A Hideous Theory

Brendan Smialowsky, NYTimes, 6/12/06:
From left, the C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, the national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza L. Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, meet on Iraq.
Why has John Negroponte resigned his post as National Director of Intelligence to become Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's deputy? There has to be some reason. Steven Pizzo at The Smirking Chimp has a theory: this paves the way for Cheney to resign, Rice to be appointed Veep in his stead, and Mr. Nicaraguan Death Squad himself, Negroponte, would be made Secretary of State. Ewwwww. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, it could.

So what's up? Here's what I think is up -- and if I were Bush I would be itching to get on with the game.

Move 1: Announce what the administration knows will be a very unpopular decision to send more troops to Iraq.

Move 2: Let the Democrat-controlled Congress throw a fit and hold hearings the administration knows will stir up additional opposition and shake loose new damning information on the administrations march to war and mismanagement of that war.

Move 3: Just when all the above is hitting the fan, Dick Cheney announces he is retiring from office early due to “health concerns," and because he does not want to be "a distraction" when he is called to testify in purjury trial of his former No. 2. Scooter Libby.

Move 4: The next day Bush announces he will nominate Condoleezza Rice to replace Cheney.

Move 5: At the same time Bush announces he is nominating Negroponte to replace Rice as Secretary of State.

The Incompetence, The Corruption, and The Cronyism: Frank Rich Edition

Frank Rich, New York Times: Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up? (behind the wall)

Or, as we like to say here, it's a story of incompetence, cronyism and corruption:

It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions.

[]

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

Ed Strong has the whole article: Frank Rich: Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

Beginning the Fall of Cheney?

A girl can dream, can't she?

NYTimes: Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping

WASHINGTON, May 13 — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

Newsweek: A Fresh Focus on Cheney
Handwritten notes by the Vice President surface in the Fitzgerald probe.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for Cheney's own notes to be made public. The notes—apparently obtained as a result of a grand jury subpoena—would appear to make Cheney an even more central witness than had been previously thought in the criminal probe. Fitzgerald's prosecution has created continued problems for the White House. Karl Rove, the President Bush's chief political adviser, recently made his fifth grand jury appearance in the case and remains under scrutiny while Fitzgerald weighs whether to file criminal charges against him. For now, Libby is the only figure charged in the case.

Talking Points Memo Document Collection: A copy of Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times Op-Ed with Handwritten Notes by Vice President Cheney

'Tip of the Iceberg'

I've been having a running argument with a commenter on an earlier post, My Radio Debut, about the nature and extent of the NSA spying program. It's my position that things are always worse than they seem with the Bush Administration, and that what we know here probably constitutes just the tip of the iceberg. Didn't take long for the next shoe to drop:

ThinkProgress: NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: ‘People…Are Going To Be Shocked’

CongressDaily reports that former NSA staffer Russell Tice will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee next week that not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Tice will tell Congress that former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush’s nominee to be the next CIA director, oversaw more illegal activity that has yet to be disclosed:

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. …

[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. … “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” Tice said. “I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now.” …

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said. … He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he “will not confirm or deny” if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.

Legal Genius Bush Says: Surveillance Legal BECAUSE I SAY SO

He also said Harriet Miers was the most qualified person to serve on the Supreme Court, so there you go.

Shorter Bush: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, an enemy, al Qaeda, 9/11, 9/11, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.

WaPo: NSA Call-Tracking Program Sparks Alarm
Bush Insists That Citizens' Privacy is 'Fiercely Protected'

President Bush, responding to a newspaper report on a previously undisclosed program to track the phone call patterns of millions of Americans, insisted today that U.S. intelligence activities he has authorized are lawful and aimed strictly at the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

In a hastily arranged appearance before reporters at the White House, Bush reacted to a USA Today report that says the National Security Agency has been secretly using records provided by the three largest American telephone companies to build a massive database of foreign and domestic phone calls. The program was launched shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with the aim of analyzing calling patterns to detect terrorist activity, the paper reported. The effort involves collecting phone numbers but does not entail recording or eavesdropping on phone conversations, it said.

The NSA declined comment, saying only that it "operates within the law."

I got this picture from one of my favorite bloggers:

Art Pottery, Politics and Food: "Our intelligence activities strictly target al Qaeda..."
--12:03 pm Statement

While I'm thieving, check out his pic of Michael Hayden, the most qualified person to run the CIA:

The Look & Feel of Harry

Verizon Sold Me Out

The dumbass who approved the program and the fathead who ran it.
I feel like Marion Barry. Bitch set me up. To any and all class action lawyers out there reading this blog (and you know who you are) I will be a name plaintiff in any case against Verizon for giving my personal, private information away to the fascists in the Bush Administration. I did not consent to this and it violates my constitutional rights under the 4th and 1st Amendments. Bastards. Pricks. Go Cheney yourself, Verizon. And Commander Codpiece. And from now on, all conversations emanating from this house will start with a seditious prelude. Like "Impeach the Lawbreaking Chimperor", if I am trying to keep it clean. Keep a record of that, assholes.

WaPo: Paper Reports NSA Collecting Phone Records

WASHINGTON -- The government is secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build a database of every call made within the country, it was reported Thursday.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls to the National Security Agency program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

[]

One big telecommunications company, Qwest, has refused to turn over records to the program, the newspaper said, because of privacy and legal concerns.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the NSA refused to grant its lawyers the necessary security clearance.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

USAToday: NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls
The spy agency, with the help of three major telecom firms, has been collecting data on the domestic calls of millions of Americans since shortly after 9/11.
Sources say the NSA is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

Blog Round-Up January 24, 2006

From Steve Gilliard, BushCo proposing its own federal police: This is how dictatorships start

From Art Pottery, Politics & Food, two good ones: Egghead = Gen. Michael V. Hayden (head of illegal wiretapping program)

Mystery Meet (Tim Russert's asking Barack Obama to comment on Harry Belafonte)

Brilliant at Breakfast on Florida exposing Diebold's easily-hacked voting machines: More on the Florida Diebold hack test

Digby can't take it anymore: Killing Me Softly (I love the use of the phrase "American sheeple")

Update: One more, from a new blog I've been loving, Glenn Greenwald on how Republicans can say anything, but Democrats are out of line: Rules for Political Discourse

The Standard Is Probable Cause

When the CEO President delegates his responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution, shouldn't he pass along a copy of said document to his minions? apparently, the general in charge of the illegal domestic spying program doesn't know his Constitution. I have a few copies to spare. Maybe I'll mail him one. Why don't we all?

From Editor & Publisher (highlighting the invaluable reporting of Knight-Ridder):

Defending Spy Program, General Reveals Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment

NEW YORK The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder's Washington office -- despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it.

General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, talked with reporters about the current controversy surrounding the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of communications of suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Hayden has been in this position since last April, but was NSA director when the NSA monitoring program began in 2001.

As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment's search standard of "reasonableness" without mentioning that it also demands "probable cause." Hayden seemed to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.

Here's the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."