Bobby G & Punaise/Berkeley: If you want to round out your evening, and I mean this most respectfully, you might REALLY want to check out http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/… for tonight’s post. I understand if you want to put on your tinfoil hats (you may want to rip them off once at site). Just a hint, the NSA taps HE SAYS… roved over into its own employees, journalists … and was named FirstFruits. whototrustwhototrust?

“It is good that the CIA is directly investigating these potential errors.”

Since when did investigations by the IGs of the department mean anything? please!

It is like the internal audit department of Enron (that works for Andrew Fastow) investigating the Company’s accounting. By suggesting that somehow the IGs serve as a check, you are according undeserving credibility to the system. Perhaps you can give us an example of an instance where the IG’s oversight has prevented a government excess from being committed,

j houston: glad to be of a bit of help. I know there’s folks here who find Wayne Madsen unreliable but I would suggest looking at his site. The readers are right, he is definitely out there, but he has a couple of fascinating reads on Brewster Jennings and I’m sure you’re capable of sorting through it for your own conclusions. It’s called the Wayne Madsen Report.

In some respects, I don’t know that we shouldn’t have absolute transparency in our security efforts as well.

sorry, but I have to disagree.

What is key here is that there is a “contract” of sorts between the American people and their President — we will believe the President even when he lies, because his lies are in the service of a greater truth that he cannot reveal without compromising “sources and methods.”

Bush has broken that contract repeatedly, but lying to the American people without knowing more than he could tell us.

The proper corrective is not to dispense with the system that requires Americans to trust their President, but to punish the President who exploits that system and operates in bad faith.

The solution is the impeachment and conviction of George W. Bush which will send a message to future Presidents — Do NOT Fuck with the trust that the American People honor you with.

Why is it good that the CIA is investigating itself? I think I can guess what they will conclude…

Many many thanks to all that responded with great tips.

Mainsailset: thanks, I have bookmarked the echochamberproject for later, it looks promising.

Constant Reader: thanks, I was hoping Santa would bring me that book, but I think he is tired of all this squabbling. I will look for it myself.

Kathi: yeah, I’ve read a number of things along these lines. One, I can’t remember where now, posited that Brewster was blown because it foiled a Dod attempt to plant false WMD evidence in Iraq, via Turkey. It is certainly plausible, because blowing the cover of an undercover agent (and operation) always seemed a bizarre way to discredit Joe Wilson to me, if it was just for revenge. However, that may have been it, hubris is a powerful thing.

The issue that has me thinking about all this, probably already covered by others, I don’t know, is this very thing. How bad was the fallout from Plame’s exposure? How damaging to the country? to other agents and their operatives? I’ve longed suspected that Fitzgerald knows a lot about this, which, of course, he can’t talk about publicly, and that his outrage over it may in part be driving his determination to bring the perpetrators down. Pure speculation on my part.

What I worry about is that he will not be allowed to bring any of this to light at trial(s) because of “national security” considerations, but this is information that we need to know and have a right to now. Simply proving that Libby and maybe others lied and obstructed justice is not enough because many people will still believe it was all a tempest in a teacup and the prosecutions were just “the criminalization of politics,” unless people understand the depth of the crime against the nation.

uh, please excuse me kind people, I just realized that I quoted Tom DeLay. I need to go gargle with some good bourbon now.

Malkin gives me the heeby-jeebies.

Rendition = kidnapping, let’s not be so coy, too many euphemisms.

Ugh. Malkin, a babe?

Makes me think of the old Rodney Dangerfield line: “Last time I saw a mouth like that it had a hook in it…”

Malkin is a self-hater just like closeted Republican gays who support “Defense of Marriage” anti-gay marriage bills.

She’s not an American citizen per se and she knows it; she’s got dual American-Philippine citizenship, making all her bluster about immigrants and national security dicey at very best. Which does make me wonder: what is it with Philippines and this administration anyhow, from the alleged spies in the VP’s office to Ralston to Malkin???

Whats’ the deal with Turley– how did he regain his sanity? Does the medical profession know about this transformation?

Michelle is a total bitch. You’re just jealous.

Jane:

Maybe that comment “Michelle is a total babe. You’re just jealous” was really posted by Michelle and SHE is jealous of you!

“How do we walk ourselves back from the edge?”

I’m not sure, but stringing George W. up by his dick would probably be a good way to start…hey, at least we might get back a little bit of respect from our allies.
_

Here we go…

WASHINGTON (AP) – A lawyer for an Islamic scholar convicted of exhorting followers to take up arms against U.S. forces overseas wants a judge to determine whether evidence against his client was gathered by a secret domestic spying program.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said there “seems to be a great likelihood” that Ali al-Timimi, a northern Virginia Islamic cleric, was “subject to this operation.”

President Bush has acknowledged that within days of the Sept. 11 attacks he authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless intercepts of conversations between people in the United States and others abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates.

In doing so, the administration bypassed the nearly 30-year-old secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court established to oversee the government’s handling of espionage and terrorism investigations.

Turley already has appealed the case to the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking that al-Timimi’s conviction and life sentence be overturned. Turley argued that the prosecution was a violation of al-Timimi’s free speech rights. His conviction was based on statements he made at a dinner days after the Sept. 11 attacks at which he urged several young Muslim men to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops overseas.

Al-Timimi’s lawyer said he recently has contacted federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., where a jury convicted al-Timimi in April, seeking their cooperation in asking the appeals court to return the case to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema. She presided over al-Timimi’s monthlong trial.

Brinkema could determine whether NSA-gathered evidence was used against al-Timimi, without the court being told, Turley said. She also could press the government to reveal whether it withheld evidence gathered by the NSA that could have helped al-Timimi’s defense, he said.

If prosecutors decline to go along, Turley said, he will file a request next week asking the appeals court to send the case back to Brinkema.

Prosecutors probably did not know about the domestic spying program, Turley said. “It’s possible that prosecutors had no idea of the origin of this evidence.”

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Wednesday that the administration would not comment on pending cases. “I don’t think it should serve as any surprise that defense attorneys are looking for ways to represent their clients,” he said. “That’s what defense attorneys do.”

—

“[O]r have we already fallen and are still, in fact, “freefalling,” with plenty of denial but little collective will to apprehend ANY bottom?”

Yes. That one.

It’s a toxic mix of demographics, economic consolidation, and coming-of-age of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

Most people aren’t even aware of half this stuff. And those who are look at you and say things like “But don’t we need to protect ourselves from terrorists?” and “Why should I care what happens to some bad guys?”

So, yeah, we haven’t even begun to hit bottom yet. We won’t until Middle America’s had a bellyful of Bushist/GOP Fascism Lite – and that won’t happen until it touches Middle America directly. And we’re a long way from that happening.

There was a post on one of the other blogs a few weeks ago on this topic. The suggestion–which I wholeheartedly agree with–was that we’re going to need some sort of Truth Commission to sort all of this out, just like South Africa had when it went democratic. That’s how bad it is.

On the 10% error rate: One place I worked demoted people who couldn’t keep their error rate below 10%. Those at the lowest level got shipped out. Sounds like a good idea here, too.

Madsen is looking less wrong by the day but that may just be me …

another source not widely liked here but often out in front of W news is Capitol Hill Blues and they have a great bit today on King George:

http://www.capitolhillblue.com…..7910.shtml

as well as a piece by Doug Thompson about repubs getting upset at W

“Michelle is a total babe. You’re just jealous.”

Oh pul-EEEEEEEEZE !!!!

If that was the last bootie left on the planet, I’d switch.

–

ugh, we didn’t jump, we were pushed!

jhouston – aside from the excellence of firedoglake, and leading blogs, there are also liberal and centrist news services such as therawstory.com and The Huffington Post, and afterdowningstreet.org, truthout.org, and Common Dreams to name some faves. The sites offer links to articles from a wide range of sources.

On the topics you asked about, I recommend articles by (apologies if I spell anything wrong): Jason Leopold, Larisa Alexandrovna, Murray Waas, Ray McGovern, and Larry Johnson. There are many other columnists and investigative reporters with articles on these sites. Next time I go there I’ll take note of other authors I like.

Then there is the massive report just released by Rep. John Conyers. “The Constitution in Crisis” which addresses the topics. At afterdowningstreet.org you can see many crucial documents on the topics you are interested in. Maybe start there, and read some key documents in the sidebar on the left.

We citizens can best defend our Constitution not only through action, but also by doing our homework. I think it is our duty to be informed and vocal, just as Congress has duties it must now perform to check the abuses of power by the Executive Branch.

So, I’m lifting a mug of hot buttered rum to all those seeking to understand and confront the critical issues before us. Hooray for the legal analysis here. Hooray for anyone who doesn’t play ostrich.

I just got my favorite RW comment ever over at the HuffPo on Malkin:

“Michelle is a total babe. You’re just jealous.”

Genius.

punaise / berkeley -

I’m with you. Madsen has been majorly wrong on a lot of stuff. He’s in love with himself. And busy selling product.

—

Wayne Madsen

This may be unfounded, but that name sets off my Tin Foil Hat Alert.

We can’t walk back from the edge if they keep moving the edge away from us.

Kathi – I’m with you about Brewster Jennings. According to Wayne Madsen, operatives who were under the Brewster Jennings umbrella were also outed and at least one was tortured and subsequently died. The company had a fascinating background and was deeply involved in Russian/Middle East actual WMD transactions after cold war.

ralphbon — thanks for the Billmon link. Too good.

jhouston: A good read, for context, is Joe Wilson’s book, “The Politics of Truth.” I found it informative on what our diplomatic corps does out there in the world, and his accounts of diplomacy and life in Africa helped me put a lot of the recent info into better context. It also reminded me that he had been criticizing the administration long before they blasted his wife’s NOC cover.

jHouston

I still stand by my assertion that the blowing of Brewster Jennings was the REAL goal and that Plame was just collateral damage.

This front was set up to investigate Nuclear Proliferation and WMD as I understand it and as such presented a threat to the Administrations case for going to war.

By outing Brewster Jennings, they crippled the people in the CIA who were “not going along with the program!”

/”How do we walk ourselves back from the edge?”/

with sanctioned torture, covert burning, indefinite detentions, questionable renditions, illegal wiretapping, politicized intel perversion, politicized dod subversion, effects and permutations potentially related thereto, i.e., meet the fan — are we really hedging the edge?

or have we already fallen and are still, in fact, “freefalling,” with plenty of denial but little collective will to apprehend ANY bottom?

jhouston: I would add another source to the excellent ones already given: try http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/717. Bye has done some excellent investigation. Good luck

What was the Nation thinking?

As fun as it was to hear Wilkerson say “cabal,” his and Powell’s dance of the seven fucking veils is a tiresome distraction.

A commenter on WashNote aptly wrote that calling Wilkerson Progressive of the Year is like calling Sammy “The Bull” Gravano FBI Agent of the Year.

Billmon dispatched Wilkerson with apppropriate dispatch.

and many thanks to you also, ReddHedd. I’m there now and you are right, great stuff. I will be posting a ‘crackpot theory’ on this subject in the next day or two.

Sonate – I recently took a look at the Democratic Leadership Council site – http://www.dlc.org – and it is informative. See their “Bull Moose Blog” – esp the Dec 20 entry about “Big Brother W?” If these are the marching orders, we won’t be seeing folks like Hilary stepping up any time soon.

jHouston — let me second Jane on the eRiposte tip. First rate stuff — incredible detail on the Niger story. Really excellent work.

Walk back from the ledge?
How about war crime trials at the Hague when the Chinese, Brazilian and EU UN Expeditionary Forces come to restore US democracy to Washington.
And then a truth and reconciliation commission.
I just heard today’s PigBoy clone screaming at a returned Iraqi veteran who was upset about the illegal wiretapping…”things have changed since 911!!!! Free-dumb isn’t free…”
yeah, baba, and arbeit macht frei! Rock and roll in 2006

“Lawrence Wilkerson Named Most Valuable Progressive by Nation Magazine “

snip…..

“
* MVP — Executive Branch:

Yes, there was one. It’s Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the retired U.S. Army colonel who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell until Powell exited the State Department in January, 2005.

After leaving his position, Wilkerson began revealing the dark secrets of the Bush-Cheney interregnum, telling a New America Foundation gathering in October that during his years in the administration: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

Wilkerson warned that, with “a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either,” the country is headed in an exceptionally dangerous direction. “I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time,” Wilkerson explained.

“And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

That is truth telling of a quality and a scope all too rarely witnessed in the Washington of Bush and Cheney.”……..

http://www.thewashingtonnote.c…..01164.html

Thanks Jane,
I have been digging around at Talking Points Memo, with some good results, but now will hie myself over to the LeftCoaster forthwith!

Still outraged, still paying attention

“Now, more than ever”

Where is the outrage of the congressional Dems on this issue, the wiretaps, e-mail spying, the Plame outing, and several more scandals I will not mention?

The Dems seem either numb, out-of-touch, or part of the problem. I am getting more upset to find as these scandals unfold weekly, the Dems respond weakly!

And my letters to the Dems haven’t helped. All I get in reply is condescending form-letter pablum. (My Republican senator, who disagrees with my positions, has replied to me with more reasoning and logic than the DNC or elected Dem officials.)

CIA investigates CIA … why am I not impressed?

Yeah, that’s almost as farfetched as the White House running ethics classes…oh, wait.

GSD -

You put your finger exactly on it. Bush appeals to our fears at every turn, exhorting us to be Very Afraid, and to lean unquestioningly on him to “protect” us. He wants a compliant Perpetual Code Brown state. His absurd arrogant “bring ‘em on” swagger is the measure of his own record of life-long cowardice (utterly apparent in his own Bubble Boy, approved-audiences-only insularity). The only thing he knows, consequently, is appeals to cowardice.

—

Government incompetence with the Muslim radiological raids, guess they didn’t get in there quick enough to plant evidence.

I note with horror that when some of the government employees involved in these warrantless raids complained about violation of rights, they were threatened with being fired.

So now they can come into your home without a warrant, and if questioned, just say Whooops we thought you were Muslim.

Where does it stop.

While we are walking towards the edge…the fake pentagon subsidized news by Iraqi journalists. Does anyone know of a specific article? And then, how can you tell if it was an article fed by Lincoln (Christian Bailey)?

The next administration needs to take all the photos, all the files, and dump them in front of the U.N for the whole world to see.

Good luck.

Why do you think bush fired the Archivist of the US?

How much of this info has and will be classified by the time Bush and Cheney leave office?

How many pardons will he have to give during his final days to keep the truth hidden?

They are already looking ahead and plan to have all this stuff hidden. It’ll take 50 years for the truth to come out……….

jhouston — eriposte at the Left Coaster. Everybody’s source for Niger stuff.

Ugh,

While I do believe that the vote in 2004 ratified and solidified our ever dwindling moral leadership spot in the world stage. It is the election in 2006 that will either allow the nation to sink further into autocracy and democractically engineered despotism or the nation will shake of the torpor and medication offered by the big daddy fear mongers and vote for investigation, vindication, and redemption.

The cornered dog of the Bush/Rove/Cheney machine will ramp up fears and terrors anew to prevent what would be the ulitmate exposure and dismantling of their Machiavellan silent coups d’etat.

-GSD

“Hero In Error” update:

Ahmed Chalabi’s bad showing

Ahmed Chalabi, friends of his had been saying not long ago, is a survivor. The former exile and longtime associate of neocons in the Bush administration faced a bit of trouble — O.K., a lot of trouble — finding his political legs in his native land shortly after the war began, but in recent months Chalabi looked to be on the rebound, earning praise for his effectiveness in the interim government, and predicted to gain a strong following in the Dec. 15 election. Some analysts even suggested Chalabi would become Iraq’s first prime minister.

But ’twas not to be. Results streaming out of Iraq now prove how unpopular a figure Chalabi really is there. With 95 percent of the vote counted, the Washington Post reports, Chalabi’s faction looks like a stinker: The party is 8,000 votes short of the 40,000 needed to gain a single seat in the National Assembly. And without any representation in that body, Chalabi could well be shut out from holding any posts in the government.

It’s probably premature to call Chalabi out for the count; as Kos notes, “Chalabi is like a horror movie villain — he keeps coming back every time we think he’s been killed good and dead.” But as a measure of how profoundly wrong the Bushies were in their pre-war assessment of the Iraqi mood, Chalabi’s bad showing is as good as it gets.

– Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com

I keep hoping there’s an RPG out there with this prick’s name on it.
—

a first rate source (FDL-type first rate)

firedoglake: the new gold standard

Yeah, start the walk back from the edge by disclosing EVERYTHING about the Bush Continuing Criminal Enterprise to the world at large. Continue that walk back by charging and prosecuting in American courts the sonsabitches responsible for the crimes. And maybe conclude the walk back, after they have been convicted and sentenced, by offering them amnesty, to try to heal the horrific wound they have caused in America’s reputation, standing, and body politic.

Good morning all – and “Good morning to you, Text-Sniffing Algorithm!” (oh thank you Ralphbon for waking me with a roar of laughter!)

In the Katrina thread below, I’ve just posted information from Common Ground Relief and links to some tales about their work – check it out – and if you can, help them out. These folks are on the ground making a difference and doing it right.

And Me – so glad you are back! and thanks for the AmCon article – wow!

It is good that the CIA is directly investigating these potential errors…

To even go there, Redd, is to take the bait. “Errors” are irrelevant; the program is illegitimate.

The indispensable Eli Stephens, of Left I on the News, nails it. Responding to the quote about someone possibly being grabbed “wrongly,” he notes:

So, if you were grabbed “rightly” (in other words, George Bush or John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzalez said you were a terrorist and you were the right Jose Padilla, not the wrong one), or if you were directly “linked” to terrorism (e.g., you once Googled “Osama bin Laden”), then rendition to foreign countries where you “might” be tortured is perfectly ok, and not even worth discussing, nevertheless [sic; he meant “much less”] investigating.

I see two loose analogies here, first to the “illegal” West Bank settlements that Israel periodically, magnanimously dismantles, ignoring the blatant illegality (per Geneva) of ANY settlement on an occupied territory.

The other is to the New York Times’s Corrections column, which Alex Cockburn once noted exists solely to sustain the pretense that everything else in the paper is true.

Wilson46201,
thanks a bunch! I have been to both of these blogs before, but have not visited them regularly – there are so many great blogs out there and so little time!

But I will go back to them now and mine their archives.

Who would have thought that Americans would need an administration (the next one) to model its behavior after Khrushchev?! And yet that is precisely what’s needed…

Transparency. Utter and complete transparency on everything that is revealed as unethical and illegal.

Woodchuck is absolutely right. But there’s more to it than this; we are, as a society, advocating more transparency. We need to make it crystal clear this is the standard for government operations, that citizens can see their government and tax dollars at work, doing for them what their aggregate democratic power expects.

In some respects, I don’t know that we shouldn’t have absolute transparency in our security efforts as well. What would terrorists do if they knew with absolute certainty that we had a bead on them, were watching them, could see their plans? Would they continue their efforts?

For that matter, what would absolute transparency do to the political process here if we could see all transactions in the open and see all the horsetrading? It bothered me to no end when Carville complained about the process leading up to Howard Dean’s DNC chairmanship — somebody ought to have fixed this in the backrooms or something to that effect. How in the world is that democratic (little d), having the powers inside the political machine cook the leadership?

What would happen if reporting was transparent? Wouldn’t we have greater trust in an organization that showed how it came by its information — as compared to NYT, for example, and the leaked information that Miller received about the aluminum tubes?

Wishful thinking, I know, that our society would get absolute transparency in public functions and absolute privacy in personal affairs. But it’s the inversion of these two issues that’s at the root of every bit of evil that’s come out of this administration.

woodchuck: The next administration needs to take all the photos, all the files, and dump them in front of the U.N for the whole world to see.

And hand over Chimpy and his lackeys to the World Court for prosecution.

http://www.warandpiece.com/ and
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
are two basic sources that have been following the Niger forgeries story for years now. Those two blogs are just generally good in general too…

Dear FireDogLake and your well informed readers,
I would like to ask 2 favors of you. While Jane & ReddHedd comment on many topics, they are especially expert on the legal aspects & ramifications of Plamegate and other issues. My request is this:
Does anyone know of a first rate source (FDL-type first rate) on the Niger forgeries? I ask because I have the feeling that, just as “following the money” was so crucial to the Watergate story, following the forgeries is an underrated key to the whole Plamegate scandal.
The second is, does anyone know of a similarly excellent source on the damage caused by the outing of V. Plame, i.e., blowing the cover on the whole Brewster Jennings operation?
I know that the administration’s mouthpieces have been bleating forever that no significant damage was done, but we know better than to trust them. I think the extent (or lack thereof) of the damage will be necessary for understandinging this scandal in its larger historical perspective. Thanks in advance for your help, and keep up the good work.

Oopsie. Can we please have a do-over?

“One thing they never really mention is that the error rate for mistakes could be as high as 10%. How could any American tolerate that?”

The “false positive” rate at Abu “Gar-Ay-beee” (Bushspeak) was perhaps 90%. The whoring Affirmative Action hire Condi-sleeza speaks about the difficult new circumstances of dealing with “these captured terrorists.” It’s be one thing if the false positive rate was zero. But we know better.

—

How do we walk ourselves back from the edge?

Too late, we jumped off the ledge in November last year.

We have to want to walk back from the edge. Sounds like we’re not there yet. Of course by the time we get there, it could be too late.

I think woodchuck is right. The next administration is going to have to come clean in a big and public way.

Of course, part of me can just see these guys suddenly saying that yes, GW didn’t really win the 2000 election afterall, so really he only won one term, so he can run for re-election for what will only be a second term since the first wasn’t really his. To suggest otherwise would be unpatriotic.

CIA investigates CIA … why am I not impressed? Oh, and whatever happened to the Dear Leader’s investigation of his own Katrina (in)actions? [sigh]

Here’s the thing, Redd. Put together the extraordinary renditions with enemy combatant status with the power to hold and torture a defendant indefinitely without trial, and who cares whether the wiretapped evidence is admissable at trial? There’s no need for a trial, a judge, or any due process at all.

One thing they never really mention is that the error rate for mistakes could be as high as 10%. How could any American tolerate that?

The only way to walk ourselves back from the edge is to be totally open and honest about it. The next administration needs to take all the photos, all the files, and dump them in front of the U.N for the whole world to see.

Am I first? Good morning. Great post below on the wiretaps.