More TSA follies

I can't help but wonder how long it's going to be before we have to be groped and scanned to get into department stores, shopping malls, sports events, movie theatres....

After all, who said that planes were the only terrorist targets? Maybe soon we'll have to be scanned before leaving the house.

UPDATE: And then there's this:

The pilot, whose name has not been released, uploaded a series of clips taken at San Francisco International Airport. His intent was to expose the insane double standard of TSA's airport employee screening policies: Although pilots and flight attendants are required to pass through the same concourse checkpoints as passengers, many ground workers, including baggage handlers, caterers and cabin cleaners, are exempt from these checks. The YouTube segments, which have since been taken down, showed ground employees passing through a simple turnstile on their way to work. You can see some highlights from the videos in this television news report by News10 in Sacramento, Calif., where the pilot lives.

This has been TSA policy from the beginning. It is also something I've been writing about in my columns, on and off, for the past eight years. Finally the issue is getting some attention -- if not entirely for the right reasons. This should be a story about farcical security practices; instead, as the media has been playing it, it's the story of a renegade pilot.

TSA says the pilot's actions are "under review," citing the possible release of what the agency calls, "sensitive security information."

That's a head-spinner if you ask me. The screening rules are public knowledge. It's not the pilot's fault that the rest of the country has been ignoring them.

What the pilot really did, of course, is throw a ring of well-deserved embarrassment around TSA's neck. And in typical fashion, the agency's response is not to review, revise or even acknowledge its foolish rules, but to harass and bully and threaten the person who drew attention to them.

[snip]

The pilot in question is also a participant in the Federal Flight Deck Officer program -- a voluntary anti-hijacking scheme that allows specially trained airline pilots to carry handguns in the cockpit. Strangely and perhaps most disturbing of all, agents from the TSA and Department of Homeland Security reportedly came to the pilot's home and confiscated his weapon.

I am hardly a firearms aficionado, and I have mixed feelings about the FFDO program in general. But this disturbs me. What grounds, exactly, did any federal agency have to visit the man's home for any reason, let alone to suspend or revoke this man's FFDO accreditation?

Yet somehow I'm not surprised. This is what happens when, in the throes of fear, you bestow a bureaucracy with lots of power and little accountability. TSA has scant respect for reason or rational policy; point out its foibles, meanwhile, and apparently you risk having agents being sent to your residence. Is this really the United States of America?

Because it never WAS about fighting terrorism -- and it still isn't

It's about monitoring every American:

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

[snip]

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

The TSA ritual at airports is just the tip of the iceberg. Our government no longer serves us, it serves the interests of corporations whose interests might be affected by terrorism -- or even by anyone who might expose what they do. Our government regards us all as potential enemies.

It no longer matters who is in the White House, or who is in the Senate. We already live in a corporate oligarchy. The only step remaining is to make it a totalitarian one.

And while you receive radiation just to go visit grandma.....

GUNS are slipping by airport hand luggage scanners:

Last fall, as he had done hundreds of times, Iranian-American businessman Farid Seif passed through security at a Houston airport and boarded an international flight.

He didn't realize he had forgotten to remove the loaded snub nose "baby" Glock pistol from his computer bag. But TSA officers never noticed as his bag glided along the belt and was x-rayed. When he got to his hotel after the three-hour flight, he was shocked to discover the gun traveled unnoticed from Houston.

"It's just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun," Seif told ABC News. "How can you miss it? You cannot miss it."

But the TSA did miss it, and despite what most people believe about the painstaking effort to screen airline passengers and their luggage before they enter the terminal, it was not that unusual.

The issue is not that the guy is Iranian. The issue is that a loaded gun got through the security theatre that has YOU either getting x-rayed just to get on an airplane or groped by strangers -- or sometimes both.

...to always remind me of how close I came to danger."

As I continue to read about the extent to which the Bush Administration was prepared to use the 9/11 attacks to destroy everything this country stands for, I keep being reminded of the line that Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I says about 1:30 into this final scene from the 1998 film Elizabeth:

There will always be voices who say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are gone, and that we should not look back but look forward. But just as in this version of the fall of Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth keeps him around as a reminder of the treachery that she will always face, so must we never, ever forget just how close George W. Bush, who said on March 18, 2002 that we were attacked because "they hate our freedom", was prepared to take away more of our freedom than terrorists could ever dream possible:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.

But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

I suppose George Bush was still holding out hope that we would be attacked again and he could become the dictator he so clearly wanted to be. And once it became clear that any attack would be viewed as a false flag operation by a sizable number of Americans, he had to revoke these rules rather than pass them on to be used by anyone else -- perhaps the one remotely redemptive thing his Administration did, even if their reasons for doing so were self-serving.

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

They didn't stop the Total Information Awareness program, they just buried it.

Remember Total Information Awareness, that Big Brother-esque effort complete with its Masonic / Illuminati imagery and its ominous motto, "scientia est potentia" (knowledge is power), to be led by Iran-Contra bigwig John Negroponte? Remember how the program was killed by Congress?

Well, since the Bush Administration don't need no es-teenking Congressional permission for anything, they just moved it to the NSA. No longer was NSA spying and data mining about foreign terrorists; now it was about scooping up every piece of phone, e-mail, and other communications traffic in the U.S.

This horrific bombshell report appeared in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, of all places:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.

Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency's mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

It isn't clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency's work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.

A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy "has never really been resolved," said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.

I wonder if this is how they nailed Spitzer.

Before Congress votes to give the telecom companies retroactive and open-ended immunity, I hope they read this article.

I'm short, I'm overweight, and I have green eyes and brown hair. Next!

Still think that fears of Big Brotherism are just so much dystopian paranoia?

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

Sometimes I worry that if I ever have to find another job, my writings here will cause a problem. But that fear may be overblown, because if everything about us is in a single database, it will give employers ever-more excuses not to hire us and instead outsource our jobs to low-wage countries, where they don't care about the employees' backgrounds, as long as they're cheap.

The irony of a Democratic-controlled Congress enshrining Total Information Awareness into law

Remember this?

TIA was the massive surveillance program to be run by Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter at the Pentagon that was defunded by Congress in 2003 as part of the 2004 defense appropriations bill.

As Eliot Cohen notes, S2248, the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 that would give Big Telecom retroactive immunity from prosecution for its role in the program (much of which went ahead anyway, at AT&T's San Francisco Hub) essentially makes TIA completely legal:

S. 2248 is now before the Senate Judiciary, and will be voted on in just a few days. Unless public opposition is once again vigilant and strong, this new TIA bill has a good chance of passing in committee and of reaching the full Senate floor. Unfortunately, the dire consequences of this legislation for the survival of democracy in America, including the potential to destroy fair elections, have been greatly muted, misrepresented, and downplayed by the mainstream media; and mounting pressure on Congress from both the Bush Administration and the giant telecommunication corporations have combined to increase the odds that S. 2248 will soon become law.

The bill would quash about 40 pending lawsuits against AT&T by granting it full retroactive legal immunity for its alleged role in helping the National Security Agency (NSA) acquire the contents of millions of domestic and international electronic messages sent by American citizens through the AT&T network. These messages were allegedly routed to secret rooms requiring NSA clearance hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs throughout the United States for purposes of building a massive data mine. This unprecedented surveillance offensive was first exposed in 2005 when an AT&T employee at the San Francisco hub blew the whistle.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization based in San Francisco that has filed a class action suit against AT&T, the company had installed a fiber-optic splitter at its San Francisco office that copies all e-mails and other Internet traffic passing through the system and deposits these copies into a separate government computer network. The EFF alleges that the secret NSA rooms, to which the copies are sent, contain "powerful computer equipment connected to separate networks. This equipment is designed to analyze communications at high speed, and can be programmed to review and select out the contents and traffic patterns of communications according to user-defined rules" (emphasis added).

With this cooperation from the telecoms, the Bush Administration now appears to have realized a major component of its TIA project, a publicly denounced program that was presumed to have been abandoned by the Bush Administration. The purpose of this project was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness." In its present form, the integrated surveillance network has the capacity to maintain fully searchable copies of the contents of all electronic communications of American citizens. Since there is virtually no judicial oversight, the Bush Administration now has a blank check to define its search criteria any way it wishes, not only to look for terrorists but also for anyone else it may deem a threat -- including investigative reporters and political opponents.

It would be the most hideous of ironies if the one program whose very logo conjures up tinfoil hattery with its slogan of "Scientia est Potentia" -- Knowledge is Power -- and its eye-in-the-pyramid symbol -- were to be enshrined in law, not by Republicans who have marched in lockstep with this aspiring dictator of a president, but by the party that's been the only place to look to apply the brakes to this march towards fascism.

Totalitarianism: Coming soon to a government near you

Those of you who are regular readers know that I am no fan of Hillary Clinton. I don't like her DLC corporatism, I don't want a return to hot and cold running scandalmongering, however unjustified, and I don't want another president who has to prove his/her manhood by being a warmonger.

That said, what Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman did today was reprehensible and should not be accepted in a free society:

The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.

In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.

A copy of Edelman's response, dated July 16, was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote.

He added that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

This is what the Bush Administration has been doing ever since the 9/11 attacks: impugning the patriotism of anyone who dares to disagree. From Ari Fleischer saying that "people need to watch what they say, watch what they do" to Eric Edelman today saying that DISCUSSION of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq constitutes aiding and abetting "the enemy" (whoever the hell that is on any given day), this Administration has countenanced no dissent ever since they turned the other way in August 2001 and allowed terrorist attacks to take place on our soil for the sole purpose of facilitating their agenda.

From the "unitary executive" theory, to defying Congress, to signing statements that announce that this president has no intentions of living by the laws he signs, it is clear that this president, and the vice president who has his hand up the president's ass, are the real traitors to this country. They are traitors to the Constitution, and they are traitors to the people they are supposed to serve.

For just shy of three years, I've been called crazy in the comments section of this blog because of the creeping totalitarianism I've seen coming from this Administration. It's no accident that this statement to the person who is, at least according to the polls, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, took place the same day that George W. Bush signed this executive order:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2. (a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;

(b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

July 17, 2007.

By this executive order, George W. Bush has put himself and the Secretary of the Treasury in the position of confiscating that nice fat campaign warchest Hillary Clinton -- or any other Democratic candidate -- has amassed on the grounds that requesting a plan for eventual withdrawal from Iraq constitutes "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people" -- as defined by George W. Bush.

Do you really believe the timing of this is purely coincidental? Do you still believe that "It can't happen here"?

Keith Olbermann had some words to say tonight on this latest outrage. A preview is below; video to come later:

The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place the most disastrous a geo-political tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become it isn't Mr. Bush's fault.

The criminal lack of planning for the war the total "jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly" tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been envelopped it isn't Mr. Bush's fault.

The utter, blinkered idiocy of "staying the course", of sending Americans to Iraq, and sending them a second time, and a third, and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever it isn't Mr. Bush's fault.

The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating, or containing, or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11 the total "Alice Through The Looking Glass" quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for Al-Qaeda it isn't Mr. Bush's fault!

The fault, brought down as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter ,by an nearly anonymous Under-Secretary of Defense the fault has tonight been laid on the doorstep of Senator Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American the now vast majority of us who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead "don't take my son; don't take my daughter."

UPDATE: If Crooks and Liars did not exist, we would have to pay John Amato to invent it. As reliable as a Toyota Corolla, here it is.

And speaking of the Bush Administration's real agenda....

...which has NOTHING to do with fighting terrorism and EVERYTHING to do with amassing power, Fred Kaplan at Slate tells us to get ready for even MORE Big Brother tactics:

In the National Intelligence Estimate titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland," which was released Tuesday, there's an intriguing section that suggests an impending push for more domestic surveillance.

Most of the report (which I analyzed here) concerns an alleged resurgence of al-Qaida. But toward the end, the authors mention a small but expanding number of "violent Islamic extremists inside the United States" who are "becoming more connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement."

The report also notes dangers posed by "non-Muslim terrorist groups," "single-issue groups," and "even small numbers of alienated people" who might "find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack—all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader."

---

---

Then comes the point:

The ability to detect broader and more diverse terrorist plotting in this environment will challenge current U.S. defensive efforts and the tools we use to detect and disrupt plots. It will also require greater understanding of how suspect activities at the local level relate to strategic threat information and how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions.

One aspect of this is uncontroversial—the need to integrate city and state law enforcement ("suspect activities at the local level") to national watch lists and other databases ("strategic threat information"). This effort falls under the Department of Homeland Security, and it's a disgrace that, with such a large budget, nobody has yet devised a systematic method of doing this.

However, the other part of this passage ("how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions") pushes a very hot button.

A year and a half ago, passionate arguments broke out over reports about the National Security Agency's "data-mining" technologies. A couple of years earlier, the Pentagon attempted to fund a still-more intrusive program called the "Total Information Awareness" network. (The latter effort failed, but the concept was almost certainly re-routed to the NSA or elsewhere.) Concerns were raised about privacy rights, the abuse of power, and the worth of such networks to begin with.

Judging from the NIE (not just from these key passages but from its general assessment of a "persistent and evolving terrorist threat"), the debate over these vast surveillance systems will soon be renewed. So, it's worth making some distinctions that tended not to be made the last time around, at least in much of the public discussion.

The key distinction is the one between data-mining and wiretapping.

In data-mining, the NSA casts a vast "net" across the global communications system, encompassing, at least in theory, every phone call, e-mail, electronic signal, and so forth. The idea is not to monitor all these calls (there's not enough time or manpower to do that, in any case) but rather to detect patterns. If someone makes or receives a number of calls to or from, say, Pakistan, Iraq, or Syria—or if someone is in frequent contact with someone else who makes or receives such calls—this pattern would set off alarm bells. At that point, an intelligence officer might want to start monitoring that person or those people to see who they are, what they're doing, and whether anything about them or their behavior seems ominous.

I don't think anyone, other than libertarians, should have a problem with this sort of data-mining. Nor do I think there should be a problem with the idea of monitoring people whose calling patterns set off alarm bells.

Perhaps not -- if we had an Administration that was trustworthy. But this one decided on September 11, 2001, that an aware, thinking population was its worst enemy, and has done everything it can to treat this country's citizens as guilty until proven innocent. An executive branch that was truly about the nation's safety could perhaps -- PERHAPS -- be trusted with an endeavor like this one. But can we EVER trust those we choose to lead us, once they get a taste from the Fountain of Power? Certainly we can't trust this one, which has been so blatant about its lust for absolute rule over not just this country, but the entire world.