Recently in NSA Category

I'm not sure I agree with Neil the "Werewolf" on this one, but it's nice that he's trying to console us. I do feel a bit better, but I'm not buying into this statement:

This bill is basically the same kind of garden-variety corruption one expects from Congress -- protecting wealthy interests at the expense of ordinary folk. That's why it's a bad piece of legislation. But Congress passes junk like that all the time (the farm bill, lots of defense appropriations, not bargaining hard with Big Pharma, etc) and it's not the end of the world. And that's why I'm writing this post -- I don't want people to lose perspective and think that this is too much more than just another garden-variety bit of corporate corruption. It's a lot closer to the tax breaks for ceiling fan importers that it is to torture.

It's a bit more troubling than all that Neil, a few more basic principles and American freedoms are at stake here, don't you think?

And the problem is broader than Neil paints with his singular focus on the imperative that we must replace George Bush and his entire criminal enterprise from the executive branch -- and of course than requires that anyone with an "R" after their name is no longer welcome at any White House Bar-B-Q's. (No, seriously. Forget about the post-partisan crap about retaining someone like Gates at DoD or any similar "enlightened" nonsense. They ALL have to go.)

Neil begins with the simple premis that , "This is a legislative precedent that emerged because Steny Hoyer decided that it would be good business to sell the telcos the immunity they wanted in exchange for campaign contributions." But that doesn't reveal the whole picture. Hoyer would never have been placed in such an untenable position, knowing he would be labeled as a bought and paid for hack by even well-meaning analysts like Neil if the Democrats in the House weren't hamstrung by the turncoat Blue-Dogs who vote with the GOP on damn near everything that matters, and thus as loyal to Bush as John McCain.

Now I don't know if these DINO's will have an epiphany when Barack Obama takes the oath of office, or will have some enlightenment shoved down their throats. But I do know that haveing the equivalent of 40 or so Joe Liebermans filling space in the Democratic Caucus and marching in lock-step with the remnants of Tom DeLay's outfit is THE principle reason Congress as an institution is despised more than anything, ever.

So thanks Neil, I do feel a bit better, but I'm looking for more than merely an inauguration ushering a new era. I'm looking for a purge.

Sadly, I'll probably be disappointed on both counts. But in the true spirit of a Cleveland sports fan and apostle of St. Wiley E. Coyote and the Church of Never Say Die, that certainly doesn't mean I'll accept the notion that the Perfect is the enemy of the Good.

Committee Caller is an automated web service that will connect you, by phone, to the front office of all Congressmen for the committee of your choice. No more fumbling for the phone numbers; in fact you don't even have to dial any numbers at all; Committee Caller will call you, in sequence, and patch you in to each of the offices.

Here's how it works:

1. Visit CommitteeCaller.com.
2. Select the appropriate committee from the list provided.
3. Enter your phone number in the form provided.
4. Click the 'Put me in touch with democracy!' button.
5. Wait for Committee Caller's automated voice application to call you.
6. Pick up the phone and stay on the line while Committee Caller starts connecting you to the members on the committee you selected -- in sequence.

Once connected, Committee Caller will tell you which representive you're calling, who their legislative director or chief of staff is, and what district they represent. At any point you can use the asterisk-key on your phone to hang up the call and move on to the next one. After each call you will have the opportunity to rate how your call went.

Visit Committee Caller and give it a test drive: they've set up a list of fake committees for you to demo the app.

Better yet: contact the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- and urge them to vote against retroactive amnesty for telecommunications companies in S. 2248, the FISA Amendments Act. Urge them to support Senator Dodd and others by allowing them to have a full debate on this issue. Urge them to vote "no" for cloture on the motion to proceed to the FISA bill.

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.

I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

by Mark Adams

(Sorry, but I'll explode if I don't get this song out of my system.)

...And he take you away.

Very little information on the NSA Program's successes, failures, and abuses has come out thusfar; and indeed it may be less likely that more comes out in the future: Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports tonight that the administration has raided the home of a former DOJ lawyer, Thomas Tamm, seizing his and his kids' computers, on suspicion that he was involved in leaking the program's existence to the media. Now that Congress is out of the oversight picture, I suppose it's time to kill the messengers and thereby get the media out of it too.

What, you may ask led to Tamm being led off the the most convenient gulag? Fresh off their latest finger-pointing circle-jerk and pointless demagoguery, Wingnuttystan speculates that crazed lefty blogging is to blame:

What this Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff doesn't mention is what might have caused the FBI to be suspicious of the alleged leaker---BDS blog postings by Thomas Tamm. One such BDS posting was made by a reader identifying himself as Thomas Mann in the New York Times The Caucus political blog.

Shocking, just shocking that an American might want to express his outrage against something that until yesterday was indefensibly illegal action by the government. Even more frightening is that Bill O'Reilly isn't the only one scouring the comment sections on liberal blogs to find anti-American subversives.

Hopefully, Mr. Tamm can expect better treatment than some others who undoubtedly entertain the Malkinites on the right nearly as much as they would have enjoyed lions shredding Christians and Jews in the Arena in another era:

"The Red Cross went in and got to interview these people for the first time," said Mayer on the CBS Evening News. "What these people described was hanging from the ceilings by their arms and being water-boarded, partially drowned, put on leashes and knocked into walls and basically deprived of all kinds of sensory imagery for years." [my emphasis]

They don't "hate us for our freedoms." They hate us because barbarisms have been undertaken in our names. As the conclusion of Mayer's extraordinary New Yorker article points out, my earlier lament that a government that acts outside of the law, cannot legally put the bad guys away. What made these neocons believe that they were smarter than over 200 years of constitutional tradition and centuries of democratic jurisprudence is beyond me.

NOT being an arbitrary and capricious despotic tyrany was supposedly what separated us from the likes of the Taliban and Hussein in the first place.

by Mark Adams

Show of hands.

After the last election, after the celebrations was over and you were smelling the Thanksgiving turkey, who really thought that with the Democrats taking over Congress the war would be over by now?

Anyone ... anybody ... Beuler...?

How about a rollback of Bush's NSA wiretapping program? Closing Gitmo? Seriously, weren't you pleasantly surprised that Rumsfeld was actually fired, finally, especially since the timing was backwards and could have helped the GOP more if it came before the election?

The absolute best we could have hoped for is that there would now be an honest check on the White House, that things wouldn't get worse...

...that the war wouldn't escalate...

...that the Administration wouldn't be able to finagle a way to get even more power to abuse our civil liberties because any new expansion of Patriot Act and NSA wiretapping would be DOA with the new Congress...

...that hard won seats in red districts that now have a Democratic representative could no longer be counted on to rubber-stamp George Bush's misguided policies.

Zack Space, Charlie Wilson, thank you so much for living up to expectations ... the expectations of all the people in your respective districts who don't think there's a hair's difference between a donkey and a 'phant, that all politicians are pathetic stooges who put their own self-interest above all else and worship at the alter of the highest bidder.

Space, Wilson of Ohio Vote for Bush Eavesdropping Amendment: "Two of Ohio's 18 Congressmen, Zachary Space and Charlie Wilson, both new and both Democrats, were sent to Washington last year as Ohioans turned out one political party for another. The duo, Space from Dover and Wilson from St. Clairesville, both representing fiscally and socially conservative rural districts, cast their votes for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which critics opposed to President Bush's anti-terrorism tactics said should be defeated because it would give much-needed legality to his administration's unrivaled and unchecked power to perform surveillance on persons overseas and within the United States."

This is the third strike for Space, and I'm done with Charlie too. If even Hillary Clinton knew it was not in her self-interest to support this measure, the same Hillary who has spoken about having wanted her husband to have had more power similar to that confiscated by the current administration, wimps like Space and Wilson are irredeemable.

This broad statement by Meteor Blades applies directly to you Messieurs Space and Wilson:

Because, frankly, you epitomize weak. Your every pore exudes feebleness. You are surrender monkeys. And you’ve just casually tossed away a basic protection as if it were a banana peel.

When it comes to votes that mattered, votes that highlighted a respect for principle instead of continuation of power, high profile votes that would have exemplified the courage of your convictions -- you both have proved you have none.

The Big Tent Democrat formerly known as Armando sums it up nicely:

The entire purpose of this provisions is to enhance the power of the executive and to free it from any checks and balances. It is clear that the Bush Administration, an Administration that has no basis for asking for any trust, has played the fear card to attack our Constitutional balance and overset the vision of the Framers of our Constitution.

For what it's worth, while I noted that as long as there are safeguards mindful of basic privacy expectations of ordinary citizens, I had no real problem with amending the FISA legislation per se. However, because of the very nature of this sensitive law, we really don't know all the nuts and bolts that went into it. (Unless, you know ... you actually read it (pdf) -- unlike most of our Congress Critters).

What we do know is that the circumstances surrounding its approval are highly suspects and ring of the same old notions that if you stand in the way of the President's demand for more power, you will be branded as a coward to your electorate come next fall. What we do know is that the deal Congress worked out with the National Intelligence Director was overruled by Bush himself (or more likely his alter ego in the Vice-President's office). That alone tells me that the current law goes beyond that which was necessary and proper. Any Democrat who voted for this ought to be ashamed.

Whereas the law previous insisted that the administration get FISA Court-approved search warrants to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans citizens on U.S. soil, this new law changes the landscape. If the federal government wants to spy on someone, and the target is "reasonably believed" to be overseas, a warrant is no longer necessary. [And the belief is not "clearly erroneous" - Mark]

This is just another bill, like the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, and the "emergency" supplemental authorization for funding the "surge," this law was yet another example of something pushed down our throats with no real time to deliberate or consider the full ramifications. Enough Democratic Congressmen and women capitulated to the White House scare tactics to give the Administration exactly what it wanted -- and unbelievably expanded the prerogatives of Alberto Gonzales -- one of the most (if not the most) reprehensible political tools ever to run the Justice Department.

Consider this statement by Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post (via Glen Greenwald):

To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

***

The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance.

Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp. . . .

Not convinced that this "fix" went far beyond what was necessary to simply allow us to intercept communications that were between terrorists whose network happened to cross through the United States. Not convinced that the rights of US citizens are going to be abused by design?

Maybe this report by James Risen of the NY Times, who's been on the NSA wiretapping story from the beginning (again, HT Glenn):

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

I don't for one minute believe that Congressmen like Space and Wilson were elected with the expectation that they would support expansion of the Unitary Executive with full Congressional approval.

And if you think that this really doesn't have any consequences to you or me, put yourself in the place of a father whose home was raided, and the computers of his children as well as his own were confiscated, merely for letting the world know that the administration was violating the law all this time. Illegal acts that now are legal.

Six month's sunset provision? Kabuki ass covering, nothing more. If you really though it mattered which party was in charge of our National Security State, you're living in a dream world where memories of a representative republic protected basic liberty are simply quaint.

Mellisa has more reactions. Does it really need to be said that if Powerline thinks Congress did the right thing, it's ghastly wrong.

Glenn Greenwald has the scoop.

Over at Daily Kos, diarist 'thereisnospoon' makes a crucial point: Democrats musn't argue points of law when opposing the warrantless wiretaps. They must say that, by avoiding the required warrants, Bush raises the suspicion that he is NOT surveilling terrorists -- he is surveilling his political enemies.

The technicalities of Constitutional Law are the realm of reason. Voters actually VOTE based on emotion. They don't really care if Bush is breaking the law; they care if he's doing something morally wrong.

The truth is that if Bush wiretaps a terrorist and doesn't bother with a warrant first, the public admires him [for being] a no-bullshit, Dirty Harry kind of guy.

But if he's hiding political Mafia tactics under the cloak of National Security, then they see him as the worst kind of villain you can imagine.

The key is getting them to entertain the unthinkable notion of what we all know is undoubtedly true: that Bush isn't Dirty Harry; he's the corrupt cop Dirty Harry has to bring to justice.

Bush is essentially saying, "trust me" and, fact is, many DO trust him. But Democrats must show that this trust is misplaced. Bush is hiding something by avoiding the warrants. What is he hiding? He is hiding the fact that terrorists are NOT the only ones he is spying on.

And another thing...

We know that a government based on "trusting" Dear Leader is not what the Founders had in mind:

The founding fathers didn't set up a government based on trust. They could've designed a government based on trust and our ability to govern fairly but they knew that power corrupts. So they invented checks and balances. That was genius. The founding fathers did not want me to trust you and they did not want you to trust me. Every White House forgets about checks and balances, you guys are no different.

As Daniel Webster warned: "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions."

Jonathan Turley:

If this court is upheld or other courts follow suit, it will leave us with a most unpleasant issue that Democrats and Republicans alike have sought to avoid.

Here it is: If this program is unlawful, federal law expressly makes the ordering of surveillance under the program a federal felony. That would mean that the president could be guilty of no fewer than 30 felonies in office. Moreover, it is not only illegal for a president to order such surveillance, it is illegal for other government officials to carry out such an order.

Who, in Congress would have the cojones to call for the impeachment of the President at that point? And if they did, who would vote for it? And if the president was not impeached, and/or convicted, wouldn't that pretty much be the end of, you know, our democratic form of government? After all, the Constitution would then, finally and irrevocably, be shown to be completely irrelevant.

After that, what future president would look at this incident and not conclude that s/he could violate the law with impunity?

This is big news:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it. The White House said it "couldn't disagree" more with the ruling.

I bet they do.

Glenn Greenwald has the particulars:

The incomparable Bob Somerby should always be consulted when thinking about a meta-story about media bias, and the Daily Howler seldom disappoints.

For forty-plus years, they've yelled "liberal bias"--going all the way back to a time when the complaint might have been justified (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/14/03). And now, at long last, just this week, Mike Allen has written a "news report" so perfectly awful that we can finally, definitively say it--after reading Allen's "news report," you'd really have to be out of your mind to believe in that tired old cry.

Somerby was writing about the Washington Post's reporting on Al Gore's Inconveniet Truth, but he certainly could have been writing about the New York Times and the NSA wiretapping scandal and the revelation that the Times knew about the program before the last presidential election, and sat on the story.

There is "bias" in the media -- but I wouldn't call it "liberal."  It's not necessarily conservative either.  There's an institutional bias in favor of covering the publication's own ass.