Wikileaks

11.15.2007 emptywheel re Judith Regan suit vs News Corp:

If what Regan alleges is true (and she says she has recordings of the conversations), it mocks the very notion of editorial independence. Here's a company that--at a corporate level--is intruding on the editorial independence of one of its properties. Yet Kevin Martin thinks that, in spite of that clear evidence that no one within the News Corp empire has editorial independence, Rupert can be trusted to grant it as he further expands his empire? (Here)

11.15.2007 Progress report: Blackwater Buzz

One of the most serious charges against Krongard is that he impeded an investigation into whether Blackwater USA employees illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq that were then sold on the black market. In a Sept. 18 letter, Waxman revealed that Krongard had ordered his employees to "IMMEDIATELY" stop cooperating with federal investigators. Krongard has denied this allegation, but yesterday's hearing revealed that he has a conflict-of-interest with the contractor: his brother, Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard sits on Blackwater USA's advisory board. At first, Krongard vehemently rebuffed the charge, calling it an "ugly rumor." "It couldn't possibly have affected anything I've done, because I don't believe it," he said. Yet during a break in the proceedings, Krongard called his brother and confirmed that the "ugly rumor" was in fact true, and promised to recuse himself from any Blackwater investigations: MORE

In the wake of 9/11, some of us pleaded for a “patriot tax” on gasoline of $1 or more a gallon to diminish the transfers of wealth we were making to the very countries who were indirectly financing the ideologies of intolerance that were killing Americans and in order to spur innovation in energy efficiency by U.S. manufacturers.

But no, George Bush and Dick Cheney had a better idea. And the Democrats went along for the ride. They were all going to let the market work and not let our government shape that market ­ like OPEC does.

You’d think that one person, just one, running for Congress or the Senate would take a flier and say: “Oh, what the heck. I’m going to lose anyway. Why not tell the truth? I’ll support a gasoline tax.” NYT OpEd via Norm

See also: "Where’s That Energy Bill?"

S. 2248, the Administration / Rockefeller bill is pretty much the same monster Congress passed in August, the so-called Protect America Act. The major difference is that it gives the Attorney General the sole discretion to provide retroactive and prospective immunity to any company that spies on its customers. Some of the highlights of S. 2248: (Here)

Christy Hardin Smith says:

We put together quite a list of ways to phrase opposition to the current FISA legislation’s most odious provisions — you can find the full compendium here. (My personal favorite was Prairie Sunshine’s “Democracy = Rule of Law, not Lawless Rule.”) Please call and FAX the offices of the Senate Judiciary Committee members regarding their obligation to uphold the rule of law, the Constitution, and the will of the people not just the rule of George. Via OldCoastie, here is a link to efax, which allows you to FAX them for free.

Buried in the just released House and Senate Conference report for the Transportation-HUD spending bill is a provision that has open government groups worried.

The provision would ban the public from having timely access to budget information for the Transportation Department, according to one open government analyst.

Here's how: each year, the appropriations committees receive access to documents known as "budget justifications" at the same time that the president's annual budget is released to the public.

Last year, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., worked with the Office of Management and Budget to make those documents available to the public at the same time they were made available to appropriators.

The conference report language, which was not included in either the House or Senate versions of the bill, prohibits the public release of that information until several months after appropriators have received it. Rebecca Carr :Austin American Statesman via progress report

Gallup has been asking the "strongly disapprove" question since the Lyndon Johnson administration. The only time the polling firm has measured such strong give-this-guy-the-hook sentiment was in February 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, when Nixon's "strongly disapprove" number was measured at 48 percent. Bush beats him by a nose, but the margin of error makes the contest for "Most Reviled President, Modern Era" a statistical tie.
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Bush didn't come by this distinction with help from family connections or the Supreme Court. No, he earned it. NYT

Those ever-observant Washington Post editorial writers have spotted the demise of President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” in Pakistan. In an editorial yesterday, the Post bewailed President Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of his country’s constitution and said that the Bush Administration’s timid response “mocks” the president’s freedom agenda.
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Listen, Diehl, I know I’m not as smart as you are with your fancypants Yale degree, but let me have a crack at it: There never was a freedom agenda. Bush simply repackaged rhetoric used by past administrations about America’s commitment to democracy abroad, and cut the same deals they did that gave a free pass to dictators willing to support American foreign policy objectives. Harpers

"The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future." (Here), (Here) and (Here)

Accusing progressives of fighting President Bush instead of fighting the actual foreign threats to America is a debate tactic used widely by radical right-wing pundits. Surprisingly, former ambassador Joe Wilson--widely viewed as a progressive hero--used the debate tactic this week to chide Barack Obama's stance on Iran.
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Democrats should certainly debate the value and pitfalls of the Kyl-Lieberman bill, but should not under any circumstances reinforce the right-wing idea that Liberals hate Bush more than they worry about protecting the country. FrameShop

Military defense lawyers said that on the eve of the hearing, military prosecutors told them for the first time of a government witness who might be able to help a detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, counter the war crimes charges on which he was arraigned Thursday.

Mr. Khadr, the only Canadian detainee at Guantánamo, has been held here since he was 16. He is now 21.WILLIAM GLABERSON:NYT

11.8.07 Gail Collins:

Back in mid-2001, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was busy committing adultery, lurching into his divorce and third marriage and rooming with a gay couple he promised to marry as soon as the law allowed, who among us would have imagined that one day he would be endorsed for president by Pat Robertson? NYT

11.7.07 "Illegal Spying on Hackers" emptywheel discusses the Harris article and asks "How Much Does Richard Clarke Know?"

``Be careful what you wish for,'' Westbrook said. ``They wanted to make sure that people kept paying their credit cards, and what they're getting is more foreclosures.'' Kathleen M. Howley:Bloomberg

11.7.07 CIA Rendition: The Smoking Gun Cable

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]." He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war -- the al Qaeda/Iraq link -- was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.Stephen Grey: ABC News

See Also:

The Washington Post reported in June that Bush's failing Pakistan policy was "essentially being run from [Vice President] Cheney's office." For the first time in U.S. history, "nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office." The Progress Report

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will get its hands on the surveillance bill passed by the intelligence committee last month. The bill blesses warrantless surveillance of foreign-domestic communications related to gathering foreign intelligence, but its most infamous provision is the legal immunity it seeks to grant telecommunications companies that complied with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program from 2001 until this January. Civil libertarians are enraged at the provision, which will invalidate a number of class-action lawsuits against the telecoms currently pending. Now they have a new lobbying ally: Mark Klein.

Klein is the retired AT&T technician who disclosed in late 2005 how his former employer had allowed the NSA to use Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco as a vacuum cleaner to capture untold millions of phone and e-mail communications. (You can read his first-hand account here, in a pdf.) His revelations formed the basis for a lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, currently before a federal court. Now he's trying to convince Senators not to preempt the case, reports The Washington Post.
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Klein says that AT&T and its affiliates (and competitors) didn't just give the NSA domestic-to-overseas communications, and it didn't just give subscriber information known as "metadata." It gave them everything:
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"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything." Talking Points Memo

“Their” legal judgment—that water-boarding is illegal—is, of course, supported by the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the Detainee Treatment Act, as well as the JAG officers, a growing group of Justice Department lawyers, and centuries of American tradition. But in Hatch’s mind, the legal status of water-boarding remains an open question. Hence, his outrage. How dare Senate Democrats attempt to compromise this nominee’s “independence” by demanding that he concede that settled law is settled law?

Finally it’s clear: In the Age of George W. Bush, a truly independent attorney general is at his best when he is “independent” of the Rule of Law.

What Levin, Goldsmith, and Comey did—what made them so "independent"—was not to change decades of settled law into unsettled law. That's not independence; it's lawlessness. What they did is what Mukasey pointedly refuses to do: draw a line around a certain class of conduct and deem it off-limits. Confronted with undeniable evidence of the suffering that water-boarding causes, and the many laws it violates, Mukasey declined to say "never."
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What Schumer and Feinstein somehow miss today, with all of their apparent pragmatism, is that the same president who has liberated himself from the strictures of the Rule of Law, liberated the DoJ from the customs, norms, and practices that allowed it to function. To suggest, as do these two Democrats, that they will let the water-boarding slide in the interest of getting the DoJ fixed up is to forget that both wrongs are of a piece. Schumer and Feinstein vote for Mukasey because they somehow believe he can fix the Justice Department without telling the president "no." As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., says in the last statement of the morning, the opposite is true: The sacrifice of the DoJ would be painful. But it's a small price to pay in pursuit of a desperately needed "moment of clarity" about the need to tell this president "no."Slate

11.6.07 House Steps Up Confrontation With Bush Over Spending

A majority of House Republicans joined Democrats this evening in escalating a confrontation with President Bush over federal spending as the House overrode Mr. Bush’s veto of a popular water projects measure. CARL HULSE:NYT

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security” and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.” MOTOKO RICH:NYT :)

11.6.07 Confronting Dr. Evil's Stranglehold

Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department. Christy Hardin Smith quoting Dan Froomkin

11.6.07 "All aboard the impeachment bandwagon: Cheney first, Bush next" By Michelle Malkin !?!

In her article, she apparently quotes House Resolution 333, proposed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich. Index of supporting documents Here She calls Kucinich a "UFO-spotter". He must be delighted.

11.6.07 Yazoo Pumps: They’re Back!

First proposed in 1941, and kept alive ever since by a complacent Congress, the Yazoo Pumps may well be the most daft in a long line of environmentally destructive schemes undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers at Congress’s request. The project calls for the corps to build the world’s largest pumping system, at a cost of more than $200 million, in the Mississippi Delta. The pumps would then drain 200,000 acres of valuable wetlands, hardwood forests and wildlife habitat so that a relatively small number of soybean farmers, who already drink liberally from the public trough, can plant more crops.
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Over the years, the cozy and durable relationship between the Corps of Engineers and its pork-loving Congressional paymasters has produced one environmental misfortune after another. This is one that the Bush administration can and should prevent. NYT Editorial, via Norm

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.
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To defeat him would be to abandon the hope of instituting the many reforms called for by our investigation. No one questions that Judge Mukasey would do much to remove the stench of politics from the Justice Department. I believe we should give him that chance. NYT

Marty Lederman summarizes some points against confirmation:

...in response to repeated questions, he insisted that he did not know enough to say whether waterboarding, or any other technique, is torture, cruel treatment under Common Article 3, or otherwise unlawful. It's really remarkable how far we have fallen when a jurist of Judge Mukasey's caliber cannot answer such questions without hesitation.

[UPDATE: Talking Points reports that Mukasey also refused to disclaim the idea that the President has a constitutional power to violate FISA. (Watching his early colloquy with Leahy just now, I see that Mukasey cites the Prize Cases as authority for the President disregarding a statute -- but under the Prize Cases, not only wasn't Lincoln acting contrary to statute; his conduct was authorized by statute.)

And Human Rights First reports that Judge Mukasey has testified that interrogations are not necessarily governed by Common Article 3, notwithstanding the Court's ruling in Hamdan -- an argument that even the Bush Administration has disclaimed!] Balkinization

11.4.07 Andrew Sullivan:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce. The Atlantic Monthly

To Black and Richer, one of the most surprising things about being in the private sector is finding that much of the information they once considered top secret is publicly available. The trick, Richer said, is knowing where to look.

"In a classified area, there's an assumption that if it is open, it can't be as good as if you stole it," Richer said. "I'm seeing that at least 80 percent of what we stole was open." Dana Hedgpeth:WAPO

I'm puzzled by all the neoconservative bloviating and war-whooping about Iran and the near deathly silence about the deteriorating situation in Pakistan. I mean, we have actual terrorist training camps in Waziristan that are just sitting there, ripe targets for the sort of quick special forces strikes that the Turks are laying on the PKK in Northern Kurdistan (with our not-so-tacit approval). But I haven't read much in the Weekly Standard about the need to act against Al-Qaeda-Not-in-Iraq. Bill K, N-Pod, you remember Osama, right? What gives? Time

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and some of President Bush's top foreign policy advisers must testify about their conversations with pro-Israel lobbyists, a federal judge ruled Friday in a trial over the misuse of classified information.

Two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists accused of passing classified information to an Israeli official and the press. They argue, however, that the U.S. regularly uses the pro-Israel group to send back-channel communications to others, and they say Rice can verify that unofficial but sanctioned role. MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

Here's a man who's standing for the elemental rule of law, and who's doing so not because it's politically convenient to do so, but because it's principled to do so.

Here's a man who, when asked if he would have all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, promptly answered, "Yes." Just. Like. That.

Here's a man who, a full year before we were all shocked at what was happening in Walter Reed-and other military and veterans' hospitals across the country-proposed fully funding those hospitals.

Here's a man who, right from the start, decided that he wasn't going to let telecommunications companies off the hook when we found out they were listening in to all our conversations. Dodd marched down to the floor of the Senate and told the world that that telecommunications amnesty bill would pass over his own cold, dead body. Square State

TakeBackTheHouse: As to Dodd, I like the guy somewhat, and in his role of Senator I do think he is serving his office well this week. But I think I like Edwards more, so for me it is not a matter of just choosing who I hate the least or who is most electable. The choices are better out there than in any year I recall.
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Primaries are for falling in love. General elections are for falling in line. If you have fallen in love with Dodd then by all means, hit your caucus and vote! But if the race comes down to Guiliani vs. Clinton, don't be fooled into believing that the vote in the General is not just as crucial. (Here)

He's right. The president will pick the judges who will determine the future of this country.

11.2.2007 Glen Greenwald:

It is absolutely the case that Mukasey is a True Believer in all of the most extreme positions of the Bush administration regarding presidential power. That has been clear from the beginning. It is why he was chosen. After all, as a federal judge, he ruled that the President has the power to detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without ever having to charge them with a crime -- a position he more or less repeated on the first day of his confirmation hearing.
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What Judge Mukasey believes is, without question, radical and disturbing. His beliefs -- from the power of the President to violate Congressional statutes to limitless war powers to the authority to order barbaric interrogation methods -- would have been unthinkable six years ago in an Attorney General. But now, it and he are well within mainstream Beltway ideology, thanks to some combination of acquiescence and active support from the core of both political parties. And there is something deeply artificial and manipulative about a Congress that has decided to permit all of these things to take root to pretend suddenly that they are so offended by them, that what Mukasey believes crosses their bright lines so clearly that he cannot be confirmed. Salon.com

In adamantly refusing to declare waterboarding illegal, Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, is steering clear of a potential legal quagmire for the Bush administration: criminal prosecution or lawsuits against Central Intelligence Agency officers who used the harsh interrogation practice and those who authorized it, legal experts said Wednesday. SCOTT SHANE:NYT

In any case, I suspect Whitehouse's comment suggests two things. First, the Senator is sniffing around some instance of Bush violating his own EO (go Whitehouse). And second, my leading bet is on Bush's rules governing classification and declassification.The Next Hurrah

The White House plans to try implementing as much new policy as it can by administrative order while stepping up its confrontational rhetoric with Congress after concluding that President Bush cannot do much business with the Democratic leadership, administration officials said. Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writers

"Given Bush’s dubious track record over the past seven-years, I get the distinct and ominous feeling this has more to do with Congress’ hesitation to green light a preemptive attack on Iran than it does with the amount of work Congress is doing overall," the Kos diarist remarks. John Byrne:Raw Story