The Agonist - USA: Intel and Policy

Race profiling eyed for terror probes

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:49:08 -0700

July 4

Raw Story - The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply "by assuming that everyone's a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent," said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Damn I'm lucky I am whiter than Casper or McCain ;)

Commentary: How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:41:30 -0700

Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

Early next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love.

That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

That a majority on both sides of the aisle — not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties — intend to vote for such a violation of Americans' right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever.

We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.

Passport record system open to abuse, IG finds

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:38:32 -0700

Warren P. Strobel | Washington | July 4

McClatchy - A State Department passport record system that holds personal data on more than 120 million Americans is wide open to abuse and unable to prevent or detect unauthorized access, investigators said Thursday.

The review by the department's inspector general was ordered after revelations in March that State Department employees and contractors had accessed the files of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama.

The IG report found a much broader problem.

Investigators surveyed the records of 150 high-profile Americans, whose names were selected from Forbes and Sports Illustrated magazine lists and Internet search engine Google's most-searched names.

Of the 150 — who weren't named in the report — 127, or 85 percent, had had their passport files accessed a total of 4,148 times, strongly suggesting attempts at unauthorized access.

"The system is unable to protect itself," said one State Department official, who requested anonymity to speak more freely. "Anybody can go in."

Want to know if waterboarding is torture? Ask Christopher Hitchens

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:10:55 -0700

Jon Henley | July 4

The Guardian - Late last year, the writer, polemicist and fierce proponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq Christopher Hitchens attempted, in a piece for the online magazine Slate, to draw a distinction between what he called techniques of "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture".

From this, his foes inferred that since it was Hitchens' belief that America did not stoop to the latter, the practice of waterboarding - known to be perpetrated by US forces against certain "high-value clients" in Iraq and elsewhere - must fall under the former heading.

Enraged by what they saw as an exercise in elegant but offensive sophistry, some of the writer's critics suggested that Hitchens give waterboarding (which may sound like some kind of fun aquatic pastime, but is probably best summarised as enforced partial drowning) a whirl, just to see what it was like. Did the experience feel like torture?

My Guantanamo Interview

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:18:07 -0700

In January, 2006 outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, Mahvish Rukhsana — a journalist and recent law school graduate — volunteered to translate for the prisoners and eventually began representing an Afghan detainee. She has since published the stories of the detainees she has met in the newly-released book, My Guantanamo Diary. For more information, please visit http://www.mahvishkhan.com.

The work that lawyers like Rukhsana have done to advocate on behalf of these detainees contributed to a recent Supreme Court ruling to grant habeas corpus to all Guantanamo prisoners. That is why I felt so privileged to be able to talk to her about the importance of upholding the Constitution and restoring our international reputation. My interview with Rukhsana was conducted just before the Supreme Court's landmark ruling, and has been edited down to narrative form. [cross-posted from www.progressivefuture.org]

How could I forget this?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:15:30 -0700

Amygdala | July 1 | STUMP THE YOO! Play the home game!

Transcript:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Yoo is answering a question from Doug Cassel.

Doug Cassel is professor of law and the director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame Law School, and former director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.

Much more

Ex-Agent Says CIA Ignored Iran Facts

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:19:54 -0700

Joby Warrick | July 1

WaPo - A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

(...)

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.

Preparing the Battlefield

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:04:52 -0700

Seymour Hersh | July 7th Issue

The New Yorker - The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Much more at link

U.S. and Europe Near Agreement on Private Data

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:10:56 -0700

Charlie Savage | Washington | June 28

NYT - The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

US removes its nuclear arms from Britain

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:00:48 -0700

Julian Borger | June 26

The Guardian - The US has removed its nuclear weapons from Britain, ending a contentious presence spanning more than half a century, a report will say today. According to the study by the Federation of American Scientists, the last 110 American nuclear weapons on UK soil were withdrawn from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on the orders of President George Bush.

The report's author, Hans Kristensen, one of the leading experts on Washington's nuclear arsenal, said the move had happened in the past few years, but had only come to light yesterday.

He described the withdrawal of the B-61 "freefall", or "gravity", bombs as part of a general strategic shift since the end of the cold war.

"The northern front is not very relevant any more for these deployments. The US nuclear posture is almost entirely focused on the southern region, in Incirlik [in Turkey] and Aviano [in Italy]."

Kristensen's report is posted today here.

Welcome back to the United States. Now let's see what's on your laptop

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:43:17 -0700

Jim Puzzanghera | June 26

LA Times - Authorities need a search warrant to get at a computer in your home, and reasonable suspicion that you're up to no good to search your laptop in other places (like if you're surfing bomb-making sites while using WiFi at a coffee shop).

But the rules change when you're crossing the border back into the United States. And that has raised concerns from business travelers, privacy advocates and some lawmakers about the vulnerability of the huge amounts of information people carry on their laptops and other digital devices.

The legality of the practice hinges around whether searching a laptop is the equivalent of looking in your luggage, or more like a strip search.

Canadians knew Khadr was tortured, judge reveals

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:32:39 -0700

Andrew Mayeda | Ottawa | June 26

Can West - Canadian officials knew that Omar Khadr was subjected to an interrogation practice at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that violated international law against the use of torture, a Federal Court judge revealed Wednesday, in deciding what evidence can be turned over to Khadr's lawyers.

The Supreme Court last month ordered the federal government to surrender files compiled by Canadian Security Intelligence Service CSIS, Foreign Affairs and other government agencies and departments, on Khadr, the Canadian accused of being an al-Qaida terrorist and killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:07:40 -0700

Scott Shane | Washington | June 22

NYT - In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

The story of Mr. Martinez’s role in the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, including his contribution to the first capture of a major figure in Al Qaeda, provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture.

Our party leaders ask:

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:30:19 -0700

Follow the FISA capitulation at Unclaimed Territory

Obama announces support for "compromise" FISA/amnesty bill)

House approves surveillance bill, protects telecoms(293-129)

The FISA Giveaway

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:32:52 -0700

Targeting Steny Hoyer for his contempt for the rule of law

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Glenn Greenwald - It is now definitively clear that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is the driving force behind a bill -- written by GOP Sen. Kit Bond -- to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to vest lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty. Even as his office dishonestly denies that he is doing so, still more reports yesterday -- this one from the NYT and this one from Roll Call (sub req'd) -- confirm that a so-called "compromise" is being spearheaded by Hoyer and the House Democratic leadership. The ACLU and EFF are holding a joint call tomorrow to denounce Hoyer's "compromise" as nothing more than disguised guaranteed immunity for telecoms and, further, because "the proposed deal could be used to authorize dragnet surveillance of Americans' communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment."

Go Read! much more at Unclaimed Territory