Lex Malla, Lex Nulla

"A bad law is no law "

A Victory for the Rule of Law
New York Times
The Supreme Court's decision striking down the military tribunals set up to try the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay is far more than a narrow ruling on ... - link -

Checking the Decider
Washington Post
It seemed almost too much to hope for, but the Supreme Court finally called George W. Bush onto the carpet yesterday and asked him the obvious question: What ... - link -

Analysis: Wartime powers faces scrutiny
Seattle Post Intelligencer
The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo puts the brakes on what has been a sharp expansion of executive ... - link -

A Governing Philosophy Rebuffed
Washington Post
For five years, President Bush waged war as he saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls ... - link -

The Supreme Court clips Bush's war wings
Salon
In a major rebuke to the president's draconian tactics, the court rules that secret military tribunals for terror suspects fundamentally violate US and ... - link -

Bush's claim to unfettered power is curbed
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
The US Supreme Court's decision on Guantanamo Bay tribunals yesterday dismantled the core philosophy ... - link -

Obscene Spending, Obscene Profiteering

U.S. Military Spending More Than Rest of the World Combined

U.S. Senate Approves $517.7B Military Budget [2007]
DefenseNews.com

The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a $517.7 billion defense bill for fiscal year 2007 that includes $50 billion $in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Passed on June 23, the bill, which also includes a 2.2 percent pay raise for troops, will have to be reconciled with the House of Representatives' $427.6 billion military budget passed Tuesday that also includes $50 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government's fiscal year 2007 starts October 1.

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Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration

Monday, June 19, 2006 --
Under the Bush Administration, the "shadow government" of private companies working under federal contract has exploded in size. Between 2000 and 2005, procurement spending increased by over $175 billion dollars, making federal contracts the fastest growing component of federal discretionary spending.

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Iraq: A Shocking Waste of Money

Matthew Yglesias
The American Prospect

Linda Bilmes, a leading Harvard budgetary expert, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out in their January 2006 paper, "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War," the spending captured by the CRS, even in strict budgetary terms, is "only the tip of a very deep iceberg."

The shocking truth, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, is that if one applies the Congressional Budget Office's basic assumptions about the duration of the conflict ("a small but continuous presence"), it will cost nearly a staggering $1.27 trillion dollars before all is said and done.

The number is so high as to defy human comprehension. All the numbers ending in "-illion" sound the same. But a trillion is what you get if you spend a million dollars a day ... for a million days. That's 2,737 years -- a cool mil a day, every day until the Year of Our Lord 4743.

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Terror Alert: Severe Risk of Hype

By Richard Cohen

The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; A21

It is the sheerest luck, I know, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looks (to me) a bit like Jerry Mahoney, because he fulfills the same function for the Bush administration that the dummy did for the ventriloquist Paul Winchell. At risk to his reputation and the mocking he must get when he comes home at night, Gonzales will call virtually anyone an al-Qaeda-type terrorist. He did that last week in announcing the arrest of seven inferred (it's the strongest word I can use) terrorists. I thought I saw Dick Cheney moving his lips.

The seven were indicted on charges that they wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI bureau in Miami. The arrests came in the nick of time, since all that prevented mass murder, mayhem and an incessant crawl at the bottom of our TV screens was the lack of explosives, weapons or vehicles. The alleged conspirators did have boots, which were supplied by an FBI informant. Maybe the devil does wear Prada.

Naturally, cable news was all over the story since it provided pictures . These included shots of the Sears Tower, the FBI bureau, the seven alleged terrorists and, of course, Gonzales dutifully playing his assigned role of the dummy. He noted that the suspects wanted to wage a "full ground war" against the United States and "kill all the devils" they could -- this despite a clear lack of materiel and sidewalk-level IQs. Still, as Gonzales pointed out, if "left unchecked, these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." A presidential medal for the man, please.

It is not now and never has been my intention to belittle terrorism. Clearly, if what the government alleges turns out to be the truth -- look, that sometimes happens -- then these guys deserve punishment. But theirs was such a preposterous, crackpot plot that the only reason it rose to the level of a televised news conference by the nation's chief law enforcement officer was the Bush administration's compulsive need to hype everything. For this, Gonzales, like a good Boy Scout, is always prepared.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. It matters because the Bush administration has already lost almost all credibility when it comes to terrorism. It said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there were none. It said al-Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots and that was not the case. It has so exaggerated its domestic success in arresting or convicting terrorists that it simply cannot be believed on that score. About a year ago, for instance, President Bush (with Gonzales at his side ) asserted that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted." The Post looked into that and found that the total number of (broadly defined) "terrorism" convictions was 39.

This compulsion to exaggerate and lie is so much a part of the Bush administration's DNA that it persists even though it has become counterproductive. For instance, the arrest of the seven suspects in Miami essentially coincided with the revelation by the New York Times that the government has "gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans." Almost instantly, the administration did two things: It confirmed the story and complained about it. The Times account only helped terrorists, Cheney said.

Is he right? I wonder. This is a serious matter. After all, Americans are being asked to surrender a measure of privacy and civil liberties in the fight against terrorism -- essentially the argument Cheney has been making. I for one am willing to make some compromises, but I feel downright foolish doing so if the fruit of the enterprise turns out to be seven hapless idiots who would blow up the Sears Tower, if only they could get to Chicago.

Cheney in particular has zero credibility, but his administration colleagues are not far behind. Prominent among them, of course, is the attorney general, a man so adept at crying wolf and mouthing the administration's line that he simply cannot be believed any more.

The Sears Tower. The Miami bureau of the FBI. Please. Someone, put the dummy back in his box.

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Two-Faced Bush Calls Report on Financial Tracking `Disgraceful'

Hypocrite offers no comment on the White House Leaker in the Plame affair.

June 26 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush called ``disgraceful'' reports last week about a secret government program to track terrorism financing, a strategy he defended as lawful and necessary to protect Americans.

``We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm,'' Bush said at the White House.

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times on June 22 revealed details of a program that scrutinizes millions of international banking transactions.

Bush's remarks were followed by criticism from other administration officials. Vice President Dick Cheney called the New York Times irresponsible. Treasury Secretary John Snow released a letter to Times Executive Editor Bill Keller saying newspaper's decision to publish the information showed ``breathtaking arrogance.''

Republican Representative Peter King of New York yesterday accused the Times of violating the Espionage Act and urged the attorney general to open a criminal investigation and prosecute the newspaper, its editors and reporters.


[two words: Valerie. Plame. The selective outrage of the Republican leadership is nauseating. - M. Peach]

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Government isn’t just listening to phone calls

The Wichita Eagle
Posted by Phillip Brownlee - June 25, 2006

Are small government conservatives concerned yet about the secret government snooping? They -- and everyone else -- should be.






The latest disclosure is that the Bush administration has secretly been tapping into a global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years. The program is based on a broad new interpretation of Treasury Department powers, The Washington Post reported, and involves collecting information on international money transfers, including many made by U.S. citizens and residents.

The goal, which everyone can support, is to locate and track suspected terrorists. But the database's wide net mostly catches the private transactions of Americans and others who have nothing to do with terrorism. Many conservatives have shrugged off reports of government eavesdropping on international phone calls and snooping on e-mails, and of a massive government database of American's phone records. And they likely will point to Friday's indictment of seven terrorist wannabes in Miami as justification for the spying.

But they shouldn't be so complacent about a loss of civil liberties. At the least, shouldn't we demand that these programs have some congressional and judicial oversight, as Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan, has argued? Or how about putting it this way: Would conservatives still not care if it were President Hillary Clinton who was collecting all this private data and doing all this spying?

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Miami "terror" arrests—a government provocation

Instigator "al Qaeda representative" was paid FBI informant

There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to "wage war on the United States" that suggest it, like so many previous "terrorist plots" announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.

None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.

There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as "even bigger than September 11"—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.

While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.

The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as "the al Qaeda representative."

The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.

On Thursday, the government's paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.

It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the "Seas of David," which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI's deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David "did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them."

According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.

Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants "swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda." Who administered this oath? The "al Qaeda representative," AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.

Aside from this "loyalty oath" solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.

The only action with which this one individual is charged—all else is words—is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The "al Qaeda representative"—i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.

The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving "with the 'al Qaeda representative'" to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.

In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a "list of shoe sizes." Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.

Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been "more aspirational than operational." In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.

"We preempted their plot," declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.

At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened "in its earliest stages.

"So early" was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government's indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, "Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk."

Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, "There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all."

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License to Lie

In his devastating new book, Ron Suskind shows how 9/11 allowed George W. Bush and his shadowy courtier, Dick Cheney, to "create whatever reality was convenient."

By Gary Kamiya
Jun. 23, 2006

If there are any observers who still deny that the Bush administration is the most secretive, vengeful, reality-averse, manipulative and arrogant government in U.S. history, they will have a lot of fast talking to do after reading Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine." A meticulous work of reporting, based on interviews with nearly 100 well-placed sources, many of them members of the U.S. intelligence community, Suskind's book paints perhaps the most intimate and damning portrait yet of the Bush team.

But despite the Bush administration's apparent imperviousness to reality, the publication of "The One Percent Doctrine" is an important event. Even if we have to wait decades for historians to pass judgment on the Bush administration, it is vital that the record on which that judgment is made be compiled. And "The One Percent Doctrine," along with Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate," Suskind's earlier "The Price of Loyalty" and a few others, will be one of the key documents on which that devastating judgment will be based.

Suskind opens the book with a damning scene in which a CIA analyst warns Bush in August 2001 that bin Laden was planning to strike the U.S. Bush's response: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." That dismissive reply displayed not just Bush's frat-boy boorishness but his poor judgment. And after the terrorist attacks came, all constraints on Bush -- and Cheney -- vanished.

Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a "global experiment in behaviorism": If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior.


"The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."

One tale is particularly glaring. In January 2003, with the war propaganda machine in full gear, Tenet's chief of staff, John Moseman, saw the head of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, Jami Miscik, walking down the hall shaking with rage.

"You okay?" he asked. "No. I'm not okay. I'm definitely not okay!" In Tenet's suite, Miscik, barely able to get the words out, told what happened. "Stephen Hadley, Condi's second [now head of the NSC], had called from the office of 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. They wanted her down at Libby's office in the White House by 5 pm. At issue was the last in an endless series of draft reports about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

How many drafts? Miscik couldn't remember. The pressure from the White House -- and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense -- had started a week after 9/11. Miscik had repeatedly shot down the bogus connections advanced by the war hawks, in particular the specious claim that hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. But Cheney and Rumsfeld and their parallel-intel shops -- factories cranking out war-justifying lies -- kept putting them back in. Miscik had sent her final draft to Libby and Hadley a few days before, and told them this was it -- she wasn't changing it again. Now they were after her again.

"'I'm not going back there, again, George,' Miscik said. 'If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report ... I'm resigning, right now.' She fought back tears of rage.

"Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley. 'She is not coming over,' he shouted into the phone. 'We are not rewriting this fucking report one more time. It's fucking over. Do you hear me! And don't you ever fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!'

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U.S. captures the Unknown Terrorist

The terror kabuki continues today with the Army's announcement that they have yet again captured a "senior al Qaeda cell leader ," but they haven't yet figured this new villain's name, despite having captured him on Monday.

The Bush Administration has been keeping the propaganda pedal down of late. One day it's Zarqawi, then the "crackdown", next the death of Mansur Sulayman Mansur Khalif al-Mashadani, followed by Thursday's Sears Tower arrest in Miami and finally this. The message is clear: be afraid, America.

props to Sploid

McCain Releases Abramoff Report

Weekend Early Edition























The folks over at TPM muckraker.com have posted a summary of the McCain Report along with vignettes of the most-likely-to-be-indicted. The list reads like a Who's Who of the GOP.




















Those whining Freepers who've been crying "but Democrats did it too!" can just pour themselves big steaming mugs of Shut The Hell Up, because their boy John McCain has made it clear that corruption is a pervasively Republican issue.

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War widow protests for VA's recognition of Wicca

Honoring Sgt. Stewart:
Wiccans Are Americans Too

By Charles C. Haynes
First Amendment Center

The current flap involving Wiccans in the military is a conflict that should never have happened. But years of foot-dragging by the Department of Veterans Affairs has turned an easy case into a major controversy complete with charges of discrimination and threats of lawsuits.

All the VA need do is announce that the pentacle - a five-pointed star that symbolizes the Wiccan faith - has been added to the list of 38 "emblems of belief" approved for placement on government headstones and memorials. No big deal, end of story. Instead, the VA keeps saying that it is "reviewing the process" - and will make a decision at some indeterminate time in the future.

Roberta Stewart has been hearing this bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo for the past eight months. She just wants to honor her husband, Patrick, a member of the Nevada National Guard killed in combat last September in Afghanistan. Sgt. Stewart, who was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, among other honors, was a Wiccan.

The VA should act immediately to honor Roberta Stewart's request and fill in the blank space reserved for Sgt. Stewart.

After all, if we can't live up to religious freedom at home, we have no business asking soldiers to die for religious freedom abroad.

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Another Bush administration official guilty in another corruption case

Lobbyist Probe Glance

By The Associated Press

Former Bush administration official David Safavian is the fifth person to be convicted or plead guilty to charges in a public corruption investigation that began with lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

• Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in January to mail fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion charges in connection with his lobbying work.

• Tony Rudy, lobbyist and one-time aide to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay , who pleaded guilty in March to conspiring with Abramoff.

• Michael Scanlon, a former Abramoff business partner and DeLay aide, who pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to bribe public officials in connection with his lobbying work on behalf of Indian tribes and casino issues.

Among other government officials — all of whom have denied any wrongdoing — under scrutiny for their ties to Abramoff are:

• DeLay, who is under indictment in Texas on charges of campaign finance improprieties. Prosecutors are looking at whether DeLay, R-Texas, who resigned from Congress on June 9, filed false public reports to disguise the source and size of political donations, travel
and other gifts he received from special interests, including some with ties to Abramoff.

• Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., who accepted campaign money from Abramoff and used the lobbyist's luxury sports box for a fundraiser without initially reporting it. Doolittle's wife and one of his former aides also worked for the lobbyist.

ZeFrank 'The Show' on Bush

ZeFrank is a popular (and awesome!) daily vidieo podcast.

Last thursday's The Show was about Bush.

Props to Shawn for the post!

Little girl in Bush campaign commercial was molested by GOP consultant

Alleged victim testifies in sexual assault trial

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June 17,2006
Brittney Booth
Monitor Staff Writer
EDINBURG — A young girl featured in a controversial television ad during the 2000 presidential campaign testified this week that the man who developed the commercial molested her for years and forced her to watch pornography and use sex toys.

The girl, now 15, told jurors Carey Lee Cramer — a 44-year-old political consultant who gained national notoriety when he released an anti-Al Gore ad showing a young girl picking daisy petals and ending in a nuclear blast — began molesting her in the third grade, when she lived in Mercedes with him, his then-wife and her younger brother.

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Frontline: The battle between Vice President Cheney and CIA to control the 'dark side'

UPDATE: View this video online

The Dark Side

coming Jun. 20, 2006 to Frontline on PBS

(check local listings)

On September 11, 2001, deep inside a White House bunker, Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering U.S. fighter planes to shoot down any commercial airliner still in the air above America. At that moment, CIA Director George Tenet was meeting with his counter-terrorism team in Langley, Virginia. Both leaders acted fast, to prepare their country for a new kind of war. But soon a debate would grow over the goals of the war on terror, and the decision to go to war in Iraq. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others saw Iraq as an important part of a broader plan to remake the Middle East and project American power worldwide.

Meanwhile Tenet, facing division in his own organization, saw non-state actors such as Al Qaeda as the highest priority. FRONTLINE's investigation of the ensuing conflict includes more than forty interviews, thousands of pages of documentary evidence, and a substantial photographic archive. It is the third documentary about the war on terror from the team that produced Rumsfeld's War and The Torture Question.

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Some Might Call It Treason

Did Bush steal the 2004 election?

"Even if it's true, shut up about it."

- Farhad Manjoo, Salon

Two weeks ago, Rolling Stone came out with "Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?" -- a masterful investigative piece by Robert Kennedy, Jr., arguing that Bush & Co. stole their "re-election" in Ohio, and pointing out exactly how they did it. Primarily because of Kennedy's good reputation, and the mainstream credibility of Rolling Stone, the article has finally opened many eyes that had been tightly shut to the grave state of American democracy.

One week after Kennedy's article appeared, Salon posted an attack upon it by Farhad Manjoo, the magazine's technology reporter. That piece contained so many errors of fact and logic, and was throughout so brazenly wrong-headed, that several hundred readers sent in angry letters, many of them brilliantly refuting some of Manjoo's misconceptions and mistakes.

I believe that the issues here are far too grave for "the debate" to be thus prematurely halted; and so I'm very pleased that HuffPost has agreed to run my e-mail as an open letter.

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Bush appointees take million-dollar private sector "kick-back" jobs

Former Antiterror Officials Find Industry Pays Better

By ERIC LIPTON New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 17 — Dozens of members of the Bush administration's domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.

At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security — including the department's former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson — are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic security business.

More than two-thirds of the department's most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door. That pattern raises questions for some former officials.

"People have a right to make a living," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the department, who now works at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research center. "But working virtually immediately for a company that is bidding for work in an area where you were just setting the policy — that is too close. It is almost incestuous."

The shift to the private sector is hardly without precedent in Washington, where generations of former administration officials have sought higher-paying jobs in industries they once regulated. But veteran Washington lobbyists and watchdog groups say the exodus of such a sizable share of an agency's senior management before the end of an administration has few modern parallels.

"It is almost like an initial public offering in the stock market," Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, based in Washington, said of the booming domestic security market. "Everyone wants a piece of it."

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'Seeing The Forest says 'Put Them In Jail!'

Lawsuit confronts Bush on secrecy

AT&T WIRETAP CASE A TEST OF PRESIDENTIAL POWERS



























By Pete Carey
Mercury News

When a federal judge in San Francisco considers a government request Friday to dismiss a wiretapping lawsuit against AT&T, he will step into an acrimonious national debate over the power of courts to check the alleged excesses of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism programs.

While the class-action lawsuit is against AT&T, the government has intervened to invoke a military and state secrets privilege, in which it contends that the matters involved are too sensitive and vital to national security to be made public.

The state secrets privilege has been in place for more than 50 years, but recently has risen to prominence in a series of cases that have provoked harsh criticism of the administration for overstepping its bounds.

``Essentially, the government is asserting it can unilaterally disregard the laws written by Congress, and there is nothing the judiciary can do about it because it is too secret for the judiciary to consider,'' said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Bush administration asserts that because the nation is at war against terrorism, the president has the constitutional authority as commander in chief to override a citizen's right to have his or her day in court.

Others say the government's argument is a stretch.

``It's the claimed authority the government has advanced to engage in warrantless surveillance of citizens of the United States, much more than the invocation of the state secrets privilege, that is much more expansive and, to my mind, extremely alarming,'' said Allen S. Weiner, Stanford University law professor and former attorney in the U.S. State Department.

``One can't simply say `Article II,' therefore there's nothing for courts to do,'' said Weiner. ``That's ultimately a legal question the courts are competent to decide.''

``The administration has been using the state secrets privilege more broadly than any administration in history,'' said Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School expert on national security law. ``It's pretty clear they do not want the legality of these programs reviewed,'' Turley said.

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2500

Posted by Evan Derkacz on AlterNet
June 15, 2006 at 9:45 AM.

The Pentagon announced today that the 2500th American soldier was killed in Iraq. Meanwhile, the latest "resolution" from the Republican leadership on the war is filled with justifications and spin, with little regard for the facts on the ground.

CBS News "new developments" hardly paint a picture of an insurgency in even its second-to-last throes... more like an Iraq our president had to "sneak into" without notifying the Iraqi government:

• A survey published Wednesday reports that more than 650,000 Iraqis have fled their homeland for Jordan and Syria since the beginning of 2005. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, violence has forced over 40 percent of Iraqi professionals to leave the country.
• Funeral services were held Tuesday in London for CBS soundman James Brolan, 42, and Monday in Bedford, England, for CBS cameraman Paul Douglas, who was 48. CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, seriously wounded by the same bomb that killed Brolan and Douglas in Iraq on Memorial Day, is at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland and is doing a lot better than in the first days after the attack but still has a long road to full recovery.
• The House passed a $94.5 billion bill Tuesday to pay for continuing U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, hurricane relief, bird flu preparations and border security at home. The House-Senate compromise bill contains $66 billion for the two wars, bringing the cost of the three-year-old war in Iraq to about $320 billion.
• The new leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, vowed to defeat "crusaders and Shiites" in Iraq, according to a statement posted on the Web Tuesday. "It's no secret the ferociousness of the battle that is going on between the soldiers of right and the soldiers of wrong, the crusaders, the rejectionists (Shiites) and apostates in Iraq," the statement said.
• The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's trial said Tuesday's session would be the last day to hear defense witnesses, suggesting he wants to quickly wrap up the proceedings despite defense complaints about being rushed. Abdel-Rahman also scolded the defense team, telling them to stop what he called political speeches.
• Iraqi police found eight bodies, including one policeman, in western Baghdad Tuesday.
• A professor at the Engineering College of Baghdad University was gunned down in a drive-by shooting as he was leaving his house in the upscale Mansour neighborhood Tuesday.

Dobbs: President and Senate allied with 'corporate supremacists'

If President Bush and the Republican leadership of the Senate have their way, 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens will receive amnesty, and at least 60 million new immigrants will be allowed into the country over the next two decades. If President Bush and the Senate prevail, it will be a clear victory for corporate supremacists, advocacy groups and dominant special interests and a historical defeat for our middle-class working men and women and their families.

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Greens release election lineup, candidate calls for Bush impeachment

BY BILL SALISBURY
Pioneer Press

Their U.S. Senate candidate called for President Bush's impeachment. Michael Cavlan, said that "Bush knowingly lied about his reasons for going to war," Cavlan not only advocated impeachment but also backed immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Their candidate for governor said that as the state's commander in chief, he would pull Minnesota National Guard troops out of Iraq, and their attorney general candidate isn't a lawyer, but he released a new folk-blues CD this week. They are the Green Party of Minnesota, and they introduced their 2006 ticket Wednesday during a news conference on the Capitol steps.

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Karl Rove and Bush - "Most Insidious Traitors"

by Evelyn Pringle

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"...even knowing what they knew, the Bush gang flooded the airwaves with political rhetoric demeaning Plame's importance at the CIA. Each time the talking heads displayed their ignorance by portraying Plame as a mere paper-pusher, or belittled the degree of cover used to protect CIA operatives, they did a disservice to all intelligence agents."

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Shortly after Valerie Plame was outed, Joe Wilson received a long handwritten letter from the first President Bush expressing his "outrage at what had happened and his understanding of the seriousness of it," according to Wilson.

The elder Bush, a former CIA Director himself, is known to have said in 1999, that "those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources" are "the most insidious of traitors."

How must the father feel now that he knows his son is the leader of a gang of the "most insidious of traitors?"

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July 19: National Teach-in on Impeachment

A "National Teach-In" on impeachment organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Melville House launches nationwide on July 19 in cities and towns across the country.

Please join the effort:­ visit www.articlesofimpeachment.net and organize a Teach-In in your home or community center. An "action kit" ­-- including a DVD documentary short, HOW TO IMPEACH A PRESIDENT, the handbook ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH, and other resources ­-- is available at the website. Join the CCR, the nation's leading institute of constitutional scholarship and activism, in making the impeachment of George W. Bush a reality.

http://www.articlesofimpeachment.net

Pass an Impeachment Resolution at Your State Democratic Party Convention

Despite the efforts of those who would sweep the issue under the rug, 10 state Democratic party organizations have already gone on record in support of impeachment resolutions: Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado and Hawaii. This weekend, we expect similar resolutions to be brought in Minnesota and even Texas! And there are more to come in the weeks ahead, which means that shortly more than a quarter of all state Democratic party organizations will have gone on record in favor of impeachment. That's not to mention the three states that have introduced resolutions in their legislatures calling on Congress to act. Several states have conventions coming up.

Welcome CIA Blog Inspectors!

We'd just like to take this opportunity to offer a hearty 'Hello!' to the CIA agents who recently trolled our blog courtesy of data mining technology provided by ANS Communications.

Nice job, boys, and thanks for leaving a DNS trail on the site meter.



Of course, we realize that the Terrorist Surveillance Program is classified and only select members of the Congressional Intelligence committees and leadership were (partially) briefed. The existence of the program was not known to the American public until December 2005, when the New York Times, after learning about the program more than a year earlier, first reported on it.

Under this program you are conducting domestic surveillance without Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court authorization, which the text of FISA defines as a felony.

The Bush administration argues that the program is in fact legal on the grounds that FISA is an unconstitutional violation of the President's "inherent powers" and/or that FISA was implicitly overridden by other acts of Congress.

We argue in response that this is complete hogwash dreamed up by the right-wing nut jobs at PNAC who pretty much run things via the Bush puppet Presidency.

We foresee three possible outcomes:

1. This all blows away in the political wind.
2. Agents conduct raids under cover of darkness and wisk us away to unknown third world countries for 'rendition'
3. Sanity returns to the American electorate, the current crop of Texas Oilmen (and other crooks masquerading as politicians) are put on trial for various crimes, and reparations are made to loyal God fearing patriotic true-blue Real Americans such as we who speak out in the Democratic tradition of dissent.

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President Bush's 'War On Terror' a Dismal Failure

Global Responses to Global Threats:
Sustainable Security for the 21st Century
Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers and John Sloboda, June 2006

This major new report is the result of an 18-month long research project examining the various threats to global security, and sustainable responses to those threats.

Current security policies assume international terrorism to be the greatest threat to global security, and attempt to maintain the status quo and control insecurity through the projection of military force. The authors argue that the failure of this approach has been clearly demonstrated during the last five years of the 'war on terror' and it is distracting governments from the real threats that humanity faces.

Unless urgent action is taken within the next five to ten years, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid a highly unstable global system by the middle years of the century.

download the full report

Time to impeach

Courier Post online - opinion

Let's stop beating around the "Bush" and start beating the "Bush."

President Bush is ruining our country. Almost everything he puts his hand on gets fouled up due to his lust for power and absolute authority, his complete lack of concern for the average person and his enormous ego and arrogance.

Did this "frat boy" ever have to put in an honest day's work to earn a living? You figure it out. How many hundreds of our finest young men and women have perished in Iraq since he boastfully declared, "mission accomplished" three years ago. How many thousands have come home badly disabled for the rest of their lives? How many (mostly innocent) Iraqis have been slaughtered? How much of our tax money has gone up in smoke over there? How heavily will our children and grandchildren be taxed to repay the enormous debt Bush is piling up?

It's time to impeach this president for his callous misleading of our beloved America. Now is the time to cut short our losses under the distorted and failing goals of this power-obsessed president.

V. TURKOT, Woodlynne

The Case of the Missing $21 Billion

Who's Following the Iraq Money?
By DAVE LINDORFF

"...more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports..."

During the days of the Nixon Watergate scandal investigation, reporter Bob Woodword was famously advised by his mysterious source, Deep Throat, to "follow the money" as a way of cracking the story.

Well, there is a lot of money to follow in the current scandal that can be best described as the Bush/Cheney administration, and so far, nobody's doing it.

My bet for the place that needs the most following is the more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports, and for which there has been little or no accounting.

As word of massive corruption began to surface in 2003, Congress passed legislation creating an office of Inspector General, assuming that this new agency would monitor the spending on the occupation and reconstruction, and figure why all so much taxpayer money was disappearing, and why only minimal reconstruction was going on in destroyed Iraq, instead of a massive rebuilding program as intended. Bush named an old friend and supporter, Stuart Bowen, to the post--a move that should have put Congress on alert, given this administration's long history of putting cronies in positions of authority.

"One of the laws the president chose to ignore with a 'signing statement' was the one establishing the inspector general post for Iraq, saying that the new inspector general would have no authority to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon."

Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone that, courtesy of an unconstitutional order from the president, he was not doing the job that Congress had intended.

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Iran-Contra Felons Get Good Jobs from Bush

Revisited (via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit)

AP - March 13, 2002
Bush Employs Iran-Contra Veterans

by the Association Press

WASHINGTON, March 13 (AP)--In the 1980s it was the biggest scandal of the Reagan administration, a covert arms-for-hostages overture to Iran -- more popularly known as "Iran-Contra."

Today, a half-dozen alumni of that episode have found prominent jobs in the Bush administration.

The most recent is former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, 65. The retired admiral took over a new Pentagon counterterrorism
office last month.

Poindexter was convicted in 1990 on five felony charges of conspiracy, making false statements to Congress and obstructing congressional inquiries. He was sentenced to six months in prison, time he never served.

Another former Iran-Contra defendant is Elliott Abrams. He now serves as Bush's special White House assistant for democracy and human rights. An assistant secretary of state under Reagan, Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress, then was pardoned by the first President Bush.

One of the most outspoken Iran-Contra figures is Otto Reich, the State Department's top official for Latin America, who migrated to
the United States shortly after the 1959 revolution in Cuba. From 1983 to 1986, Reich led a State Department office accused of a
covert domestic-propaganda effort against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

Others given jobs by Bush:

--Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Questions linger over the former Defense Department official's 1986 contacts with Israel on the Iran arms sales.

--U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte. His service in the 1980s as ambassador to Honduras, which the U.S.-supported Contra rebels used as a base, has drawn criticism.

--Budget Director Mitch Daniels. As Reagan's political director in 1986 and 1987, Daniels helped oversee a White House damage-control
effort.

Senate Democrats raised Iran-Contra objections last year, particularly over the Reich and Negroponte nominations. The appointments of Abrams, and now Poindexter, drew little open criticism. Neither post is subject to Senate confirmation.


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Specter warns of 'confrontation' over NSA hearings

Sen. Arlen Specter scolds Vice President Cheney for lobbying his committee without telling him.
CNN Thursday, June 8, 2006

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Senate committee chairman warned of a "constitutional confrontation" with the Bush administration Wednesday over its domestic surveillance program, threatening to subpoena administration officials or phone company executives in a congressional review.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter publicly complained about the Bush administration's refusal to cooperate with his panel Tuesday and sent a stinging letter to Vice President Dick Cheney after learning Cheney had lobbied other Republicans on his committee without his knowledge.

"I'm not looking for courtesy," the Pennsylvania Republican told CNN. "What I'm looking for is judicial review of wiretaps, which is the tradition in America.

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Democrats call for Bush impeachment

By JOHN DISTASO
New Hampshire Union Leader

STATE DEMOCRATS did more than listen to rousing speeches at their convention last Saturday at St. Anselm College.

They passed several resolutions — chief among them a call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush because he "has committed high crimes and misdemeanors as he has repeatedly and intentionally violated the United States Constitution and other laws of the United States."

Is that all? No.

Before voting overwhelmingly by a show of hands on that one, there was a strong voice vote to censure the President — a resolution submitted on behalf of one of the keynote speakers, "red meat" Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold.

The censure motion contended Bush authorized the illegal wire-tapping of "perhaps more than 1 million Americans."

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Bush's Cash, Not His Company, Sought by Republican Candidates

Bloomberg.com

Republican congressional candidates throughout the U.S. love President George W. Bush's fund-raising prowess. They just don't want to be seen in public with him.

Bush, whose approval ratings have fallen to record lows, has already raised $125 million for the 2006 elections, according to the Republican National Committee. And his fundraising is ahead of the pace of 2002, when his ratings topped 50 percent.

At the same time, some lawmakers have failed to show up by his side as he raises money in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Maryland. Polls show that voters are unhappy with Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, energy prices and budget issues, and Democrats are looking to link Republican candidates to his record.

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There Is No War on Terror

There is no "War on Terror." There is only a war on the law; a conscious destruction of the U.S. Constitution. This is not the first time right-wing interests have attempted to overthrow the U.S. government. An attempt was thwarted during the FDR administration. Then, as now, America's greatest enemies came from among the ranks of the ruling class.

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ABA to investigate Bush signing statements

The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office.

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Bush Tops List As U.S. Voters Name Worst President EVER

Quinnipiac University
June 1, 2006

Strong Democratic sentiment pushes President George W. Bush to the top of the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years. Bush is named by 34 percent of voters, followed by Richard Nixon at 17 percent and Bill Clinton at 16 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. Leading the list for best President since 1945 is Ronald Reagan with 28 percent, and Clinton with 25 percent.

President Bush is ranked worst by 56 percent of Democrats, 35 percent of independent voters and 7 percent of Republicans, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. Best ranking for Reagan comes from 56 percent of Republicans, 7 percent of Democrats and 25 percent of independent voters. Among American voters 18 - 29 years old, Clinton leads the "best" list with 40 percent.

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The Somalian warlords who slaughtered US soldiers are working for Bush now

Black Hawk Down Revisited


Somalia is still ruled by the brutal warlords who dragged dead US soldiers through the streets in 1993. But times change. Now they are America's new allies in the war on terror


THIRTEEN years after President Bill Clinton withdrew forces from Somalia, in the "Black Hawk down" shambles, American security officials are giving clandestine support to the same warlords who mutilated and humiliated US soldiers in 1993.

The American Operation, in breach of the United Nations' arms embargo on Somalia and therefore in breach of international law, is controlled through the US Embassy in Kenya and Washington's 1800-strong Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti, on Somalia's northern border.

The Combined Joint Task Force, under Admiral Richard Hunt, is an anti-terrorist operation for the troubled Horn of Africa, but most specifically for Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991 and is seen as an ideal place for al-Qaeda activists to hide and plot attacks.

Somalia is only a short boat ride from Yemen and is a historic doorway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia and there is no police force. The country has a weak and ineffective transitional government operating largely out of neighbouring Kenya. Most of Somalia is in mayhem and lawlessness, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia's acting prime minister to visit.

The US, terrified that Islamists allied to al-Qaeda are gaining control in Somalia, has turned to the kind of warlords who once dragged dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, as its new allies in the "war on terror".

Africa Confidential, the London-based intelligence newsletter, reports in its latest edition: "CIA staff certainly helped to organise the [Somali warlord] Alliance, with, we hear, the involvement of at least one National Intelligence Support Group." Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told the Sunday Herald: "If what is happening now in Somalia was happening in Latin America, it would be a new Iran-Contra scandal." He is referring to the biggest political scandal in the United States during the 1980s. It involved several members of the Reagan administration who in 1986 helped sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, a right-wing guerrilla group in Nicaragua.

The Somali Alliance – or, more fully, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism [ARPCT] – is a group of once-discredited warlords who, with Washington's backing as "counter-terrorists", depict their own opponents in perhaps the world's most anarchistic theatre as agents of al-Qaeda.

So far, the efforts of the US-backed Alliance have met with no success. No "terrorists" have been detained, and Alliance forces have not fared well in ferocious house-to-house fighting against Islamist militias that control most of Mogadishu.

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The Swift Boating of America

TomDispatch.com
Thursday 01 June 2006

An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and - wait for it - the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians a good time.

Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good reason - they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's rèsumè...

href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060206O.shtml">link

More Democrats want their leaders to stand up against Bush, war

BY STEVEN THOMMA

Knight Ridder Newspapers

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Anti-war and anti-Bush fervor is growing among rank and file Democrats, threatening to pull the party to the left and creating a rift between increasingly belligerent activists and the party's leaders in Washington.

Many outside-the-Beltway Democrats want the party to turn forcefully against the war in Iraq and to investigate, censure or even impeach President Bush should the party win control of Congress this fall.

Yet party leaders such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York have maintained support for the war while criticizing the way Bush handled it, and have shied away from talk of using power to go to after him.

The fault line is evident as Democrats gather for spring and summer sessions filled with demands for bolder action by the congressional wing of their party, especially if they win control of the House or Senate in November.

In New Hampshire, the state that will kick off the party's 2008 presidential primary voting, activists gave thunderous ovations this weekend to Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., when he pressed his anti-war agenda, boasted that he alone among potential 2008 presidential candidates opposed the war from the start, and pushed for a censure of Bush.

In Maine Saturday, state Democrats passed a resolution urging impeachment.

In Ohio, the state that decided the last presidential election and is a pivotal battleground for this year's congressional elections, the state party chairman notes that the two top statewide candidates voted against the war and says 2008 candidates who did support it have some explaining to do.

And nationally, one poll shows that more than eight out of 10 Democrats now believe the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. The same poll for CBS News this spring showed that more than three out of five Democrats want U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, even if the country is not stable.

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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Rolling Stone does some investigative and rather exhaustive digging into public documents and says we're almost guaranteed the 2004 election results were massively rigged.

BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.

And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush.

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Mission Accomplished

Shocking, honest, brave and an amazing eye-opener.
Watch this movie if you really want to know what's happening in Iraq.

Run Time - 89 Minutes

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13440.htm