Said he’d never heard of it.

This, from a former federal judge.

Disqualified him right there.

Though, I could be completely wrong too. LOL ;-)

It’s really hard to say. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore.

There is a key idea here. It’s no accident. That idea is to insure that the American people have as little information about how their secret government operates or what it is doing to them until it is much too late.

It is a synthesis of the paradigm seen in bananna republics and totalitarian regimes alike. We now have a heavy infusion of both in the D.N.A. of our Executive Branch, the D.O.J. and West Wing.

In other words, to answer no questions and if you read the transcripts of Alito and Roberts, the feeble Senate Judiciary committee allowed this. Even Sheldon Whitehouse, a bright analytical former U.S. Attorney is tolerating this waymore than I expected.

Now we have a Supreme Court that is very damaged goods for the next 30-40 years. I don’t know how long you can expect Ruth Ginsburg who has resigned herself to making points as she said in a recent speech with oral dissents from the Bench and John Paul Stevens who may have more courtroom litigation experience than any Supreme Court Justice in history to stay there.

If Bush or any Republican gets another shot at the Supreme Court, the results will be truly horrific. I don’t know any other way to describe it. You are going to see some opinions this term that will show the full panoply of the Alito and Roberts tilt that forecloses the rights of the individual and champions the causes of multimillion dollar corporations and a unitary executive government.

LHP @11: It’s very frustrating when folks on Capital hill appear to be acting irrationally. However, I doubt that is often the case.

See, this is what worries me. Despite appearances, our elected officals are NOT generally idiots. When they seem like idiots, many times it’s because we don’t know the WHY…and they don’t mind so much looking like idiots as long as we don’t figure WHY out.

Suddenly, a couple of Dems decide that Mukasey’s position on waterboarding is okay and they’ll vote to approve. Feinstein is NOT an idiot, so why? A trip on Air Force 1 and face time with a lame duck hardly seems worth it. Mukasey is not an idiot, so why does he pretend he doesn’t know exactly what waterboarding is? Because he’s going to be the new Abu Gonzo, protecting Bush until the Jan 2009 Pardon season.

BoxTurtle (That’s my guess)

MODS: Please delete my typo post @18. Apologies.

Is it possible Mukasey didn’t want to state his view on waterboarding, because he wants to get in, meaning, if he said, “Yes, waterboarding is torture”, he knows the republicans in the Senate (and the White House) won’t vote to confirm him, but if he said absolutely nothing, he has a good chance of becoming AG and can then say that waterboarding is torture and will be banned once he is in?

Could be. We don’t know. Liberals originally embraced this guy, so that tells me he’s a much better choice for AG than Gonzales could ever dream of being! Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the Senate when this is all said and done.

If anynoe can give me an explanation for the contrast between the high hopes of the 110th Congress and the massive failure, I’m all ears.

They abandoned you long ago and are supporting Addington, Cheney, and Fielding’s staff as well as the current OLC at DOJ, or as they call it in intelligence circles, Bush’s handlers.

I can’t believe that this piece completely ignores that Freeh made a career of wholeheartedly joining in the Monica “freeh for all” attack on Clinton.
In his tenure was the horrible meltdown of of the FBI technical capability. I have read that the agency paid hundreds of millions of dollars for a computer system that never worked, and that they still do not have “Google” capability.
There was also extensive reporting on the meltdown of their once admired technical crime labs, which became a scandal.
And the FBI leadership he put in place was widely reported to have stopped the efforts of agents on the ground to arrest suspects who then were part of the 9/11 attacks.
How on earth, you came out of all that with a favorable view of Freeh is beyond me.
You must have slept through all of his tenure, and suddenly awoken to remember the reputation he had before he was appointed at head of the FBI.
I thought he disappointed everyone, and let the agency completely self-destruct, while he turned into an right-wing attack-Clinton zealot.

You’re on the money Saundra. Freeh and his Manhatten homeboys Guilliani and Material Witness Mukasey have the magic amalgam of complete incompetence and failure and bombastic distortion of facts and outright lying. They are all dedicated to strip you of every one of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth Amendment which is a pale shell of itself if not now D.O.A.

Guilliani was told repeatedly to get the radio frequencies meshed for NYPD, NYFD, and the choppers. He failed and hundreds of firemen were given incorrect information about the status of the building and burned to death and died of smoke inhallation.

Following this, Guilliani ignored warnings to protect workers, and now hundreds of them have irreversible, severe granulomatous pulmonary disease much like moderate or severe Sarcoidosis. This has been followed by a number of hospital staffs, and is discussed in the May 2007 issue of CHEST by David Prezant, M.D.

I call it Guilliani’s Granulomatosis Syndrome or GGS in honor of the lying imbecile who participated in its etiology.

Freeh’s computer stupidity shared by many in the F.B.I. and D.O.J. is widely and accurately chronicled as well as the hemorrhaging of hundreds of millions of dollars by Reno, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Freeh, and Mueller.

Freeh and Mueller’s Folly: The FBI’s Upgrade That Wasn’t: $170 Million Bought an Unusable Computer System

F.B.I. Ends a Faltering Effort to Overhaul Computer Software

What the F.B.I. and D.O.J. are admirably successful at is forging a Fascist Police State as every day passes. Their willing dupes are your US Senators and Congressmen who merrily and stupidly rubber stamp Bush’s handlers, Addington, Cheney, and Fielding and a cast of hundreds of other attorneys that work at D.O.J. and the West Wing and on Congressional staffs.

Schmendrik Schumer has merrily hopped on the bandwagon now along with Ferragamo Feinstein, Jello Jay, Anything Bush Wants Arlen, Loosley Lenient Let it All Hang Out for Bush Leahy, and Rubber Stamp Bush Appendage Democrats too numerous to name– a list that grows every day.

The two qualities that unites Mukasey and Freeh, and Rudy 911 are their overriding ability to be self-righteous and sanctimonious, united in moving this country completely into the landscape of a police state.

Louis Freeh’s F.B.I. had their pants completely down and tied in Boa and Constrictor knots around their ankles with resepect to the facillitation of 911.

The Xgboys tried unsuccessfully to defrey criticism of Freeh’s cascade of incompetencies as it mounted.

Xgboys

Freeh did nothing to stop the fiasco where Tenet enabled Cheney and Addington and their staffs to distort accurate intelligence on both 911 terrorists and WMD in Iraq.

Judge Freeh who knew well the precedents, case law, and code section on discovery intentionally violated them by witholding 3000 pages of documents in the Oklahoma bombing case. This was clearly exculpable material and Freeh intentionally ordered it witheld and DOJ complied. It was also the case that the completely muddled and outdated computer system of the F.B.I. that had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade during Freeh’s lack of a watch, couldn’t have found all the documents on point anyway.

There is a compelling argument to be made that Louis Freeh was the worst F.B.I. director in history wasting much of his energy on undermining Bill Clinton, supressing and delaying translations crucial to stopping 911, and flying their computer modernization into the ground repeatedly while creating a wall between intelligence gathering by F.B.I. and intelligence agencies in government like C.I.A. and D.I.A. N.G.I.A., and N.S.A.

There is a good chance that Freeh, Senior Vice Chairman and member of the Executive Group of credit card giant, M.B.N.A., was there both as consultant absolutely and will play a prominent role in the inevitable Mukasey DOJ. Freeh left the F.B.I. in June, 2001 just three months before 911.

After all, Mukasey pushed some of his Fascist ideals from the trial bench of the S.D.N.Y. when he could become the whip of the D.O.J. to impose abusive material witness distortions that picked up hundreds of people and held them without access to their families or attorneys, renditioning some of them and holding some of them incommunicado today.

This is a DOJ which will carve out new territory pushing toward the grim landscape that firewalls Americans from any information and keeps track of every molecule of their personal lives solely for the purpose of seizing them and burying them.

Naomi Wolf’s 10th step to cement a Facist America becoming a reality, and the other nine were achieved efficiently in the last seven years by the Bush Administration and their Republican rubberstamps and the Democratic (in name only but never in vote) lapdogs who are but compliant appendages now to the Republican will.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

While the 911 Commission left several key questions unexplored or white washed them, they correctly nailed Freeh’s incompetent leadership.

Freeh and the clown Thomas J. Pickard and Ashcroft share the blame of bungling prevention of 911. There was plenty of blame to go around, and possibly someone who was more a contemporary of LHP in DOJ, (I have no idea), Jamie Gorelic, DAG to Reno, was instrumental in walling off DOJ and CIA and authored a memo to do it.

Of course Jamie Gorelic, true to form, weasled out of commenting on her role in failure, hiding disingenously behind her role on the 911 Commission. And of course, Gorelic deliberately never mentioned the memo or her many phone calls and conferences to execute the lack of communication, to the very naive 911 Commission.

The Freeh FBI were keystone cops when it came to terrorism, but Freeh pushed Magic Lantern and Carnivore to put keystroke tracking Trojans on your pc from your friendly ISP, and put all of your email into a matrix where it continues to go this minute.

Freeh gave the usual excuse of resources, and he also pointed the finger at impediments, many engineered by Gorelic herself.

Freeh, who has long been a patsy of the Saudi Kingdom, like the Bushies was a willing partner in what Christy Smith has referred to as “patty cake with Bandar in linking Laura Rozen’s article here:

Bandar; No More Pattycake

Freeh was deep asleep at the switch in allowing the Saudis to become as unaccountable as they are at protecting an epicenter of flourishing terrorism in “The Kingdom” that thrives today.

From Eric Lichtblaugh in The Times in April, 2004:

“While Mr. Freeh has maintained that his counterterrorism operation was hamstrung by inadequate financing, a study from the Congressional Research Service released Monday [April 9] found that F.B.I. financing rose 132 percent from 1993 to 2003, to $4.6 billion from almost $2 billion, though the pace of the increase quickened after the Sept. 11 attacks. It also determined that the money approved by Congress was nearly equal to or greater than what the Clinton and Bush administrations requested in 9 of 11 years. Money for counterterrorism and related areas rose 365 percent to $475 million from $102 million from 1997 to 2003, the study said.”

The direction of computer capability at the F.B.I. under Freeh and the current incompetent, Mueller who can’t even account for thousands of laptops and expensive firearms that have been stolen largely by F.B.I. personnel, and some handed off to D.O.J. staffers to steal, have presided over a huge hemmorhage of hundreds of millions of dollars in failed computer and IT modernization projects that have been started and repeatedly scrapped. This has caused severe systemic harm to intelligence integration, as has the emphasis and wasted energy on wiretapping and seizing the emails and bank account data of the entire American population advocated by both Freeh and Mueller.

Mark Minasi, the author of many Windows server and other books, and a frequent consultant to many law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies in government, has pointed out at meetings that backup servers were stored directly on top of primary servers at F.B.I. and other agencies instead of off site.

Freeh alleged, and I have a hard time believing this, that he did not use a computer in his office. Contrastingly, Mueller is an amatuer geek whose wife has to drag him away from his P.C. at home. Both have succeeded admirably in running the F.B.I’s computer system completely into the ground and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars purporting to, and failing to upgrade it.

David G. Binney, a former deputy FBI director under Freeh who became chief of security for IBM, repeatedly warned him specifically that the F.B.I. computer system was antiquated and in shambles. Bob E. Dies a 30 year I.B.M. vet finally asked to evaluate the F.B.I.’s computers towards the time Freeh was leaving, said he had never seen such antiquated system in a large organization, and that the Automated Case Support System was using 1980’s technology in 2001.

The Bureau had far less than one p.c. per employee, unless you want to count the subset of approximately 1500 laptops that F.B.I. employees stole outright that Mueller has not lifted a finger to recover. Most of their computers didn’t have browsers that connected to the web, and were woven together over extremely slow phone lines that couldn’t handle graphics –and often pics of suspects were mailed to agents’ home pcs, an additional security breach.

Paradoxically this was presided over by Freeh, the King of Magic Lantern, the keystroke logging Trojan Freeh wanted installed on your home pc by your ISP, and Carnivore to wiretap your emails championed and implemented by Freeh who couldn’t connect F.B.I. computers to the web and barely could find the Start button himself.

9th Circuit Ruling Endangers Privacy in Email and IP Addresses

Carnivore and Magic Lantern

Freeh also led in supressing translator Sibel Edmonds, and ignoring Coleen Rowley completely. He wasted time and resources in investigating a brothel in New Orleans, an initiative of the incompetent Ashcroft that Freeh executed, that could have been directed towards stopping 911.

This was typical of Louie Freeh’s incompetence and how he insured the success of 911, and the handlnig of Edmonds and Jan Dickerson who Edmonds claimed left crucial information out of Dickerson’s translation under Freeh was an eggregious failure.

The 911 Commission failed miserably in not giving any attention to Edmonds whatsoever.

“Because she is fluent in Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages, Edmonds, a Turkish-American, was hired by the FBI soon after Sept. 11 and given top-secret security clearance to translate some of the reams of documents seized by FBI agents who have been rounding up suspected terrorists across the United States and abroad.

Edmonds says that to her amazement, from the day she started the job, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency,- that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.”

Sibel Edmonds Vindicated

Lost In Translation [By Louis Freeh Intentionally]

Last month, the FBI took the highly unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress two years ago about the Sibel Edmonds case.

This will dovetail nicely with a takeover of FBI by a Mukasey-Freeh regime, insuring that the F.B.I. remains largely incompetent with its energies spent on gutting the constitutional rights of Americans rather than effectively investigating terror.

Freeh will absolutely help Mukasey move the United States towards a Fascist state, and your feckless Democratic Senators like Jello Jay and
Feckless Feinstein and Schmendrik Schumer who are reduced to being a wholly compliant appendage of Bush and Cheney are happily on the roarin’ train.

[mod note; Quoting this comment will land your comment in moderation.]

I have no doubt this latest clown will appoint him to some high office. I also have no doubt that he will either show his true “very conservative” (I call it right-wing) colors, or will completely cave when Bush tells him to. I’m too old to think any (and I do mean any) right-winger is an adult. I’ll believe it when I see it.