge off on McCain's newest crusade against "torturing" our detainees. (It is, of course, yet another attempt by McCain to aggrandize himself by smearing President Bush. But that's a given, considering who we're dealing with, and beside the point.)

Here is what caught my eye:

There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to some of the rhetoric coming from the White House these days on the subject of torture and treatment of detainees held in the war against terrorism.

On his South American swing, President Bush responded firmly to questions from reporters: "We do not torture," he insisted, when asked about alleged secret CIA prisons overseas.

That should be reassuring, but what, precisely, does the president mean? That's a legitimate question, considering back in Washington his administration is struggling to exempt the CIA from a proposed law that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of people held in U.S. custody.

Apparently, in some semantic netherworld, "cruel and degrading" treatment does not add up to torture.

The problem is not in the banning; nobody of any significance in the government supports or would even tolerate actual torture, either conducted by us or by some other state actor in our presence or with our knowledge. The problem is that every time a body like Congress addresses the issue, they define torture downward.

Here, for example: "cruel and degrading," the language used in the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is so nebulous and malleable that it can mean anything some international tribunal chooses it to mean.

Far from "offer[ing] clear and consistent guidelines for troops who are charged with handling and questioning detainees," the definition of what constitutes torture or "'cruel and degrading' treatment" would be a moving target that changed daily (or perhaps hourly). Since no CIA field interrogator could ever be sure he wouldn't run afoul of Congress's new defintion -- and since the penalties would be harsh -- none would ever so much as ask a tough question or dare raise his voice for fear that he would find himself in a cell next to Charles Graner.

The Universal Code of Military Justice already bans torture... obviously; look at what happened to the idiots at Abu Ghraib. But the military makes the definition "clear and consistent." Congress, by contrast, could change the definition on a whim (or a good election day for the Democrats). All right... but what about the CIA? They're not under the UCMJ; should they be barred from engaging in anything that Congress, relying upon an international tribunal, defines as "cruel and degrading?" Or should they be allowed in extreme cases to use more aggressive interrogation?

It would be reasonable to leave the final decision up to the president, not Congress... which by an odd coincidence is the very exemption that the Bush administration is seeking:

The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States." The president would have to approve the exemption, and Defense Department personnel could not be involved. In addition, any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations, according to draft changes in the exemption the White House is seeking.

Not that the CIA should be allowed to romp through the torture chamber like Tomás de Torquemada, but that in very exceptional circumstances (the "ticking bomb" scenario), they be allowed under direct presidential directive to use aggressive interrogation techniques, even those that don't sit well with the berobed pedants at the Hague (or in Congress).

This is precisely the sort of operational decision that must be made by the Commander in Chief, not by preening senators like John McCain (R-AZ) or anti-military, anti-war, anti-Bush House zealots like Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (S-VT).

It's as easy to say "I'm against torture" as it is to say "Nazis are bad," and just about as meaningful. Opposing a Congressional takeover of operational military decisionmaking is, quite naturally, portrayed in the press as supporting torture, as the Advertiser does above. But on this issue, Bush has no choice: he must do as he is doing, and just hope that there is enough sanity in Congress that they will sustain his inevitable veto.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 10, 2005, at the time of 02:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 03, 2005

Little Demo In Slumberland

Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

John over at Power Line (easily the second snappiest dresser of those three) mulls the motive behind the Democrats' hysteria -- now -- over pre-war intelligence:

Democratic activists desperately want to block Judge Alito from ascending to the Court, but the reality is that Senate Democrats are powerless to achieve that goal. Alito's qualifications are unassailable, the Democrats are a minority party, and the Republicans are united in the conviction that Alito deserves a vote. A filibuster isn't out of the question, but if the Dems try it, it will fail.

So the Senate Democrats can't come through for their party where it counts. I doubt that the timing of the Month of Valerie is a coincidence; I suspect it is intended mostly to distract the Democratic base from the reality of the Senate Democrats' impotence.

I don't mean to be fip, but I think John has hold of the means, not the motive. He has to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.

Ever since the catastrophe of 1994, the Democratic Party has lived in a fantasy world of its own devising. Unable to face the reality of losing the House and Senate in 1994, then the presidency in 2000, then the Senate again in 2002 (after Jumpin' Jim Jeffords' defection was discounted), and most recently the 2004 reelection, they have been unable to recover sanity, daily drifting deeper into political schizophrenia... to quote Adam Savage, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

I don't need a psychiatrist like Charles Krauthammer or Thomas Szasz; the signs are manifest. Most overtly and trivially, there are the two distinct TV shows set in fantasy universes where the Democrats are in charge of everything: the West Wing and Commander In Chief. Arguably, many Democrats demanded a show like CinC because they were unsatisfied with the West Wing -- because they had a few Republican characters who were not totally corrupt raving lunatics.

But the dementia manifests in uglier ways, too: many Democrats still, to this day, refuse to admit that Bush won the election in 2000 or in 2004. A U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), actually tried to prevent the Ohio electoral votes for Bush from being certified in January of this year, presumably on the grounds that John Kerry was the "real" winner there.

Democrats have wallowed in increasingly occult conspiracy theories and nightmarish fantasies, from George W. Bush conspiring with Arabs on the 9/11 attacks to Republicans and the Army Corps of Engineers plotting to blow up the New Orleans levees "to kill the black people." Karl Rove has assumed monstrous significance, as if he were an incarnation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (for the younger set, Dr. Evil). Creepy cartels of neocons (read "Jew-o-cons") secretly seize control of the world for their nefarious Zionist plans.

Many left-liberals now live in a world that is as thrilling and horrific as the H.P. Lovecraft "Cthulhu" Mythos *, full of dark, eldrich gods, nameless cults, and unspeakable rites. Reliable, old, secret-society paranoia has resurged, of course: the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, even the Illuminati; but new and bizarre cults have formed around the basic template of "Famous Right-Winger X is secretly in league with Evil Villain Y"... for example, Osama bin Laden is actually a Mossad agent working for Ariel Sharon, Bush-41 started the Gulf War in order to build an oil pipeline for Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein is actually a mole who has been under Donald Rumsfeld's thumb since the early 1980s. Other brand new (tired old) cult archetypes include the specter of "globalization," with the World Trade Organization taking the place of the Knights Templar or the Hashishim "Assassins;" and the omnipotent, omnipresent Haliburton standing in for Wolfram & Hart in the Buffy spinoff Angel.

Let's be clear about this. Reality does not come packaged in stories; but our brains are hardwired to comprehend events in dramatic form, with heroes, villains, a climax, and a denouement. So we (all of us) dream up "the story of our lives," in which the dreamer is the protagonist, someone or some group is elected to be antagonist, and life becomes a series of chapters, each ending in a cliffhanger.

For Republicans and conservatives, who are in the ascendency and generally happy with life, the tale is a modern-day adventure-romance, typically with a happy ending. But for Democrats and liberals, who have seen nothing but dark chapters for years now, the tome is a Clive Barker bloodfest, a King Lear tale of madness and woe, a science-fiction black comedy like the Matrix, or a Walter-Mitty fantasy of easy triumph and cheap, childish victory, depending how much angst the tale-singer can take before breaking from reality entirely. Read the New York Times quickly, then ask yourself whether it wouldn't have even more verisimilitude with a wicked stepmother and a dragon.

The Democrats have no "plan" for how to use pre-war intelligence against Bush... no more than John Nash (Russell Crowe) had any well thought out purpose for hallucinating "Agent Parcher" (Ed Harris) and his machinations in a Beautiful Mind. They are demon-driven to expose the evil, just as D.A. Jim Garrison was driven to expose the massive conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (a plot that required the connivance of Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the Soviets, and the 82nd Airborne). And it doesn't matter that nobody will listen anymore, that Democrats have "no one left to lie to," in Christopher Hitchens' memorable phrase. Like Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they are condemned to stagger forever along the street, flagging down cars and screaming the warning: "They're already here! You're next!"

* Spellchecker attempted to correct this to the "Chihuahua Mythos."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 03, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 01, 2005

Weapon of Mass Media Deception

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The absurdity of Harry Reid's tantrum today, forcing the Senate into a rare closed session as a stunt to draw attention to the Democrats' claims that the entire Iraq war was cooked up by Karl Rove and the neocons and sold to Americans by lies and distortions (see virtually any speech by John F. Kerry in 2004) has been ably covered already today by Power Line and by Captain's Quarters. I have little to add to the main points of Paul and Ed.

I'm more interested in the way that the mainstream news media manipulate the story in order to support the Democrats' side of the dispute. Let's start with the easiest to document, the slam dunk. Here is the Associated Press today:

Democrats contend that the unmasking of Valerie Plame was retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson, publicly challenging the Bush administration's contention that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Africa. That claim was part of the White House's justification for going to war.

Missing in action from this report is the fact that the Butler Report from Great Britain completely affirmed this very contention (actually, Bush said that the British had such evidence), and also that the final, unanimous report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Joseph Wilson himself told his CIA debriefer that the Nigerien prime minister (and former minister of mines) had stated that the Iraqis conducted secret negotiations to buy something from Niger -- and that the prime minister believed that "something" was yellowcake uranium (as opposed to animal hides or cowpeas, Niger's other exports).

But lying by omission is not the worst of the reporting. In its zeal to cheer the Democrats on, AP has yet again exaggerated beyond the evidence to blatant falsehood about what we actually found in Iraq:

Reid's move shone a spotlight on the continuing controversy over prewar intelligence. Despite administration claims, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and some Democrats have accused the White House of manipulating the information.

While it is true that under the crabbed definition of WMDs used by the U.N. inspectors no "large stockpiles" of chemical or biological weapons have been found, it is completely false to assert, as AP does, that none were. Washington Post, July 3rd, 2004, in a story written by Walter Pincus:

Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."

...

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.

Even by the overly strict definition of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), these all qualify as "weapons of mass destruction." But more to the point is the definition itself: for Walter Pincus, the Associated Press, the entire mainstream media, the official line of the Democratic Party, and evidently the CIA and State Department themselves, the rockets found (or purchased) by the Poles in 2004 do not count as chemical munitions because the warheads, while manufactured to accept chemicals, were not filled.

Bear in mind that the ISG was led first by David Kay, then by Charles Duelfer. Kay was pushed by the State Department and by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei; and Duelfer was appointed by then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet: all three of these groups have waged relentless political warfare against George W. Bush, against Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in particular, against the conclusion of the "neocons" that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to the United States.

Each has persisted in this war-against-the-war long after the major-combat phase of the war itself was won, and the peace began to be waged with such intensity. The primary tactic they have used during this latter period has been to dispute every single WMD find as being something benign -- or at least potentially civilian -- instead of military.

Many times, we found huge drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers... and many times we found empty chemical rockets and artillery shells, often at the same ammo dumps. But evidently, that doesn't constitute chemical weapons according to the ISG. But if Hussein's regime had actually poured the first into the second, then and only then would they be defined as chemical weapons.

Does this mean that a gun is not a gun if it's not loaded?

Captain Ed discussed this also, way back in April of 2004. He quotes extensively from Kenneth Timmerman's investigative piece in Insight Magazine, April 26th, 2004:

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors....

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same....

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" [Douglas] Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

(Hanson was an "atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer" who was a civilian analyst in Iraq in summer 2003 working on WMD issues.)

It is well known that the staggering extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs was only discovered after he lost the Gulf War. Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands were unearthed (often literally) and destroyed by the coalition. Afterward (we have known this for some time from defectors), Hussein decided that Iraq would take a new tack in its never-ending quest for WMD: from then on, all of Iraq's programs were designed to be "dual use": each would have an ostensibly civilian purpose (pesticides, medical research, nuclear power generation) but could quickly -- in some cases within minutes -- be converted to military use.

Therefore, when looking for "stockpiles" of WMD, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) should have been looking, not for a warehouse full of shells pre-filled with sarin or mustard gas or anthrax, but rather for the precursor components of such: shells and rockets built to accept such chemicals or biological agents in close proximity to the agents themselves... even if they're not actually loaded into the warhead yet.

A rocket that can accept toxic chemicals into its warhead near a 55-gallon drum of cyclosarin-based "pesticide" is a chemical weapon, and it should be defined as such.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'" [Emphasis added]

Coalition troops have found mortar shells filled with a mystery liquid that tested positive in the field for being a blister agent (mustard gas, used so horrifically in World War I, is a blister agent); subsequent testing (redefinition) by the ISG disputed that finding. But lost in the shuffle was the question that should have leapt out at everyone: what conceivable purpose is served by placing a liquid inside a mortar shell in the first place?

Putting any sloshing substance inside a ballistic object would obviously throw off the accuracy -- so there must be some advantage that offsets that problem. Can we put our heads together and think of some possibility, a reason why a man like Saddam Hussein would order some liquid to be poured into a rocket or a mortar round?

Even by the most tendentious definition of WMD, we have found some; so AP's overreach is just flatly wrong. But more important, the definition of WMD stockpile itself is wrong. When assessing threat, you dare not take the most benign view that all those drums of cyclosarin, "reference strains" of Anthrax and botulinum, and those empty chemical and biological munitions are unrelated and only coincidentally situated right next to each other in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps. You must use the most expansive defintion that takes into account the avowed intent of the Iraqi WMD programs to produce "dual use" chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. And by that definition -- which the ISG would have used in any other context than the CIA's attempt to thwart the Bush Administration's foreign policy -- we have indeed found "large stockpiles" of WMD.

Even if the Democrats -- and their allies in the MSM and the CIA -- don't want to admit it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 01, 2005, at the time of 04:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 24, 2005

MPM From the MSM

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Plame Blame Game , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Misinformation per minute from the mainstream media, that is. AP has an incredible story up -- with the word "incredible" meant literally: it's hard to count the number of misstatements, malicious manglings, myopic maunderings, and just plain mental missteps. If the author's name were not "Nancy Benac," I would assume Paul Krugman wrote it. (Maybe he has a secret identity.)

Let me just run through a few; but you really should read the original, lest I spoil the best parts.

NOTE: Bulleted points are quotations from the Benac story.

  • CIA officials asked [Joe Wilson] to travel to Africa in February 2002 to check out a report that Niger sold uranium to Iraq in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson quickly concluded the report was bogus. (Documents related to the purported sale later were exposed as a forgery.)

Actually, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Wilson quietly concluded the opposite... at least, that is what he told his CIA handlers. I'm sure that was just an honest mistake from Ms. Benac, who is an honorable woman. They are all honorable men (and women) at the Associated Press.

Clifford May is the man-on-the-spot at the National Review to debunk this first set of -- misunderstandings (for Nancy Benac is an honorable woman). (And a tip of the hat to Power Line for the link.) From July 12th, 2004:

First:

Ironically, Senate investigators found that at least some of what Wilson told his CIA briefer not only failed to persuade the agency that there was nothing to reports of Niger-Iraq link — his information actually created additional suspicion.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger [basically just yellowcake and animal hides --DaH], interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Second:

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for "yellowcake" uranium. On the contrary, according to some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered — as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people there were no grounds for the charge. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm.

But that's not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. [And so it did. --DaH]

  • The Times' Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days before sharing with the grand jury what she knew. After [I. Lewis "Scooter"] Libby personally assured her that he had waived her pledge of confidentiality, Miller told the grand jury about three conversations with him.

In fact, Libby had "waived her pledge of confidentiality" a year before she reported to la calabooza. If she were in any doubt about his seriousness, she had only to pick up the phone and call him or have her attorney do so. Whatever is the reason for her curious decision to don prison gray, like Joan of Arc, and suffer for the cause -- and speculation is delicious -- it was not uncertainty whether Libby had really, truly, actually waived confidentiality when he signed a document waiving confidentiality.

I'm sure that Nancy Benac knew all this and simply thought it too tedious to bring up, for they are all honorable men. Women. Whatever.

  • One important question is what Bush and Cheney might do if top aides like Rove or Libby are found to have been the leakers. Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers but later gave himself more wiggle room by promising to fire anyone who is found to have committed a crime.

This is pure invention from the MSM, though certes, they are all honorable. Nobody has found any quotation from Bush where he said he would "fire any leakers," or fire anyone who spoke to reporters about Mrs. Wilson, or any other such prejudicial nonsense.

This all stems from a reporter who started asking a question of the president at a press conference. I don't recall the exact wording, but he said as preamble that Bush had promised to fire any leakers, and did he still stand by that pledge.

President Bush tried to answer, but the reporter kept talking, forcing the president to repeat his answer. In a move eerily presaging what was done later to Laura Bush to falsely make it appear as though she were calling Miers critics "sexists," the reporter seized upon the word "yes" that began Bush's answer -- and clearly referred to another point of the question -- to claim that Bush had therefore agreed with the reporter's premise that Bush earlier said he would fire any leakers... notwithstanding the fact that Bush had said no such thing.

Note how this asinine claim has progressed: nobody can find an original quotation of Bush saying he would "fire any leakers;" so the reporter's premise, at least as publicly provable, was factually wrong. But by tacking it onto a question that would certainly draw a "Yes" response (Bush responding that no one convicted of a crime in this affair would have a place in his administration), the reporter could later claim that Bush had retroactively made the reporter's false premise true!

And after that bit of legerdemain, all the news media may take it as read that "Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers." See how easy that was? Though we must absolve Ms. Benac of blame, for she is an honorable woman.

  • In a way, the whole Wilson saga can be traced back to Cheney and Bush. It was Cheney's interest in the alleged Iraq-Niger deal that led the CIA to dispatch Wilson to Africa.

Well, so sayeth Mr. Wilson. He claims that:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report.

But Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, and a hot tomato in both positions, begs to demur. From a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, posted by JustOneMinute a couple of years ago:

BLITZER: Who sent [Wilson]?

RICE: Well, it was certainly not a level that had anything to do with the White House, and I do not believe at a level that had anything to do with the leadership of the CIA.

BLITZER: Supposedly, it came at the request of the vice president.

RICE: No, this is simply not true, and this is something that's been perpetuated that we simply have to straighten out.

The vice president did not ask that Joe Wilson go to Niger. The vice president did not know. I don't think he knew who Joe Wilson was, and he certainly didn't know that he was going.

It's still possible that the CIA simply misled poor Joe Wilson into thinking the VP really wanted to know; but if so, why would they send a retired ambassador with no expertise in either Iraq or WMD, no experience as an investigator, and who did not even work for the Company? Heck, they could at least have sent the man's wife instead. In any event, official denials of the administration should disallow AP -- for they are all honorable, all honorable persons -- from stating as fact what is still in dispute.

  • And it [was] Bush's use of the debunked claim in his State of the Union address that led Wilson to publish his doubts.

Just in case you missed it the first time; for being honorable men, they could not do otherwise than to remind you. And women... honorable women.

I'm afraid I have spoilt it for you after all, those intrepid few who read to the end of this post. But don't fret: I'm sure these honorable persons, variously male and female, will give us another incredible story to digest tomorrow!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 02:06 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 22, 2005

The 800 Pound Gorelick

Able Danger for the Masses , Terrorism Intelligence , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm quite reluctant to run with this, considering the source -- actually, considering both the original and the reporting sources! -- but what the heck. Consider yourselves duly cautioned: objects in the mirror may be farther than they appear.

Newsmax.com alleges that Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) now alleges that the staffer who actually blocked the 9/11 Commission from hearing testimony about Able Danger was none other than Dieter Snell, one of the chief investigating lawyers on the commission and a former prosecutor of Ramzi Yousef for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 -- and that Snell, according to Weldon, was "the lead staffer for Jamie Gorelick." It's this last part that is a new claim, a supposed direct connection between Snell and Gorelick... and that is the part I cannot independently verify.

(I am guessing this is why Captain Ed has not yet commented on this: he is waiting for some verification of the central claim.)

It has been known for some time that it was Snell who did not pass along Navy Captain Scott Philpot's testimony to the commission; for example, consider these two postings on National Review Online's blog the Corner, two posts the same day (August 20th, 2005) by Andrew McCarthy:

This is a troublesome story, we don’t know all the facts, and I happen to know and be fond of Dieter Snell--the Commission staffer who did the interview of the naval intel officer [Scott Philpot] -- so if Snell found him unpersuasive, that carries a lot of weight with me. ("WANT TO REPHRASE THAT?," at 4:52 am)

As I've noted with respect to the former, we don't know enough about what happened, and the fact that someone as able as commission staffer Dieter Snell appears to have rejected the naval officer's information gives me cause for pause. ("THE POINT IS TRAINING AND FOCUS, NOT ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY," at 10:45 am)

But Weldon now claims that Dietrich Dieter Snell was "the lead staffer for Jamie Gorelick." Alas, I cannot find any definitive evidence that Snell was specifically working for Gorelick, as opposed simply to being the lead investigative staffer (or one of the leads) for the commission as a whole. Also, I'm not sure how much weight to give this even if true: I can't find any connection between Gorelick and Snell prior to the 9/11 Commission. If that is correct, then the mere fact that he was appointed her staffer -- if he actually was, that is -- wouldn't mean he would necessarily collaborate with her on some deep conspiracy to keep Able Danger out of the public eye in order to hide the damage caused by what I called "Jamie Gorelick's wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement" back on Captain's Quarters.

Until I see much stronger evidence of some prior connection between Snell and Gorelick than the mere fact that he was an investigator on the commission that she (and many others) sat on, I'm not going to believe in a conspiracy arising between the two... despite the fact that Rep. Weldon has been right more often than wrong on this issue.

Commenters with knowledge of this specific question -- the actual connection, if any, between Snell and Gorelick -- are urged to share.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 22, 2005, at the time of 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 19, 2005

ab Hugh's Universal Rules of Intelligence

Futurism , Scaley Classics , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Thinking about the many intelligence failures -- the collapse of the Shah of Iran, the failure to find "large stockpiles" of WMD in Iraq, the tragic case of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, shot to death in London by police who mistook him for a suicide bomber -- and about the many intelligence successes (all those terrible terrorist attacks that didn't occur on American soil because they were thwarted -- suggests some rules of intelligence and analysis that we should always keep in mind:

1. The Law of Imperfect Precognition: Sometimes there is no "right choice." Throw the dice.

2. The Law of Imperfect Postcognition: Not even hindsight is ever really 20-20.

3. The Law of Colliding Interests: Five different people can each make a rational decision and still wind up in a melee.

4. The Law of the Onion: There is always another layer of analysis that contradicts everything you've already concluded. At some point, you just have to stop.

5. The Law of Models: There is a real reality out there, whether you can see it or not. And it will bite.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2005, at the time of 07:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

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