Monthly Archives: December 2005

All the King’s Men

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Former Senator Tom Daschle writes in today’s WaPo,

In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president “was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that’s what we’ve done.”

As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel’s office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.

Now, was that so hard, Tom? Why couldn’t you have talked like that while you were still in the Senate?

I can see from WaPo‘s handy-dandy “Who’s Blogging” links that the spineless, potty-mouth cowards known as “Bush supporters” are arguing that the Senate authorized warrantless wiretaps when the Senate “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided” the attacks of 9/11.

So, the word force includes ” warrantless surveillance.” I wouldn’t have known that, would you? I even looked it up in the dictionary. Nope, not there.

Reminds me of what Humpty Dumpty told Alice:

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”‘ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – – that’s all.’

So righties can fudge the meanings of words to change the meaning of legislation and cause the Senate to approve of something they hadn’t intended. There’s glory for you. By which I mean “righties are sniveling cowards who will destroy everything America ever stood for to save their own skins, and call it ‘patriotism.'”

Heck of a Job, All Around

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Be sure to read Part II of the Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser report on the DHS in WaPo. Today they focus on the turf wars between Michael Brown at FEMA and the rest of the Washington establishment. Jaw-dropping stuff. A sample:

Long before his e-mails portrayed a befuddled bureaucrat who fretted about restaurant reservations and his Nordstrom wardrobe while New Orleans drowned, he [Michael Brown] was known at DHS as a fierce turf warrior whose griping about FEMA’s role alienated superiors and marginalized his agency.

“The biggest danger in the department was tribalism,” said Bruce M. Lawlor, Ridge’s initial chief of staff, “and FEMA was the number one tribe.”

In many ways, Brown is a cautionary tale of what can happen to Washington officials who make mistakes in the public eye after making enemies behind the scenes. Brown spent two years trying to use his contacts with White House officials to undercut DHS, but the White House rarely backed him, and DHS leaders responded by shifting FEMA’s responsibilities and resources to more cooperative agencies.

Ridge stripped FEMA’s power over billions of dollars worth of preparedness grants as well as the creation of a national disaster response plan. Most of the agency’s top staff quit. And after he arrived at DHS in February, Chertoff decided to take away the rest of FEMA’s preparedness duties.

Brown was actually right about many things, but the whole Bush bureaucracy is a joke. Chertoff is just as clueless as Brown is; possibly more so. And it is obvious hardly anyone in Washington took disaster preparedness seriously. It was all about power and politics to them.

The “Clinton Did It” Alabi

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In this Washington Times article, Charles Hunt claims “One of the most famous examples of warrantless searches in recent years was the investigation of CIA official Aldrich H. Ames, who ultimately pleaded guilty to spying for the former Soviet Union. That case was largely built upon secret searches of Ames’ home and office in 1993, conducted without federal warrants.”

Judd at Think Progress debunks the Hunt article here, but doesn’t mention Ames specifically.

Hunt provides no documentation that the search of Ames’s office and home were without warrants. But this document from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence begins,

On February 21, 1994, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a 52-year old employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Aldrich Hazen Ames, outside his Arlington, Virginia residence, on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union. According to the affidavit supporting the arrest warrant, these activities had begun in April 1985, and continued to the time of the arrest. Ames’s wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, was arrested inside the residence on the same charges shortly after her husband was taken into custody. …

… The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (hereinafter “the Committee”) received its initial briefing regarding the case on the day the arrests were publicly announced. The facts contained in the affidavit supporting the arrest and search warrants were summarized by representatives of the FBI.

Later in the document we learn —

Under applicable Attorney General guidelines, this meant that the FBI was able to seek authority under pertinent laws and Justice Department guidelines to employ a full array of investigative techniques against Ames. For instance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing electronic surveillance of Ames’s office and residence.

This is a long and sometimes vague document, and maybe I missed it, but I don’t see “warrantless searches” in there anywhere. I found other documents regarding Ames linked on this Department of Justice page, but I didn’t find mention of the searches in them.

I’m not sure who initiated the story that Ames’s house and office were searched without warrants, but it may have started with Republican attorney Victoria Toensing during a call-in to CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Today a number of rightie commenters and bloggers repeat this story as gospel. So far, I have seen no documentation whatsoever. Maybe there is such documentation, but so far it has remained uncited. The claim that Clinton ordered warrantless physical searches of Ames’s house and office is just repeated on rightie sites as gospel truth.

Much of today’s confusion regarding FISA during the Clinton Administration stems from the fact that FISA regulations were changed after the Ames searches and arrests —

When Gorelick testified before the House Intelligence Committee in 1994 that the president had the “inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches,” FISA did not apply to physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes, as Media Matters for America has noted. A year later, Congress — with Clinton’s support — amended FISA to require court orders for physical searches. The Clinton administration thereafter never argued that any “inherent authority” pre-empted the new warrant requirements for physical searches under FISA.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, has argued that it had the authority to authorize the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on domestic communications without warrants, despite FISA’s clear restrictions on warrantless electronic eavesdropping.

Toensing’s use of the Aldrich Ames case is similarly misleading. The joint CIA/FBI investigation of Ames, a CIA analyst ultimately convicted of espionage, also took place prior to the 1995 FISA amendment requiring warrants for physical searches. Therefore, when the Clinton administration ordered investigators to go “into Aldrich Ames’s house without a warrant,” they did not — as Toensing argued — “carry out their authority” to bypass the FISA requirements, because FISA did not cover such searches.

And, the SSCI document says that electronic searches complied with FISA. The Media Matters article linked above provides other documentation of compliance with FISA.

Of the physical searches, the only ones mentioned in the SSCI document are:

On June 25, 1993, the FBI conducted a search of Ames’s office at the CIA. Approximately 144 classified documents were located in his work area, most of which did not relate to his official duties. …

Do the feds need a search warrant to search other feds? I honestly don’t know.

…On September 15,1993, a search of Ames’s trash disclosed a torn note in Ames’s handwriting which appeared to relate to a clandestine meeting planned for Bogota, Colombia on October 1, 1993. …

… On October 6, 1993, a search of Ames’s trash turned up a typewriter or printer ribbon which contained two documents which Ames appeared to have prepared in 1992. Among other things, these documents discussed CIA personnel, access to classified information, and classified operational matters.

I believe I learned from Law & Order that you don’t need a warrant to search trash if it’s out on the curb to be picked up.

On October 9, 1993, FBI agents conducted a search of Ames’s residence in Arlington. Among other things, this search yielded (1) a typewriter ribbon which contained a note Ames had written to his KGB contact regarding a meeting in Caracas, Venezuela in October 1992; (2) a computer document which identified a mailbox at 37th and R Streets in Washington, D.C. as a signal site, and (3) a series of computer documents regarding Ames’s relationship with the KGB. These computer documents included information on clandestine communications, classified CIA operations, classified CIA human assets, and information regarding the payments previously made to Ames. …

… The searches of Ames’s office and residence conducted after the arrests yielded additional evidence of his relationship with the KGB and, since 1991, with its successor intelligence service, the SVR.

It may be the October 9 search that righties are claiming was conducted without a warrant, but it’s not clear from the SSCI document that there was no warrant. The document just says the FBI “was able to seek authority under pertinent laws and Justice Department guidelines to employ a full array of investigative techniques against Ames,” whatever that means.

By October 1993 the FBI had been watching Ames for a long time, and there was copious evidence he was up to something. So, surely, the FBI could have obtained a warrant. If it didn’t — far from a verified fact, IMO — I believe that was wrong.

I have noticed that righties of late like to argue that if Bill Clinton did so-and-so, then it’s OK if Bush does it. That argument doesn’t work for me — if it’s wrong, it’s wrong, no matter who does it — but it’s wonderfully persuasive to righties. Very odd.

Also: “Where’s the Outrage?“

Running Government Like a Corporation

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Susan B. Glasser’s and Michael Grunwald’s Washington Post article about the ongoing comedy of errors that is the Department of Homeland Securityis a fun read. Did you know that the DHS has its own official typeface? It also has an official color scheme (cool gray, red and hints of “punched-up” blue), a nifty focus-group-tested seal and lapel pins for every employee.

What is doesn’t have is focus, organization, or a clue.

Here’s a quickie history: You may remember that President Bush was against formation of a DHS before he was for it. There had been talk of a DHS before September 11. The Hart-Rudman commission, which issued a final report in January 2001 (the WaPo article says May, but it was January), recommended a cabinet-level DHS and several other reforms that Bush and Cheney, upon ascending to office, promptly kneecapped. After 9/11 Bush had announced creation of an Office of Homeland Security, headed by Tom Ridge, who would work out of the West Wing and report only to the President. As far as Bush was concerned, the biggest argument in favor of this arrangement was that as a presidential aide Ridge was not required to testify to Congress. For this reason, Bush resisted suggestions that Ridge’s position be cabinet level.

But Democrats in Congress were pushing for a Department of Homeland Security instead of an Office. “On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in both parties were upset by Bush’s refusal to let Ridge testify as a presidential aide,” write Glasser and Grunwald. “and Lieberman’s bill to create a new department was gaining momentum. While many Republicans were leery about a vast new bureaucracy, they did not want to cede the homeland security issue to the Democrats.” So early in 2002, even as Bush and Capitol Hill Republicans continued to speak out against formation of the department, White House staffers began to plot the president’s reversal. Glasser and Grunwald:

In the White House bunker where Cheney had waited out the Sept. 11 attacks, a select group of policy aides had been secretly commissioned to plot the administration’s about-face.

They were called together in April by White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. — five mid-level staffers known as the “Gang of Five,” or as they liked to call themselves, the “G-5.” Two worked for Ridge — Lawlor and Richard A. Falkenrath, a security expert from Harvard — and Card sent his deputy Joel D. Kaplan, associate counsel Brad Berenson and deputy budget director Mark W. Everson.

As near as I can determine, none of these people had any hands-on experience working in the bureaucracies they were meeting to overhaul. Indeed, they didn’t seem to have a whole lot of experience working in any big bureaucracy.

Several times a week, the G-5 met with a group of principals, including Card, Ridge, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. and Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. On poster boards, they listed all the agencies that might make sense in the department. “The overriding guidance,” Lawlor recalled, “was that everything was on the table for consideration.”

This anecdote nicely illustrates the expertise and professionalism of the DHS crew:

Some of the decisions were almost random. Falkenrath thought it would be nice to give the new department a research lab that could bring cutting-edge research to homeland security problems. He called up a friend and asked which of the three Department of Energy labs would work. “He goes, ‘Livermore.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. See you later.’ Click,” Falkenrath told historians from the Naval Postgraduate School. He did not realize that he had just decided to give the new department a thermonuclear weapon simulator, among other highly sensitive assets of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In June of 2002 Bush announced the formation of DHS. The White House crew had been working on the plan for all of six months.

On Capitol Hill, Bush’s allies were left tongue-tied by his abrupt shift. In late May the White House had pushed Republicans on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to oppose Lieberman’s bill. Now, Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) told Lieberman: “I’ve been having a great time explaining my enthusiastic support for a proposition I voted against two weeks ago.”

The next step was all Karl Rove. Harold Meyerson wrote in WaPo (September 21, 2005),

In the fall of 2002, as the legislation establishing the DHS was wending its way through Congress, Rove had a Rovean idea: Embed some extraneous, ideological criteria in the bill — criteria that the Democrats would obviously oppose — and then campaign against those Democrats for being soft on homeland security. Which is why one day the bill suddenly contained language mandating that the unionized federal employees at the agencies being merged into DHS would henceforth be non-union. Predictably, the Democrats squawked, and predictably, the Republicans took out after a southern Democratic senator up for reelection — Georgia’s Max Cleland, who’d lost an arm and both legs while fighting in Vietnam — as indifferent to protecting our nation. Cleland was defeated.

To this day, Bush likes to speechify that Democrats had been opposed to DHS, implying that they are “weak” on homeland security, leaving out the detail that DHS had been primarily their idea to begin with.

But let’s continue — once the plan was made public, the amateurs who had drawn up the plans began to hear from the professionals that it wouldn’t work.

Falkenrath was barraged by Hill staffers with questions he could not answer: If the Immigration and Naturalization Service was moving to the new department, why were immigration judges staying at the Justice Department? Falkenrath did not know there were immigration judges. “Every one of these staffers had some little angle on something that we hadn’t thought of,” he said. “I was like, ‘We better go figure out what we’ve missed here.’ ”

Inside the White House, some aides were appalled by the specter of “a group of people who really didn’t know a whole lot about the boxes they were moving around,” as one put it. White House cybersecurity czar Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism chief sidelined by Bush after urging more decisive action against al Qaeda before Sept. 11, blasted Ridge’s office with a memo about the new department’s design flaws, warning that the failure to include a policy office would leave the secretary helpless to control its independent fiefdoms.

“Creating a significant policy shop is like Bureaucracy 101,” said Clarke deputy Roger Cressey. “We never heard anything back.”

And, as the DHS prepared to go into operation, political considerations continued to trump security considerations.

One stark example was the White House’s blockade of a Ridge-supported plan to secure large chemical plants. After Sept. 11, Whitman had worked with Ridge on a modest effort to require high-risk plants — especially the 123 factories where a toxic release could endanger at least 1 million people — to enhance security. But industry groups warned Bush political adviser Karl Rove that giving new regulatory power to the Environmental Protection Agency would be a disaster.

“We have a similar set of concerns,” Rove wrote to the president of BP Amoco Chemical Co.

In an interagency meeting shortly before DHS’s birth, White House budget official Philip J. Perry, who also happens to be Cheney’s son-in-law, declared the Ridge-Whitman plan dead.

The White House continued to undermine the DHS.

On Jan. 24, 2003, Ridge was sworn in as the first secretary of homeland security; Bush hailed him as a “superb leader who has my confidence.” Four days later, Ridge learned from the president’s State of the Union address that a new intelligence center for tracking terrorists — which he had expected to be the hub of DHS’s dot-connecting efforts — would not be controlled by DHS.

Ridge and his aides thought the center was one of the key reasons the department had been created, to prevent the coordination failures that helped produce Sept. 11. Not only had the White House undercut Ridge, it also let him find out about his defeat on television.

Bush didn’t even want the new Department to have its offices in Washington.

The first battle over DHS came when the White House tried to exile it from Washington. Initially, Daniels proposed to let cities around the country bid to host the new department as a cost-saving measure. Then the White House tried to park DHS outside the Beltway in Chantilly.

Just before the department’s official March 1 start date, the Chantilly deal fell through and DHS ended up in a decrepit Navy complex on Nebraska Avenue in Upper Northwest, several miles from the rest of federal Washington. Top DHS officials had to share desks in a “gulag-like” hangar at Building 3; the White House initially told them it was temporary quarters until a new “campus” was commissioned. But the talk of a new home for the department quickly stopped.

While everybody seems to think Tom Ridge is a lovely man, he lacked the mangerial skill to pull the behemouth of a department together. But he tried hard to pull together a regional plan for DHS.

From his first day at DHS, Ridge pushed to create what he called “mini-me’s,” eight regional directors who would manage the department’s assets in their areas during a crisis. It was Ridge’s one major effort to put his own organizational stamp on DHS, and it was meant to ensure better preparedness for a disaster, the thinking being that “you can’t plan a response in Los Angeles out of Washington, D.C.,” Lawlor said. With hurricanes in mind, Ridge wanted one region to have headquarters in New Orleans.

Some of DHS’s own managers, including Michael Brown of FEMA, complained about this idea. Brown actually went over Ridge’s head and complained to the White House. The White House would eventually kill the plan.

Tom Ridge resigned at the end of Bush’s first term, and Michael Chertoff took his place. And the rest is, well, Katrina. Glasser and Grunwald promise another installment of this saga tomorrow — FEMA’s war on DHS.

Update: I ought to explain the title — I started to write about the fact that DHS reminds me of corporations I used to work for — all slick PR, but total chaos beneath the surface. But the corporations had the benefit of enough long-term employees who knew the ropes that the companies were able to stumble along in spite of gross mismanagement.

Not Knowing When to Quit

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This evening on MSNBC I saw the “Clinton did it too” defense of Bush’s secret wiretapping knocked down by Andrea Mitchell, believe it or not, who is guest hosting Hardball, and by Alison Stewart, who is guest hosting Countdown.

Seriously. There were actual experts who patiently explained that presidents Clinton and Carter followed FISA regulations regarding wiretapping, which is way different from what Bush is doing. And for the most part these people were allowed to speak at length without being interrupted by a rightie goon. I was astonished.

This hasn’t stopped the VRWC echo chamber from pumping out the now utterly debunked lie that President Clinton believed he had an “inherent authority” to order warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. Today’s new twist is the “Gorelick Myth,” which Judd at Think Progress takes apart here. I assume the Faux News crew and the radio righties are going along with the program, so that people getting most of their news from O’Reilly, Limbaugh, et al. will never hear the debunking. And, of course, rightie bloggers are obediently falling into line.

And according to Atrios, people watching CNN this evening didn’t hear the debunking either.

This means we’re at Stage 3 of the Daou Dynamics of a Bush Scandal, and we’re rapidly moving into Stage 4.

For the next few days the Right will work hard to continually repeat their storyline, or narrative, or excuse, or whatever you want to call it, over and over, often enough that most people will hear it and believe it to be true. The fact that it’s a flat-out lie will not, of course, discourage them.

However, for the most part, tonight two MSNBC programs got it right. Better than nothing.

Powers and Presidents

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Kevin Drum makes a good point here about presidential war powers. There is general agreement (accept maybe among hard-core libertarians) that in times of war and extreme emergency, presidents can take on expanded powers, à la Lincoln and FDR.

But the next question is, what is war? “War powers” have always been considered extraordinary, to be used only in case of emergency. But if you count “hot wars,” the U.S. has been at war for about 20 of the past 65 years. And if you count the Cold War, then we’ve been at war for 50 of the past 65 years. If we consider ourselves to be in a state of war nearly all the time, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. If we assume the president is allowed expanded powers for 50 out of 65 years, the checks and balances of the Constitution are effectively nullified.

Kevin writes,

Somehow we need to come to grips with this. There’s “wartime” and then there’s “wartime,” and not all armed conflicts vest the president with emergency powers. George Bush may have the best intentions in the world — and in this case he probably did have the best intentions in the world — but that still doesn’t mean he has the kind of plenary power Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised during their wars.

During a genuine emergency, the president’s powers are at their most expansive. The rest of the time they’re more restricted, whether he considers himself a wartime president or not. Right now, if George Bush needs or wants greater authority than he currently has, he should ask Congress to give it to him — after all, they approve black programs all the time and are fully capable of holding closed hearings to debate sensitive national security issues. It’s worth remembering that “regulation of the land and naval forces” is a power the constitution gives to Congress, and both Congress and the president ought to start taking that a little more seriously.

We need to be clear about whether global terrorism is an extraordinary threat that can be defeated, or whether it’s part of a new phase of human history in which war is not between nations but between sects. I strongly suspect the latter is true, and that the threat of global terrorism will hang over civilizations for generations. Even if the Islamic jihadists were to surrender their fight in our lifetime — highly unlikely, IMO — the world is full of other groups with different agendas who might very well resort to the same tactics.

Horrible though they were, “declared” wars like World Wars I and II had a certain clarity to them. The wars had a sharply defined beginning and end –e.g., the World War I cease fire on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Everybody understood who their enemies were. Soldiers wore uniforms and were (supposed to) operate within certain rules.

But the “war on terror” is so hazily defined that Americans disagree among themselves what it is, or exactly who our enemies are. Regarding Iraq (which may or may not be part of the war on terror, depending on who’s talking), the President only recently acknowledged that the people we are fighting aren’t all “terrorists,” even though he doesn’t seem to be able to get the word “insurgency” out of his mouth. Yet others tell us the al Qaeda affiliates make up less than 10 percent of the people we are fighting in Iraq.

I think the Iraq War is less about fighting al Qaeda, or reshaping the Middle East, or even oil, than it is about the Right’s collective emotional need for a conventional enemy. Iraq is a proxy war standing in for the old-fashioned “glorious little war” the righties desire. But glorious little wars no longer apply to geopolitical reality. Although certainly military actions will be part of the effort to combat terrorism, talk of “fronts” — as in “central front of the war on terror” — seems to me as anachronistic as mounted saber charges.

And the righties seem to think we are in a state of emergency, and have been continually since 9/11. If you’ve ever worked for someone who can’t set priorities, you may know what I’m talking about — when everything’s a priority, nothing is a priority. And when we’re always in a state of emergency, we’re never in a state of emergency. As a nation we need to take a deep breath and understand that we’ve got a lot of long, hard, and mostly not glorious work ahead of us to face the challenge of global terrorism. But we’ve got to understand this is how the world is going to be for the foreseeable future, probably the rest of our lives. And that means fighting terrorism is not an “emergency.” It’s the norm. And all constitutional restrictions apply.

Tainted

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Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer write in today’s Washington Post that a judge on the FISA court has resigned.

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court’s work.

According to colleagues, Robertson was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants.

“They just don’t know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants — to kind of cleanse the information,” said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. “What I’ve heard some of the judges say is they feel they’ve participated in a Potemkin court.”

Meanwhile, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times report that the NSA program did too include surveillance of purely domestic communications.

A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

The officials say the National Security Agency’s interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact “international.”

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

The blogosphere is, of course, seeing two different realities. The righties have made up their minds that presidents Clinton and Carter also ordered warrantless searches, which (1) isn’t true, and (2) wouldn’t make it right, even if it were true. But you know that won’t make any difference to cowards. There are terrorists out there! Quick, throw the Bill of Rights overboard!

[Update: See more debunking of “warrantless” searches by Clinton and Carter by Georgia10 at Kos.]

Just call them cowards. That’s what they are. I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and saw the worst that terrorism can do, and I am not crawling around under rocks screaming that we must compromise everything America stands for to keep us safe. And I’ve never considered myself especially brave; just put me in a dentist’s chair, and I’ll confess to anything. But as I wrote yesterday, righties are so terrified of the jihadist boogeymen they’ll make excuses for anything Big Brother does, in the opinion — unjustified, I say — that Big Brother is keeping them safe. And they call themselves patriots. It’s too pathetic.

And the White House has yet to demonstrate that taking the path to tyranny has made us any safer. For example, Josh Meyer of the Los Angeles Times writes that at least one of Bush’s arguments is bogus.

In confirming the existence of a top-secret domestic spying program, President Bush offered one case as proof that authorities desperately needed the eavesdropping ability in order to plug a hole in the counter-terrorism firewall that had allowed the Sept. 11 plot to go undetected.

In his radio address Saturday, Bush said two of the hijackers who helped fly a jet into the Pentagon — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — had communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the U.S.

“But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late,” Bush said. “The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after Sept. 11 helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.”

But some current and former high-ranking U.S. counter-terrorism officials say that the still-classified details of the case undermine the president’s rationale for the recently disclosed domestic spying program.

Indeed, a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines.

See also “Bush’s Bogus Analogy” by Daniel Benjamin in Slate.

And of course it didn’t help that the President and National Security Adviser were told that “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” and made no attempt to shake trees, rattle cages or otherwise follow up.

But I digress.

Douglas Jehl writes in today’s New York Times that

The limited oral briefings provided by the White House to a handful of lawmakers about the domestic eavesdropping program may not have fulfilled a legal requirement under the National Security Act that calls for such reports to be in written form, Congressional officials from both parties said on Tuesday.

The White House has refused to describe the timing and scope of the briefings, except to say that there were more than a dozen. But among the small group of current and former Congressional leaders who have attended the high-level gatherings conducted by Vice President Dick Cheney at the White House, several have described them as sessions in which aides were barred and note-taking was prohibited.

Dick is warning senators that investigating the NSA program could be bad for their careers. Ron Hutcheson and James Kuhnhenn write for Knight Ridder,

Senators of both parties on Tuesday demanded a congressional investigation into President Bush’s domestic-surveillance program, even as Vice President Dick Cheney warned that the president’s critics could face political repercussions. …

… Cheney forcefully defended the previously secret spying program – disclosed last Friday by The New York Times – and said that Bush’s critics could pay a political price.

But at the moment the question is not whether there will be an investigation — there will be an investigation — but how the investigation will be conducted.

Five members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – two Republicans and three Democrats – called for a joint investigation by their panel and the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, saying revelations that Bush authorized spying on U.S. residents without court approval “require immediate inquiry and action by the Senate.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he was discussing the possibility of hearings with various committee chairmen, but he didn’t pledge to hold any. Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said he preferred for each committee to conduct independent inquiries.

David Ignatius at WaPo is encouraged by a revolt of the professionals.

The national security structure that the Bush administration created after Sept. 11, 2001, began to crumble this month because of a bipartisan revolt on Capitol Hill. Newly emboldened legislators forced the administration to accept new rules for the interrogation of prisoners, delayed renewal of the Patriot Act and demanded an investigation of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency.

President Bush has bristled at these challenges to his authority over what has amounted to an undeclared national state of emergency. But the intelligence professionals who have daily responsibility for waging the war against terrorism don’t seem particularly surprised or unhappy to see the emergency structure in trouble. They want clear rules and public support that will allow them to do their jobs effectively over the long haul, without getting second-guessed or jerked around by politicians. Basically, they don’t want to be left holding the bag — which this nation has too often done with its professional military and intelligence officers.

The President needs to do what he often talks about, which is provide strong leadership, says Ignatius. The way Bush works to get his way isn’t leadership; it’s bullying. And when bullying doesn’t work, he lies, and bypasses Congress and the courts and the Constitution and anyone else he doesn’t want to bother about actually leading. Real leadership is haaaarrd work, you know.

See also Bruce Ackerman,” The Secrets They Keep Safe” in Slate.

Doesn’t Sound Good

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Doug Struck of the Washington Post reports that Iraqi Sunnis claim last week’s election was rigged.

Sunni and secular political parties angrily claimed Tuesday that Iraq’s national election was rigged, threatening to leave in shambles the delicate plan to bring Iraq’s wary factions together in a new government.

Faced with an emerging strong victory by the religious Shiite group that has close ties to Iran, the minority Sunnis demanded a new election and hinted darkly that the violence of the insurgency would be accelerated by the suspicions of fraud.

Early voting results announced by Iraqi electoral officials yesterday, reflecting two-thirds of the ballots, showed religious (mostly Shiite) groups taking a commanding lead. Today, with 95 percent of votes counted, it appears conservative religious Shiite groups will dominate the parliament and the selection of the country’s prime minister.

Former prime minister Ayad Allawi, whose secular slate appeared likely to take a small, fourth-place role in the government, also questioned the results of Thursday’s polling and called a meeting for Wednesday of other groups angry with the outcome.

And Salah Mutlak, who headed an independent Sunni slate, said, “I don’t think there is any practical point for us for being in this National Assembly if things stay like this.”

This is not a positive development, I suspect.

Real Resolve

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Resolve is one of President Bush’s favorite words. You can choose any of his speeches on the war on terror, or Iraq, and you’ll find that the transcript is larded with the R word.

A random example, Bush’s speech from December 12:

I’ve come to discuss an issue that’s really important, and that is victory in the war on terror. And that war started on September the 11th, 2001, when our nation awoke to a sudden attack.

Like generations before us, we have accepted new responsibilities. We’re confronting dangers with new resolve. We’re taking the fight to those who attacked us and to those who share their murderous vision for future attacks.

We will fight this war without wavering, and we’ll prevail.

But what the hell does “confronting dangers with new resolve” mean? What has actually been asked of us? With the exception of the sacrifices made by our soldiers and Marines … nothing. We go on with our lives just as before. We are not buying liberty bonds, growing victory gardens, knitting socks or rolling bandages for the troops. As illustrated by the World War I-era posters, in past wars citizens were asked to at least give up some extravagances for the war. Today the president and the Republicans in Congress won’t even consider raising taxes to pay for their war. Instead, they’ll shift the burden to the future. Our children will thank them, Im sure.

So what is Bush asking of us, except to trust him? Is that what we’re supposed to be “resolved” about?

All over the Right Blogosphere today the righties argue that Bush must be allowed unprecedented presidential powers because we are fighting terrorists. And terrorists are scary. They killed people on 9/11. They might kill more people, like me. I’ll gladly trade some civil liberties for safety.

In today’s Boston Globe, H.D.S. Greenway writes that fear is distorting our judgment.

I have no doubt that one day the Bush administration’s curtailment of civil liberties, especially the torture of prisoners, will be looked back on as a national shame. I never would have thought I would live to see the day when the president of the United States would threaten to veto a bill in Congress to ban torture, or when the vice president would spend his days lobbying Congress in favor of torture. That little shop of horrors, the vice president’s office, seems to be the place where fear regularly gains ascendancy over good judgment.

The Bush administration’s predilection to torture was clearly a result of mind-clouding fear caused by the greatest terrorist attack in history on Sept. 11th, 2001. The same can be said of the excesses of the Patriot Act, and, too, the decision to use the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without benefit of warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Bush administration has shamelessly used fear to get its way. Both the president and vice president have tried to picture a withdrawal from Iraq as resulting in an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq, and an Al Qaeda-led Caliphate stretching across the Muslim world. In reality al Qaeda hasn’t the remotest chance of taking over Iraq, not with 80 percent of the population either Kurdish or Shi’ite, and a timely end to American occupation might sooner lead to an Iraqi-Sunni disenchantment with foreign terrorists.

Today, righties are frantically patching together byzantine legal arguments in favor of trusting Bush. In every case, when you read deeply, you see their concern is not for the integrity of the Constitution, but the integrity of their skins. Here’s an example; keep reading to the conclusion —

I’m just guessing here, but I suspect that we have technology in place that allows us to begin intercepting phone calls within a matter of minutes after we learn of a phone number being used by an al Qaeda operative overseas. My guess is that there is a system into which our military can plug a new phone number, and begin receiving intercepts almost immediately. I hope so, anyway; and I’m guessing that the disclosure of this system to al Qaeda is one of the reasons why President Bush is so unhappy with the New York Times. If we do have such a technology, it certainly would help to explain the remarkable fact that the terrorists haven’t executed a successful attack on our soil since September 2001. And the disclosure of such a system, by leaking Democrats in the federal bureaucracy and the New York Times, makes it more likely, by an unknowable percentage, that al Qaeda and other terrrorist organizations will launch successful attacks in the future.

Translation: I don’t know what Bush is doing, but I want him to keep doing it to protect me from the terrorists.

This is not “resolve,” people. This is cowardice. This is being a herd of frightened beasts stampeding off a cliff.

My dictionary says resolve means “Unwavering firmness of character, action, or will.” I say that real resolve is not letting fear gut the Constitution.

Last June Lance Mannion wrote, “[t]hat’s why the Right hates the Left these days. We aren’t as afraid as they are. They hate us for our freedom from fear.” And now the righties are waxing hysterical because the jihadists are here! These little niceties about warrants and laws are a luxury we don’t have!

To which I say, first, no one is saying that we shouldn’t conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists. But the Bush Administration has yet to explain (to anyone’s satisfaction but a terrorized rightie’s) why it bypassed FISA, or if there was a problem with FISA why it didn’t go to Congress to make new provisions for oversight. So the argument that insisting on these constitutional niceties will make us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks just doesn’t wash. We are not choosing between safety and liberty; we are choosing between tyranny and liberty.

But what if, in some remote stretch of possibility, putting some limits on The Emperor Bush actually did increase risk of terrorist attack? I do not believe this is true, but let’s pretend. Isn’t standing on principle, even in the face of danger, the very essence of resolve? Shouldn’t we be facing terrorism with “unwavering firmness of character, action, or will” intead of running to Big Brother for protection?