Most Questionable Power-Grab Yet

…this one is ominous!

Yahoo News reported: White House unveils intelligence powers overhaul.

“Unveils?” Is this some sort of proposal? Nope. It’s a done deal, no oversight or even prior notice required…

The action by Bush provoked bipartisan anger among House of Representatives lawmakers who said they were not properly consulted or briefed on the planned changes.

“We were only shown the document after it was complete and on its way to the president for his signature,” said Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee.

“Given the impact that this order will have on America’s intelligence community, and this committee’s responsibility to oversee intelligence activities, this cannot be seen as anything other than an attempt to undercut congressional oversight,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the panel.

So. What exactly does this done deal include? Over at AFP the story is entitled: Bush orders overhaul of US intelligence. But don’t bother, it’s mostly a pro-fluff piece. Better is the offering by Raw Story: Watchdog: Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans…

“This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office.

Another interesting analysis appears in cskendrick’s DKos diary, Who Needs Congress? Bush Reorgs Intel Services by Decree. The logical next question for any citizen concerned about civil liberties, the US Constitution, and things like the orderly transfer of power to the next duly elected President is,

Are they doing this for Barack Obama’s benefit?

P.S. Check out Pulitzer winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s report in the New Yorker (analyzed at Think Progress) about how VP Dick Cheney proposed a “false flag” operation to provoke war with Iran To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal to Dress Up Navy Seals as Iranians and Shoot at Them. Is it likely these guys are tired of All The Power In The World yet?

Opinion: Obama Blows It On FISA

An Independence Day Comment

As an early Edwards supporter strong on health care, I considered the erstwhile “frontrunner” [Hillary Clinton] to be well to the right-center of me. As Obama’s star rose, I investigated and found him well to the right-center of me too. I was going for the populist, not The Machine or The Inspiration. Because after all the harm the Bushies have done over nearly eight years, Democrats have proven themselves cowards over and over and over again. Even after 2006. We needed, thought I, someone who understands reality in America, not just for the top 2%.

Sometimes I think we need a third party, to represent those of us who self-identify as ‘progressive’. But I’ve seen too many split-party tactics in my time, and I’m not sure at all that the US can handle more than two parties sans a representative form of parliamentary government. We’re just not equipped for it. Yet the Constitution is the only thing still standing between me and Big Brother. I’m not willing to give up on it now.

Which brings me around to the current presumptive front-runner, Barack Obama. And his odd vote on the FISA bill, complete with expansion of powers and retroactive immunity for breaking the law for the telecoms who were blackmailed into cooperating with illegal wiretaps.

The country’s just not in THAT much danger. I’m not plotting terrorist attacks when I talk to my relatives or friends on the phone. But I damn sure don’t want the NSA listening to everything I say! Or logging all my text messages. Or reading all my emails. I believe it’s a complete waste of resources electronic and human. I am not a threat. The time, money, energy and storage space they waste on me talking to my 85-year old Mother-in-Law or giving hubby a grocery list on his way home from work is wasted EVERYTHING.

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Judiciary Committee Demands Answers

Congressman John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee has forwarded a formal request for answers from Attorney General Michael Mukasey about his assertion in a speech last week in San Francisco that a phone call from an Al Queda safe house in Afghanistan to someone in the U.S. was not monitored prior to 9-11.

The full text of the letter is below the fold:

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AG Mukasey’s 9-11 Bombshell

Our ever-vigilant U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey committed a major faux-pas last week when trying to work up some crocodile tears during a speech touting “necessary” domestic spying in San Francisco. Attempting to blame a lack of power-to-spy for the 3,000 American fatalities on September 11, 2001, Mukasey revealed…

Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we really want to know about. And before 9-11, that’s the call we didn’t know about. We knew that there was a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

Holy Moley, Batman!!! Did the AG just tell us something nobody in the BushCo administration bothered to tell the 9-11 Commission during its investigation? That US officials KNEW of a call from an Al Queda “safe house” in Afghanistan to someone in the United States, but didn’t listen in because they were scared of breaking the law?

Is Mukasey trying to tell us that US intelligence agencies - including NSA who monitors virtually ALL telecommunications, and the CIA who knows where Al Queda’s “safe houses” are - have no understanding of the FISA law that has been on the books since 1978? What in the world DO they teach these spooks at training camp?

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Secrecy and the Rule of Law: Connecting the Dots

Senator Chris Dodd made a statement on the Senate floor on Friday, January 25th during the cloture debate on Bush’s FISA bill - the one granting retroactive immunity to America’s telecom giants for aiding and abetting Bushco’s rampant lawbreaking. The statement well explains what’s wrong with the entire situation in which we find ourselves after 7 long years of the decidedly un-American “Unitary Executive” - a.k.a. “The Deciderer.”

Dodd had threatened to filibuster the bill last month, so Harry Reid was forced to withdraw it from debate until last Friday, when Dodd again threatened filibuster. Reid then put off the cloture vote until today, January 28th. Senators Clinton and Obama, who were out of town campaigning in South Carolina on Friday, are scheduled to be present for this afternoon’s cloture vote (and filibuster, should that ensue).

Dodd noted that it wasn’t his colleagues in Congress - either house - who convinced him of the unacceptability of telecom immunity, it was the many citizens he met in his recently aborted campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination…

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US Press: Still Silent as the Grave

On January 10 I wrote about British press coverage of former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ shocking revelations of high-level nuclear spying. Nearly 2 weeks later Edmonds’ charges have still not seen the light of day in the Corporate Owned Media [COM] in this country. Even after the Sunday Times scooped them all again on January 20.

On Monday (Jan. 21) Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame wrote about the lack of US coverage in an op-ed at Brad Blog and hosted at Huffington Post on Tuesday. Another strong diary at Daily Kos appeared Tuesday, UK media slams US media on Sibel Edmonds case.

[Ellsberg] For the second time in two weeks, the entire US press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch’s London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt US officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the US Congress and the courts.

Ellsberg notes that some American journalists have reportedly received calls from “intelligence sources” hinting that what Edmonds happened upon is not a ‘real’ spy ring, but a very sensitive covert operation with highest authorization. Yet if her allegations are true, we have this insane operation to thank for the Pakistani bomb and A.Q. Khan selling nuclear technology to places like Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea!

[Ellsberg] …if there is any truth to that, we clearly have another prize candidate …in the category of “worst covert operation in US history,” rivaling such contenders as the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, and the secret CIA torture camps abroad.

Knowledge of the charges, the backup, the evidence and the players is widespread in D.C. on both sides of the aisle. Complicity in the cover-up is just as widespread and includes the US mainstream media. But the cat’s out of the bag now - the whole world knows about it, except Americans who get their news from newspapers and television. There’s no good reason why the American people should be the last to know about the traitorous deeds of their government.

Links:

US National Security for Sale

US journalists ignore Sunday Times scoop

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

Daniel Ellsberg: Covering Up the Coverage

UK media slams US media on Sibel Edmonds case

US National Security for Sale

The Insane World of Nuclear Spies and Counter-Spies

FBI translator Sibel Edmonds

Britain’s Sunday Times published an article on January 6 entitled For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets, detailing the extraordinary claims of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds about how corrupt US government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to ’steal’ nuclear weapons secrets. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a real “bombshell” that ties together many years’ worth of nefarious dealings in the Middle East by officials charged specifically with the task of protecting those nuclear weapons secrets from theft by the very people who were allowed to ’steal’ them!

Edmonds, a Turkish language translator before turning whistleblower, listened to hundreds of sensitive communications intercepted by the FBI while she was stationed at the FBI’s D.C. field office, described to the Sunday Times how foreign intelligence agents enlisted the support of US officials to establish a network of ‘moles’ inside sensitive US military and nuclear installations. The officials involved included one well-known senior official in the US State Department, whom Edmonds says was being paid by Turkish agents in D.C. Those Turks then sold the information to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

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State of Denial

Torture as U.S. Policy and Practice

The recent hoopla about videotapes of the torture of ‘War on Terror’ prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri by CIA interrogators has drawn some odd denials from people who ought to know better by now. White House press spokesbot Dana Perino kept insisting to all questions that the US does not torture. Period, end of discussion.

What American with an IQ of over 75 believes this garbage, or the George W. Bush “doesn’t remember” knowing about those torture tapes - or ordering their destruction? Anyone who doubts US involvement in torture (and, too often, murder) should read Jennifer Hardbury’s Interview with Buzzflash for realistic background on this issue.

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What Olbermann’s NIE Special Comment Missed

Unmasking the Puppet Master …hiding in plain sight

[cross-posted to DailyKos and Randall’s blog]

Many years ago during the worst of the paranoid breakdown of “Tricky Dick” before his forced resignation, and again during the sneaky, behind-the-scenes horrors being brought to light in those infamous Iran-Contra hearings that made Ollie North such a wingnut hero, I used to console myself with the thought…

“As long as Frank Zappa is running around free, this is still America!”

Today, as we enter year number 8 of the most damaging and destructive American administration of my [Truman+] lifetime, Frank Zappa is dead and the steady erosion of our rights and standing in the world is worse than I’ve ever seen it. But I do have another true hero of freedom to console myself with…

“As long as Keith Olbermann is running around free, this is still America!”

Maybe it’s because I was born into the US Navy (NIS planning officer) where courage and resolve and honesty and patriotism were a way of life my siblings and I were fed along with mother’s milk. Qualities completely expected and always encouraged, a reflection of total dedication to defending and preserving that which was most noble about our nation’s aspirations as a beacon of freedom in the wider world. We were proud of that even if we were always “the new kid” in our classes for moving around the country/world a lot, always picked on by the bigger kids for being outsiders or having funny accents or just for being ‘military brats’.

So when Keith Olbermann looked right into the MSNBC camera this past Wednesday and said to the current occupant of the White House that…

“The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, sir, that you see in the mirror.”

…I just had to laugh out loud. If that idiot child at 1600 was watching, the whole thing no doubt went right over his pin-sized head. I have no doubt he has no idea who the heck Chicken Little is, and hasn’t the IQ to find out. Why, as this nation was being attacked on 9-11 he was having real trouble following along with the kindergartners reading “My Pet Goat,” and was far more interested in how that story turned out than in what was happening in New York City.

God bless you, K.O., and keep you free!

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Stopping the Next War Before It Starts: The Latest NIE

16 US Intelligence Agencies agree, but not with Bush/Cheney…

With Bush and his cadre’s recent hyperbolic rhetoric introducing “World War III” in the same sentence with Iran, it looks to me like the various US intelligence agencies don’t plan to be made scapegoat once again for Bush/Cheney’s delusions of Hitlerian grandeur. They all got together this time and reported in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is years away from having nuclear weapons even if it tries really hard. CNN reported that…

A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with “high confidence” that the Islamic republic halted an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003.

Worse, this report was prepared in December of 2006. Which explains why Cheney and the boyz were so anxious to keep a lid on it while they beat the drums toward a opening a new front in their forever-war. Ex-CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson offered this observation:

There are some unsung heroes in the National Intelligence Council who insisted on the integrity of the product. In the face of enormous political pressure to tailor information and pull punches that undermine Bush Administration talking points, the intelligence professionals did their job. They told the truth based on the facts in hand.

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