Archive for category: emptywheel

I guess this offers at least a trickle of hope that those that made up reasons to torture and wiretap and ignore the Constitution might be held to account?

The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into thegovernment’s warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift onlydays into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The investigation by the department’s Office of ProfessionalResponsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general,Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances toinvestigators.

"We recently received the necessary security clearances and are nowable to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counselfor the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey. A copy of the letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press.

Recall that the inquiry was designed to find out whether the Office of Legal Counsel acted improperly when it approved the illegal wiretapping program. Of course, none of the lawyers in question work at DOJ anymore, and OPR investigation results are not made public. But still, I’m happy to start with baby steps if you promise we’ll keep walking.

Update: TP notes this:

 In a response to an inquiry from Sen. DickDurbin (D-IL), Mukasey suggested that the decision to re-start the OPRinquiry had already been Read more →

I’ve been puzzling over something since the temporary FISA amendment passed in August. The Administration has claimed they needed on easy fix: to allow NSA to wiretap electronic communication that starts and finishes on foreign soil, whether or not that communication passes through the US between sender and recipient. Yet both times when Congress sets about providing that easy fix to FISA, the Administration demands much more. I believe those demands reveal what this FISA amendment is really about, and I believe this bill will legalize the Total Information Awareness program (or something like it) that the Administration had to scrap because Americans hated the idea. In other words, the battle happening in Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee mark-up of the bill is about massive data mining–it’s not primarily about discrete taps of individuals’ phones.

There are two demands on which the Administration has refused to budge:

• Minimization
• Basket warrants

I’m going to do a three-part series, looking first at each of these issues on which the Administration is intransigent, then explaining why I think this means they’re trying to authorize a massive data mining program.

CREW and the National Security Archive won the first part of their fight with the White House–getting a court order requiring the White House to preserve their emails and the back-ups (h/t PJ Evans).

A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies ofall its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had arguedstrongly against.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of thePresident to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits thatseek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails inviolation of federal law.

The White House is seekingdismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups — Citizens forResponsibility and Ethics in Government and the National SecurityArchive.

This is just the first part of the battle, of course. The White House will surely invoke some kind of expansive privilege to avoid telling us taxpayers whether it destroyed emails, why, and how. But for now, they’re forced to contend with an order that they keep the emails.

Wonder what will happen if we discover they’ve destroyed these, too?

Which is effectively what’s been happening with Matt Blunt in MO. Via the Pope, Blunt has been definitively busted pretending not to know he shouldn’t delete emails Read more →

My post on Armitage forced me to wade through the archives, where I saw this post.

On July 13, Christine Axsmith posted this on her blog on the CIA’s confidential intranet, Intelink.

Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.

Not to mention ineffective.  Econo-Girl has serious doubts as to whether European lives were  saved.

Econo-Girl’spurpose in writing this blog is to start a dialog on the GenevaConvention, since it now applies to the Department of Defense again.Guess it’s not quaint anymore, eh?

Over the next few weeks,Econo-Girl would like to post articles about the Geneva Convention,like its origin and major provisions. Legal analysis is not the magicsome would have you believe.

If the grunts and paper pushers are knowledgeable, the anti-torture infrastructure will be strengthened.

On July 13, her blog was taken down and her security badge taken away. Fewer than 890 people read the post.

On July 17, she was fired from her job with CIA contractor BAE Systems and she lost her Top Secret security clearance (hat tip to Laura Rozen for the links).

Given our new Attorney General’s inability to make the same clear statement, I thought it deserved to be posted again.

Fill in the blanks:

[ISIS President David] Albright said yesterday that the tubes acquired by ___________ neededto be cut in half and shaped in order to be used as the outer casingsof centrifuges. If ___________ proves that the tubes were untouched, hesaid, it could "shatter the argument" that they were meant for auranium program.

Let’s see, WMD expert David Albright describing doubts about claims that a country was using aluminum tubes to build a nuclear centrifuge. It must be the debate over Iraq’s aluminum tubes, right?

No. It’s the growing debate over whether US claims that North Korea had a large-scale uranium enrichment program have any basis in fact.

North Korea is providing evidence to the United States aimed at proving that itnever intended to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons,undermining a key U.S. intelligence finding, South Korean and U.S.officials said this week.

In closely held talks, the North Korean government has granted U.S. experts access to equipment and documents to make its case, in preparation for declaring the extent of its nuclear activities before the end of the year. North Korean officials hope the United States will simultaneously lift sanctions against Pyongyang as the declaration is made.

If North Korea successfully demonstrates Read more →