bustardblog

Bush, Lies.

Yesterday, our honest leader was asked whether or not he consults with his father, the former President. His answer:

"No ... He understands what I know, that the level of information I have relative to the level of information most other people have, including himself, is significant and that he trusts me to make decisions."

On November 10, 2005 speaking in Tobyhanna, PA:

"more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

Is our President telling us that a former President of the United States, former Director of the C.I.A., has a lower security clearance than Congressman Jerry Nadler from the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Or, maybe, just maybe, the President lied to us.

 

No More Excuses.

Bush lovers are really desperate people. For proof of this, please look at David Brooks' op-ed in today's NY Times, entitled "No More Excuses". He's so  proud of the newest accomplishments of this administration, you'd think that his son, W., had just been bar mitzvahed.
Having called Iran called Iran a part of the axis of evil, and having watched them pursue the possession of a nuclear bomb for five years, our government has announced that we will talk to Iran. Iran has wanted to talk to us for years, but Bush has always refused.
Brooks would have you believe that this is a brilliant strategic move, or a "gutsy maneuver" as he put it. As Iran was continuing to develop a bomb, the Bush/Rice team "quickly" "agreed upon a course of action that was neither passivity, nor bombing."
They decided to use diplomacy.
That's right: Brooks is impressed that the President and the Secretary of State decided to use diplomacy. (Under other Presidents diplomacy was actually a part of the Secretary of State's job description.) Working with our allies, an agreement was reached on possible sanctions: "Reaching [it] was no easy task"  according to Brooks. Normally getting allies to agree is not something to rave about; that's why they're called allies.
He writes that "the accomplishments over the past few weeks have been impressive. Bush and Rice have created a coherent policy." (Yep, - a coherent policy is an impressive achievement - for this administration.)
He concludes by writing that "this display of competence" causes him to remember other things that the administration has recently done "well;"  the appointments of Hayden and Paulson. Actually promoting the head of the NSA to the be head of the CIA was never considered the equivalent of brain surgery, and hiring a Wall Street Big Shot to head up the Treasury Dep't wasn't viewed as a successful heart transplant. But we are talking about this administration. 
BoBo's next piece is entitled "No More Mishaps" and will note the triumph of Bush's failing to fall of his bike for ten days straight!
I'd hate to have to call BoBo unfair because of "the soft bigotry" of his "low expectations."

Selling Coulter

That oft-infected anorexic, Ann Coulter, is responding to her potential indictment for felony vote fraud by trying to promote sales of her latest screed. "Sales" in the Coulter lexicon do not actually mean that people buy her book - more typically,they are paid to receive it. Still, they must be convinced.

NewsMax is offering the following deal: if you're willing to receive Miss Ann's book, they'll only charge you $4.99 for 4 copies of the magazine which normally sells for $15.00 - in other words, if you'll participate in the falsehood that Ann's books actually sell by actually letting one into your house, you'll receive a profit of $10.01

Miss Coulter, whose sex lives tell us more about "values" voters than we would ever want to know, has entitled her latest tome "Godless:The Church of Liberalism." One of the chapters in the book bears the title of "The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion."

One of her proudest claims is that she is the conservative that liberals hate the most. She uses this line to help "distribute" her books. The fact is that when her attempts at getting publicity become so very extreme, we feel a need to respond - in reality, we don't have to, but it is hard to leave lies lying on the table as if they were truths.

Send me the check for $10.01, and I'll let you send me the book.

Scary Stuff

A few days ago I posted on why Michael Hayden should not be confirmed as the new CIA director. (5/9/06)
One  reader commented, indicating  just how much bigger this was than the failure of the NSA to get FISA approval on surveillance of international communications. He wrote:

Narus Ltd.==
Under Gen. Michael V. Hayden the NSA has forced tecom companies to implement massive domestic spying hardware. Even though Gen. Hayden has said at the National Press Club that "As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application." The NarusInsight is one type of domestic spying hardware. Capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second in real-time. This means the NarusInsight can monitor an OC-192 in realtime. For reference 10 billion bits is 10 million Kbts, divide that by the average DSL user witch is 256 Kbts (10000000/256) you get monitoring of 39062.5 DSL lines in realtime for every piece of hardware. After data capture Narus softeware can replay data. What does this mean well acrodding too Narus website "Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols." Think of it as Tivo for the internet able to replay 39000 US DSL users activity in realtime for every piece of hardware.They talk about limits but this hardware is anything but [limited]
References:
Narus Ltd http://narus.com

Wired News published an article on April 7, 2006 about a whistle-blower, a retired AT&T employee, who had observed an NSA agent specially interviewing and hiring someone who would work in a secret room at AT&T in San Francisco. "The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400," which was frequently used by government spy agencies. He was able to confirm that cables from the secret room were tapping into AT&T's Internet service.'

AT&T is a large customer of Narus, and the company even lists AT&T as a 'partner.'

William P. Crowell, a director on the Board of Narus, held "a series of senior positions at the National Security Agency, including Deputy Director of Operations and Deputy Director of the Agency." He currently serves on the Defense Advanced Research Agency Task Force on Terrorism and Deterrence.

The San Jose Mercury News wrote that the CEO of Narus, Greg Olshan, "said the company's software is designed to allow carriers to monitor all Internet traffic, including Web searches, e-mail content and attachments, and Internet phone calls.
(emphasis added)

Scary Stuff.

 

Nyet on Hayden

News revealed since my post on Tuesday saying No to Hayden, make the need to reject this guy even more urgent:

• The WaPo reports today that Hayden was open to the idea of bringing the surveillance program "under federal law." Hayden, who headed up the NSA for six years, is just a little slow on this: why did he insitute a program outside of federal law. Clearly the discussion of whether or not the program was legal is moot. Hayden is essentially admitting that it was not under federal law, and that this administration is not interested in following the law.
• Proof of their lack of interest in the law came from USA today. In trying to obtain information on every single phone call,domestic or international, made in the U.S.A. the NSA  tried to pressured QWEST into providing it's share of that information.  QWEST said they thought it was illegal, and asked the NSA to consult with the FISA court, or with the Attorney General. Hayden's NSA refused to do either, as they feared that they would not get the green light.
• The Department of Justice jusy announced that it cannot investigate what role it's own lawyers played in this mess. Why? Because the NSA won't let it.

If Congress approves Hayden's nomination, they should just close up shop - they will have finally made themselves completely irrelevant. Clearly Hayden does not believe in the rule of law, and Negroponte never did- so why bother with a legislature?

Hayden: Absolutely Not

His program of illegally spying on U.S. citizens is sufficient justification for opposing the nomination of  Michael Hayden to be the Director of the CIA. His failure to prevent Al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. is more than enough to call for his rejection. He became the director of the National Security Agency in 1999, and cannot attempt to use the standard Bush denial of responsibility for 9/11, - their "brief" tenure at the White House by that date. At his up-coming hearings, many will want to hammer him on the illegal wiretapping, which would be perfectly justified. But it would be more effective to emphasize his participation in so much that has gone wrong in the last five years, as well as his own feckless, dishonest performance.

In his presentation at the National Press Club in January of this year; Hayden, who the press likes to describe as a straight talker, was disingenuous and evasive. In that presentation, he frequently referred to suggestions and comments made by the 9/11 Commission, as if they were justifications for his "surveillance" program.  But of course that report came out long after Hayden had begun his 'eavesdropping.' In his defense of the program, he incorrectly interpreted the Constitutional standard that must be met in order to search; but Glenn Greenwald (and others) have argued against this 'error' far better than I could.

Hayden also defends the program by insisting that "the revolution in telecommunications technology has extended the actual impact of the FISA regime far beyond what Congress could ever have anticipated in 1978." Like the rest of the administration, he neglects to mention how often the law has beeen amended since 1978. But it is doubly despicable for him to do ignore this. If FISA was in fact outdated, it was his job, as the director of the NSA since March of 1999, to ensure that it was updated.

In the speech he stated that "Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 operatives in the U.S., and we would have identified them as such."  He also explained that the agency had already had legal "authorities" for such a program. If in fact the program was legal, who is responsible for it's not being in effect?

His presentation repeated a theme commonly used by the Bush administration, and one that in the end helps define their incompetence :

"There is one other area in our pre-September 11th performance that has attracted a great deal of public attention. In the hours just prior to the attacks, NSA did obtain two pieces of information suggesting that individuals with terrorist connections believed something significant would happen on September 11th. This information did not specifically indicate an attack would take place on that day. It did not contain any details on the time, place, or nature of what might happen. It also contained no suggestion of airplanes being used as weapons. Because of the processing involved, we were unable to report the information until September 12th. To put this into some perspective, throughout the summer of 2001 we had more than 30 warnings that something was imminent. We dutifully reported these."

So what happened with the "dutifully reported" 30+ warnings?  30+ warnings, and 0 responses? Why is it that no one is to blame that these went unheeded?

According to Wikipedia, the NSA is the largest U.S. government intelligence agency - even bigger than the CIA. Details as to it's size or budget are not available to the public, but it's offices in Maryland have their own exit off the Interstate and have parking for 18,000 cars. It is the world's largest employer of PhD's in mathematics, as well as the second largest electricity consumer in the state of Maryland. It's big, and it had to be responsible for a lot of the "intelligence" that led us into war in Iraq. At what point must the Director the agency admit they got it wrong?

Michael Scheuer was with the CIA for 22 years. He was the head of the bin Laden Unit from 1996-1999, and has made it clear that the desire of the  NSA to defend its 'Turf' meant that the CIA could only get summarized information on intercepted communication between Al Qaeda members. He makes a devastating argument that the CIA would have been much more effective in fighting Al Qaeda if it had had access to original material that the NSA refused to give them. Hayden strikes again.

To most of the country the notion of upholding the Constitution is quite abstract. Bush is hoping that we will fight against Hayden's nomination based on arguments which they'll characterize as, at worst, slight excesses in their successful fight to protect the Homeland: "eavesdropping" or "surveillance."

But with his approval ratings at  31%  it would be folly not to emphasize the Bush administration's failings that have brought them to such a level:  dishonesty, incompetence, and a refusal to take responsibility for mistakes.

Updated slightly on May 10 for grammatical & stylistical amelioration.

CIA Flights.

The European Union reported today that there have been over 1,000 secret CIA flights over European territory since 2001.  The report comes from Eurocontrol - the air traffic safety organization for the Union and is based on a three month long investigation.  The Globe and Mail indicates that this is a "clear violation of an international treaty." The report goes on to point out that "incidents when terror suspects were handed over to U.S. agents did not appear to be isolated, and that the suspects often were transported by the same planes and groups of people. (Violate a Treaty - not The bU.S.h Administration)

Of course the only issue that the right is concerned about is why Agent Mary McCarthy still lives.