Dave Drier, in an interview with Dennis Miller on his radio show last week, emphasized the importance of granting legal immunity to the Telecomms when they pass to our intelligence agencies communication intelligence. As you remember, several years ago the patriotic-impared New York Times published classified information on the warrantless wiretap program (even though communications which include at least one party not on domestic soil were never considered warrant-required). Democrats then made an election issue of it, claiming that it would ruin our democracy -- even though the British and French have been doing so for decades and their Republics are just fine, thank you very much.

Drier quoted Mike McConnell -- our current Director of National Intelligence who was also served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council -- as saying that ever since the Telecomms stopped monitoring communications without assurances of immunity from legal threats, "We are missing about 60 percent of the communications taking place among the bad guys, the people who want to kill us."

Nice, huh.

So when Barack Obama, among others, say we are less safe now than before 9-11, they're partly right. But not for the reasons they think.

Now, here's the down side of the new FISA deal.

The steep price of this authority is that from now on all of these overseas eavesdropping orders will require advance approval by a special FISA court of rotating judges. This will apply even to emails or calls that emanate in, say, Peshawar and never leave Pakistan – except that by the accident of our Internet age they may happen to move through American switching networks.

The deal does carve out an exception to this judicial preapproval for "exigent circumstances" involving urgent threats, but the FISA judges would still have to approve after the fact. No other nation in the world, to our knowledge, requires such deference to judges when tracking foreign enemies abroad.

This judicial review is supposedly to check abuses by the executive. But it also imposes a judge in the middle of the wartime chain of command. A judge, moreover, who may have no special intelligence expertise and no understanding of the enemy threat. For this reason, these judges will in practice tend to rubber stamp executive requests.

But the precedent of judicial intrusion is still dismaying because it will be used as a baseline to limit future Presidential discretion. As for potential abuses, at least an Attorney General and President are accountable to voters if they use this authority to spy on their political opponents. On the other hand, if a willful judge denies a surveillance request and Americans are killed as a result, he is accountable to no one. Recall the "wall" of separation between intelligence and law enforcement that developed in the 1990s under domestic FISA and which the 9/11 Commission so criticized. No one paid any political price for that.
That wall, by the way, was mostly due to the insistance of former Attorney General Janet Reno's deputy, Jamie Gorelick.

By the way, should he defeat McCain in November, do you know who Barack Obama is considering for his Attorney General post? Yep, Jamie Gorelick.

Welcome to September 10, 2001.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, intelligence, interrogation, surveillance, war on terror, wiretap

Now and then sanity prevails, even in Washington. So it did yesterday as the Senate passed a warrantless wiretap bill for overseas terrorists while killing most of the Lilliputian attempts to tie down our war fighters.

"We lost every single battle we had on this bill," conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing. His own amendment -- to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies that cooperated with the government after 9/11 -- didn't even get a third of the Senate. It lost 67-31, though notably among the 31 was possible Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. (Hillary Clinton was absent, while John McCain voted in favor.)

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had "acted in good faith." Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told "no way" when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

The defeat of these antiwar amendments means the legislation now moves to the House in a strong position. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in the Dodd-Obama camp, but 21 Blue Dog Democrats have sent her a letter saying they are happy with the Senate bill. She may try to pass the restrictions that failed in the Senate, and Republicans should tell her to make their day. This is a fight Senator McCain should want to have right up through Election Day, with Democrats having to explain why they want to hamstring the best weapon -- real-time surveillance -- we have against al Qaeda.

-- Wall Street Journal

Labels: 9-11, Clinton, Congress, democrats, intelligence, Obama, surveillance, wiretap

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

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

Here's another warning from National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, this time in a Washington Post op-ed.

Many Americans would be surprised at just what the current law requires. To state the facts plainly: In a significant number of cases, our intelligence agencies must obtain a court order to monitor the communications of foreigners suspected of terrorist activity who are physically located in foreign countries. We are in this situation because the law simply has not kept pace with technology.
A few weeks ago McConnell told Congress that US intelligence agencies were already hampered by recent knee-jerk restrictions placed on surveillance, which are needed to prevent another 9-11.

These restrictions, naturally, were created by the very Congressional leaders (some Republican but mostly Democrat) to whom McConnell was lecturing.

It's just as author Tom Clancy once said: "First we gutted the CIA, then we blamed it [for 9-11]." We haven't learned from our past failures. And in a few years these same Congressmen and women will be deriding the CIA and FBI for failed to stop a terror attack which they empowered.

Curiously, the Democrats look to Europe -- which itself hypocritically levies criticism upon "big brother" America -- even though French and UK intelligence agencies, for example, are far more empowered to conduct domestic surveillance than their US counterparts!

As Bret Stephens explained in February, "Warrantless wiretaps? Not a problem under French law, as long as the Interior Ministry approves. Court-issued search warrants based on probable cause? Not needed to conduct a search. Hearsay evidence? Admissible in court. Habeas corpus? Suspects can be held and questioned by authorities for up to 96 hours without judicial supervision or the notification of third parties. Profiling? French officials commonly boast of having a "spy in every mosque." A wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement agencies? France's domestic and foreign intelligence bureaus work hand-in-glove. Bail? Authorities can detain suspects in "investigative" detentions for up to a year. Mr. Bruguiere once held 138 suspects on terrorism-related charges. The courts eventually cleared 51 of the suspects--some of whom had spent four years in preventive detention--at their 1998 trial."

Yet I don't hear the world's Rosie O'Donnells arguing that France is a human-rights violating autocracy...

Perhaps after the next skyscraper crumbles we will learn.

Labels: CIA, democrats, intelligence, straw man, surveillance, wiretap

Remember this article the next time a group of terrorists come to our country and murder our citizens, and remember that it was the Democrats who curbed our intelligence gather capabilities and demonized anyone as a civil liberties boogeyman who dared try to close the loopholes that lead to 9-11:

[Washington Post] Court orders in January that brought President Bush's warrantless terrorist surveillance program under existing law have limited the intelligence that agencies can collect, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.

"We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting," McConnell said during an unusual public session of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the administration's proposal to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
Remember too something the Democrats never bother to define (which to its credit the Washington Post did) -- when they say "warrantless terrorist surveillance" what they're saying is spying on international communications (between a target in the US and another in a foreign country), not domestic spying where both points of communication are in the United States.

In their quest for political power the Democrats have proven time and again that they are willingly placing the country at risk by eliminating all the necessary but reasonable protections that were put in place after 9-11, and often against the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission.

So, yeah, Democrats, congratulations for besting Bush. But when the next attack occurs and intelligence operatives point to the knee-jerk legislative hand cuffs that restrict our ability to weed out terrorist, will it matter any more?

Labels: democrats, intelligence, surveillance, wiretap

See if you can identify the contradiction in these four recent headlines from the UK:

[2004] Fertiliser bombers linked to 7/7 [2005] attacks

MI5 'knew 7/7 [2005] bomber was terror target associate [in 2004]'

And...

Britain becoming a Big Brother society, says data watchdog

UK committee probes surveillance, data collection
Just so it's clear...

We demand our intelligence services survey for potential terrorists without actually conducting, you know, surveillance.

Labels: intelligence, interrogation, surveillance, wiretap