Friday News Dump: July 10, 2009

I was thinking today was a pretty slow news day, but it appears that the administration has tried to quietly sneak out quite a bit of very creepy information today in a classic Bush-style Friday news dump.

Warrantless Wiretapping Report

The Inspector General’s report on Bush’s secret warrantless wiretapping program came out today, and the Associated Press says it was “massive.”

The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be “carefully monitored.”

That sounds like a sneaky way of saying the program goes way beyond any semblance of legality. I say let’s prosecute all of the fascists who created and tried to justify this horrendous program to spy on Americans citizens as if we were all terrorists. Let’s start with the five Bush officials who refused to be interviewed by the Inspectors General: Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Assistant AG John Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Dick Cheney’s alter ego, David Addingon. And can we find out if the Obama administration is still carrying on this program, because the report apparently doesn’t say. From the AP story:

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

According Wired’s Threat Level blog,

also warned that President’ Bush’s post-9/11 extrajudicial intelligence programs involved unprecedented collection of communications, and that the government needs to be careful about storing and using that data.

Senator Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat who sits on the Intelligence committee, said the report showed the programs were “outrageous” and called for more declassification.

“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power,” Feingold said. “I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.”

The government has only admitted to eavesdropping on calls and e-mails where one end was overseas and one person was suspected to be a terrorist. It has never officially confirmed that it sucked in the telephone records of millions of Americans or eavesdropped wholesale on the internet, despite repeated media reports and confirmations from Congress members. But the report makes clear that there were more intelligence programs that the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” that the administration acknowledged after the New York Times revealed in December 2005.

And the massive spying program was apparently stunningly ineffective–at least for its supposed purpose of detecting and catching terrorists.

Despite the Bush administration’s insistence that its warrantless eavesdropping program was necessary to protect the country from another terrorist attack, FBI agents, CIA analysts and other officials had difficulty evaluating its effectiveness, according to an unclassified government report made public Friday.

The CIA made no effort to document how the program had contributed to counterterrorism successes, and CIA officials saw it as just “one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools,” the report said.

“Consequently, it is difficult to attribute the success of (any) particular counterterrorism case exclusively to the (program),” it said.

Uh huh. Did CIA officials “make no effort” to find out how well the program was serving the Agency’s own purposes (whatever they might be) though? Spencer Ackerman argues that the CIA Played a Leading Role in Warrantless Surveillance

As far as I know, the CIA involvement in domestic spying is absolutely illegal–not that I’m kidding myself that it doesn’t happen. I’d like to know if this is still going on.

Afghanistan

According to the Washington Post, “‘Extraordinary and inappropriate’ secrecy about” the spying program “undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool.”

For the first few years of the program’s operation, only three Justice Department lawyers were aware of the highly classified initiative, and intelligence analysts whose “scary memos” helped certify the program initially were kept in the dark by supervisors who sometimes ordered up more data to prepare a “compelling case,” the watchdog report said.

In addition to the wiretapping report, a couple of big stories about the war in Afghanistan were also dumped out there today. James Risen reports that

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

The Obama administration will certainly investigate these war crimes, right?

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”

If I were Mr. Prosper, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the Obama administration to investigate. So far they have mostly defended Bush’s policies on torture, domestic spying, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, according to the Washington Post,

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that Afghan security forces will have to expand far beyond currently planned levels if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war there is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Well isn’t that a shocker?

Such an expansion would require additional billions beyond the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.

McChrystal has not yet completed a 60-day assessment of the war due next month. But Defense Department officials in Washington and in Kabul said he has informed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, including in a status update this week, of the need to increase the Afghan force substantially.

Doesn’t anyone down there in D.C. remember Vietnam? Oh yeah, that was one of those “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” that Obama told us all we need to forget about.

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