from John Palcewski
to crimetips@conus.army.mil
date Oct 30, 2007 8:16 AM
subject Conduct Unbecoming An Officer? Or Forgery?

Dear sir:

You may be aware of the recent email interchange between Col. Steven Boylan (an aide to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US Forces in Iraq), and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald.

Reviewing this correspondence you may conclude there are but two possibilities: a) Col. Boylan violated the UCMJ article outlining conduct unbecoming an officer by writing an unsolicited, ungrammatical, incoherent and highly politicized email to Mr. Greenwald, or b) someone in Col. Boylan’s office or elsewhere forged it. Which, by the way, is identity theft on a Federal computing resource.

Either way, there’s a serious crime here, and you ought to begin an investigation forthwith. You might review the matter here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Now, this is some great news. Sybil Edmunds will tell all!!:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5197

Really great news

Whether republicans are just to push for this immunity is debatable.

What can’t be debated is the democrats seeming ambivalence over this issue. I know many good dem politicians have spoken out about this, however belatedly, but why is this issue even close?

sporkovat @ 5. It seems like more and more people are coming to Greenwald’s position.

The whole system seems to be rotting at its core, and the Democratic Party — in general, with some exceptions — is but a branch of that rotting system.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’ve now reached the point where I’m seriously considering voting third party. But, even more, I’m finding myself in agreement with Grace Lee Boggs, who counseled on Bill Moyers Journal, not to expect very much help from politicians of any stripe when working for progressive social and economic change.

cheers mate. the energy and dedication of the left blogoshpere will need to find other outlets than just sheepdogging for the (D) party, else they lose a bit of credibility.

In contrast, under this bill, the FISC will need to approve both the “targeting” determination and the “minimization” procedures that are designed to protect U.S. citizens in America whose communications are intercepted incidentally. – Senator Whitehouse

This is the way Sheldon Whitehouse seems to understand (or simply pretends to believe) that the new spying authorities of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s FISA bill would apply. When I read this, having also read the House Judiciary Committee’s report about their RESTORE bill (which I highlighted here with regard to the two newspaper accounts of abusive spying affirmed by that report), I concluded that one of two options must apply:

1. Senator Whitehouse does not in fact understand the technical aspects of the spying he is helping to enable.

or, much more likely (given the testimony and documents the Intelligence Committee has been privy to behind closed doors)

2. Senator Whitehouse assumes that we in fact don’t know or understand the technical aspects of the spying he is helping to enable, and that therefore pretending it is only “incidentally” touching upon the communications of Americans in America is something he can get away with using as a cover explanation for his actions and this bill.

Neither explanation is worthy of someone of Senator Whitehouse’s experience and abilities.

For whatever reason, the House Judiciary Committee report made absolutely clear that the new spying authority includes link analysis – which collects the content (meaning, under FISA, the identity of the parties, at a minimum) of our communications inside America into massive databases (from both streaming interception and from stored private databases after the fact) for manipulation and analysis (i.e., it’s a massive fishing expedition in the American pond). See Page 16, and Footnote 27:

http://www.rules.house.gov/110…..iciary.pdf

So Senator Whitehouse is kidding nobody, and if he is really out to lunch about these details, needs to kick it up a notch in a hurry. “Targeting” in the context of the proposed new Title VII of FISA is about software programming, and “minimization” is about all the American data swept up in that programming but not ‘recognized’ as present until a later date – neither of which can really be considered “incidental” collection of the communications of Americans in the way that used to pertain under FISA.

http://intelligence.senate.gov/071025/report.pdf

Our personal security (and our right to privacy) may not be sacrificed by The Government or The State in the name of national security, or in the name of any other government-sanctioned police power wielded against our liberty. Source: The United States Constitution, Fourth Amendment.

This clearly makes the Gilded Age’s son Jay Rockefeller very uncomfortable – his people need The Government to control us to keep their lives above the fray of the masses – but too bad. Rockefeller has helped turn our Congress from the locomotive of our nation’s federal train to the caboose on a runaway Executive Branch train, and he’s now helping to push that train with this atrocious monstrosity of a FISA bill. Dianne Feinstein and apparently the authority-enamored Barbara Mikulski – hoping to be considered members of that elite group of benevolent rulers – are doing their best imitation of Mr. Rockefeller.

Senator Whitehouse needs to help Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and Ron Wyden apply the brakes to stop this train, out of respect for his own family’s service to the nation. The course our nation is on will not self-correct if left to its own devices.

The State of California several years ago passed a law to retroactively extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault cases (it was 6 years at the time) so that cases against hundreds of Catholic priests accused of pedophilia could go forward. But the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down the law as unconstitutional — thereby ending 800 cases against priests accused of sexual abuse.

If it’s unconstitutional to retroactively extend the statute of limitations against pedophilia priests, isn’t it also unconstitutional to extend retroactive immunity to phone companies?

I know the answer to my own question of course. This Supreme Court doesn’t care about law or precedent or being consistent — so it’s not like we should expect relief from them. It’s just one more example to show that we don’t live in a democracy anymore.

Cheers to Glenn Greenwald for another marvelous piece! Can we all chip in to get that dude his own nightly TV show — right after Keith Olbermann? Great stuff!

I asked what information was he waiting for and she wasn’t sure. WTF!?

I just called again today, got a different staffer who seemed a bit frazzled and rushed. He said he wasn’t aware of any decision yet, would I like to leave a message? I registered my opposition to the amnesty and said I’ll call back again.

So now I’m thinking they’re either extremely busy or are just blowing me off. I may have to schedule a visit to his Chicago office to find out for sure.