The constitution isn’t just for the good times. It is designed for even the tough times, times the country is tested. It is built to last. It provided plenty of security as we fought the Soviet Union, the Nazis and just about every other enemy you can imagine. But now we should fold it up because of a couple of guys hiding in a cave in Afghanistan? Cenk Uygur

When we change how we function as a free society, and turn to a more totalitarian approach to law enforcement that has ever-shrinking respect for individual liberty, we become the very thing that we say we are fighting against. Christy Hardin Smith

5.31.2006 What You Don't Know About the Immigration Bill By Robert J. Samuelson

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

5.30.2006 NYT Editorial, "Block the Vote":

Congress is considering a terrible voter ID requirement as part of the immigration reform bill. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, introduced an amendment to require all voters to present a federally mandated photo ID. Even people who have been voting for years would need to get a new ID to vote in 2008. Millions of people without drivers' licenses, including many elderly people and city residents, might fail to do so, and be ineligible to vote. The amendment has been blocked so far, but voting-rights advocates worry that it could reappear.

5.30.2006 No More Mister Nice Blog on Mayor Bloomberg:

This is not just a guy they'd vote against. For a lot of Americans, this is someone who was prophesied in the Book of Revelation. This is a guy they'd be checking for cloven hooves and horns.

5.29.2006 Separation Of Powers: Fight brewing, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

The criminal case looks bad for Jefferson. There is a videotape of him accepting $100,000. Officers found $90,000 in cash stashed in his home freezer. Indeed, prosecutors would seem to have had plenty on Jefferson without risking a constitutional confrontation.

But even if Jefferson is proved corrupt, the larger concern is the harm that could be done by a corrupt executive seeking to discredit or intimidate a congressional enemy.

I understand that the speech and debate clause is in the Constitution. It is there because Queen Elizabeth I and King James I were disrespectful of Parliament. It ought to be, in my judgment, construed narrowly. It should not be in any way interpreted as meaning that we as Members of Congress have legal protections superior to those of the average citizen.

When it was clear that Iraq was spiraling out of control, the president should have changed commanders. In December 2004, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Rumsfeld, “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” It was a good question, one that no Republican in Congress had asked. The Defense secretary answered: “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” He should have been fired on the spot for such arrogance and ignorance. Yet the president stood by him, and Congress stood by the president.

Start sending the children of the well-to-do to Baghdad, and start raising taxes to pay off the many hundreds of billions that the war is costing, and watch how quickly this tragic fiasco is brought to an end.
...
Reacting to the allegations about the murder of civilians, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael Hagee, went to Iraq last week to warn his troops about the danger of becoming “indifferent to the loss of a human life.”

Somehow that message needs to be conveyed to the top leaders of this country, and to the public at large. There is no better day than Memorial Day to reflect on it. As we remember the dead, we should consider the living, and stop sending people by the thousands to pointless, unnecessary deaths.

The officials said Cheney's legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington , is the Bush administration's leading architect of the ``signing statements" the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president's right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.
...
Kmiec said the Reagan team's goal was to leave a record of the president's understanding of new laws only in cases where an important statute was ambiguous. Kmiec rejected the idea of using signing statements to contradict the clear intent of Congress, as Bush has done. Presidents should either tolerate provisions of bills they don't like, or they should veto the bill, he said.

``Following a model of restraint, [the Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel] took it seriously that we were to construe statutes to avoid constitutional problems, not to invent them," said Kmiec, who is now a Pepperdine University law professor.

By contrast, Bush has used the signing statements to waive his obligation to follow the new laws. In addition to the torture ban and oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, the laws Bush has claimed the authority to disobey include restrictions against US troops engaging in combat in Colombia, whistle-blower protections for government employees, and safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.

I won't join the sudden surge of speculation about whether "An Inconvenient Truth" will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

The FBI is seeking interviews with top House Members from both parties to determine whether they leaked details of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program to The New York Times, further fanning the flames of an already tense relationship between Capitol Hill and the Bush administration.

On May 24, 2005, the House passed HR 810, a bipartisan bill to lift the President's crippling restrictions on stem cell research. On that same day, I took the lead in introducing the same bill in the Senate. But for an entire year now, President Bush and Republican leadership have refused to allow HR 810 to come to the Senate floor for a vote.

Think about it. Embryonic stem cell research is the No. 1 health-research priority of the American people. HR 810 is supported by a majority of Senators on a bipartisan basis. It enjoys the support of large majorities in every public opinion poll - which is not surprising, because this research holds tremendous promise for curing illnesses and saving lives.

But President Bush has threatened to veto HR 810 if it ever comes to his desk (this would be his first veto of any bill!) He has given speech after speech saying that lifting his restrictions on stem cell research would give the green light to abortion. This is outrageous - and it is false. The truth is that HR 810 would enforce strict ethical requirements. New stem cell lines would be derived from any of the more than 400,000 existing embryos that are left over from fertility treatments, embryos which will otherwise eventually be discarded. Shouldn't we use them instead to ease human suffering?

What is immoral is a President who blocks scientific progress. Meanwhile, people we love are suffering and dying from Parkinson's and ALS. Children are suffering from juvenile diabetes. People - including my nephew Kelly -- are unable to walk due to spinal cord injuries. These people are desperate for progress on embryonic stem cell research. But President Bush has turned his back on them.

Make no mistake, if the Democrats were in charge in the Senate, HR 810 would have been brought to the floor, passed overwhelmingly, and sent to the President long ago. I am demanding that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist allow the Senate to vote on HR 810 no later than May 24, the one-year anniversary of House passage of the bill.

Sign the Stem Cell Petition [CLICK HERE]

"This latest "turning point" reveals an Iraqi state without a social contract, a government without a center, a prime minister without power and an American president without a strategy. Each sectarian group maintains its own militia. Each leader's influence rests on these armed bands, separate armies of tens of thousands of men. The militias have infiltrated and taken over key units of the Iraqi army and local police, using them as death squads, protection rackets and deterrent forces against enemies. Reliable statistics are impossible, but knowledgeable reporters estimate there are about 40 assassinations a day in Iraq. Ethnic cleansing is sweeping the country. From Kirkuk in the north to Baghdad in the middle to Basra in the south, Kurds are driving out Turkmen and Arabs, Shiites are killing Sunnis, and the insurgency enjoys near unanimous support among Sunnis. Contrary to Bush's blanket rhetoric about "terrorists" and constant reference to the insurgency as "the enemy," "foreign fighters are a small component of the insurgency," according to Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.
...
AUTHORITY GRANTED. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about."

Investi-Gate -- What's really at stake in the November elections. By Zachary Roth

Democrats might wish they could avoid talking about their investigative plans. But if they do, the press and the GOP will raise the issue for them, and they'll frame it around the prospect of impeachment. So Democrats might as well meet the challenge head on, and spend the summer making their case. Of course we'll vigorously investigate the administration if we win, they should say. And we'll do so the same way previous Democratic Congresses have investigated GOP presidents: shoulder-to-shoulder with honest Republican lawmakers willing to put country before party. The fact that the current GOP leadership chose to abandon the great American tradition of bipartisan Congressional oversight is no reason Democrats have to follow suit. Instead, they should embrace that tradition, with the faith that if they do, the president will get the legacy he deserves.

After years of quietly acceding to the Bush administration's assertions of executive power, the Republican-led Congress hit a limit this weekend.

Resentment boiled among senior Republicans for a second day on Tuesday after a team of warrant-bearing agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned up at a closed House office building on Saturday evening, demanded entry to the office of a lawmaker and spent the night going through his files.
...
"I clearly have serious concerns about what happened," Mr. Boehner said, "and whether the people at the Justice Department have looked at the Constitution."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday that the government can obtain domestic telephone records without court approval under a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that authorized the collection of business records.
...
"Let me try to reassure journalists that my primary focus, quite frankly, is on the leak -- on leakers who share the information with journalists," Gonzales said yesterday. He added that he would prefer to "try to persuade" journalists "that it would be better not to publish those kind of stories." h/t tpmmuckraker

5.22.2006 Robert J. Elisberg:

The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…"

"Legal contortionists believe that by "reading carefully," Freedom of the Press may indeed be abridged, so long as the government does not actually "respect" journalists."
...
Gonzales taking a buzzsaw to yet one more American freedom is all in a day's work. To his Justice Department, "Give me your tired, your poor" is not a welcoming salutation, but a demand. You almost except to find that the Statue of Liberty now reads, "…or else."
...
The White House is giving new meaning to the phrase, "Stop the presses."

The Wall Street Journal subsequently found that companies are quietly footing the bill for their executives' taxes. And USA Today reports that over the last five years, at the 60 worst-performing companies in America in terms of their market value, executives have pocketed $12 billion. All of this has raised a question from shareholders: How have these executives been able to raid company treasuries like this with such little fanfare?
...
Not surprisingly, ending the corruption that is afflicting the political and corporate world means more disclosure. ... But lawmakers should not be able to earmark taxpayer money without attaching their names to the projects they are funding.
If we want to end Congress' pay-to-play culture, forcing lawmakers to publicly disclose what projects they are supporting would go a long way toward shaming them into better behavior. They would at least have to worry about being caught when they shower their campaign contributors with federal contracts.

So what happens when NSA analysts feed data into Gen. Hadley's $2 billion cuisinart -- which includes the NSA's $1.2 billion threat-sniffing initiative called "Trailblazer?"

Well, for starters, it might be the last time any sees that data. Here's what 10 analysts who recently left the NSA told the Baltimore Sun about the NSA's expensive failure:

• When the agency's communications lines become overloaded, the system often delivers garbled intelligence reports,
• NSA analysts and managers say the new cumbersome and unreliable system has cut their productivity in half since it was installed,
• The new system requires analysts to perform many more steps to accomplish what the old system used to get done with a keystroke or two.
• They report getting locked out of their computers without warning,
• Agency linguists say the number of conversations they can translate in a day has dropped significantly with the new system.

Gen. Hayden has now been tapped by President Bush to fix the CIA. It looks to me that he is getting away from the NSA in the nick of time since his $2 billion computer system has left the NSA stuffed like a Jonestown goose with data it can't digest. (Heck of a job, Stevie!)

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.
...
But in the face of the uproar over the issue, others on Capitol Hill are pushing for more government data collection. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) is drafting legislation to require ISPs to amass information about users' Web-surfing habits to assist government investigations. Executives at companies that fail to comply could be subject to up to a year in prison.

"When one group is singled out for discrimination, it's not long before other groups will be singled out, too," said Rabbi Craig Axler of Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, Pa. "It's the first time we see the Constitution in danger of enshrining discrimination against one party, one class, and to remain silent as a Jew is unconscionable."

But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. “After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it,” the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect’s name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. (“There’s too many calls and not enough judges in the world,” the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. “In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,” the consultant explained. “But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law.” One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

5.22.2006 Personal data of 26.5M veterans stolen By HOPE YEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- Personal data, including Social Security numbers of 26.5 million U.S. veterans, was stolen from a Veterans Affairs employee this month after he took the information home without authorization, the department said Monday.

... we are publishing the complete text of a set of documents from the EFF's primary witness in the case, former AT&T employee and whistle-blower Mark Klein -- information obtained by investigative reporter Ryan Singel through an anonymous source close to the litigation. The documents, available on Wired News as of Monday, consist of 30 pages, with an affidavit attributed to Klein, eight pages of AT&T documents marked "proprietary," and several pages of news clippings and other public information related to government-surveillance issues.

Glenn Greenwald:

This administration is obsessed with eliminating the few remaining checks on their ability to operate in secret, and there is nothing which can advance that goal more than official threats of imprisonment of journalists -- which, as amazing as it is, is exactly what happened this weekend.

The New Yorker's Sy Hersh brings news that the National Security Agency monitored the content of calls by U.S. persons. Interestingly, some of Hersh's details mesh with our earlier conjecture about how the FBI may be supporting the NSA's questionable call records-mining.

... Blackwater and other leading security companies are seriously proposing to officials at very high levels of the government that their private forces could relieve a number of the burdens now being shouldered (or not) by American troops. The underlying theory seems to be that where a host government is unable to protect American business interests overseas and where the American government may be reluctant or unable to intervene, there is another option conveniently available.
...
What then if the commercial interests of a company or foreign government hiring one of these security contractors comes into conflict with the interests of the United States government? Mr. Taylor of Blackwater doesn't even concede the possibility. "At the end of the day," he said, "we consider ourselves responsible to be strategic partners of the U.S. government." To which he then added, perhaps a little more convincingly: "If we went against U.S. government interests we would never get another contract."

Look, there are a lot of risks that we can't do much about. Brain tumors, for example. Or plane crashes. Or foreign leaders who are absolutely determined to produce nuclear weapons. But trans fats kill more Americans than any of those, and they're very easy to protect against ­ so I hope the Bush administration will follow the Danish model and curb the use of trans fats.

5.21.2006 Larry Beinhart:

“If someone is calling al Qaeda, we want to know about it.”
...
Line ‘em up and show us the results. Let’s have the perp walk of all the al Qaedas, all the al Qaeda caller uppers you’ve located, investigated, caught, apprehended and brought to trial! With all this horseshit there must be a whole herd of ponies.

5.20.2006 Glenn Greenwald:

AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden's nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is "waterboarding" an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail." That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No.
...
The question amounts to nothing more than an inquiry as to whether Hayden intends to obey the law as CIA Director. Although the Bush administration's claimed right to break the law amazingly compels that such a question has to be asked, there is nothing secret about it. Americans have the right to know if the nominated CIA Director intends to follow the law.

5.20.2006 Did Telcos Hire "Scapegoat" To Give NSA Phone Records? By Paul Kiel and Justin Rood

What are the benefits? One company, NeuStar, doesn't beat around the bush. In a pitch to service providers, it bills itself as a "scapegoat" for hire, presumably allowing phone companies to deny responsibility for or involvement in turning over their records to the government.

Sound familiar?

NeuStar actually has an advantage over its competitors: it's not just an FBI-friendly third party, it's a major routing company. According to their web site, "Nearly every telephone call placed is routed using NeuStar's system, and every telecommunications service provider is one of NeuStar's customers."

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a man who says he was an innocent victim of the United States government's program transferring terrorism suspects secretly to other countries for detention and interrogation.
...
The case involves Khaled el-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German, who was arrested on Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia, where he had gone for a vacation. From there, he was flown to a prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for five months before being released. During his incarceration in Kabul, he has said, he was shackled, beaten and injected with drugs.
...
Mr. Masri's lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that there were no state secrets to protect as his story has been widely reported and officials had even acknowledged the existence of the rendition program. But Judge Ellis said there was an important distinction between "a general admission the program exists and the admission or denial of the specific facts at issue in this case."

Justice Antonin Scalia rebuked fellow conservatives on Capitol Hill yesterday, saying they have gone too far in trying to prevent the Supreme Court from using foreign law in its constitutional rulings.
...
The proposed legislation "is like telling us not to use certain principles of logic," he said, adding: "Let us make our mistakes just as we let you make yours."

Some legal experts say that AT&T may be off the hook if former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in office at the time the NSA program began, provided a letter of certification. (Other officials, including the deputy attorney general and state attorneys general, also are authorized to write these letters.)
...
The next tussle in this lawsuit is likely to center on how far the "state secrets" concept can extend. Is AT&T able to divulge the text of any certification letter, without saying exactly what information it turned over as a result? Must the mere existence of a certification letter remain secret?

Tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims remain without homes. The environment is devastated. People are disenfranchised. Financial resources, desperate residents are told, are scarce. But at least New Orleans has a Wal-Mart parking lot serving as a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center with perhaps the tightest security of any parking lot in the world. That's thanks to the more than $30 million Washington has shelled out to the Blackwater USA security firm since its men deployed after Katrina hit. Under contract with the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Protective Service, Blackwater's men are ostensibly protecting federal reconstruction projects for FEMA. Documents show that the government paid Blackwater $950 a day for each of its guards in the area. Interviewed by The Nation last September, several of the company's guards stationed in New Orleans said they were being paid $350 a day. That would have left Blackwater with $600 per man, per day to cover lodging, ammo, other overhead--and profits.

5.19.2006 The Progress Report:

The House yesterday voted to repeal $7 billion in subsidies for oil companies drilling in publicly owned waters. The vote was "approved 252 to 165 over the objections of many Republican leaders," and now goes to the Senate. "In a separate defeat for energy companies, the House voted 279 to 141 to reject a provision that would lift a 25-year ban on oil drilling in coastal areas outside the western Gulf of Mexico."

As you may know, Vice President Cheney's daughter Elizabeth is the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. She also has the title of "Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives." Basically that means she's in charge of democratizing the Middle East.

She has a budget of, I believe $75 million, for bringing about 'regime change' in Iran.
...
Elizabeth Cheney recently went on an open-ended maternity leave. But I am still curious to know what happened or is happening with that money. Vice President Cheney is clearly deeply involved in packing that outfit with political appointees. So given all that's happened in recent years I think this operation needs some real scrutiny.

I don't know enough about Hayden, nor about the current struggles among DOD, DHS, Negroponte and the CIA for control of intelligence operations, to have any view on whether he should be confirmed. I've heard many people in the know opine that he is a thoughtful, dedicated and effective public servant. But would it be too much to ask the Senate, at a minimum, to extract a promise from Hayden that when the CIA determines not to abide by certain statutes in the name of the Commander-in-Chief Clause, that such a decision be made openly, thereby permitting such a solemn constitutional judgment to be subject to legislative and public scrutiny and debate? (A rhetorical question -- the answer is all-too-obvious.)

Speaking of which, the law already requires that such decisions be disclosed to Congress, so that the other branches of government can, if they wish, implement systems of checks and balances. 28 U.S.C. 530D(a)(1)(A)(i) provides that the Attorney General "shall submit to the Congress a report of any instance in which the Attorney General or any officer of the Department of Justice . . . establishes or implements a formal or informal policy to refrain . . . from enforcing, applying, or administering any provision of any Federal statute . . . whose enforcement, application, or administration is within the responsibility of the Attorney General or such officer on the grounds that such provision is unconstitutional." Subsection (e) of that statute extends this reporting obligation to the head of each executive agency or military department that implements such a policy of "constitutional noncompliance." Such a report must be made within 30 days after the policy is implemented, and must "include a complete and detailed statement of the relevant issues and background (including a complete and detailed statement of the reasons for the policy or determination)." (The statute includes provisions for redaction of classified information in copies of the report distributed outside a congressional committee or agency.)

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a man who says he was an innocent victim of the United States government's program transferring terrorism suspects secretly to other countries for detention and interrogation.
...
The case involves Khaled el-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German, who was arrested on Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia, where he had gone for a vacation. From there, he was flown to a prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for five months before being released. During his incarceration in Kabul, he has said, he was shackled, beaten and injected with drugs.
...
Mr. Masri's lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that there were no state secrets to protect as his story has been widely reported and officials had even acknowledged the existence of the rendition program. But Judge Ellis said there was an important distinction between "a general admission the program exists and the admission or denial of the specific facts at issue in this case."

A high-ranking National Park Service official improperly helped Washington Redskins owner Daniel M. Snyder broker a deal to cut down more than 130 trees on a hillside between his Potomac estate and the C&O Canal, according to a report by the Interior Department inspector general's office.
...
According to the inspector general's report, Brandt -- against the advice of the Park Service's chief horticulturist -- then began working on the details of the agreement with Snyder. In the rush to complete the deal, the Park Service failed to adhere to the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the impact of proposed land-use decisions.

If they had, the report concludes, the Park Service probably would have discovered that the removal of the trees -- even nonnative species -- would harm the environment. That removal has caused the hill behind Snyder's house, on Park Service property, to begin eroding, according to the report.

Snyder is now trying to get county approval to shore up a retaining wall before it crumbles into the canal, Montgomery County officials said.

The "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" will give certainty to entrepreneurs, investors, and others who seek to deliver innovative ideas to market that they may do so without fearing discrimination. Specifically, this bill would amend the Clayton Act to require that network providers: 1) interconnect with the facilities of other network providers on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory basis; 2) operate their network in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner such that non-affiliated providers of content, services and applications have an equal opportunity to reach consumers; and 3) refrain from interfering with users' ability to choose the lawful content, services and applications they want to use
...
H.R. 5417 is expected to be considered by the House Judiciary Committee next week.

In court, AT&T attorney Bradford Berenson cast his client as a hapless victim, unable to defend itself while maintaining its national security obligations.

"The problem here is not just that the plaintiffs can't make their case, but that the defendants can't defend themselves," said Berenson, noting that some perfectly legal instruments of surveillance, like Patriot Act national security letters, come with binding secrecy requirements.

"AT&T is an innocent bystander, and the fight should be between private parties and the government that started these (surveillance) programs and ran them," Berenson told the court.

5.18.2006 The Frontline Isn't the Border From The Seattle Times, By Froma Harrop

Just whom does the president think he’s kidding? This idea of sending thousands of National Guard troops to patrol the southern border is, in the words of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, Democrat from El Paso, “cheap political theater.” It lets Bush appear to be doing something dramatic about illegal immigrants without depriving American business of cut-rate labor.

See also: Saudi king calls for female picture ban

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has told newspaper editors to stop publishing pictures of women as they could lead young men astray.

5.17.2006 NSA killed system that sifted phone data legally -- Sources say project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting By Siobhan Gorman, Sun Reporter

5.17.2006 New Presidential Memorandum Permits Intelligence Director To Authorize Telcos To Lie Without Violating Securities Law

5.17.2006 "How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?", Thomas Friedman

5.17.2006 Politics, or Insanity? By By Molly Ivins

Militarizing the border is a totally terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it's sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat-herder from Redford, Texas. That's the definition of crazy - repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
...
The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here - and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support George W. Bush. That's where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.

5.17.2006 Congress may make ISPs snoop on you

A prominent Republican on Capitol Hill has prepared legislation that would rewrite Internet privacy rules by requiring that logs of Americans' online activities be stored, CNET News.com has learned.

If the government can create a parallel law enforcement structure that routes around the traditional criminal justice system, and which is not subject to the oversight and restrictions of the criminal justice system, it may be increasingly tempted to make use of that parallel system for more and more things. It may argue that the criminal justice system is insufficiently flexible and outmoded for the types of problems it faces. However, the more that it routes around the criminal justice system, the more it institutionalizes the parallel system as the method of choice for the government to pursue.

For example, by going outside of FISA and telecommunications privacy laws, the government ensures that the information gleaned from monitoring phone calls and data mining phone records cannot be used to justify traditional judge-issued warrants, and the evidence produced cannot be introduced in ordinary criminal trials. Similarly, evidence derived from coercive interrogations or interrogations involving cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment cannot be introduced in criminal trials. This means that if the government attempts to use the criminal justice system after having used the parallel system it is put at a significant disadvantage in its ability to prove its case. Faced with this disadvantage, it may choose increasingly to expand and defend the parallel system of intelligence, interdiction, incarceration, interrogation, and punishment.
...
That is why the debate over the NSA program is so incredibly important. We need to have a national debate on how we will implement a system of information gathering and processing that is quickly becoming the norm and not the exception. If we do not have this debate, the system will be implemented so as to displace the civil liberties and rights of citizenship we hold dear.

5.17.2006 "General Hayden" By Stan Goff

The excuse being put forward by both Bush and Hayden is that they didn't listen to the calls, so it wasn't spying. The legal issue is that the NSA is prohibited in monitoring people inside the United States without express permission from a federal judge showing cause. The Federal Intelligence Security Act (FISA) that lays out this rule was written in the wake of the domestic spying scandal that led to the presidential resignation of Richard Nixon.

But in December 2005, Bush actually signed and executive order authorizing not merely the harvesting of phone records, but actual wiretaps. So their excuse now undermines their claim they did nothing wrong then.

See also: "Big Brother's Little Brother" By Katrina vanden Heuvel