Month: October 2008

They Would Never Invade Our Privacy

by dday

Since the revelation of the illegal surveillance program in December 2005, the fundamental question – who has the government been spying on? – has yet to be answered, and with the FISA legislation providing immunity for the telecoms we thought it would forever fade into the background. But it’s more likely that the truth will come out in drips and drabs; maybe not the whole truth, but enough of it to shock the conscience. Today we have another fallen domino:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia […]

“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

But, we were told that it was a Terrorist Surveillance Program, and Obama Osama bin Laden (darn it, I just always mix them up) would come to our ballgames and sell tainted Dodger Dogs to us if we didn’t allow wise and benevolent Government access to every piece of communication in the world!

Funny how that worked out.

Turns out that the ordinary grunts listening to this stuff were passing around audio snippets to each other:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

And then there’s this amazing statement, which kind of sums up life in the 21st-century surveillance state:

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said “all employees of the US government” should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and “information assurance.”

“They certainly didn’t consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game,” said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country’s warrantless surveillance program.

“This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,” Turley said….

“Information assurance.” How pleasantly banal.

See the beginning here for who was spied on – not just military and government personnel but journalists and aid workers. That’s exactly who I would target if I wanted to control the flow of information to the public. And there was no mistake here – members of the International Red Cross were surveilled and were “identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’,” according to one of the intercept operators.

This is what everybody voted for in the Congress. Not to “protect America from harm,” but to maintain and indemnify a shadow spying system so the highest levels of government can maintain control and power. It’s against the law and many of our foundational principles and George Bush did it anyway, and the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – enabled him.

And they’re still doing it.

It goes without saying that such attention to the calls and communications of ordinary Americans actually hurts our capacity to deal with any terrorist threat as simply a function of time management and prioritizing. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security funded this report.

The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.

The committee, created by the National Research Council in 2005, also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of technology designed to decide from afar whether a person had terrorist intents, saying false positives could quickly lead to privacy invasions.

“Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” the report found. “Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.”

This is true, but of course you would have to believe that the system Bush and his pals set up was in any way designed for terrorist surveillance. Based on the details we now know, I can’t imagine it was. The program is an example of how authoritarian societies maintain order and power.

You’ll be thrilled to know that Jay Rockefeller is going to begin an examination of this and request information from the Administration about it. I don’t know what’s more hysterical – that he thinks he can get one scrap of paper from the White House, or that he thinks we’ll buy that he’s about to sit down and investigate himself, in effect.

Greenwald has more.

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Crash

by digby

There’s no getting around it now. Every day the market seems to drop like a stone in the last hour. It closed below 8600. Yikes. I have recurring nightmares of falling from great heights and this feels a lot like that.

According to the shrill one, there will probably be global action over the weekend. If not, well …

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Fever Dreams

by digby

Apparently, Obama wasn’t only palling around with William Ayers, Ayres wrote his autobiography for him:

If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama’s sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.

I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.” In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

The paranoid strain is alive and well. if you add up all the latest “evidence,” Obama was programmed to be a member of a Muslim sleeper cell when he was six years old and then joined up with his fellow terrorist Bill Ayers (who is also in cahoots with Muslim extremists, which is a bit odd for a leftist, but whatever.) Ayers then wrote Obama’s biography, with the idea that he would someday run for president, thus allowing Muslims to force Sharia law on Americans. (Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, the man is black.)

As I mentioned below, I’m not bringing any of this up because I take it as a serious threat to the election. Events are in the driver’s seat and I don’t think any of this is going to stick with a majority of voters right now. But that’s what makes it so insidious: it’s being done more with an eye toward an Obama administration than a McCain victory.

Slow Release Poison

by digby

This is upsetting. John McCain and Sarah W. Palin know that Barack Obama is not a terrorist (well, maybe Palin doesn’t … she’s Queen of the tribe that believes this crap) and yet they are purposefully inciting people who are obviously dumb enough to believe it.

I think this is dangerous stuff and far beyond the pale. We saw what happened in Tennessee recently. It was the act of a mentally disturbed person, for sure. But it was also explicitly political — he had been trained to blame liberals for his woes and so when he went out searching for someone to shoot, he knew who to target. He’d been reading books which claimed liberals are treasonous and unAmerican, written by people who are treated as being perfectly respectable on television and are welcomed into the highest circles of power. His act was his own responsibility, but those who turn normal political differences into bloodsport for personal profit contributed to the madness.

We are entering a turbulent period in our country. Validating a bogus accusation that your political rival is a terrorist in our current environment is the most irresponsible thing I’ve seen a campaign do in many a year. They know they are very likely going to lose this election. And McCain certainly knows that the main reason he is losing is because of the dramatic failures of fellow failed Republican George W. Bush. But even knowing that his candidacy was always very likely doomed is not stopping him from releasing this poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, a poison which will be with us for a long time to come. I guess that’s what McCain means when he says that Americans should fight for a cause greater than themselves. That cause, evidently, is him.

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Fixing The Mess

by dday

Noriel Roubini has a transcript of a colloquy between Barney Frank and Jim Moran that effectively informed the Treasury Department that they could go the route of partially nationalizing the banks instead of their craptacular troubled asset buy-up program:

At first, Congressional aides we contacted were confused on whether the wording in the legislation did allow such public recapitalization was permitted or not. They pointed out to us that several sections of the legislation could be interpreted as allowing such public capital injection. Specifically such senior Congressional aides argued that several sections of the bill could be used to argue that the purchased “assets” as used in these provision would include not only securities accounted for as assets on the balance sheet of the financial institution but would also include common and preferred share, warrants on common and preferred shares, as well as secured and unsecured and convertible debt in the financial institution itself, which would be accounted for as assets on the balance sheet of the US Treasury […]

But we pointed out that this interpretation of “assets” as including preferred shares, left to itself, was a real stretch of the meaning of the legislation as preferred shares and common shares and sub debt are liabilities – rather than assets – of the bank. Thus, it was important to clarify that “any other financial instrument” was not limited to assets but also included institution’s liabilities such as stock, preferred stock, subordinated debt, senior debt.

In other terms it was necessary to explicitly clarify that the definition of “assets” or “any other financial instrument” in the legislation did allow for such public injection of capital so as to ensure that the regulations following the legislation would allow for such interpretation and actual practice. Since it was too late – by Wednesday last week – to explicitly modify the legislation to allow for explicit wording on this matter and since Treasury was resisting such late explicit changes (that would have jolted the banking industry) the tool that was used (in full agreement with the House and Senate leadership) to allow for such interpretation was to have Representative Jim Moran use the October 3rd House floor debate right before the final vote to put on the legislative record such interpretation. See the following important exchange between Jim Moran and Barney Frank that is now on the legislative record of the House:

Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I won’t take that much time. I do want to thank the chairman for his masterful leadership on this bill, and I do want to clarify that the intent of this legislation is to authorize the Treasury Department to strengthen credit markets by infusing capital into weak institutions in two ways: By buying their stock, debt, or other capital instruments; and, two, by purchasing bad assets from the institutions, in coordination with existing regulatory agencies and their responsibilities under this legislation, as well as under already existing authorization for prompt, corrective action and leastcost resolution.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MORAN of Virginia. I’d be happy to yield.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I can affirm that. As the gentleman knows, the Treasury Department is in agreement with this, and we should be clear, this is one of the things that this House and the Senate added to the bill, the authority to buy equity. It is not simply buying up the assets, it is to buy equity, and to buy equity in a way that the Federal Government will able to benefit if there is an appreciation.

So Moran asks Frank to clarify that the explicit intent of the legislation is to allow the purchase of bank liabilities (stock, debt, or other capital instruments) not just assets; and Frank replies firmly that this is the case and that Treasury agrees with such interpretation. Done!

I know that there’s this knee-jerk response that we’re supposed to de facto assume that Democrats cave and aren’t worth a warm bucket of spit, but they appear to have back-doored the right idea on this crisis. And this is what must be done. Nationalizing the banks is the best way to both shore up the system and get the best deal for taxpayers. It may not what you’d want to do in a sustainable economy, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. And nobody’s going to argue with it. Hell, The Wall Street Journal is arguing in favor of this move.

The fact that the Treasury Department came to this realization now is helpful for a potential Obama Administration. He’s still going to inherit one heck of a mess, but at least the plan is in action and may be in motion.

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Barack Gets Angry

by tristero

For insight into the complicated, talented, politician Barack Obama is, you could do a lot worse than read this WaPo article about his years in the State Senate. I was particularly struck by this section, where Obama lost his temper. Or did he?

Obama’s poker buddies encouraged him to stand up to Hendon and Trotter, but he refused. Not his style, he said. And why sink to their level? When Hendon ridiculed Obama, his standard comeback was a dismissive shrug and a wave of his hand. Ah, Rickey, you’ve always got something to say.”I never would have called him a fighter,” Hendon said. “He used the silk gloves, and I used the iron fists.”

The tension between the two men peaked on June 11, 2002, after Hendon made an impassioned speech on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to preserve funding for a child welfare facility in his district. It was, Hendon remembers, “basically the most emotional speech of my life, and I was pulling out all the stops.” Every Republican still voted against him. Every Democrat voted with him — except Obama and three other members who made up a faction known in Springfield as “liberal row.”

Incensed by those four votes, Hendon walked across the floor and confronted Obama, who explained by saying “something about fiscal responsibility,” Hendon recalls. A few minutes later, after Hendon’s proposal had lost, Obama stood up and asked to have his previous vote changed to a “Yes” for the record, saying he had misunderstood the legislation. His request was declined, and Hendon stood to criticize Obama for political maneuvering.

Infuriated that Hendon had embarrassed him publicly on the Senate floor, Obama walked over to his rival’s seat, witnesses said.

“He leaned over, put his arm on my shoulder real nice and then threatened to kick my ass,” Hendon said.

The two men walked out of the chamber into a back room and shoved each other a few times before colleagues broke them apart, Hendon and other witnesses said. Obama and Hendon never talked about the incident with each other again, but they reached an awkward understanding. Hendon stopped teasing Obama; Obama started voting with Hendon more regularly. Hendon now supports Obama for president.

Some of the legislators on the floor that day believed Obama had finally snapped after more than five years of tolerating Hendon’s provocations. But Obama’s allies, the poker buddies and other friends who knew him best, wondered if his actions resulted from a deeper calculation. Had he actually reacted, so uncharacteristically, out of pure emotion? Or was his scuffle with Hendon a final, brilliant tactic in coalition-building?

“He finally met Rickey on his level, and that got him some respect,” Lightford said. “That’s what Barack needed to do, and it worked. They didn’t tease him so much after that. It was like they finally realized that Barack was more than some soft punk to push around. He could play tough to get his way.”

I suppose the right can spin this incident as a bug instead of a feature, but to me, this is jaw-droppingly intelligent politicking.

Is it possible the US could have a president that isn’t a hot-headed fool, that is slow to anger, and even when angry expresses only the exact amount needed to advance his purposes? A president who patiently builds friendships and coalitions, even with natural political enemies? I suspect there are very few people who read this site who would disagree that – policy disagreements aside – this is exactly the type of character traits we’d like to see in a president. Oh sure, you can Monday-morning quarterback this and argue that maybe a president needs to react faster in a crisis than Obama did with Hendon. But in the end, Obama got his respect and his support.

Very impressive.

We Are All Socialists Now

by digby

Thank goodness we still have muslims forming a fifth column or the right would have no one left to hate:

Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash directly into banks that request it. Such a move would quickly strengthen banks’ balance sheets and, officials hope, persuade them to resume lending. In return, the law gives the Treasury the right to take ownership positions in banks, including healthy ones.

The Treasury plan was still preliminary and it was unclear how the process would work, but it appeared that it would be voluntary for banks.

The proposal resembles one announced on Wednesday in Britain. Under that plan, the British government would offer banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings up to $87 billion to shore up their capital in exchange for preference shares. It also would provide a guarantee of about $430 billion to help banks refinance debt.

The American recapitalization plan, officials say, has emerged as one of the most favored new options being discussed in Washington and on Wall Street. The appeal is that it would directly address the worries that banks have about lending to one another and to other customers.

[…]

The idea is gaining support even among longtime Republican policy makers who have spent most of their careers defending laissez-faire economic policies.

“The problem is the uncertainty that people have about doing business with banks, and banks have about doing business with each other,” said William Poole, a staunchly free-market Republican who stepped down as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on Aug. 31. “We need to eliminate that uncertainty as fast as we can, and one way to do that is by injecting capital directly into banks. I think it could be done very quickly.

[…]

Fed officials increasingly talk about the challenge they face with a phrase that President Bush used in another context: “regime change.”

This regime change refers to a change in the economic environment so radical that, at least for a while, economic policy makers will need to suspend what are usually sacred principles: minimal interference in free markets, gradualism and predictability.

I can think of another way to define “regime change” that will probably be more effective in the long run.

And the idea that “minimal interference in free markets” is a sacred principle is just laughable. Only rubes and losers ever have to deal with “free markets.” Winners are too big to fail …

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The Victimized Bullies

by digby

I’m just now catching up and came across this:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

The media gets the dirty hippie treatment right to their faces — with a little Bull Connor thrown in for good measure. Good times.

Everyone seems surprised that the right has the nerve to portray Katie Couric as some sort of ruthless gotcha journalist. But there’s actually nothing new in it. After all, she’s famously known on Free Republic as “little Katie Communist.” And that was from her days hosting the Today Show.

If you weren’t paying attention to the last Democratic administration (or are too young to remember) you’re in for a real treat when the right fully revives its liberal media crusade. The Villagers will soon yearn for the day when the DFH bloggers were sending in angry emails.

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You Want A Piece ‘O Me?

by digby

Obama throws down:

Obama also said he was surprised some of those attacks weren’t brought up by his opponent at the debate Tuesday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn.

“I am surprised that, you know, we’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.”

I have a feeling the erratic, mean coot isn’t going to like that much.

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The New McCarthyism

by digby

I just heard Chris Matthews say that McCain seems to be building the case that Obama is in some sort of Muslim terrorist sleeper cell.

He’s actually quite right. This may very well end up being an ongoing right wing theme for the next four years:

What the desultory townhall-style debate last night in Nashville between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama lacked in passion and focus on the most important issue of our time – the threat posed by Shariah (Islamic law) to our freedoms, way of life and form of government – was much in evidence in another debate held near Baltimore. Under the sponsorship of The Harbor League, Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. squared off with Suhail Khan, the Bush Administration’s Assistant to the Secretary of Transportation for Policy.

As an article by Mr. Gaffney describing the highlights of “the Other Debate” (repoduced below) makes clear, Khan did little to dissipate serious concerns about his past associations with, and affinity for, those who minimize the threat posed by Shariah-adherent Muslims – including many who are prominent supporters of Shariah’s largely stealthy insinuation into this country.

Keep in mind that polling still suggests that people believe that Republicans are better on the issue of terrorism.

This “debate” was hosted by none other than ultra conservative Sinclair Broadcasting. And Frank Gaffney isn’t some obscure right wing blogger, he’s a longstanding member of the permanent neconservative establishment. Indeed, he was one of the members of the “Family Security Council” the wingnut welfare group that published this notorious essay on its website:

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Now that Bush failed to take that sage advice, it looks like they’re going to have to deal with the “enemy within.”

The interesting thing about Gaffney (besides promoting rightwing propaganda about a Muslim fifth column in the government) is that one of his main targets is none other than Grover Norquist:

I also reported on the role Norquist has played before and during the George W. Bush administration in facilitating Islamist influence operations involving – at key points, with Suhail Khan’s help at the White House Office of Public Liaison – the likes of now-convicted terrorist-supporters like Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian. Khan serves on the board of the Islamic Free Market Institute, the organization Alamoudi helped Norquist establish a decade ago in his Americans for Tax Reform offices, apparently for the purpose of credentialing Islamists as conservatives, promoting their agenda in Washington and placing their friends in government jobs.

Speaking of the audience, the packed room included a couple of car-loads worth of staff and associates of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Several of them asked pointed questions taken straight out of the Islamist play-book: asserting a moral equivalence between the extremists of Islam and those of Christianity and Judaism; insisting that there was no problem with authoritative Shariah, only with a small number of terrorists who falsely claim religious grounds for their criminal conduct; and suggesting that if Jews and various Christian sects can have and observe their own laws, why can’t Muslims? The fervor with which these non-Muslim conservative activists parroted the Brotherhood line suggested that more than simple solidarity with their friend, Suhail Khan, is at work in Norquist’s Islamist influence operation.

And here I thought Norquist was just trying to build a political majority.

Gaffney’s cracked paranoia is aimed at certain conservatives for the moment, but I can see quite clearly where this is going. I don’t doubt that Gaffney truly believes that Norquist is dangerous. He’s been pounding this thing for years. But very soon we are likely to have a president who is believed by a substantial minority to be a secret Muslim who is friendly with terrorists and Gaffney’s dark vision of a government infiltrated by radical Muslims who want to overturn the constitution and force Sharia law on all Americans will suddenly have salience:

At its core, Shariah’s agenda is seditious since it is designed to destroy the constitutional government of the United States and replace it with Islamic rule.

This end-state will be achieved here as elsewhere through violent (or “hard”) jihad, if possible. Where that is not immediately practicable, the Muslim Brotherhood has established scores of organizations to promote what might be called “soft” or “stealth” jihad.

The objective, however, is absolutely the same: In the words of an internal planning document written in 1991, “[The Brotherhood’s] work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

I concluded with the following points:

* Every U.S. government official swears a solemn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Those officials who are Muslim have a special responsibility to reject Shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood organizations stealthily trying to impose it on all of us.
* To do otherwise is to fail to act in the face of seditious behavior – a felony offense under the U.S. code known as “misprision of treason.”
* We need the help of all patriotic, law-abiding, tolerant Americans who are Muslims in fighting our mutual enemy: Shariah-adherent Islamists in this country and elsewhere.
* A key test of which camp they are in is whether they acknowledge the nature of authoritative Islam’s Shariah and the threat it represents to our country and Constitution, and work against – not with – the groups advancing this seditious agenda.

This is the kind of thing that really makes me fear for Obama. They are already screaming “terrorist” at Palin’s rallies and shouting “kill him.” The whole “Obama is a muslim” thing is bizarre, but with his name and childhood spent partly in a Muslim country — and the fact that he’s black, which makes everyone flash on Louis Farrakhan — the collective right wing lizard brain twitches uncontrollably. They will use this, I have no doubt. There is an entire wingnut industry devoted to stirring up tensions in the middle east and another on devoted to character assassination of Democrats. Obama brings them together in serendipitous loathing and paranoia. It’s going to be ugly.

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