Breaking News: 9/11 Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Congress is ready to extend the NSA surveillance program, provided court-issued warrants for wiretapping continue to be required. Dubya has threatened to veto the legislation unless retroactive immunity is guaranteed for telecom companies that turned over customers' phone records to the government in the absence of warrants.

Bush warned that he would not sign the Democratic legislation unless it gives U.S. telecommunications firms retroactive immunity from lawsuits for lending assistance in counterterrorism investigations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

After the September 11 attacks. After. That phrase is going to cause some problems.

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

September 11 changed everything? Not so much. January 20, 2001 changed everything? Much more like it. The government went to the telecoms scarcely a month after Bush took office to enact a spying program the adminstration insists is necessary to prevent another 9/11 attack. Except that the program was in place before 9/11, and 9/11 not only happened anyway, but was immediately thrust forward as the reason why the program is necessary. It's logic, Mobius-strip style. It's one more example of enacting a policy, based on deception, that immediately becomes an inescapable causality loop.

Pelosi, Reid, where are you? How many more times will you allow this administration to go all Uri Geller on our reality, bending the Constitution and our lives in one giant stage show designed only for the perpetuation of its own power?

Re: My Previous Post

I'm sorry; I misused the term "brazen" by applying it, in my previous post, to the latest actions by the Attorney General. I should have saved it for application to said AG's thought processes.

GONZALES: I will go back and look at it. The fact that the Constitution — again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme —

SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?

GONZALES: I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by —

SPECTER: You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common sense, Mr. Attorney General.

GONZALES: Um.

Holy fucking shit. Wait, let me say that again. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. This is the fucking Attorney General. The top lawyer in the country. And he doesn't understand the fucking Constitution. Or, worse, he's deliberately misinterpreting... misinterpeting? Let me reword that. He's delilberately laying interpretation onto something that is not subject to interpretation. He's worse than Hayden saying the Fourth Amendment is grounded in reasonable suspicion, not in the requirement for a warrant.

Brazen Brazenity

Duke Cunningham went down last year; Bob Ney's tumble came this morning. Ah, you might think, the corrupt pigeons of the 109th Congress are finally coming home to roost... but, alas, AG Gonzales is booting out seven prosecutors who are sniffing too close on Republican tails. And replacing them with people like Timothy Griffin, whose last paying gig was helping Karl Rove dig up dirt on political opponents. Oh, wait--not simply replacing them on an interim basis, but forever, or at least until the 2008 elections, because Arlen Specter quietly slipped a provision into the renewed PATRIOT Act removing the requirement that interim prosecutors go through Senate confirmation within 120 days. The new guys now serve at the pleasure of the president. Or to pleasure the president, as the case may be. Paul Krugman summarizes more elegantly than I could hope to...

Mr. Gonzales says that there’s nothing political about the firings. And according to The Associated Press, he said that district court judges shouldn’t appoint U.S. attorneys because they “tend to appoint friends and others not properly qualified to be prosecutors.” Words fail me.

...so go read his column right now.

Given this brazen vaffanculo to rule of law, I'm stunned that the White House reversed course yesterday and decided that the FISA court might work just fine after all, that 72-hours-ex-post-facto warrants do not, in fact, take away the tools the preznit needs to protect us from the terrorists or embolden the enemy.

Maybe the FISA move was a gambit designed to establish the administration's law-abiding character in the investigations headed by the now-replaced prosecutors, just in case somebody in the Senate notices they are... what are the words... oh, yeah, "not properly qualified."

Well, Who Could Have Foreseen This?

President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

Another day, another signing statement that brazenly contradicts the law it's appended to. Do I remember correctly that some commentary on last year's warrantless wiretapping brouhaha raised the spectre of government agents combing citizens' private mail? And that those concerns were huffily brushed aside?

Hmm. I am not finding direct links other than my memory, but there's this from my February 7, 2006 post on the NSA hearings:

Perhaps the most troubling spectre to float out of yesterday's hearing was that of other surveillance programs we don't know about yet. The Attorney General framed many of his responses as pertaining only to "the program we are discussing today." The most telling moment came when Kennedy asked directly whether other, more insidious domestic spying programs were either in the works or already operational. Gonzales hesitated, silent, for a good two or three seconds, sighed deeply, and stammered, as if his tongue had suddenly swollen to the size of a canned ham, that he could not answer that question.

The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear on the issue of people being "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." In fact, the security of our persons, houses, papers, and effects leads off the first clause of the Fourth Amendment, which apparently was the only relevant segment in the mind of NSA chief (then deputy director) Hayden last January when he tried to explain why warrantless surveillance is legal after all. You remember from your high school civic class, of course, that the second big ol' clause of the amendment states that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That's what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable --

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.. . .

If the operating standard is "reasonable," and the unitary executive gets to decide what "reasonable" means, the Constitution becomes even less than the window dressing it was reduced to last winter. It becomes the thin haze of adhesive left by the masking tape slapped up there when the casing was repainted, waiting to be scraped away with the swipe of a razor blade.

Party down today, Mmes and Mssrs Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel. Tomorrow is time to get your asses to work.

A Peep of Reason

Finally. The NSA warrantless wiretapping program has been ruled unconstitutional, and the government has been ordered to halt it immediately. Holding for the official WH response...

Anyway, the federal judge's ruling is the peep of reason. In other news, it seems that the immediate threat of the British liquid bomb plot may have been played up just a tad. I won't get into the discussion of whether some exaggerations were made or the schedule pushed up at American insistence to satisfy political ends--no energy for it this morning--but this, on the heels of the revelation that the three guys arrested in Michigan for mass cell-phone purchases (allegedly to blow up the Mackinac Bridge) were not, after all, terrorists, but just three guys looking to run an eBay scam... well, it makes a body weary. Credibility has to be one of the basic tools of the Homeland Security folks; without it they're some amalgamation of the boy who cried wolf and Chicken Little when they should be that industrious ant (it was an ant, right? the one being dissed by the grasshopper or cricket or other random ornithoptera).

Some people will stay ever-vigilant, ready to turn in the neighbors at the slightest whiff of strange activity, but I'm betting the majority of the public is going to become jaded by the constant stream of hysterical terror alerts that increasingly (not "inevitably;" I'm not that cynical yet) are followed by an official Never Mind. If they're not that jaded already.

The Job I'm Glad I Don't Have

Channeling Michael Chertoff is not the way I prefer to pass time in the shower, but sometimes it just happens.

I was thinking of him standing there at his presser, detailing the new security rules that don't ban all liquids but allow up to four ounces of nonprescription meds, solid lipstick, and gel-based diabetic supplies, and imaginging what maybe he would like to say, were he able to shed his bureaucratic flunky shell and be nakedly honest for a few minutes:

Hello, my name is Michael Chertoff. Please make sure your cameras are powered up, your satellite feeds clean, and your pencils sharp, because I am about to commit political suicide and I'm only going to say this once.

The TSA is taking away your toothpaste, shampoo, and Chanel No. 5 because we have to do something to make it look like we're on top of things. We hope that if you're stuck in line for five hours waiting to pour your Diet Coke into an official trash can with all the other liquids, gels, soft solids, and random goos we can strip from your fellow travelers, you'll be too exhausted and frazzled to think about the thousands of pounds of cargo riding in the belly of the jet under your feet.

Because we don't look at that stuff. We don't have the funding or personnel, and if you think a GOP-controlled Congress will mandate security measures the airlines have to pay for themselves, well, you're wrong. So we put on our dog-and-pony show at the security gate with a handful of underpaid, undertrained workers and hope that makes you feel safe enough that you won't ask the hard questions.

The simple fact, ladies and gents, is that the potential for terrorist attacks is this big, with "this big" representing roughly the size of the universe.


And what we're able to do to ameliorate that is about this big on a good day. This "this big" is actual size.

The country's just too damn big and technology allows nefarious devices to be ever smaller, more concealable. Communication is instant. Very destructive materials can be packaged in very small delivery systems. If al Qaeda or my crazy Uncle Joe want to blow ten airliners out of the air simultaneously, they can do it and there's not a damn thing the US government can do to stop them.

The only impediment, really, is the incompetence of the foot soldiers they send out to do the job. Will somebody get nervous and blow his cover, or panic and back out at the last second? That's about the best we can hope for. Richard Reid can't quite get his sneaker lit, so the TSA makes everyone send their shoes through the X-ray machine. The Brits find a ring of guys trying to get their liquid explosives straightened out and the TSA bans lip gloss. Does this make you any more than marginally safer? No. It doesn't.

The point is that it doesn't matter what we find out about and add to the list of hoops you have to jump through before getting on a plane. There are always other ways, other things we just haven't thought of yet and won't until somebody tries them. We could, as so many people have groused, simply strip you all naked and have you ride in cages. That wouldn't do a damn thing to keep a Semtex-stuffed teddy bear wired to a timer sitting inside an iPod shell in checked baggage or undisguised Semtex in an air cargo crate from blowing the 6:15 to Cleveland right out of the sky. It won't do a damn thing to keep the uninspected suitcases on the Sunset Limited (read: all of them) from detonating as the train chugs past the munitions depot in Yuma or pulls into downtown LA. It won't do jack to stop coordinated hits in small towns throughout the Midwest--you know, away from any targets of tactical value, but right in the heart of what you thought were the last safe spots in America.

We can't do shit. We can, at best, protect you from the really stupid or incompetent terrorists who can't think outside the traditional knife-to-the-throat box of airplane hijackings. So we make you traipse through the security gate barefoot and dry to assuage your fears with the veneer of Doing Something, and hope that the majority of you will think that's great and continue to consider Republicans the Party of Strong on Terror.

You want consolation? Here's your consolation. In a nation of 300 million people, your odds of survival are pretty good. Thank you and have a nice day.

Those Who Would Give Up Liberty for a Little Security...

The girlfriend tells me I should stop reading the paper, or that, at the very least, my breakfast table letters-to-the-editor-reading privileges might be revoked. Maybe she's tired of me sputtering Cheerios everywhere at the latest in the long parade of mind-boggling letters from the right side of Tucson's citizenry.

Yesterday dawned hopefully, with a separate little section of letters about Qwest's refusal to cooperate in the NSA call data-mining operation. Then I actually started reading the letters and, well, the Cheerio deluge began.

Rick in Tucson writes:

I've written Qwest and demanded that my phone records be immediately turned over to the NSA and have also demanded that Qwest immediately begin assisting the NSA in any way possible.

I thought it was satire. I hoped it was satire. Maybe the hook at the end, the little emoticon wink letting us know it was satire, inadvertently got edited out. But then I moved on to another letter, from James, retired Air Force:

I'm a Qwest customer and am disgusted that my phone provider did not see fit to help our government compile data to ferret out those who would gladly kill us.

And finally, we have this from Rod:

Qwest once again has demonstrated its insensitivity to the communities that it serves by denying the National Security Agency the opportunity to collect data on telephone traffic over its system.

The decision is but another example of Qwest's historic contempt for their customers. This time it is their customers' safety.

Two pro-Qwest letters were interspersed with the above. Somebody demanded that Qwest turn over his phone records to the NSA? Holy Grail, anyone? Spank me first! No, me!!!

The multiple layers of blind trust are impressive, if disturbing. Rick and James and Rod are rock-solid in their conviction that (1) the data-mining system is an efficient means to identify a couple hundred? a thousand? how many? al Qaeda stooges both in the US and foreign countries by combing through billions of calls made; (2) being automatically covered in the net of suspicion by the mere virtue of subscribing to telephone service is a-okay, because (3) the NSA would never (a) make a mistaken connection between an innocent patriotic American and a terrorist cell due to a call for carryout baba ganoush or (b) start transcribing actual conversations rather than simple numbers called or (c) use the calling patterns to investigate activities other than terrorism.

This is the kind of shit we used to revile the Red Menace for, the kind of government-sponsored snooping that prompted so many people to try to climb the Berlin Wall. The general lack of outrage over the NSA program disgusted me enough. The subsequent desire by individuals to actively participate in the same leaves me speechless.

Dig Dig Dig, Dig All Day...

The federal government cut secret (until today) deals with AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to acquire telephone records. Of every call made within the United States. By anyone.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

The White House, apparently sensing more immediately pending doom than in any previous point in this entire six-month NSA wiretapping story arc, trotted W hisself out to explain exactly what's going on here.

Making a hastily scheduled appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that "new claims" had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted "within the law" and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he said. "Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates."

Okay... compiling a database of all telephone calls made within the borders of the US, by all of the citizens who are of phone-calling age, suggests upwards of 250 million known AQ associates, does it not? And if the government doesn't really suspect all of us MoviePhone dialers of being terrorist collaborators, well, excuse me, but what the fuck? W asserts no data mining will take place. So they're simply collecting the phone records for fun, then, no? Like stamps, or butterflies, or heads on pikes.

The confirmation hearings for the new CIA chief should be very interesting in light of this, especially given the fact--should the nomination not be withdrawn--that Michael Hayden has demonstrated either a fundamental misunderstanding or deliberate misconstruing of exactly what the Fourth Amendment contains.