Below is an op-ed from Congressmen Kid Bond (vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), Pete Hoekstra (ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) and Lamar Smith (ranking Republican on the House Committee on the Judiciary), rebutting an anti-eavesdropping opinion written by key Democrats yesterday in the Washington Post.

We are less safe today and will remain so until Congress clears up the legal uncertainty for companies that assist in collecting intelligence for the government -- and until it gives explicit permission to our intelligence agencies to intercept, without a warrant, foreign communications that pass through the U.S. Here's why:

- Intercepting terrorist communications requires the cooperation of our telecommunications companies. They're already being sued for having cooperated with the government after 9/11. So without explicit protection for future actions (and civil liability protection for the help they provided in the past), those companies critical to collecting actionable intelligence could be sidelined in the fight.

It has already happened, briefly. "[W]e have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in a letter dated Feb. 22 to Mr. Reyes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

- The old FISA law does not adequately protect the U.S., which is why it was revised by the Protect America Act last summer. The problem is that, although it has a few work-around-provisions, such as allowing intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance for up to 72 hours without a warrant, FISA ultimately requires those agencies to jump through too many legal hurdles. Those include the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause" requirements, protections never intended for suspected terrorists' communications that are routed through the U.S.

It is true that the FISA Court approves the vast majority of warrants sought by intelligence agencies. This demonstrates that our intelligence agencies are professional and painstakingly provide all of the necessary evidence to establish probable cause to the Court. But in the fast-paced intelligence world, and when dealing with foreign communications, we need our agencies to be able to intercept a far greater number of communications -- notably those of foreign terrorists -- than can be justified under the Fourth Amendment.

- Telecommunications companies are for now, after intense negotiations, cooperating with the government under the assumption that protections granted to them under the Protect America Act will be upheld in court, even though the law is now defunct. But there is no guarantee that the courts will do any such thing. There is also no guarantee that corporate executives, under pressure from their legal counsels and shareholders to limit liabilities, will continue to cooperate.

- The cooperation of the telecommunications companies is limited to intercepting communications of terrorists identified before the Protect America Act lapsed. Until intelligence agencies can chase leads involving foreign communications, the U.S. will not be as safe as it was just a few weeks ago.

Further extending the Protect America Act is no way to fight a war against a determined enemy that uses our infrastructure against us. We need a long-term fix for FISA; and that is what a bipartisan majority in the Senate tried to accomplish earlier this month when it passed its FISA modernization bill by a 68-29 margin.

The problem is in the House, where Democratic leaders prefer to play an obstructionist role instead of constructing the architecture we need to fight an intelligence-driven war. Instead of voting on the Senate bill, even though a majority of House members stand ready to pass it, Mrs. Pelosi is still sitting on it. She is now pushing for a "compromise" that would gut many of the provisions that secure the cooperation of telecommunications companies.

Our troops collect intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan on a daily basis. We must exploit quickly the leads they turn up. Court orders should not be necessary to engage foreign targets in foreign countries. The Senate bill must be allowed to come to a vote in the House of Representatives without further delay.

Labels: Afghanistan, Congress, Iraq, surveillance, TSP, war on terror

Investors Business Daily examines the flip side to the Pervez Musharraf regime -- there are certainly worse things. It's even more relevant given that our intelligence services haven't seemed to have corrected course in 10 years, or even since 9-11.

What would an Islamist terrorist not give to commandeer one of Pakistan's 50 or so atomic bombs?

Yet as recently pointed out by Andrew Koch, defense/security analyst with Washington's Scribe Strategies and Advisors consulting firm, to Agence France Presse: "We don't have absolute certainty we know where all of Pakistan's weapons are kept." That makes taking those sites out in such a large country more than tough.

Of the many blemishes the U.S. intelligence establishment has accrued over the years, this is one of the most glaring. Why don't we know? Our spies and surrogates should be ensconced in Pakistan's military and its intelligence service nine ways to jumu'ah.

But how could they be, what with a CIA so deficient it was shocked when India conducted an underground nuclear test in May 1998, shortly followed by a tit-for-tat underground explosion by neighboring Pakistan.

"The reporting from the CIA's station in New Delhi was lazy," as Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner writes in "Legacy of Ashes," a history of the CIA published earlier this year. "The warning bell never rang. The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to comprehend reports, a failure to think, and a failure to see . . . a clear sign of a systemic breakdown."

The Pakistan Army, which controls the nuclear arsenal, may well be pro-Western, as experts assure us. But the country's powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which the U.S. used in training, arming and funding Afghanistan's mujahedeen rebels against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, has had ties to al-Qaida from its beginnings during that era.

What power would the ISI — or extreme elements within it — have over Pakistan's nukes if things got worse there?
All relevant questions. And it should be noted: Musharraf is 64 years old. He's not getting any younger. Maybe he'll last another 20 years. Maybe 20 days. But even if not now, the time will come when we have to face the facts of a changing Pakistan.

And the criticism of our lack of intelligence capabilities, especially after already having been burnt in 1998, just bolsters one's opinion of their incompetence. Like I said a couple days ago when noting their hiring of a Hezbollah-supporter, they're experts at leaking information to the New York Times. But at recruiting spies and infiltrating enemy organizations? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are far more concerned with opposing all things Bush than they are preventing that fourth hijacked plane from slamming into their own Capital Hill building!

Brian Faughan explains:

Was it really less than a month ago that House leaders tried to pass a deeply flawed rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by running roughshod over the opposition? As we covered at the time, the House leadership version of FISA actually makes it harder to conduct surveillance of terrorists in a number of ways. For example, it requires a court order for surveillance any time a call might involve an American. Since we do not know who a terrorist may call in advance, it essentially requires a court order to target foreigners overseas.

It also subjects military intelligence to FISA--so our forces in Iraq, for example, would require a court order before being permitted to listen in on communications by suspected terrorists. It would also require intelligence agencies to compile a database of U.S. citizens potentially involved in targeted communications.

Observers of this debate will recall that when the Democrats tried to ram the bill through with no debate last month, they were stymied by a proposed 'motion to recommit' that would have said that nothing in the bill would prevent the United States 'from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization…from attacking the United States.' Democrats complained both that the bill already contained this protection, and that they had to vote against it--which would have effectively killed the bill.

What have the Democrats learned from this experience? Not much. They have again brought their flawed FISA bill to the floor. They have not amended the bill to correct the problems it creates for intelligence agencies and they have again moved to block all amendments. The sole move they have made to ensure that this debate goes better than the first is to press all Democrats to vote against the GOP motion--no matter what it says.

Labels: Congress, intelligence, pakistan, proliferation, surveillance, TSP

Labels: Congress, democrats, intelligence, interrogation, surveillance, TSP

Labels: CIA, defending liberty, intelligence, interrogation, TSP

[ABC NEWS] For all the debate over waterboarding, it has been used on only three al Qaeda figures, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. As ABC News first reported in September, waterboarding has not been used since 2003 and has been specifically prohibited since Gen. Michael Hayden took over as CIA director.

Read the rest.

And while we're on the subject, Max Boot comments on a recent American Enterprise Institute study that finds that "France has become the most accomplished counterterrorism practitioner in Europe." Yes, that France.

I've blogged about that before, here (See: Jacques Bauer)

The basis of author's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Gary Schmitt is that France long ago had all the so-called intrusive antiterror procedures, and even more, than we in the US currently debate, and the French Republic has nonetheless survived just fine.

The last office, whose most famous holder is Jean-Louis Bruguière, was created in 1986 and is utterly without parallel in the American system, because it gives a single magistrate the power to use both intelligence and police services to stop terrorists before they strike. Magistrates even have the power to lock up French citizens when there is not enough evidence to convict them of a crime.

For all their carping about America's supposed civil-liberties abuses, the French have concentrated more power in the hands of their counterterrorism officials than we have. And it's paid off. Gerecht and Schmitt conclude:

"We underscore the power of the French state since so much post–Patriot Act commentary in the United States suggests that enhanced police powers—for example, the sequestration of terrorist suspects without immediate access to attorneys, or the use of wiretapping and physical surveillance that falls far short of 'probable cause' of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) standards—are counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts since they corrode our collective trust in the law and are ineffective in any case."
In fact, as they stress, the kind of steps the French take work. And yet in the more than twenty years since this system was created, "France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France's society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open."

Labels: capitulation, CIA, Congress, democrats, France, intelligence, interrogation, TSP, war on terror

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy opines that Bill and Hillary Clinton's position on torture and interrogation are a lot more vague than that of attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey.

As is the senator's [Hillary Clinton's] wont (see, e.g., myriad positions on Iraq, Iran, illegal immigration, etc.), she has since flipped from this flop — just in time for a candidates' debate before a base inherently hostile to such flashes of common sense. But she clearly made the remarks. It was thus jarring to find her announcing opposition on Monday to Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination to become the next attorney general because, as Sen. Clinton explained, "I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey's continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power."

As it happens, Judge Mukasey's views on torture and "unchecked Executive power" are a lot clearer than Hillary Clinton's.

...So Judge Mukasey has essentially said that waterboarding might be torture and would, in any event, be illegal in all but the most dire emergencies. Senator Clinton, to the contrary, has said a president could order not just waterboarding but torture, despite a congressional statute and treaty obligations that brook no exceptions. Yet, Democrats are questioning Mukasey's fitness even as they trip over themselves to hop aboard Clinton's bandwagon.
Read the rest. The Democrats' hypocrisy on intelligence and surveillance know no bounds.

In addition, McCarthy highlights Bill Clinton's recent comment to "permit the president to make a finding [a torture warrant]," and that Clinton's Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified to Congress in 1994 that "the president [Bill Clinton] has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

So remember the rule. Democrats can torture and spy without warrants to protect national security. But Republicans are criminals if they attempt to do the same.

Labels: CIA, Clinton, democrats, Hypocrisy, intelligence, surveillance, TSP

Technology is a blessing, but unfortunately, also for those who wish us harm:

Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned.

Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular Internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.

"We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas," Khaled Jaabari, the group's commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.

And if the least technical and funded terrorist groups can do it...

Here's something you may not know, I forgot until only recently reminded from the 9-11 Commission Report: Ziad Jarrah purchased a portable GPS in Miami, and Mohammed Atta purchased three more, possibly even visiting the WTC on September 10, 2001, for a final reading.

Cheap technology (and a little imagination) goes a long way to killing thousands, which is why it's so very important we use our advantages in hi-tech surveillance, intelligence and interrogation methods, and not hamstring the police and agents trying to stop those who would kill us.

It's why I personally get so frustrated when I read about some foolish (good intended or not) politico attempting to turn the US Constitution into a suicide pact.

Labels: intelligence, interrogation, Israel, palestinians, surveillance, terrorism, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

A former member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council, Daniel Benjamin, debunks several myths promoted in large part by Hollywood's latest movie titled "Rendition."

With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that it's synonymous with torture and lawlessness.
In fact, the term "rendition" in the counterterrorism context means nothing more than moving someone from one country to another, outside the formal process of extradition. For the CIA, rendition has become a key tool for getting terrorists from places where they're causing trouble to places where they can't. The problem is where these people are taken and what happens to them when they get there. As a former director for counterterrorism policy on the National Security Council staff, I've been involved with the issue of rendition for nearly a decade -- and some of the myths surrounding it need to be cleared up.

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

Actually, that's not a foregone conclusion. Alvarez was brought to the United States. So was Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two CIA employees in their cars outside the agency's Langley headquarters in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both were apprehended in Pakistan, whose leaders decided that the nation would rather not have those two -- folk heroes to some -- sitting in jail, awaiting extradition. Pakistan's leaders feared that cooperating with the United States would be dangerously unpopular, so they wanted the suspects out of the country quickly. For many pro-U.S. Muslim leaders, that concern has only deepened as anti-Americanism has soared.

By my count, most renditions since 1995 have involved moving individuals from one foreign country to another -- not grabbing someone in Washington and carting them off to North Africa, as happens to Witherspoon's onscreen husband. Such operations typically occur in secret because, again, Muslim leaders (especially in the Arab world) want to shield their cooperation with Washington from their anti-American publics. The CIA has acted as a go-between, arranging the transfers and providing transportation. Usually those being rendered are not brought to the United States because, while the U.S. government may have an abundance of intelligence showing their malfeasance, it doesn't have enough courtroom evidence. There's a big difference between the two.

One other safeguard: During the Clinton years, the United States required the country that received a rendered person to have some kind of legal process against the suspect -- an arrest warrant or indictment, for example. It's not clear whether that is still the case. Perhaps Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general nominee, can check.

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

The individual may feel as though he's being kidnapped, but that's not usually what's going on. Most of the time, the person is detained by the authorities of the country he is in. They will then hand him off to the CIA, which will fly him to his destination.

In rare cases when the country of residence is a hostile one, an "extraordinary rendition" can be carried out: a covert effort to abduct the suspect and spirit him out of the country. The CIA put considerable time into efforts to capture Osama bin Laden this way from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Had it worked, it would have been an extraordinary rendition -- and Americans would have cheered.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured -- countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It's impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or to interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently grabbed in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has "defined down" torture looks pretty persuasive. It's probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie "Rendition" -- in which Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors -- is bound to spread this myth. A " U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, Hollywood bias, intelligence, interrogation, media bias, Smearing the Troops, surveillance, tribunals, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

The Wall Street Journal summarizes some long-term problems with the recent FISA-surveillance compromise between Congressional Democrats and President Bush. In short, the conspiracy-nut and otherwise privacy-extreme wings of the Democrat party lost big time, but the executive branch loses equally in other ways for every president going forward.

Worse for Presidential authority, the Administration has agreed to let the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pass judgment after the fact on its overseas wiretap findings and procedures. This is an expansion of judicial power from the 1978 FISA law, which applied to domestic wiretaps. No President has ever conceded that his ability to eavesdrop on a foreign enemy abroad could be second-guessed by judges. And no court has found that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches apply to foreigners working out of Karachi. This bill creates a bad precedent on both counts.

The bill even requires the executive to present the FISA court (and Congress) with a semi-annual review of the surveillance program and its procedures. Since when do courts, which operate under the limits of Article III of the Constitution, have the power to oversee such executive operations? Judges lack the expertise to make intelligence judgments, and in any case are accountable to no one if they object to some executive process and then order it halted.

The great irony here is that, in the name of checking "secret" Presidential power, Congress is giving enormous authority to judges who will also make decisions in secret and never have to answer to the voters. In our view, this entire process is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. The President is allowing more judicial micromanagement of war decisions in order to please Congress, which prefers to pass the buck to the courts rather than take responsibility itself for overruling Presidential war decisions.

Labels: surveillance, TSP

This article should make you sick to your stomach. For all their talk about "spying on Americans" and other such nonsense, at the end of the day, when Democrats are challenging so-called "warrantless wiretaps" or the Patriot Act, all they're really doing is ensuring that another horrible episode, whether 9-11 or the one below, occurs.

[NY Post] U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned.

This week, Congress plans to vote on a bill that leaves in place the legal hurdles in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - problems that were highlighted during the May search for a group of kidnapped U.S. soldiers.

...A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers - obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance - cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.

Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.

For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the "probable cause" necessary for the attorney general to grant such "emergency" permission.

Finally, approval was granted and, at 7:38 that night, surveillance began.

"The intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law," a senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case told The Post.

"How many lawyers does it take to rescue our soldiers?" he asked. "It should be zero." [emphasis mine]

The FISA law applies even to a cellphone conversation between two people in Iraq, because those communications zip along wires through U.S. hubs, which is where the taps are typically applied.

Labels: antiwar loonies, civil liberties, Congress, Delusional Democrats, rules of engagement, surveillance, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy derides the New York Times for - what else! - misrepresenting the new Terrorist Surveillance Program bill by suggesting the Feds now have unprecidented search and surveillance powers.

The Times is engaged here in the worst kind of journalistic abuse. Risen and Lichtblau sprinkle their story with the names of several experts, but not a single one is identified as standing behind the explosive claims quoted above. Those are attributed to “experts” — unnamed. And unnamed for good reason: What the Times represents as a respectable, mainstream interpretation of the new law is actually a fringe construction unsupportable by any coherent reading.

All the very narrow reform bill really accomplished was a return of FISA (and only for the next six months) to its original design, stripped of the gloss recently imposed by the imperious FISA court. The law gives Americans modest protection against some forms of national security surveillance but otherwise acknowledges that the NSA and CIA have a free hand to target people outside the U.S. — especially if, as is usually the case, these overseas targets are contacting people who are also outside the U.S.; and even if, as is sometimes the case, they are contacting people who happen to be inside our country (and may or may not be Americans).

The reform bill allows the attorney general and the director of National Intelligence to “acquire foreign intelligence information concerning persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.” Could that information implicate Americans? Of course it could. If the government is monitoring an al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan and he happens to call you, an American citizen in, say, St. Louis, it will monitor your conversation. But just your calls with him. If the government then wants to take the next step and monitor all your calls, get your business records, or search your house, it still has to go to the FISA court to get authorization. The new law does not change that.

Labels: media bias, NYT, surveillance, TSP, wiretap

The delusions of the Democratic party can be neatly summarized with a trio of news articles today.

According to the NY Sun, Western and American intelligence services believe that terrorist cells connected to the British "doctors plot" may already be in the United States and planning terrorist attacks here based on "E-mail addresses for American individuals [which] were found on the same password-protected e-mail chains used by the United Kingdom plotters to communicate with Qaeda handlers in Europe."

But what are the Democrats and liberal community worried about (well, besides the red herring of climate change)?

They're worried about eavesdropping on communications of suspected terrorists, and they're worried about how the CIA has been treating the captured 9-11 mastermind and murderer of 3,000 Americans, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Let's start with the news regarding the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP, aka warrantless wiretapping):

The Democratic-controlled House last night approved and sent to President Bush for his signature legislation written by his intelligence advisers to enhance their ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners without a court order.

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on a general congressional desire to act on the measure before an August recess.
Oh, gee, no biased reporting there! The TSP enhancement was needed to help our intelligence agencies catch terrorists. Period. Not to assist "Bush advisers" or "play on fears."

Clearly enough Democrats knew this to be true.

Maybe the votes were instigated by the warning to Congress from National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden: "Had this program [TSP] been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such."

Maybe they were instigated by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who told the media last week that intelligence operatives are unable to protect Americans because Democrats previously abridged the TSP program. "'[The intelligence community is] missing a significant portion of what we should be getting' from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots," according to Newsweek.

Maybe it was because even some of the less liberal democrats recognized that it shouldn't take a warrant to spy on a jihadist in Peshawar who is telephoning instructions to a suicide bomber in London, all because the call happens to go through a switch located in the US.

One suspects that if a President Clinton or Obama takes the reigns most of this leftist concern will wither away. But for now, regardless of their loss in Congress, it won't stop the anti-war left from being far more concerned about intangible and theoretical dangers (see: post below) than of the actual terrorists trying to kill them.

"There are a lot of people who felt we had to pass something," said one angry Democratic lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of caucus discussions. "It was tantamount to being railroaded."
Railroaded? Yes, railroaded said the Democrat so proud and sure of themselves they refused to be identified.

Civil liberties and privacy advocates and a majority of Democrats said the bill could allow the monitoring of virtually any calls, e-mails or other communications going overseas that originate in the United States, without a court order, if the government deems the recipient to be the target of a U.S. probe.
"Board your wife and children! Virtually any calls!" (some restrictions apply, such as target "BEING RECIPIENT OF A US TERRORISM PROBE.")

Last night, several Democrats said the bill would undermine the Fourth Amendment. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said lawmakers were being "stampeded by fearmongering and deception" into voting for the bill. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) warned that the bill would lead to "potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans' privacy."
So the Fourth Amendment now applies to foreign nationals suspected of terrorism and electronically communicating overseas...? I don't think James Madison had that in mind.

Needless to say that Mr. Nadler and Ms. Harman represent two states most likely to be terrorist targets.

"I'm not comfortable suspending the constitution even temporarily," said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence committee. "The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security."
Does Mr. Holt "detest" the United Kingdom? Because their MI-5 conducts domestic spying everyday, and yet their democracy seems intact. Likewise even wacky-liberal France conducts domestic spying.

The bottom line is that this bill was created because the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Service Act) courts were created decades ago and no longer cover our modern technologies, at least not without some upkeeping, which is what this bill did.

And, of course, if Democrats allowed more surveillance maybe we wouldn't need to have women interrogate a naked Khalid Mohammed.

Which brings us to our last article:

[Washington Post] Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was subjected to the CIA's harshest interrogation methods while he was held in secret prisons around the world for more than three years, part of an interrogation regimen that the International Committee of the Red Cross has called "tantamount to torture," according to a New Yorker article to be published on the magazine's Web site today.

In a 12-page article released yesterday, reporter Jane Mayer analyzes the development of the CIA's secret interrogation techniques and writes that a confidential ICRC report to the U.S. government details Mohammed's assertions that he was tortured by the CIA. Unnamed Washington sources told Mayer that Mohammed said he was held naked in his cell, questioned by female interrogators to humiliate him, attached to a dog leash and made to run into walls, and put in painful positions while chained to the floor. Mohammed also said he was "waterboarded" -- a simulated drowning -- in addition to being held in suffocating heat and painfully cold conditions. Mohammed's captors also told him shortly after his arrest in March 2003: "We're not going to kill you. But we're going to take you to the very brink of your death and back," the article said.

Me thinks torture is made of sterner stuff. Torture doesn't "simulate drowning," it actually drowns you. Or your family in front of you, etc.

Certainly one would wager our treatment of al Qaeda operatives is purposely designed to skirt techical law - which is why they don't cause "prolonged mental harm" or threaten death. One can be sure it's not pleasant. But neither is anal rape in our state prison systems, yet we hear no peep from the liberal community to reform that. So, beyond discomfort and humiliation, Mohammed gets to keep all of his limbs - unlike, say, Saddam's victims - and has been flat out told we'll never kill him.

And this assumes Mohammed is speaking the truth even though the ICRC admits that the only person who can verify these claims is the very terrorist, Khalid Mohammed.

If Khalid Mohammed can organize the murder of 3,000 Americans he can certainly lie about or exaggerate his treatment to the Red Cross and play to their bleeding-heart sympathies.

But, even if he isn't lying, his fate is far, far better than those of his victims.

Labels: Delusional Democrats, Doctors plot, intelligence, interrogation, surveillance, TSP

What's most ironic about the Democrats' efforts to undermine the TSP program?

If the next terrorist attack succeeds because the TSP program has been rendered ineffective it will be those very legistators whose lives are put most in danger. Hijackers intended United FLT 93 to ram the Capital Building -- and there's no guarantee that next time US citizens will be able to protect what our intelligence agencies couldn't on 9-11.

Related: An educating editorial by the Wall Street Journal.

Democratic leaders were briefed on the [Terrorist Surveillance Program (aka warrantless wiretapping) program from the first and never once tried to shut it down. But once it was exposed [by a criminal leak to the New York Times], these same Democrats accused Mr. Bush of breaking the law by not getting warrants from the special court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Mr. Bush has rightly defended the program's legality, but as a gesture of compromise in January he agreed to seek warrants under the FISA process.

This has turned out to be an enormous mistake that has unilaterally disarmed one of our best intelligence weapons in the war on terror. To understand why, keep in mind that we live in a world of fiber optics and packet-switching. A wiretap today doesn't mean the FBI must install a bug on Abdul Terrorist's phone in Peshawar. Information now follows the path of least resistance, wherever that may lead. And because the U.S. has among the world's most efficient networks, hundreds of millions of foreign calls are routed through the U.S.

That's right: If an al Qaeda operative in Quetta calls a fellow jihadi in Peshawar, that call may well travel through a U.S. network. This ought to be a big U.S. advantage in our "asymmetrical" conflict with terrorists. But it also means that, for the purposes of FISA, a foreign call that is routed through U.S. networks becomes a domestic call. So thanks to the obligation to abide by an outdated FISA statute, U.S. intelligence is now struggling even to tap the communications of foreign-based terrorists. If this makes you furious, it gets worse.

Our understanding is that some FISA judges have been open to expediting warrants, as well as granting retroactive approval. But there are 11 judges in the FISA rotation, and some of them have been demanding that intelligence officials get permission in advance for wiretaps. This means missed opportunities and less effective intelligence. And it shows once again why the decisions of unaccountable judges shouldn't be allowed to supplant those of an elected Commander in Chief.

When the program began, certain U.S. telecom companies also cooperated with the National Security Agency. But they were sued once the program was exposed, and so some have ceased cooperating for fear of damaging liability claims. We found all of this hard to believe when we first heard it, but we've since confirmed the details with other high-level sources.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell more or less admitted the problem last week, albeit obliquely, when he told the Senate that "we're actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting." That's understating things. Our sources say the surveillance program is now at most one-third as effective as it once was.

Labels: 9-11, Congress, democrats, folly, intelligence, interrogation, TSP

Gosh, even Newsweek agrees that the Democrats attacks on the Terrorist Surveillance Program have gone too far. Well, not exactly:

Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Six years after 9/11 , U.S. intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major "gap" in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters. In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel "czar" Mike McConnell has argued that the nation's spook community is "missing a significant portion of what we should be getting" from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots. Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told NEWSWEEK she has learned of "specific cases where U.S. lives have been put at risk" as a result. Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

... Two officials familiar with the controversy, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, said that had the administration initially been candid about its antiterror surveillance plans, it could have worked with Congress years ago to tweak the FISA laws to account for the technological changes. One of the officials said the administration's secretiveness had, in this case, created problems for antiterrorism efforts.
So, who is to blame for Congress attempting to undermine President Bush's TSP program? Why Bush himself! But of course!

Such tortured logic, however, doesn't meet with honesty.

You see, Bush presented Congress the details of the TSP shortly after its creation in 2002. It was only after the New York Times leaked the story that Congress pretended to be shocked -- yes, we're shocked!!! -- and awed.

Pathetic.

I guess the Newsweek gang is getting a little nervous knowing this since, you know, their main offices are in DC and NYC.

Labels: Congress, democrats, folly, intelligence, surveillance, TSP

The fellas at Power Line Blog comment about the New York Times half-a$$ed apology over the fabricated non-scandal that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had lied to Congress about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

Today the New York Times filled in the blanks on Alberto Gonzales's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. As we discussed in detail here and here, Gonzales testified that he had visited John Ashcroft in the hospital to try to resolve a legal dispute that had developed over an intelligence program, but that the program in question was not the "terrorist surveillance program" that had been confirmed by President Bush, i.e., the interception of international communications where one participant is associated with al Qaeda. About that program, Gonzales said there had been no serious legal question.

This testimony was met with incredulity by the Senators. "Do you expect us to believe that?" Arlen Spector asked. Committee members Schumer and Leahy flatly accused Gonzales of lying, and called for a special prosecutor to carry out a perjury investigation. One thing I could never understand was why anyone cares: what difference would it make if Gonzales's hospital visit related to the "terrorist surveillance program," or to some other intelligence activity? And what reason would Gonzales have to lie about that fact?

Today the Times confirms that Gonzales told the truth. The legal dispute that broke out in 2004 was about the NSA's "data mining" project, in which databases of telephone records were reviewed for patterns suggestive of terrorist cells.

What's comical about the Times' reporting is that the paper can't bring itself to acknowledge that this means Gonzales has been vindicated.

Labels: Congress, gonzales, intelligence, surveillance, TSP