AAT

AAT = Another AssRocket Takedown

(Via Atrios) Glenn Greenwald demolishes AR in a great post at Unclaimed Territory.

I have one disagreement with Greenwald. In the comments, he states:

Whether it's because they're dumb or malicious doesn't seem to me to matter all that much.

"Dumb" gives some hope that the person can be educated, "malicious" means that the person won't stop lying unless forced to.

CRS REPORT ON BUSH & NSA

(Via TalkLeft)

Report Questions Legal Basis for Bush's Spying Program

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
Published: January 6, 2006
NY TIMES

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - President Bush's rationale for authorizing eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants rests on questionable legal ground and "may represent an exercise of presidential power at its lowest ebb," according to a formal Congressional analysis released today.

The analysis, conducted by the Congressional Research Service, an independent research arm of Congress, is the first formal assessment of a question that has gripped Washington for the last three weeks: Did President Bush act within the law when he ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans?

While the Congressional report reached no bottom-line conclusions on whether the program is legal or not, it concluded that the legal rationale appears somewhat dubious. The legal rationale "does not seem to be as well-grounded" as the Bush administration's lawyers have suggested, and Congress did not appear to have intended to authorize warrantless wiretaps when it gave President Bush the authority to wage war against Al Qaeda in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded.

A 7TH GOP SENATOR DOUBTS FREDO ON THE NSA

(Via The Carpetbagger Report)

Senator: Bush’s spying raises concerns
Brownback disagrees with legal rationale
By Scott Rothschild (Contact)
Saturday, December 24, 2005

Topeka — U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., on Friday said the Bush administration needed to answer questions about spying on Americans without court authorization.
And Brownback said he disagreed with the administration’s legal rationale, which he said could hamper future presidents during war.

“There are questions that should be examined at this point in time,” Brownback said during a news conference.

The administration said Bush’s decision was legal in part because of a congressional resolution that authorized force to fight terrorism, which was adopted after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Brownback said he disagreed with that justification.

“I do not agree with the legal basis on which they are basing their surveillance — that when the Congress gave the authorization to go to war that that gives sufficient legal basis for the surveillance,” he said.

He said if the justification holds up, “you’re going to have real trouble having future Congresses giving approval



Earlier list of GOP senators here.

MORE ON "THE CABAL"

I have written previously that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Dept., said that Cheney and Rumsfeld form a cabal that is essentially a secret "wartime" government. James Risen, the NY Times reporter who broke the NSA domestic spying story, has reached a similar conclusion. From an interview done by Andrea Mitchell for NBC News:

Mitchell: Among the players whom you describe, you say that the Secretary of State got rolled, really, by the Secretary of Defense, and so did the National Security Advisor.

Risen: The power in this administration was Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and that Cheney and Rumsfeld really set the national security agenda for the administration.

This concentration of power didn't happen by accident - it's exactly what Cheney wants. Paul O'neill relates his judgment in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, page 293:

Cheney and O’Neill had had more conversations on process in the preceding months, until O’Neill gave up. They talked about everything that was apparent. The President was caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that’s tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything – a circle that conceals him from public view and keeps him away from the one thing he needs most: honest, disinterested perspectives about what’s real and what the hell he might do about it. But then “I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all this, over and over, and nothing ever changed…because this is the way Dick likes it.”

JAMES WEBB ON PRES. FREDO

Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.

There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.

James Webb was secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, and a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam. He also is an author and filmmaker.
Posted 2/18/2004 8:03 PM USA TODAY

THE LASTEST SHAMMITY WHOPPER

(Via Crooks & Liars)

Hannity: If Osama Bin Laden calls the United States, they're saying we need to go spend 76 hours and get a court order before we can record that phone conversation-that's how asinine their logic is.

The truth is that FISA allows a tap to be in place for 72 hours before getting a warrant but I'm sure this lie will turn up on the AOL message boards. In case of a formal declaration of war, the President has 15 days from the declaration to tap without a warrant.

WAR COST REVISIONS

(Via Atrios)

TPM Cafe has this excerpt:


A new study by two leading academic experts suggests that the costs of the Iraq war will be substantially higher than previously reckoned. In a paper presented to this week’s Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting in Boston MA., Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes and Columbia University Professor and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz calculate that the war is likely to cost the United States a minimum of nearly one trillion dollars and potentially over $2 trillion.

The Allied Social Sciences Association meeting is attended by the nation’s leading economists and social scientists. It is sponsored jointly by the American Economic Association and the Economists for Peace and Security.

Commenters provide references to other studies:

Fred Polvere:

In an Aug 20, 2005 New York Times OpEd, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce said the costs would be over a trillion.
"..if the American military presence in the region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion.”


anrig:

This American Enterprise Institute-Brookings study from September came up with a net present value cost to the US through 2015 of $604 billion.

JamesW:

William Nordhaus of Yale published an estimate of the cost of the war in the NYRB in in December 2002, well before it was launched, that came to a worst case of almost $2trn. The article is now behind a paywall. But you can get his figures and his technical paper here.

FREDO'S RECESS APPOINTMENTS

I had heard of England before but I didn't know much about him. AFP has a good round-up of some of the appointees:

Bush defies Congress in filling defense, foreign policy posts
05/01/2006 07h31

However, England's appointed was expected to generate less controversy than that of Dorrance Smith, who was named assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, or the Pentagon's chief spokesman. In November, Smith penned an article for The Wall Street Journal blasting all major US television networks and the government of Qatar for cooperating with Al-Jazeera in showing gruesome battlefield footage obtained by the Arab television channel in Iraq. He decried what he called "the ongoing relationship between terrorists, Al-Jazeera and the networks" and asked if the US government should maintain normal relations with Qatar as long as its government continued to subsidize Al-Jazeera.

The recess appointment list also includes Ellen Sauerbrey, who has now become assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. A former unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate in Maryland, Sauerbrey has infuriated most women's groups by her staunch opposition to abortion rights in her current job as ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Her nomination was being fought by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and Paul Sarbanes, with Boxer charging Sauerbrey had displayed "outright hostility" to women's rights at her UN job.

But if most of the latest recess appointees were opposed on ideological grounds, the naming of Julie Myers to the job of assistant secretary of homeland security in charge of immigration and customs was likely to revive charges of lax ethics. The 36-year-old lawyer from Kansas lacks significant management experience, her critics said, but has the distinction of being a niece of the former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Richard Myers, who retired from the Pentagon last year. Even The National Review, a leading conservative mouthpiece that rarely disagrees with Bush, editorialized last September that Myers' appointment "smacks of cronyism."

AMANPOUR FOLLOW-UP

I sent my post below to CNN and NBC but I have only received automated replies. (Via Atrios) MediaBistro/TVNewser got a reply from NBC:

In a statement to TVNewser tonight, NBC explained why:

"Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry."

I don't see why having that section up would hinder their inquiry, especially since the word's out now.

4 to 1

Bush, others dump Abramoff donations
By DAVID ESPO
AP Special Correspondent
Jan 4, 8:33 PM EST

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush and numerous lawmakers hastily jettisoned campaign donations linked to lobbyist Jack Abramoff on Wednesday as Republican Party officials pondered the impact of a spreading scandal on their 2006 election prospects.

"I wish it hadn't happened because it's not going to help us keep our majority," conceded Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas - facing legal problems of his own - took similar steps, as did his leadership successor, Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, another member of the GOP leadership.

In all, two dozen Republicans and six Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have announced plans this week to return donations, mostly funds that came from Abramoff or Indian tribes he represented.

Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who faces legal scrutiny for his links to the lobbyist, joined in the rush. And a political action committee controlled by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said it planned to return $2,000 from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe.

People familiar with the investigation said federal investigators are interested in questioning Abramoff about his dealings with DeLay and Ney as well as other lawmakers and officials. Those include Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., Rudy and Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., as well as former deputy Interior Secretary Stephen Griles and former top Bush administration contract officer David Safavian, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Abramoff's information is likely to be submitted to a federal grand jury.

NBC CENSORSHIP!

(Via Atrios) AmericaBlog put up this exchange between Andrea Mitchell and James Risen:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that.

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Later, Americablog discovered that NBC had removed the Q&A about Amanpour from the transcript. The first question about reporters is still there but when you go to the next page, the second question is missing. Americablog then raises some important questions about this censorship:

But before you say "yeah, go for it," consider the implications of tapping Christiane Amanpour's phones:

1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.

2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.

3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.

5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, DC - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?

8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?

Now you understand how potentially broad a violation of privacy the Bush doctrine on illegal domestic spying really is. Everyone who's anyone is a degree or two of separation away from a terrorist.

I think John of Americablog has done great work on this latest episode about the so-called "liberal media."

RADIO TIDBITS

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, was on Slot's show this AM. He repeated the legal farce that the AUMF of Sept. 2001 allowed Bush to bypass FISA and, more ominously, claimed that the recent stories in the NY Times about warrantless NSA domestic spying were as damaging and as illegal as the John Walker family spy ring that was uncovered in 1985.

Here's a brief refresher on the Walker ring:

WALKER, JOHN ANTHONY and his son, MICHAEL LANCE WALKER, were indicted 28 May 1985 by a Federal grand jury in Baltimore on six counts of espionage. The elder Walker, a retired Navy warrant officer who had held a Top Secret Crypto clearance, was charged with having sold classified material to Soviet agents for the past 18 years. During his military career, Walker made some investments in which he lost money. To make up for his losses, in late 1968 at the age of 30, Walker went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and offered his services for purposes of espionage. He compromised key cards used for enciphering messages and also provided information on the encryption devices themselves. At least a million classified messages of the military services and US intelligence agencies were compromised.


Bennett added the Dana Priest articles in the WaPo about the secret prisons but he's been on that hobby horse for weeks. (Byron York also made a brief appearance to repeat his misinterpretation of Jamie Gorelick's testimony about Presidential power, go here for details.) Slots later expressed outrage that our national security had been compromised by these reports and tied this to the meme that the Democrats are weak on national defense.

This seems to be the GOP plan to defend Pres. Fredo:

1) Bush has the authority to break the law
2) Reporting on breaking the law is treason
3) The Democrats are weak on defense

TENET'S CIA

New book reveals secret war operations
Jan 2, 7:11 PM EST

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.

Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because - he said - it had been dead for a decade.

The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother's information that there was no nuclear program.

A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.

MORE ON PROF. YOO

I went to the Boalt Hall site and find this bio-bit on Yoo:

BIO - John Yoo received his B.A., summa cum laude, in American history from Harvard University. Between college and law school, he worked as a newspaper reporter (WSJ) in Washington, D.C. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He then clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit. Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty in 1993, then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.


The name Silberman was familiar to me from reading David Brock's book, Blinded by the Right. People for the American Way has a lot more about Silberman here and this is what they have from Brock:

David Brock’s Surrogate Father

During the early years of the Clinton administration, Brock wrote stories—which he now disavows—accusing Anita Hill of lying in her testimony against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Brock also wrote smear pieces concerning rumors of President Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual improprieties, including the now infamous “Troopergate” scandal. According to Brock, who has since cut his ties with the Right, Silberman and his wife Ricky were his “surrogate parents” during this period and played “an absolutely key role” in what he wrote.

In Blinded by the Right, Brock notes that the Silbermans provided grist for the Anita Hill rumor mill even as he was serving as a judge on the Court of Appeals:

“If Republican aides were eager to abet my savaging [Anita] Hill, so were Thomas’s closest friends [including] D.C. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman [and] his wife, Ricky…. [Judge] Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian, ‘acting out.’ Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would have never asked Hill for a date: Did I know she had bad breath?”

Such groundless speculation eventually served as part of backbone for Brock’s 1993 book, The Real Anita Hill.

Brock also indicates Ricky Silberman viewed investigations of the Clintons as payback for the Clarence Thomas hearings:

“[I]t was actually Ricky Silberman's idea to approach Ken Starr to file that friend-of-the-court brief in the Paula Jones case. And Ricky knew the Jones case was simply payback for the Anita Hill affair. She thought, wouldn't it be delicious that Clinton would now be accused of sexual improprieties in the same way that Clarence Thomas had been?”

And, according to Brock, Silberman pressed him to write a controversial piece on Troopergate:

“Though he was a sitting judge who would rule on matters to which the Clinton administration was a party, Larry [Silberman] strongly urged me to go forward…. The trooper story would be much bigger than the Anita Hill book, he predicted. Clinton would be ‘devastated’…. [T]he judge told me he felt sure that if the same story had been written about Ronald Reagan, it would have toppled him from office. Clinton, he surmised, might be toppled as well.”

I am trying to suggest here that Yoo may be just another wingnut lawyer who was glad to provide Pres. Fredo with any legal justification he needed or wanted.

"CUT AND RUN" BUSH

U.S. Has End in Sight on Iraq Rebuilding
Documents Show Much of the Funding Diverted to Security, Justice System and Hussein Inquiry
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 2, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.


In two of the most crucial areas, electricity and oil production, relentless sabotage has kept output at or below prewar levels despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of American dollars and countless man-hours. Oil production stands at roughly 2 million barrels a day, compared with 2.6 million before U.S. troops entered Iraq in March 2003, according to U.S. government statistics. The national electrical grid has an average daily output of 4,000 megawatts, about 400 megawatts less than its prewar level.

DUELFER REPORT SUMMARY

(I am posting this here so I can have it in a format that transfers easily to AOL's message boards.)

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability-which was essentially destroyed in 1991-after sanctions were removed and Iraq's economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed.

Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq's principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary.

ISG uncovered Iraqi plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 km and for a 1,000-km-range cruise missile, although none of these systems progressed to production and only one reportedly passed the design phase.

Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991.

In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.

RADIO TIDBITS

A caller to the Drudge show pointed out a flaw in the Administration's justification for warrantless spying on Americans: If this was legalized by the AUMF, then why did the Administration bother to get the Patriot Act passed?

Drudge couldn't answer the question so he uttered a non-sequitor about polling numbers.

MAKE THAT 6 GOP SENATORS

Sen. Lugar joins Specter, McCain, Hagel, Snowe and Graham. (Via ThinkProgress)


Add Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) to the list of conservative senators - which already includes Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) - who have expressed serious concerns about Bush’s secret domestic spying program. From CNN’s Late Edition:

BLITZER: So you want hearings? You want hearings?
LUGAR: I do. I think this is an appropriate time, without going back and should the president have ever tried to listen to a call coming from Afghanistan, probably of course. And in the first few weeks we made many concessions in the Congress because we were at war and we were under attack. We still have the possibility of that going on so we don’t want to obviate all of this, but I think we want to see what in the course of time really works best and the FISA Act has worked pretty well from the time of President Carter’s day to the current time.

"DOC" GETS SOME SUPPORT

On the thread started by Doc, there were a few supporters.

#6 - 1/01/06 12:48 AM (Msg Id: 523441:1296983)
Re:#5

Gpsmyth2
View
Profile
Send IM
Send Mail
Rating: 20 % of 5 people liked
this post Do you find it useful?
Yes or
No
love it or leave it you cowards
Reply
to Message
Ignore
Gpsmyth2 Notify AOL Mark
Message Unread



#50 - 1/01/06 02:49 AM (Msg Id: 523441:1297233)
Re:#1

SolidU17
View
Profile
Send IM
Send Mail
Rating: 0 % of 2 people liked
this post Do you find it useful?
Yes or
No

Great post Carl.... Happy New Year... I wager the drunken
liberals will respond with wrath...
Reply
to Message
Ignore
SolidU17 Notify AOL Mark
Message Unrea