Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Groundhog Day

by digby

This premature poll in the Wapo this morning has predictably led the little kewl kidz to conclude that the nation is so afraid of terrorism that they will go along with any number of invasions of their civil liberties. That may be true (although I have my doubts.)

But I wonder what the nation would think if they knew that the very same people who initiated this program in the name of the war on terror tried this long before there was any war on terror: more than 30 years ago. From Jason Vest at POGO blog:

None too pleased about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth doing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bidding, Arlen Specter says he’s going to haul the three telecom companies before the Judiciary Committee for some pointed questions. Deja vu; in 1976, the now-deceased Rep. Bella Abzug did the same thing with three telegraph companies for their similar handmaiden-to-NSA roles. Looking back to those events, we can’t help but wonder if there’s more history that will repeat itself–will the Bush Administration try, as the Ford Administration did, to extend executive privilege to private industry.

After the Church Committee revealed the existence of NSA’s Project SHAMROCK, Abzug, the chair of the House Committee on Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, wanted to go deeper. Abzug promptly subpoenaed not just current and former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA officials involved in SHAMROCK, but also the CEOs of Western Union, ITT and RCA Global.

The Ford White House responded by ordering, on the grounds of executive privilege, the FBI and NSA employees to remain silent before Abzug. But Ford also went one amazing step further: “For the first time in history,” James Bamford wrote in The Puzzle Palace, “the concept of executive privilege was extended to a private corporation.” Attorney General Edward Levi actually asked Western Union’s president not to comply with Abzug’s subpeona as a means of “honor[ing] this invocation of executive privilege.” He later making a similar request of RCA.

While the FBI and NSA officials did as ordered by Levi and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Western Union and RCA didn’t, with both companies’s executives testifying and furnishing the Abzug Subcommittee with documents. (Apparently acknowledging their failure, Ford officials refrained from trying to muzzle ITT, which also cooperated with the committee.)

When the history of this period is written, one of its most important characteristics will be this zombie conservatism. Their leader, Richard Nixon, was destroyed by hubris at the very zenith of his power but it didn’t stop them. They just keep coming back with the same imperial presidency theory whenever they get the chance.

Vest quotes an old intelligence hand who recalls meetings at the time:

There were some meetings, he said, that were particularly memorable because of the vehement opposition voiced by two men who were intractably hostile to the notion that executive privilege did not allow for things like surveillance without oversight and gagging civil servants and CEOs before Congress.

“Their great fear was that oversight and procedures and legislation would fatally undermine the presidency by neutering executive privilege,” he recalled. “I don’t know where all of this will ultimately go, but I don’t think this Administration would be at all unhappy for hearings that have NSA and telecom [company] guys subpeoaned, which they’d regard as an opportunity for a showdown over executive privilege.”

Those two men? Guess who…

In light of this history, I think Specter’s plan to haul the telcos before the committee is the best approach, just as Abzug did in the 70’s. Many people may not think there’s anything wrong with the government collecting their phone records, but I seriously doubt that they will be happy to see the government claiming executive privilege to keep a telco corporation from having to testify before congress.

I’ll bet money they are going to do just that. These zombies just keep doing the same stuff over and over and over again. Who on earth ever said they were the ones with the new ideas?

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More Bad Guys

by digby

This diary over at DKOS illustrates why we should be worried about the administration asserting they are only targeting “the bad guys.”

We stood with about 50 others on rte 674 and when the motorcade came by there was assault rifle OUT the window pointing at ALL of us and the cars all looked like I remember seeing in the Hitler motorcades in the movies when I was a child, all boxy and black and one had the Pres seal and American flag on the sides. It was absolutely chilling!

[…]

Mary, Nic, and I were there as well; and yes, it went down exactly as Barbara and John have said below. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a sense of foreboding in my life as when I saw that automatic rifle pointed at us, peaceful protesters.

At the time September 11th happened, I worked at a military base near where I used to live before we moved to FL. Immediately after 9/11, our base was at Threatcon D, meaning that the military personnel guarding our base had to be armed. Yeah, I saw sharp-shooters and automatic rifles; but I took some kind of comfort in the notion that these measures were meant for the “bad guys.”

On Tuesday, the message that the sniper hanging out the window with his automatic weapon had for us was that we peacefully-protesting Americans were the “bad guys.” And that thought alone gave me the chills.

Which is exactly what they want us to feel. This isn’t about security, national or otherwise. It’s about intimidation.

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And The Deaths Continue

by tristero

Four Marines killed in Iraq when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal. We’ve been assured their deaths were not the result of hostile attack.

Of course It was just an accident. What reason could anyone have for doubting that?

Quotes Of The Day

by tristero

Courtesy Salon:

The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith. They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.

Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology by Fritz Stern. 1961.

Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.

It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.

It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.

It is dominion we are after.

World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less…

Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.

George Grant, The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action. 1995

The Salon piece is an excerpt of Michelle Goldberg’s new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism which looks to be a very useful introduction to the less well-known ultra-radical christianists whose ideas, a la Orcinus, get “mainstreamed” by more well-known political operatives like Falwell and Robertson.

Dinner With A Liberal Hawk

by tristero

Last night, I went to the annual dinner of a liberal group, and sat next to a very smart, very successful, and very well travelled man in his mid 60’s. I found him likable, talkative and in many ways, quite an interesting fellow.

He told us he supported the Bush/Iraq war because 9/11 was a wake-up call and it was inconceivable to him that the Bush administration would lie the United States into an invasion. Another reason: he had been in Cambodia and seen firsthand the capacity of human beings to do evil. Also, he said that during his lifetime, there was the Holocaust. If there was a chance to prevent that kind of horror from re-occurring, then he felt it was important to take that chance.

My mind started to reel from the effort of discerning what the connection was between Pol Pot’s atrocities and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Yes, they were both horrible and both were inflicted on innocents. But how did that lead one to conclude: “Invade Iraq?” And as catastrophic as the Holocaust was, I couldn’t figure out how the desire to prevent another such tragedy factored into his willingness to support the pre-emptive invasion and conquest of a country which, while brutal, had apparently given up gassing its citizens right around the time Donald Rumsfeld no longer was in a position to shake Saddam’s bloody hand.

There’s something about such reasoning that strikes me as profoundly illogical, as if history literally repeats itself and therefore we’re now getting a second chance to “get it right.” Time The Revelator (in Gillian Welch’s brilliant phrase) has other tricks up Her sleeve and never repeats, only cycles.

I tried to interrupt – as I said, he was talkative. But when he claimed that the Middle East had been “deadlocked for years,” I saw my chance, “What’s so bad about a deadlock? It certainly beats sheer chao…” and then he repeated everything in the first paragraph again. He seemed calm to me as he went through his reasons, but I noticed he spilled some wine on what looked to be a rather pricey shirt. He dropped his fork just a mite too loudly on his plate.

My friend on the other side managed to slip in, “Y’know, Tristero got it right from the start. He knew Bush was lying. He was right. And he was worried about the aftermath from the start.”

“So, you were right,” he said, a little bit of anger now creeping into his voice.

“Yes, I was right, and I knew I had to be right from the beginning, in 2002 and 2003,” I said, with not a trace of false modesty – or any other kind.

“Okay,” he rapidly wiped his lips with a napkin. “You know, a stopped watch is right twice a day.”

“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t a stopped watch about Iraq.”

Eyes blinked, but he didn’t skip a beat.

“Okay, you were right. I ‘ll grant you that. You were right when the rest of us were wrong…”

“Well, actually…” I was trying to tell him that in fact the majority of the world opposed the invasion and I was simply in the majority, but I couldn’t. He was angry and unstoppable.

“No, no, let me ask you a question. How come you, a musician, maybe a good one, maybe a well-read one, but a musician with no training in affairs of state – how come you of all people were right about Iraq but the most respected, most experienced, most intelligent, most serious thinkers in the United States got it wrong?”

“That is a question I ask myself every day, because it scares the daylights out of me,” I replied.

My eyes started to tear up and the winter of 02/03 raced through my head. That awful sense of dissociation watching every American media outlet try to outdo its rivals by printing lies, the unspeakable dread as I watched my country willingly go over the abyss. The shock of realizing that nearly everyone I knew had bought the myth of the Good War and that nothing I could say or do, nothing anyone could say or do could change their mind. It was too late.

I tried to say more, but I couldn’t, and then the subject changed and the dinner went on.

[Update: Link added to the great Gillian Welch’s album, Time (The Revelator), and my shameful misspelling of her name corrected. ]

Objectively Bad Guys

by tristero

Let’s not forget that there are those amongst us who opposed the Liberation of Iraq. They were, and they remain, objectively pro-Saddam and therefore “not neutral” in the Great Crusade against evilosity. A Crusade, I remind you, in which God On High personally guides the decisive decisionmaking of George W. Bush.

In short, dear friends, it is not only a patriotic duty – nay, honor – for phone companies to turn over the records of these damned souls for data mining. It is a solemn spiritual obligation, a tithe, as it were. What mortal Verizon employee would dare risk damnation -ie, working for a bloody phone company for all eternity – by objectively defying the Will of the Lord?

Bad Guys

by digby

One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of “known bad guys.”

“To perform such traces,” the official said, “you’d have to have all the calls or most of them. But you wouldn’t be interested in the vast majority of them.”

Well, that’s good. I feel so relieved. But it sure would be nice to know what the criteria for “known bad guys” are. There are, after all, people who work for some security agencies who have some funny ideas:

“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”

And you just never know when somebody’s going to take it into their heads that it’s a threat to national security to dissent, do you? Why, it’s already happening:

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation’s supposed “war profiteering.” The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street political theater,” Parkin says.

But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA’s role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon’s “terrorism threat warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.

The fact this administration continues to say “trust us, we’re only going after Al Qaeda” even though we already know they are tracking political dissenters is galling in the extreme. There is every reason to believe that the government that has instituted surveillance on protesters, that revealed the identity of a CIA agent for political purposes and that continues to characterize each revelation of their unconstitutional acts as a threat to national security will use this illegal NSA program to invade the privacy of Americans for political reasons. It’s insulting to the nation’s collective intelligence to suggest otherwise.

To this administration it’s “L’etat c’est moi.” If you are against the administration, you are against the country. Which means that 71% of Americans are unamerican.

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See No Evil

by digby

With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.

“It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,” said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday.

[…]

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company’s technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

Of course they don’t.

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Freefall!

President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” This trend has declined every month since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction. Iraq remains a key concern for the general public, as 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. The immigration debate also prompted 16% of Americans to consider it a top issue, down from 19% last month, but still sharply higher from 4% in March.

The Harris poll comes two days after a downbeat assessement of Bush in a New York Times/CBS News poll. The Times, in analyzing the results, said “Americans have a bleaker view of the country’s direction than at any time in more than two decades.”

Oh, and Jane says the Rove Grand Jury has been called tomorrrow. Fasten your seatbelts.

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And I Thought I Was Jaded

by tristero

During the past five godawful years, I’ve tried as hard as I could, as a defense and therapy, to cultivate a zen-like attachment that is beyond shock. And yet, dammit, It’s simply impossible.

The moment I think the group of morons running amok in my country couldn’t possibly make bigger fools of themselves, they manage to surpass their previous idiocy by being more incompetent than anyone, not even I, could possibly imagine:

Inside Higher Ed reports that some people got together and went through David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America looking for errors. They found a bunch, of course, but by far the funniest one was the discovery that “While Horowitz’s book promises a list of the 101 most dangerous academics, he actually includes only 100.”

PZ Myers makes the excellent point that this means that those of us who are royally pissed that we weren’t included can assume it was just an inadvertent editing snafu (I’m no professor but I have taught at some good universities on occasion, and did my best to corrupt young minds by exposing them to leftist/liberal masterpieces like the Marriage of Figaro. Man, I so totally deserve to be 101.)

(slightly edited after original posting.)