If Not Ivins, Then Who?

Crossposted from our new home blog,They gave us a republic...
A stunning op-ed from the Wall Street Journal asserts that the Anthrax killer is still on the loose, and that Bruce Ivins could not have manufactured the Anthrax.

Richard Spertzel lays out a very compelling set of facts that indicate that the FBI wants to close the case and move on. The initial reaction to the revelation that Ivins was a suspect, who then killed himself with tylenol codeine, was that he may have been a patsy. I think he was a patsy in waiting. I think the FBI was waiting to see what Ivins would do so they could hang the case on him and close it. Why else would this have dragged on for so long? To make that case, let's follow what Spertzel lays out in his op-ed:

The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute.

It gets worse:

Information released by the FBI over the past seven years indicates a product of exceptional quality. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax that small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough that it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled.

What's more, they were also tailored to make them potentially more dangerous. According to a FBI news release from November 2001, the particles were coated by a "product not seen previously to be used in this fashion before." Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. That's what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time.

The Washington Post says that the FBI has a possible reason for how Ivins carried out the milling and the processing of the Anthrax spores. My question is--how plausible is this? Does that shoot a hole in Spertzel's assessment?

...Ivins, the government's leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case.

Ivins's possession of the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army's sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

The FBI's own sloppy procedures and leaks are what undermines their case. Are we to believe that Ivins was really foolish enough to request a piece of equipment that, had the FBI been capable of conducting a reasonably competent investigation, should have tipped everyone off? If the lyopholizer was the equipment used to weaponize the Anthrax, how is it that every single lyopholizer wasn't accounted for, tested, and tracked back to whoever used it within days or weeks of the 2001 attack?

This is another carefully orchestrated leak that could be used to bolster the FBI's non-case. They have been diligent at letting every little damning detail come out, all but convicting Ivins with the certainty of their investigation. But when you start to look at the facts, that certainty melts away. Could there have been a legitimate reason for Ivins to use that equipment? And could the equipment Ivins used actually do the job?

Another FBI leak indicated that each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs.

In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as "according to the Russian recipes" -- apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge.

The latest line of speculation asserts that the anthrax's DNA, obtained from some of the victims, initially led investigators to the laboratory where Ivins worked. But the FBI stated a few years ago that a complete DNA analysis was not helpful in identifying what laboratory might have made the product.

So, it not Ivins, then whom? Spertzel lays this out as well:

Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the "Ames strain," is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist.

The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product.

The lone "mad scientist" motif runs through the investigation. We still can't figure out how Ivins kept any sort of clearance. Was he allowed to keep his clearance so that they could continue to investigate him? Did they let him continue to have access so they could watch him and see if he tried to duplicate what the original Anthrax killer had done? If you knew there was someone unstable in an organization who could possibly carry out a copycat attack--and then give you the perfect patsy on whom you could hang the whole affair--would you risk waiting for years to see if your patsy tripped up?

Ivins may have been demented, troubled, and unstable enough to use a biological weapon against innocent people. But was he the man who carried out the Anthrax attacks in 2001?

From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products.

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?

I don't know about you, but the FBI's case is pretty much in doubt, and a possibly innocent man took the fall for one of the worst failures in the history of the US government.

Remember to update your blogrolls and bookmarks with our new domain name, They gave us a republic...

Ivins Held Onto His Clearance Long After It Should Have Been Taken Away

I have to admit it--I was skeptical that anyone in the media would pick up on the fact that Dr. Bruce Ivins should have had his clearance denied, suspended, or taken away from him years ago. Today, the Washington Post comes out with a powerful story that should force many into retirement, if not into having their own clearances suspended and their careers ended.

As an FBI investigation increasingly focused on him as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fort Detrick scientist Bruce E. Ivins enjoyed a security clearance that allowed him to work in the facility's most dangerous laboratories, to handle deadly biological agents, and to take part in broad discussions about the Pentagon's defenses against germ warfare.

On July 10, the day he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, for example, Ivins spent part of the afternoon at a sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center, according to a former colleague who talked with him there.

Does it get any crazier than that? They knew this man was a serious threat for years--years--and they never cut off his access.


The only thing that seems to be a constant is the confusion, the incompetence, and the "cover your ass" mentality that persists throughout our government. It's not just the political appointees that are to blame. The bureaucrats and the career people failed to protect our country by tolerating and allowing Ivins to hold a clearance.

Colleagues question how Ivins could have maintained his security credentials if the FBI suspected him in the anthrax case. "Even back in the old days, there was a screening process for people who work in those laboratories," Adamovicz said.

Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for USAMRIID, said government rules bar her from discussing the security clearance of a specific employee.

"There are time-honored procedures to examine security clearances on a regular basis, to verify information provided by the security-clearance holder, and traditional steps to ensure that only the appropriate level of security access is granted, largely based on the nature of the person's government job," she said in an e-mail. It would not have been "unusual" for a scientist of Ivins's standing to attend a briefing on the unclassified plague-vaccine research program, she added.

Ivins himself had questioned the effectiveness of the fort's security procedures in interviews with reporters as long as six years ago. At the time of the anthrax attacks, only senior managers at USAMRIID were routinely required to obtain top-secret-level security clearances. Most scientists of Ivins's rank would be required to undergo a background check and would be cleared to see classified documents on a need-to-know basis, according to a former senior official at the lab.

Therein lies the problem. Why was the briefing unclassified? Was it held in an unclassified lab? Meaning, could any citizen have walked into that briefing and attended? Not if it was in a sensitive laboratory on Fort Detrick, Maryland. Was this briefing determined to be "unclassified" after it was known Ivins had attended it? If so, who can answer for the fact that it took until July 10 to get Ivins some medical help?

Tom Daschle was right to question whether the FBI got its man. The real criminals are the ones who let Ivins have access to classified materials after he was known to be a threat. Depending on who you believe, someone has known for years that a man with access to materials that could kill untold numbers of Americans was a psychopath bent on revenge.

All I can say to the situation is this--cover your ass, people. If the Washington Post is smart enough to ask these questions, perhaps someone else will be asking them as well.

Top scientist kills himself as Feds close in...

Updating, and pushing this story down below the fold: we are following the suicide of the man that the Federal government was preparing charges against in connection to the 2001 Anthrax attacks. The case of what happened has long been shrouded in mystery and in deception. Here's an invaluable little piece of insight from Glenn Greenwald:

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. And look where -- according to Brian Ross' report on October 28, 2001 -- these tests were conducted:

And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.

Two days earlier, Ross went on ABC News' World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and, as the lead story, breathlessly reported:

The discovery of bentonite came in an urgent series of tests conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere.

Panic, confusion, and just plain old laziness and incompetence have dogged this story from the beginning. Someone was trying to spin this story and manipulate it to calm public fears. Has it now been solved? Or is this just the beginning of a new chapter?

Continuing our post, below:

Incredible...this story broke overnight and we're just now getting more details.

A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in 2001, according to a published report.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax mailings, which killed five people in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

We're going to get as much of this out as possible--this is a huge development that underscores how a failed investigation can put Americans at risk. We do not know exactly how the investigation moved from Steven Hatfill to Bruce Ivins, but the fact that it has taken nearly seven years to get to this point leaves many more questions than it does answers.

Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill -- for years the only publicly identified "person of interest" -- and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.

The FBI's new top investigators -- Vincent B. Lisi and Edward W. Montooth -- instructed agents to reexamine leads or potential suspects that may have received insufficient attention. Moreover, significant progress was made in analyzing genetic properties of the anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two senators.

The renewed efforts led the FBI back to USAMRIID, where agents first questioned scientists in December 2001, a few weeks after the fatal mailings.

By spring of this year, FBI agents were still contacting Ivins' present and former colleagues. At USAMRIID and elsewhere, scientists acquainted with Ivins were asked to sign confidentiality agreements in order to prevent leaks of new investigative details.

Ivins, employed as a civilian at Ft. Detrick, earlier had attracted the attention of Army officials because of anthrax contaminations that Ivins failed to report for five months. In sworn oral and written statements to an Army investigator, Ivins said that he had erred by keeping the episodes secret -- from December 2001 to late April 2002. He said he had swabbed and bleached more than 20 areas that he suspected were contaminated by a sloppy lab technician.

"In retrospect, although my concern for biosafety was honest and my desire to refrain from crying 'Wolf!' . . . was sincere, I should have notified my supervisor ahead of time of my worries about a possible breach in biocontainment," Ivins told the Army. "I thought that quietly and diligently cleaning the dirty desk area would both eliminate any possible [anthrax] contamination as well as prevent unintended anxiety at the institute."

The Army chose not to discipline Ivins regarding his failure to report the contamination. Officials said that penalizing Ivins might discourage other employees from voluntarily reporting accidental spills of "hot" agents.

But Ivins' recollections should have raised serious questions about his veracity and his intentions, according to some of those familiar with the investigation.

More updates when we get them.
--WS

Ignoring the Home Grown Hate Groups

I was browsing over at Orcinus, and I came across an incident that we missed back in June--the arrest of several members of a home grown terrorist hate group outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring.

And he's right--what I've seen so far is enough to give me pause:

A fourth person is under arrest in what KDKA has learned was an undercover investigation into a ring of domestic terrorists.

Bradley Kahle, of Troutville, Clearfield County, is charged with firearms violations and possession of illegal explosives.

Kahle joins Marvin Hall of Rimersburg, Perry Landis of the Clarion area, Morgan Jones of Lucinda, who were arrested and charged with federal firearm and explosives violations. Until now, their intent has been a mystery.

But Kahle's indictment papers may have shed some light. In them, Kahle tells federal undercover agents of making so-called bean can grenades - empty cans hollowed out and filled with explosives and nails which he said could be used to kill police if they raided his home.

"Hey, eight or 10 good bean bombs, five or 600 rounds of ammo and some good equipment, I could be a tough take," he said according to documents.

On another occasion, Kahle tells the operatives, "If Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated. If not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war."

And yet on another occasion, Kahle tells the agents that the shooting of judges, magistrates and chiefs of police will start the doomsday process or "words to that effect."

Whether this was just a boast or part of a real plan is unclear. But a neighbor of one of the suspects say he's harmless.

You know, no one with bombs and an AK47 is harmless, no matter what some idiot neighbor has to say.

A guy with circus balloons, Spiderman jammies, and a collection of Rick Astley records is still pretty fucking weird, but only mildly harmless. But don't worry--the Department of Homeland Security has been on the case for a while now:

Homeland Security focuses on "possible terror threats from radical environmental and animal rights activists" but omits threats posed by right-wing extremists" according to a DHS report "first disclosed" the last week in March 2005 on the website of the Congressional Quarterly.

The report states that between 2005 and 2011 DHS "expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups."

The report "does not mention domestic extremist groups" or white supremacist groups like Aryan Nations and Army of God or anti-abortion activists, "which have previously been identified by federal officials as threats."

The report lists "left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats.

Experts on domestic terrorism were "surprised the department did not include right-wing groups on their list of adversaries. ... James O. Ellis III, a senior terror researcher for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), said ... that whereas left-wing groups, which have been more active recently, have focused mainly on the destruction of property, right-wing groups have a much deadlier and more violent record and should be on the list. 'The nature of the history of terrorism is that you will see acts in the name of [right-wing] causes in the future.'"

And these are the people to whom we're going to hand over the right to conduct warrantless wiretaps?

It looks like "the Michigan militia" craze is making a comeback. Invest wisely in generators, firearms, and flannel shirt manufacturers. Oh, and you'd better pray we get a Justice Department and a DHS that can actually pay attention to the real hate groups in this country who organize themselves, arm themselves, and kill people when they have the chance.

Civil Liberties are indispensable because sometimes the government gets it wrong

Does anyone remember the anthrax attacks that happened in the weeks following the attacks of September 11, 2001? I sure as hell do, because literally everyone in my line of work (clinical laboratory sciences) got looked at very closely. We will not soon be forgetting how quickly we became suspect after our decades of service to the public and, in many, many cases, service in the military in the Medical Officer Corps.

The government really dropped the ball on that one and still haven't caught the culprit(s). They did manage to ruin the life and career of one academic, though. Now they have settled with him, to the tune of $5.8 million dollars.


From MSNBC:

The Justice Department on Friday agreed to pay more than $5.8 million to Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist once branded by the Justice Department a person of interest in the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. The legal settlement to Hatfill, in cash and an annual payments, signals the end of a civil lawsuit Hatfill brought against the Justice Department and FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy rights by improperly leaking sensitive information about the anthrax investigation to reporters.

"I think it's a gratifying end to a very sad chapter in [Hatfill's] life and that of the FBI and DOJ,” said Hatfill’s lawyer, Thomas Connolly, of the Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis law firm in Washington, D.C. “I'm hopeful that the settlement is punitive enough that they will learn their lesson" regarding the treatment of future suspects in high-profile criminal cases, he told NBC News.

The settlement language tries to give the government a figleaf by stating that it "should not be construed as an admission of liability or fault on the part of the FBI or Justice Department" but only an idiot will believe it. Lots of us remember the attorney general naming former Army scientist Steven Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks, we remember that the FBI agents and Justice Department officials leaked key details about the case to willing reporters, according to depositions provided in Hatfill’s civil suit. The FBI kept the pressure on Hatfill by conspicuously tailing him in public, with one agent in an unmarked car once running over his foot. We also remember the resulting media trial as the first anniversary of September 11 drew near.

Hatfill deserves at least as much compensation as he received. And the government officials who leaked the information should face federal civil rights charges. And I would be saying that even if I didn't take Mr. Hatfill's experience so very personally on so very many levels.

And the fact that the government, spurred on by a 24-hour news cycle that encourages speculation and false accusations, gets it so spectacularly wrong so freakin' often (Richard Jewell, anyone?) is exactly why it is so important to jealously safeguard our remaining liberties.

They violated international law, they employed torture, and Condoleezza Rice is complicit

An audit by the Inspector General for the Department of Justice was released yesterday and what is detailed in the 370-page report is enough to turn the stomach of decent people. It is horrifying. It is sick. It is perverse. And FBI Agents were complaining about the detainee treatment they witnessed that was perpetrated by military interrogators and CIA agents at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and other detention centers.

And it was all done in your name. You had to be made safe, you know, even at the expense of the moral high ground that we liked to consider we occupied. That illusion should be over by now, in the face of what we know has transpired.

Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released yesterday.

Reports that Guantanamo detainees were being subjected to extreme temperatures, religious abuses and nude interrogation were conveyed at White House meetings of senior officials in 2003, yet these questionable tactics remained in use, a lengthy report by the Justice Department's inspector general concluded.

In one instance, colleagues of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft reported that he personally aired concerns about Defense Department strategy toward a particular detainee with Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, while other Justice managers shared similar fears with the council's legal adviser in November 2003, the report said.

Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by investigators, so it remains uncertain how aggressively he pressed the issue, according to the report. Other senior Justice officials told investigators that no changes were made in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay even after these and other complaints filtered up to the National Security Council.

Nearly half of the 450 FBI agents who worked at Guantanamo reported that they had observed or heard about military interrogators using a variety of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, with the most common being sleep deprivation and short-shackling -- or locking a detainee's hands and feet together to prevent comfortable sitting or standing -- for long periods of time.

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law, the report said. They also continued to use "stress positions" and other such techniques well after they were prohibited by Defense Department policy in January 2003, the report said.

The 370-page report draws heavily on e-mail messages and contemporaneous memos to provide the clearest and most definitive account to date of the key tactics used by the government against suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It describes, for example, a "frequent flyer program" meant to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, twisting of thumbs backward, and exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.

Detainees in Iraq had water poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.

Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was angry. "Some have suggested that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own. The report released today by the Department of Justice Inspector General is proof that that is simply not true. The IG found that scores of FBI agents observed the use of harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay."

Aren't you just bursting with pride?

We can not abide this as a nation. We know the Congress can't impeach Bush and Cheney because there is not the political will to make it stick. If anyone got a blow job the woman who knew about it and could prove it is conveniently dead..so...no impeachment for them...

But Condi Rice is another story. Can't we impeach her for her complicity in desecrating our country and allowing us to become a nation of gulags and torture and Kafkaesque process?

UPDATE I / Warren Street / 11:51 AM

The government kept meticulous records of everything it did, also in our name, by the way. TPM's document collection has more

This is just for IRAQ:




What kind of horrific bureaucracy keeps track of how many times it threatens to harm someone's family? I just want to know. Because I don't care what anyone says--THAT'S un-American. Period.

"the utter lack of sophistication and circus-like atmosphere..."

Every time someone says that the United States does not torture, remember this one salient point:

The CIA has acknowledged waterboarding [Abu] Zubaydah, in part out of concern that he had information that could prevent another imminent attack.

That is all the proof one needs in order to show that the US government tortures.

The larger revelations found in the Justice Department audit of the system in which detainees were handled raise troubling questions about the tactics and the mindset of the people who were charged with keeping America safe. Did they, unwittingly, endanger America even more by operating well outside the boundaries of common sense and decency?

The report, written by Glenn Fine, the Inspector General of the US Justice Department, reached several disturbing conclusions:

While the Inspector General's report "...found no instances in which an FBI agent participated in clear detainee abuse..." it blamed the FBI for failing to give clear instructions to its agents in the field.

The split, pitting the FBI against the CIA and Pentagon, came to a head over the treatment of the so-called 20th hijacker Muhammad al-Qahtani. Qahtani is accused by the government of attempting to enter the United States in August 2001 to be a muscle hijacker on one of the planes used in the 9/11 attacks. He was turned away at the Orlando airport and not allowed entry into the country.

Fine's report raises troubling questions about CIA and Pentagon interrogators whose use of snarling dogs, short shackles, mocking of the Quran and other abuses of detainees overseas appear to have overstepped what U.S. courts would allow in collecting evidence.

At the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, FBI agents in 2002 openly clashed with military interrogators bent on "aggressively" interrogating al-Qahtani by confronting him with agitated dogs and keeping him awake for continuous 20-hour interviews daily.

Didn't the US Military just apologize for desecrating a Koran in Iraq? Why the change of heart, one wonders.

The most glaring aspect of the revelations in this report are not that the US tortures detainees--we've become accustomed to learning that about our government. What stands out like a sore thumb, at least to me, is the rejection of proven methods for interrogation:

Such tactics "have been employed only when traditional means of questioning - things like rapport-building - were ineffective," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Tuesday.

In al-Qahtani's case, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said no evidence of torture has ever surfaced after extensive internal reviews. Al-Qahtani, designated as an additional hijacker for the 2001 attacks, was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog while at Guantanamo Bay, according to a 2005 Pentagon report.

Whitman also said he was unaware of any Pentagon actions that would have delayed the Justice report. Fine's audit, however, describes seven months of foot-dragging and negotiating by the Pentagon over how much information in the report should be classified or otherwise shielded from public review. The 438-page report issued Tuesday is only sparsely blacked-out.

The report surveyed over 1,000 agents, interviews with hundreds of other witnesses and a review of more than a half-million documents. It concluded FBI agents in nearly all cases refused to participate in harsh interrogations and left the room when they were ongoing.

Agents also were fairly vigilant about reporting their concerns to their superiors, the report shows.

At Guantanamo Bay, two FBI agents "had concerns not only about the proposed techniques but also about the glee with which the would-be (military) participants discussed their respective roles in carrying out these techniques, and the utter lack of sophistication and circus-like atmosphere within this interrogation strategy session," the report found.

Within the system, there has emerged a few leaders who are trying to resist the CIA and the Bush Administration. We have seen this with the lawyers who have refused to go forward with the trials, and we're also seeing it with the men who have been brought in to clean up the mess:

Interrogators at Guantanamo got intelligence from detainees that helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan attack Taliban fighters last summer — and they did it through casual questioning and not torture, the military's chief interrogator [there] said.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press, veteran interrogator Paul Rester complained that his profession has gotten a bad reputation due to accounts of waterboarding and other rough interrogation tactics used by the CIA at "black sites."

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, however, allege their clients have been subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation and threats at this U.S. military base in southeast Cuba.

Wearing a blue-striped business shirt without a tie and looking more like a harried executive than a top interrogator, Rester groused that his line of work is "a business that is fundamentally thankless."

He sat hunched over a table in a snack room inside the building where the top commanders keep their offices. In an attempt to keep personnel from blabbing about intelligence-gathering, a poster showed a picture of a hooded gunman and the words: "Keep talking. We're listening" — today's version of the World War II-era admonishment that "Loose lips sink ships."

"Everybody in the world believes that they know how we do what we do, and I have to endure it every time I turn around and somebody is making reference to waterboarding," Rester said. He insisted that Guantanamo interrogators have had many successes using rapport-building and said that technique was the norm here.

For security reasons, he would only discuss one of the successes, and that was only because his boss, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, had already described it in a speech last month. Buzby said several detainees, using poster board paper and crayons, drew detailed maps of the Tora Bora area in eastern Afghanistan that enabled coalition forces to wipe out safe houses, trenches and supplies last summer as Taliban forces were returning to the stronghold they had abandoned more than five years ago.

Rapport-building actually works. But it is slow, tedious and not very glamorous to "make nice" with the enemy and use a more "diplomatic" way to getting information out of them.

It's not hard to see why anything relating to "talking" or "diplomacy" or "common sense" is universally rejected by the Bush Administration.

Office of the Special Counsel Under Investigation

This is never a good sign...usually, they give you til Friday to destroy the evidence and hide what you need to hide. What gives, Justice Department? I thought we had an "understanding?"

A multi-year investigation has led federal agents to search the Office of Special Counsel's building. Employees have alleged that the agency, which investigates whistleblower complaints by federal workers, was misused for political purposes.

Neither Office of Special Counsel head Scott Bloch nor anyone else has officially been charged with a crime. But the FBI secured a separate subpoena for Bloch's home.

According to a Wall Street Journal article from last year, Bloch used a private tech company — Geeks on Call — to delete e-mails instead of using his office's federal technicians.

Late Tuesday morning, the entire office's e-mail system was shut down — a fact that the San Francisco field office confirmed.

Other offices, including the one in Washington, did not respond to requests for comment.

I hate to tell Mr. Bloch this, but those Geeks on Call don't know what the fuck they're doing. See, they're comprised of people who can't get real IT jobs and, as anyone can tell you, good luck getting service from those bastards.

Anyhow, another day, another embarrassment. Another fruitless attempt at ferreting out lawbreaking and corruption. I guess Mukasey read our blog post and decided he had to move and move fast! Had this happened, oh, I dunno...TWO years ago? They might have actually, you know, 'caught' someone doing something. I'm not holding my breath.

[Here's how jaded I am--I had MORE fun combining the picture of Bloch with "Mr. Krabs" of Spongebob Squarepants than I've had all damned day...]

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Just so we know what we're talking about here...

Mr. Bloch had his computer's hard disk completely cleansed using a "seven-level" wipe: a thorough scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards. The process makes it nearly impossible for forensics experts to restore the data later. He also directed Geeks on Call to erase laptop computers that had been used by his two top political deputies, who had recently left the agency.

Geeks on Call visited Mr. Bloch's government office in a nondescript office building on M Street in Washington twice, on Dec. 18 and Dec. 21, 2006, according to a receipt reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The total charge was $1,149, paid with an agency credit card, the receipt shows. The receipt says a seven-level wipe was performed but doesn't mention any computer virus.

Jeff Phelps, who runs Washington's Geeks on Call franchise, declined to talk about specific clients, but said calls placed directly by government officials are unusual. He also said erasing a drive is an unusual virus treatment. "We don't do a seven-level wipe for a virus," he said.

Mr. Bloch was a loyal member of the Bush administration, serving in the Justice Department's office of faith-based programs, when the president named him to head the Office of Special Counsel in 2003. Unlike many administration appointees, Mr. Bloch doesn't serve at the pleasure of the president. He has a fixed five-year term and may be removed only for malfeasance. That is supposed to ensure his agency has the independence to pursue any probe.

A "seven-level wipe" huh? Well, "blogger" won't let me post a picture of what they probably took off of his computer. How is it that this bastard wasn't arrested the moment it became clear that he destroyed evidence? Isn't anyone fucking paying any fucking attention anymore?

Who the Hell Thought This Was a Good Idea?

One company in Northern Virginia controls the database for all phone numbers in North America. And, no, that's not a great idea.

Sterling-based NeuStar is the carriers' digital directory for all phone calls in North America. More than 800 telephone companies have numbers in the database. NeuStar assigns blocks of available telephone numbers to carriers. It also manages the directory for common short codes: five- or six-digit codes that people punch into their cellphones to take part in sweepstakes or to vote for game-show contestants, for instance. And about one out of every four Internet transactions is routed using a NeuStar database, as NeuStar handles traffic for domains that include .biz, .us, .org and .info.

NeuStar's databases are so powerful that the FBI a few years ago sought direct, unfettered access to one containing 310 million phone numbers in the United States and Canada. The telephone companies that pay NeuStar to run the database denied the FBI's request, but they did allow NeuStar to create a site where authorized law enforcement officials with court orders can obtain carrier information on telephone numbers.

NeuStar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances. Its registries fall under international, U.S. government and trade association rules, including those set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The company is dependent on and crucial to telecom companies and state, local and federal governments, part of the government-industrial complex that drives the region's economy. Indeed, said Jeffrey E. Ganek, NeuStar chairman and chief executive, "this is a business that could only have grown up in Washington."

[snip]

NeuStar also helps optimize Web traffic for clients such as Amazon so that when a customer types in Amazon.com, NeuStar directs the request to one of Amazon's thousands of servers around the world. It provides the same kind of service for Oracle, Emirates Airlines and Forbes.

"We're at all the key Internet nodes in the world," Ganek said. "Depending on the time of the day and the point of origination, we send the traffic to Seattle, for instance, or to a data center in Miami or another data center in Singapore. If there's a fiber cable cut in the Pacific, we see it before [the carriers] do and turn the traffic in the other direction so it goes counterclockwise around the globe."

First of all, BULLSHIT. The FBI asked and they "turned them down?" How did that work? During 2005 and 2006, the FBI was going crazy with "National Security Letters" and they weren't taking "no" for an answer from anyone.

Second of all, they're not just operating here in North America:

Revenue last year was $429.2 million, and profit was $92.3 million, up from $73.9 million the previous year. Company officials expect revenue to exceed $500 million this year. Soon, they said, NeuStar expects to be providing digital directory service for about 85 percent of all wireless devices in the world.

How is that a good idea, either? How savvy are the foreign companies to the fact that US law enforcement can look at any and all numbers?

Third, they didn't "deny" the government. They winked and said, "here you go!"

In 2005, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted a direct link to the database in NeuStar's Sterling headquarters, according to a January 2005 letter from the Justice Department criminal division to a consortium of carriers that have given NeuStar the contract to run the database. The department wanted to use the data to identify which carrier to subpoena for records concerning telephone numbers in an investigation, the letter said.

"What they were asking for in a nutshell was a copy of the database," said Mike Warren, NeuStar vice president of fiduciary services. "They wanted us to send them an update of the database once a day."

Instead, NeuStar set up LEAP, or Local Number Portability Enhanced Analytical Platform, a Web site to help local, state and federal law enforcement in investigations that rely on phone call surveillance. The database gives basic information such as carrier but not more technical details such as whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline. Earlier this year, NeuStar added historical carrier information to that service.

Whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline can be gotten from the companies that already allow warrantless wiretaps. Or a simple telephone lookup. Or just "pinging" the phone with a single dialing from a piece of software designed to determine where the number traces to. That's a very cozy arrangement, designed to skirt the law. Telecom Immunity makes skirting these laws even easier.

In effect, they make a big deal of telling the Feds that they can't have their product, but they give them the whole thing simply by witholding the one thing the Feds can figure out themselves.

Remind me again how we lost our privacy rights? Did I vote for this shit? Because if I did, I really screwed up.

Another Reason To Watch the Watchers...

Some ace reporting from Ryan Singel--reminding us exactly why we need oversight of ANY agency investigating US persons:

For the second time in five months, a jury has deadlocked over charges against an inept group of Miami cultists, a massive setback for the Justice Department who accuses the group of plotting to topple the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The Justice Department built the case using paid informants and numerous wiretaps, but the six men on trial (one was acquitted) say they only pretended to want to wage jihad in order to swindle $50,000 from a government informant. The supposed ring-leader of the so-called Liberty City 7 Narseal Batiste was known for roaming Miami streets in his bathrobe to find recruits.

When the indictments were announced in 2006, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole described the arrests as "yet another important victory in the war on terrorism" and a "grim reminder of the persistent threat environment that exists here at home and underscores the need for continued vigilance and cooperation."

THREAT LEVEL is reminded of a snippet from FBI wiretapping documents that trumpeted the surveillance of the group, saying the wiretaps led to other leads and more than 50 intelligence reports.

We provided continuing support for a FBI Miami counterterrorism case which during this time period [October 2005 through September 2006] has intercepted in excess of 1800 telephone calls. Intercepted communications and call data records provided by the system that HAT [High-Capacity Access Team] installed, operates and maintains allowed for the identification of a previously unknown terror organization and individuals operating in the United States. This information has supplied the probable cause for additional case and FISA initiations at other FBI divisions. The derived intelligence has been disseminated to the intelligence community, via approximately 50 IIRS [Intelligence Information Reports], as well to allies of the United States.

One can only imagine the contents of the 50 intelligence reports about a group whose idea of secrecy was to station a guy in a military uniform with a mask on outside their warehouse when having 'meetings.'

You know, if we had a functioning system of overseeing what the FBI is doing and what our intelligence agencies as a whole are doing when they look at US persons, someone would have been able to step in and put a quick end to this ridiculous incident. The FISA provisions worked the way the wingnuts claim that they don't--no one was "denied" anything in this case. They SHOULD have been able to cut this off and have the local police deal with these idiots. If anything, this case proves there should be stringent oversight of the value of the intelligence, not just the process of giving permission to eavesdrop. These were clearly not "international terrorists." These were "wannabe badasses" who could have been arrested and charged locally for being stupid with firearms.

Oversight means more than just blessing off on whatever a G-man or a DIA analyst wants to do for months on end--oversight should function as a gatekeeper of sorts, ensuring that we are directing our resources at real threats and real targets, and not wasting our time on shambling, bath-robe wearing idiots. These particular idiots were more of a danger to themselves than they were to the public. You could, literally, make the case that they should have been committed to a mental health facility and treated, instead of being brought up on shaky Federal charges. Sure would have been a better use of resources and money.

This used to be a pretty badass country. If someone like this popped up on the radar back in the day, they were rounded up and dealt with accordingly, you know, with real courts and judges and the rule of law and Habeas Corpus and all that. Quaint, yes. But effective.

I mean, how many Michigan militia are running around right now?

Couldn't Have Come at a Worse Time

I think you would have to be feeble of mind, delusional, or simply unable to pay attention to trust this government to do anything anymore. How long do we have left? Ten months?

Updated: The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the privacy breach by FBI agents and lawyers occurred a year before the bureau enacted sweeping new reforms to prevent future lapses.

[snip]

Mueller offered no additional details. Several other Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with this year's findings have said privately the upcoming report will show the letters were wrongly used at a similar rate as during the previous three years.

In contrast to the outrage by Congress and civil liberties groups after last year's report was issued, Mueller's disclosure drew no initial criticism from senators at Wednesday's hearing.

Speaking before the FBI chief, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urged Mueller to be more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters."

"Everybody wants to stop terrorists. But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."

I think that you can clearly see that a report that identifies the widespread abuse of National Security Letters--which are nothing more than incidents where the FBI is given access to information collected without oversight--comes at a really bad time for anyone trying to argue that we should just trust the government not to abuse its power.

Here, in full, is an example of what a National Security Letter can do--and it is particularly important to note that granting immunity to telecom companies means we'll never get to the discovery phase in about 40 pending lawsuits. A discovery phase where we might find out what the hell they were looking for.

From the Washington Post:

My National Security Letter Gag Order
Friday, March 23, 2007; Page A17

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

FISA and the FBI

Here's a comment that I posted elsewhere--

At the breakfast yesterday, [Kenneth] Wainstein highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA's current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Privacy advocates have raised concerns that the Senate bill contains a provision that would allow the attorney general to erect a new barrier to future privacy cases brought under the nation's foreign intelligence surveillance law.

Contrary to current practice, the Senate bill would halt such lawsuits if the attorney general certifies that the assistance provided by the telecom carrier is lawful. The only check on that certification would be a court review as to whether the attorney general "abused" his discretion, which experts said yesterday is the lowest possible standard of judicial review.

"This provision is yet another example of the executive branch 'just trust us' mentality when it comes to intelligence matters," said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You know, when I see something like this reproduced and commented upon here--as if it were actually true--it makes me realize that we're fighting a losing battle with people who will say anything to stay in power.

Here's Glenn Greenwald, to smack this shit down once again:

The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone -- from Russ Feingold to the ACLU -- agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered -- including the bill passed by the House -- requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:

Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .
The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts -- and not an executive branch political appointee -- who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.

Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required -- as [Time Columnist Joe] Klein falsely claimed -- for "every foreign-terrorist target's calls."

While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein's shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that's not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).

So, once again, we have to stomp our feet and patiently explain why you can't believe anything a member of the Bush Administration or the Republican Party has to say--they are lying and they know it. This is the smokescreen that they are trying to use to cover up systematic abuse.

Here is an excerpt from a filing dated MAY 17 2002
from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and it details abuse of intercept BEFORE 9/11:

In November of 2000, the Court held a special meeting to consider the troubling number of inaccurate FBI affidavits in so many FISA applications. After receiving a more detailed explanation from the Department of Justice about what went wrong, but not why, the Court decided not to accept inaccurate affidavits from FBI agents whether or not intentionally false. One FBI agent was barred from appearing before the Court as a FISA affiant. The Court decided to await the results of the investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility before taking further action.

In March of 2001, the government reported similar misstatements in another series of FISA applications in which there was supposedly a "wall" between separate intelligence and criminal squads in FBI field offices to screen FISA intercepts, when in fact all of the FBI agents were on the same squad and all of the screening was done by the one supervisor overseeing both investigations.

To come to grips with this problem, in April of 2001, the FBI promulgated detailed procedures governing the submission of requests to conduct FISA surveillances and searches, and to review draft affidavits in FISA applications, to ensure their accuracy. These procedures are currently in use and require careful review of draft affidavits by the FBI agents in the field offices who are conducting the FISA case investigations, as well as the supervising agents at FBI headquarters who appear before the Court and swear to the affidavits.

In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors. These incidents have been under investigation by the FBI's and the Justice Department's Offices of Professional Responsibility for more than one year to determine how the violations occurred in the field offices, and how the misinformation found its way into the FISA applications and remained uncorrected for more than one year despite procedures to verify the accuracy of FISA pleadings. As of this date, no report has been published, and how these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the Court.

Instead of correcting the problem, which actually dated back to the Clinton Administration, the problem got worse:

At the end of 2006, the FBI's Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Strikingly, the report said that the FBI's software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.

Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

According to the math that means each court order resulted in 12,742 "sessions," all in regards to phone, not internet, surveillance.

That's a lot of terrorism. You'd think there were bombs going off on Main Street in Podunk, Idaho on a daily basis.

The only explanation is that the FBI is running wild, collection all manner of information on US persons, and handing that information over to the Bush administration. Is the FBI complicit in the wholesale spying of the Bush administration on the Democratic Party? On anyone opposed to the policies of the Bush Administration?

There aren't even 27.7 million illegal aliens in this country. How could there be 27.7 million terrorists?

If they grant immunity to the telecom companies, we will never find out why they had to listen in on 27.7 million conversations in 2006. We will never get to the bottom of this.

Mukasey in the Hot Seat

During his confirmation hearings last fall, new Attorney General Michael Mukasey pledged to act independently and swore that he would not hesitate to pursue investigations that might displease the Bush administration.

A month in, he is faced with calls for an investigation into the destruction of video of interrogations of terror suspects that show the men being tortured. Such an investigation would delve into the heart of darkness itself, and expose some of the most closely guarded secrets of the Bush administration, highlighting the "aggressive interrogation" favored - nay lusted after - by the small men in the administration for what it is: Torture.

Torture is a crime against humanity, under treaty as well as international statute.

Last week, Senator Dick Durbin (D - IL) officially requested the Attorney General open an investigation into the destruction of the tapes. "The CIA apparently withheld information about the existence of these videotapes from official proceedings, including the 9/11 Commission and a federal court," Durbin charged in the letter he sent to Mukasey.

But this story just keeps getting weirder and weirder:

Justice officials refused to comment on what the new A.G. will do, but White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that if he does open an investigation, the White House would support him. The videotapes, made in 2002, showed the questioning of two high-level Qaeda detainees, including logistics chief Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation at a secret cell in Thailand sparked an internal battle within the U.S. intelligence community after FBI agents angrily protested the aggressive methods that were used. In addition to waterboarding, Zubaydah was subjected to sleep deprivation and bombarded with blaring rock music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One [FBI] agent was so offended he threatened to arrest the CIA interrogators, according to two former government officials directly familiar with the dispute. [emphasis added]

Yes. You read that right. An FBI agent was so put off by what he witnessed, he threatened to take the CIA interrogators into custody. And when an FBI agent threatens to arrest CIA agents,it is safe to say that the CIA agents have definitely crossed a bright line.

Officials with the CIA claim that the decision was made three years ago to destroy the tapes. The "reason" the CIA gives for the destruction is laughable: The identity of the torturers interrogators might pose a security risk if the tapes were to leak.

Please.

Spare me.

The identity of the interrogators might pose an incarceration risk.

And if they were acting on orders from the White House, they would most likely say so before they went to prison for a long time for committing war crimes.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in spite of requests for records of interrogations by multiple entities, includign the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission. Representative Jane Harman, then the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee had also submitted a written directive that videos of interrogations be preserved.

Additionally, in the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui , defense attorneys requested any video of interrogations, but the CIA told a Federal judge that no videos existed. (Got Perjury? Hows' about Obstruction of Justice?)

A thorough investigation into the destruction of the video tapes by the Justice Department would be undertaken with one goal: Find out who issued the orders and make that person accountable. Porter Goss was the CIA Director at the time, and thought he had an "understanding" with ops officials that the tapes would be preserved. He reportedly was extremely unhappy when he learned that the tapes had been destroyed. Meantime, Jose Rodriguez, who as head of the Clandesting Service at the time and issued the destroy order has a reputation as a "loyal subordinate" who would never have taken it upon himself to make such a decision.

Whoever ordered that the tapes be destroyed, all eyes are on Mukaey now.

Incompetence? Or Obstruction?

Justice Department officials grappling with bringing to account the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the murderous rampage in Nissour Square on September 16 got a nasty surprise. Investigators from the State Department - who lacked the authority to do so - offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity in exchange for their statements. State Department protocols require that Diplomatic Security agents investigate and report all incidents in which force is used. Last week, the chief of the Diplomatic Security Bureau, Richard J. Griffin, resigned abruptly. Presumably, his inability to control Blackwater was at the root of his sudden departure, but now it looks like he may have left in advance of this information becoming public.

FBI agents took over the State Department's investigation two weeks after the Sept. 16 killing spree, but the damage was already done. None of the information obtained during questioning of the guards by the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the division of the State Department that oversees security contractors, will be admissible. (I believe that defense attorneys call this "fruit of the poisoned tree.")

Subsequently, some Blackwater guards have cited promises of immunity from State, and refused to even be interviewed by the FBI. The Justice Department is not precluded from bringing charges using other evidence, but the inadmissibility of their initial statements complicates matters significantly.

From the New York Times:

Most of the guards who took part in the Sept. 16 shooting were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised that they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true. The immunity offers were first reported Monday by The Associated Press.

The officials who spoke of the immunity deals have been briefed on the matter, but agreed to talk about the arrangement only on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss a continuing criminal investigation.

The precise legal status of the immunity offer is unclear. Those who have been offered immunity would seem likely to assert that their statements are legally protected, even as some government officials say that immunity was never officially sanctioned by the Justice Department.

Spokesmen for the State and Justice Departments would not comment on the matter. A State Department official said, “If there’s any truth to this story, then the decision was made without consultation with senior officials in Washington.”

This complicates an already-dicey legal situation. Blackwater and other mercenary outfits are immune from prosecution under Iraqi law under Order 17, signed by Paul Bremmer on his way out of town. The order still stands, the Iraqi parliament has not repealed it. They can't be tried in military courts (at least not yet.) And it is unclear what American criminal statutes apply to armed Americans operating in a war zone.

A review panel sent by State to investigate the incident determined that the legal standing to hold the Blackwater mercenaries to account under U.S. federal statute was lacking, and urged Congress to address this gaping loophole in accountability and oversight authority. To date, the House has passed a bill with an overwhelming majority that would hold all security contractors* liable under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act; the Senate is considering similar legislation. Some legal experts have suggested that the Nissour Square killings be the first cases prosecuted through the act once it is extended.

But...(Isn't there always a great big But...?)

For a case to be tried in federal court, evidence is only admissible when it meets a very high chain-of-custody bar, designed to put in place guarantees that evidence has not been tampered with. Evidence gathered by foreign investigators and turned over to U.S. investigators is reflexively seen as suspect on it's face, and the admissibility of the evidence would be contested by any first year law student. Additionally, the Constitutional guarantee of the accused to cross-examine witnesses is problematic in these instances, requiring foreign witnesses be transported to the United States to appear in court.

What was from the outset a brutally difficult case to bring was complicated further by the actions of the State Department investigators.

So was it incompetence? Could the Keystone Kops run a better State Department?

Or was it obstruction? Yet another instance of sand in the umpires eyes?


*security contractors = mercenaries

FBI investigating Blackwater in wake of Sept. 16 rampage

The FBI is sending a team of investigators to Iraq to investigate the bloody September 16 rampage by Blackwater mercenaries against Iraqi civilians at a busy traffic roundabout in Nisoor Square in Baghdad. At least 11 civilians died, including a family of three that burned to death in their vehicle. The heat was so intense that the two-year-old child was melted to his mother’s body.

Special Agent Richard Kolko confirmed that the FBI is initiating the investigation at the behest of the State Department. "The results of the investigation will be reviewed for possible criminal liability and referred to the appropriate legal authority," Kolko said.

Blackwater has had a tremendous termination rate among their mercenaries in Iraq. 122 have been fired, or about one in seven Blackwater mercenaries have been terminated for various reasons, ranging from substance abuse to violent behavior and misuse of weapons. This low ratio raises serious questions about the character of the people hired by Blackwater. On Christmas Eve of last year, a Blackwater mercenary, drunk and belligerent, gunned down a bodyguard for Iraq’s Vice President, he faced no consequences and was spirited out of Iraq within 36 hours.

Officials in Baghdad and Washington then dickered with Blackwater on the compensation for the family of the guard, Raheem Khalif. An unnamed official in the State Department's Diplomatic Security service complained that the $250,000 payment proposed by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was too much, because it might lead Iraqis to "try to get killed so as to set up their family financially," according to a State Department e-mail obtained by the committee.

When a Blackwater contract employee killed an Iraqi in Hillah in June 2005, the State Department asked the firm to pay $5,000 in compensation. "(W)e are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly," a department official wrote.

A report prepared by the majority staff of the House Oversight Committee that was released today reveals that Blackwater has been involved in 195 shooting incidents since 2005 – approximately 1.5 per week. In 84% of the instances, Blackwater fired first – even though the contract the company has with the State Department calls for the defensive use of force only. Blackwater has been involved in more live-fire incidents than the other two *Security Contractor* companies combined.

"In the vast majority of instances in which Blackwater fired shots, Blackwater is firing from a moving vehicle and does not remain at the scene to determine if the shots resulted in casualties," according to the report.

The staff report paints Blackwater as a company that's made huge sums of money despite its questionable performance in Iraq, where Blackwater guards provide protective services for U.S. diplomatic personnel.

Blackwater has earned more than $1 billion from federal contracts since 2001, when it had less than $1 million in government work. Overall, the State Department paid Blackwater more than $832 million between 2004 and 2006 for security work, according to the report.

The report was presented to committee members today, in advance of testimony before the committee by Blackwater founder and chairman, Eric Prince, scheduled for tomorrow.

Anne Tyrrell, a Blackwater spokesperson, made the obligatory ‘we look forward to the opportunity to clear our name’ remarks in advance of the hearings: "We look forward to setting the record straight on this issue and others tomorrow when Erik Prince testifies before the committee." quoth Anne Tyrrell.

Several investigations are being undertaken into the incident,

The mercenary company has a few friends on the committee, who have requested that the hearings be postponed until the ongoing investigations are complete.

In a Sept. 28 letter, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., and six other Republicans said the committee should wait until these investigations are complete.

"We feel it would be irresponsible for the committee to rush to judgment until all the facts are considered," the letter states.

Rep. Tom Davis or Virginia, the committee's top Republican, did not sign the letter.

Prince is just one of the witnesses scheduled to testify. Several State Department higher-ups are scheduled to appear as well, including the assistant secretary for logistics management and the assistant secretary for diplomatic security.

A spokesman for Davis said that the Congressman had no objection to the hearings moving forward because the State Department officials were scheduled to appear as well.

Lets hope that everyone appearing before the committee is asked to explain the apparent collusion between State and her Praetorian Guard to cover up incidents of Blackwater violence against Iraqi civilians.