Month: May 2006

Wrong numbers: According to today’s PollWatch from the National Journal, there’s no clear majority opinion among Americans on the topic of phone-record data mining by the National Secret Agency (I suggest this name change, as the agency has little to do with security and everything to do with secrecy). I suppose folks are more concerned with “American Idol” than with American ideals.

A slight majority (51 percent) told Gallup/USA Today pollsters they disapproved of the program to collect phone records, while 43 percent said they approved. A new survey from Newsweek found similar sentiments: 53 percent of respondents said they thought the program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” compared with 41 percent who deemed it a “necessary tool to combat terrorism.”

Gallup/USA Today found more than 60 percent said they would not be concerned if they knew the government had their records; 22 percent said they would be very concerned, and 13 percent said they would be somewhat concerned. Those numbers dovetail with an ABC News/Washington Post overnight poll released last week in which 66 percent of respondents said it would not bother them if they learned the NSA had a record of their calls.

But Gallup/USA Today also found that a majority of respondents (57 percent) said they would feel their “personal privacy” had been violated if they knew their phone company had handed their records over to the government; 42 percent said they would not. Nearly two-thirds said they favor immediate hearings in Congress on the issue.

When Newsweek pollsters asked if presidential powers have been overextended “in light of this news and other executive actions by the Bush-Cheney administration,” 57 percent said it had and 38 percent said it had not. Responses were split along party lines — with 81 percent of Democrats and 25 percent of Republicans answering affirmatively — but 61 percent of self-identified independents fell also said yes.

Newsweek’s poll showed another new low for Bush: 35 percent said they approved of the way he is handling his job and 59 percent said they disapproved, a slight shift from March’s 36/58 split.

The direction-of-the-country measure showed a more precipitous drop: Just 23 percent said they were satisfied with the way things are going, down 7 points since the previous poll. A slight majority — 52 percent — said they wanted to see Democrats win back control of Congress in the fall; 35 percent said they wanted the GOP to keep its grip on power.

Truthout says Karl Rove’s indictment is a done deal:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

An announcement by Fitzgerald is expected to come this week, sources close to the case said. However, the day and time is unknown. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the special prosecutor was unavailable for comment. In the past, Samborn said he could not comment on the case.

The grand jury hearing evidence in the Plame Wilson case met Friday on other matters while Fitzgerald spent the entire day at Luskin’s office. The meeting was a closely guarded secret and seems to have taken place without the knowledge of the media.

Meanwhile Democratic Underground is rife with speculation because it appears that a previously scheduled speech by Rove at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute has vanished from this week’s list of events:

A link to the list of events is here, but the list changes daily. A screenshot of the page from today is here.

The details page for Rove’s event is here, or see the screenshot here.

“Saturday Night Live” comes on way past my bedtime (and, no, we don’t have that new-fangled TiVo whatsit) but it appears that “President” Al Gore’s fake address to the nation from the Oval Office set appears to have knocked one out of the fake news park. Crooks & Liars has the video and this rough transcript:

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

In 2000 when you overwhelmingly made the decision to elect me as your 43rd president, I knew the road ahead would be difficult. We have accomplished so much yet challenges lie ahead.

In the last 6 years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack.

As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine, but I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Right now, in the 2nd week of May 2006, we are facing perhaps the worst gas crisis in history.

We have way too much gasoline. Gas is down to $0.19 a gallon and the oil companies are hurting.

I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.

I am therefore proposing a federal bailout to our oil companies because – hey if it were the other way around, you know the oil companies would help us.

[…]

Saw it coming: Two years before the existence of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying program was revealed in the news, the agency created an employee training program, including a training film, for dealing with congressional inquiries into the matter:

After leaving the National Security Agency in 1976, Joseph J. Tomba had no contact with his former employer until 2004. Then, for the first time in almost three decades, the super-secret signals intelligence agency called to ask him to come back to headquarters to be interviewed for an in-house training film. Though long retired from government service, Tomba, a former technical specialist for NSA, proceeded to Fort Meade, Md., home of the agency.

The film, however, had nothing to do with instruction about technical specialist work. It was a primer for NSA employees on how to deal with congressional inquiries and subpoenas. Tomba has a unique perspective on the subject. On Feb. 25, 1976, the West Virginia-born engineer became the first, and so far the only, NSA employee subpoenaed by Congress for his role in a domestic surveillance program. And because he was a less-than-cooperative witness before a House Government Operations subcommittee, he also became the only NSA employee to be recommended for a citation for contempt of Congress. The lack of cooperation wasn’t entirely his idea. As part of a sweeping assertion of executive privilege by President Gerald Ford, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered Tomba not to answer legislators’ questions, particularly those about Project Shamrock, under which NSA had spent the previous three decades intercepting almost all outgoing U.S. telegram traffic.

Tomba says the 2004 training film shows that NSA was preparing for a collision over its domestic activities even before the current and still not fully understood surveillance program authorized by President Bush. “What they were doing was building a training film for . . . what’s happening right now,” he says. The program shows NSA staffers how to handle such situations, he says, good evidence that the agency had reason to expect the problem might recur.

Operation Shamrock came to light in 1975 during investigations by the U.S. Senate into government intelligence abuses in the Nixon Administration. The committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), learned that three telegraph companies had turned over all their overseas communications traffic, both outbound and inbound, to the National Security Agency (NSA) on a daily basis for 30 years.

The spy program was initiated in World War II as part of the government’s wartime censorship program, but by the 1970s, political operatives in the Nixon Administration were using it to collect information on their political enemies:

In 1945, US Government SIGINT operatives met with representatives of the three main telegraph companies – ITT World Communications, Western Union International and RCA Global (both now part of MCI Worldcom) – starting Operation Shamrock, a 30-year illegal coordinated program to spy on the electronic communications of American citizens. The telegraph companies each night packaged up the day’s transmissions and handed them to operatives who sent them to NSA headquarters in Virginia [it’s actually in Fort Meade, Maryland – Ed.] for analysis. During the Vietnam War the NSA used the information gathered to compile a watch-list (Codeword: MINARET) of more than 600 “dangerous” Americans, including folksinger Joan Baez, paediatrican Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King. The NSA claims in 1974 it destroyed files on more than 75,000 other Americans it illegally collected during Shamrock.

Shamrock and MINARET came to an end only in 1975 when they were uncovered by the Church Committee, the US Senate Select Committee into spy agencies.

Investigators for the Senate’s Church Committee included L. Britt Snider, who would later serve as a CIA Inspector General and more recently headed the 9/11 congressional inquiry for a short time — and Peter Fenn, who is now a regular on cable news pundit panels, ably representing the Democratic Party establishment.

In 1999, Brett Snider wrote a short essay titled “Unlucky Shamrock,” recounting the events that led to the revelation of the NSA’s first illegal domestic spying program. Snider recalls that the investigation started with a few fits and starts but eventually he came upon Dr. Louis Tordella, who was then in retirement but who had been a deputy director at the NSA where he had been very familiar with the Shamrock program:

[…]

I can’t find another source on this, and Mark is skeptical, but what can it hurt to get in the Fitzmas spirit just in case it’s true:

Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove’s discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on “wildly speculative rumors.”

From ThinkProgress:

CongressDaily reports that former NSA staffer Russell Tice will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee next week that not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Tice will tell Congress that former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush’s nominee to be the next CIA director, oversaw more illegal activity that has yet to be disclosed.

According to the National Journal:

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said.

Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich trashed President Bush for ordering the NSA to create a database of the phone records of millions of Americans:

I’m not going to defend the indefensible. The Bush administration has an obligation to level with the American people. And I’m prepared to defend a very aggressive anti-terrorist campaign, and I’m prepared to defend the idea that the government ought to know who’s making the calls, as long as that information is only used against terrorists, and as long as the Congress knows that it’s underway.

But I don’t think the way they’ve handled this can be defended by reasonable people. It is sloppy. It is contradictory, and frankly for normal Americans, it makes no sense to listen to these three totally different explanations.

Karl Rove can’t love it that Newt is leading the rats off the sinking ship.