Today's Must Read...WE KNEW THIS WAS COMING

It's not just foreign-to-domestic calls involving suspected terrorists. Nor library, business and medical records of American citizens in (mostly) terrorism-related cases. The list of circumstances under which law enforcement can jettison probable cause as a standard for obtaining information is expanding to include... carrying a cellphone.

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.


Basically, as carriers increasingly offer subscribers the ability to stay informed of where their associates are at all times, law enforcement gets an investigative tool. In one recent case, a DEA agent sought a drug-trafficking suspect's Nextel tracking information from a judge simply by asserting that the suspect was trafficking drugs, thereby turning probable cause on its head. The agent didn't get away with it in this case, but in several other recent cases, courts issued warrants based on a determination that the location information provides "specific and articulable facts" relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.

What does the Justice Department say about the practice? According to national-security division spokesman Dean Boyd, the department "strongly recommend[s]" retaining the probable cause standard. But judges have ruled that it's not always necessary.

Since 2005, federal magistrate judges in at least 17 cases have denied federal requests for the less-precise cellphone tracking data absent a demonstration of probable cause that a crime is being committed. Some went out of their way to issue published opinions in these otherwise sealed cases.
"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns especially when the phone is in a house or other place where privacy is reasonably expected," said Judge Stephen William Smith of the Southern District of Texas, whose 2005 opinion on the matter was among the first published.

But judges in a majority of districts have ruled otherwise on this issue, Boyd said. Shortly after Smith issued his decision, a magistrate judge in the same district approved a federal request for cell-tower data without requiring probable cause. And in December 2005, Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein of the Southern District of New York, approving a request for cell-site data, wrote that because the government did not install the "tracking device" and the user chose to carry the phone and permit transmission of its information to a carrier, no warrant was needed.

George Bush, Traitor and Liar in Chief

Former Presidential spokesliar, oops, I mean spokesman, Scott McClellan, reminded us this week that the fish rots from the head. McClellan drops the truth bombshell that implicates George Bush and Dick Cheney in the sordid outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. CNN reports that:


Amid a swelling controversy about the leak of Valerie Wilson’s name, McClellan went to the White House podium in October 2003 and told reporters that Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, had not been involved. . .

There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes in his new book, “What Happened,” which is to be released in April. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”


We knew about Rove and Libby. But now we can add the names of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Andy Card to the list of people who helped create the lie, i.e., that no one at the White House was involved in leaking the name of Valerie. We no longer have to wonder if any damage was done. We have the revelations in Valerie’s book, Fair Game, describing in detail her job as the operations chief for the Iraq Task Force and her mission of tracking down and eliminating weapons of mass destruction.



If outing a CIA intelligence officer collecting intelligence on our enemy during a time of war is not treason, then what is? George Bush commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby to help buy his silence. Why? McClellan’s revelation blows the cover on that sham. Bush was involved. Of course we will now witness the spectacle of Republicans, who delighted in castigating Bill Clinton for his confusion about the meaning of sex, themselves doing verbal gymnastics as they search for the true meaning of “involved”. Horseshit!

This is an impeachable offense. George Bush not only helped obstruct justice, but continues to obstruct justice. The President is no longer an idle bystander. He is a participant in a cover up. He knew that Rove, Libby, Card, and Cheney were involved in leaking Valerie’s name. Yet the coward, the man who failed to complete his Reserve duty, went AWOL on his staff. He sent Scott McClellan out to lie to the press.

We already knew that Bush was neither honorable nor a man or his word. Despite his vow to remove anyone involved in leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson, he kept Card, Rove and Libby safe in the White House until Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald blew the whistle. And even then, Bush refused to do the right thing. He acted immorally and illegally. Why should Scooter come clean when he knows his co-conspirator will get him off? And he did.

Now the ball is in the court of the Congress. Will the Democrats find their spine and enforce the law? I doubt it. They want the perks of power without being willing to bear the burden of upholding justice and and enforcing the law. Will the Republicans voice outrage at this betrayal? Not likely. Men of the character of Howard Baker, who called out Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, no longer lead that party.

George Bush may be genial, but now we know he is scum. Facilitating the cover up of the crime of outing a CIA operative in a time of war puts blood on his hands. It is that simple.

Good riddance to them all

There was little for the unindicted co-conspirators of the Bush administration to give thanks for this week as the clock winds down on the 14 months they have left in power.

With former White House press secretary Scott McClellan spilling the beans on who told him to lie to the American people and cover up the White House's responsibility for the criminal act of revealing the identity of a covert CIA officer, it clearly was time for some folks to begin drafting their requests for presidential pardons.

McClellan, in a forthcoming book that will tell some, if not all, reveals that his 2003 statements absolving top White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of any involvement in leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame were untrue — and that the orders to make those statements came from President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Rove and Libby.

McClellan's revelation makes it abundantly clear that a subsequent statement by Bush that White House aides had no involvement in outing Ms. Plame, and that anyone who did would be fired was also, shall we say, inoperative.

It also confirms long-held suspicions that the whole despicable affair — an attempt to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for debunking a bit of the bogus intelligence the administration wheeled out to justify invading Iraq — was orchestrated in the offices of Bush and Cheney, and with their knowledge.

It also might shed new light on why Bush quickly commuted Cheney’s hatchet man Libby's prison sentence after he was convicted on four counts of lying to federal investigators. It simply wouldn’t do to have Libby rolling over on his bosses.

Somehow, I have a strong feeling that this isn't the only or the last revelation of wrong-doing and criminality that we're likely to hear before and after Bush and Co. leave office, or that additional presidential acts of clemency will be needed to spare other top administration officials from prison and buy their silence.

What we've witnessed and endured during seven long years of the Bush presidency is the inevitable consequence of bringing vicious and unprincipled but successful political campaigners — attack dogs — into top White House jobs.

The idea that a political campaign should address any and all criticism by going for the throats of those who dare to question it may work on election day but it doesn’t work, or shouldn’t, when the full weight and power of the federal government is put behind it.

We are a better people and this is a better country than that, and this is why, when it's weighed and judged, the Bush presidency will be found to have perverted not only our system but also the very principles on which our nation was founded.

We don’t rush into a war that has cost so many lives and so much national treasure, and has so damaged our standing in the world, based on a tissue of lies. But under the leadership of George W. Bush, that's what we did in Iraq.

We don’t stand idly by, backs turned and eyes closed, while in wartime our friends and political contributors loot the national treasury of billions of taxpayer dollars. But the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress did just that.

We don’t send our soldiers and Marines into combat without enough of everything they need to fight, survive and win. But that's what this administration and its political operatives in charge of the Pentagon did.

We don’t turn the office of the attorney general and key parts of the Justice Department into a branch of a partisan political campaign — gutting offices charged with protecting the civil rights of minorities and directing the prosecution of those of a different political party — but this administration did.

We don’t declare war and then expect that the entire sacrifice will be borne by the half a percent of our population who wear uniforms. We don’t fight a long and costly war by cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and borrowing trillions of dollars to finance it from foreign competitors such as China. But this administration did.

We don’t prosecute a war to spread democracy by curtailing democracy and suspending the Bill of Rights at home. We cannot promote our principles abroad by denying the same principles — the right to a lawyer, the right to a fair trial, the right to be secure in our homes — to ourselves. But this administration did.

We don’t beat or torture confessions out of prisoners in violation of our laws and the laws of the civilized world. We don’t lock people up and hold them incommunicado for years without charges or trials. But this administration did and does.

We don’t applaud and cheer an administration and a Congress that make the rich vastly richer, the middle class less secure and the poor even poorer. But this administration has done just that, in violation of our principles and the principles of love, peace and charity that are engrained in the Christianity that these rogues and charlatans embrace so publicly but violate every day.

It will be a good day when they are gone, and good riddance to them all.

Senator: U.S. has become haven for war criminals

WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.

America has become a haven for the world's war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. There's been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national.

"This is unacceptable. Our laws must change and our determination to end this shameful situation must become a priority," Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, said at a hearing of the subcommittee Wednesday.

He's trying to get more information about specific cases.

One is that of Juan Romagoza Arce, the director of a clinic that provides free care for the poor in Washington. In 1980, Romagoza was a young doctor caring for the poor in El Salvador during the early period of his country's civil war when the military seized him and tortured him for 22 days. An estimated 75,000 people died in the 12-year war.

Romagoza told Durbin that he was given electric shocks until he lost consciousness, then kicked and burned with cigarettes until he came to. He also told of being sodomized, nearly asphyxiated in a hood containing calcium oxide — which can cause severe shortness of breath when inhaled — and subjected to waterboarding, including being hung by his feet with his head immersed in water until he nearly drowned.

Romagoza and two other torture victims brought a civil suit in U.S. federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., against two Salvadoran generals who moved to Florida in 1989: Jose Guillermo Garcia, who was the minister of defense, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was the director general of the Salvadoran National Guard.

In 2002, a jury found them liable for the torture of the three, and a judgment of $54.6 million was entered against them and upheld on appeal.

Romagoza said he didn't expect to see any of the money.

He testified that he'd received many threatening phone calls and letters at the time of the trial but that he'd overcome his fears and testified.

"I felt like I was in the prow of a boat and that there were many people rowing behind that were moving me into this moment," he told Durbin's panel. "I felt that if I looked back at them I'd weep, because I'd see them again, wounded, tortured, raped, naked, torn and bleeding. So I didn't look back, but I felt their support, their strength and their energy."

He said he and others were angry and frustrated that the two men "live in the same country where we have found refuge from their persecution."

Durbin said he'd send a letter asking the U.S. attorney in South Florida what was being done in the case.

"If he says he doesn't have authority, we should change the law. If he has the authority and is not using it, we should change the U.S. attorney," Durbin said.

Durbin and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., have introduced legislation that would authorize the government to prosecute anyone found in the U.S. who's guilty of genocide, human trafficking or recruiting child soldiers.

David Scheffer is a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration. He testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, "one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts — criminal and military — to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. . . .

"That, however, is not the case."

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NOV. 14

The date of Wednesday's hearing is significant in the history of war crimes, Justice Department official Sigal P. Mandelker told the subcommittee:

On Nov. 14, 1935, the Third Reich issued regulations that deprived Germany's Jews of their citizenship and established a system to classify people as Jews based on their ancestry and affiliations.

On Nov. 14, 1945, the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg, Germany, to try Nazi leaders.

On Nov. 14, 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued its first indictments on genocide charges over the massacres of as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Two of the leaders indicted, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain fugitives.

Does America (heart) waterboarding?

Two centuries after the Bill of Rights, a half century after the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, torture is no longer an evil to be denounced; it’s an open question. “McCain Finds Sympathy on Torture Issue,” a Nov. 16 New York Times headline proclaimed. It doesn’t get any more official than that. Forget earmarks and Social Security; in Election 2008 it looks as if we get to vote on stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and maybe even the rack. And the blogosphere, as usual, has got a head start on arguing what kind of place America wants to be.

With McCain a “courageous” exception among GOP candidates, “The use of torture is fast becoming a core principle of today's Republican party,” conservative Andrew Sullivan asserts at TheAtlantic.com. “My sense is that many in the base are uncomfortable with the defensiveness of the Bush people, and their use of euphemism in this respect.”

Scott Horton, the international law expert who writes the No Comment blog at Harper’s, offers confirmation. He reports that “movement conservatives,” meeting with Attorney General Michael Muskasey before his confirmation hearings, pressed the nominee to protect those in the Bush administration who opened the door to waterboarding and other forms of torture. “There has been no shortage of litmus tests in the past: abortion, gay marriage, the flag amendment—whatever hot-button issue the G.O.P. cooks up for its next election campaign. But the torture litmus test is new,” Horton contends.

The suggestion that conservatives have made torture a political litmus test might be expected to provoke outrage in the right blogosphere. The response, though, has been surprisingly muted.

Some conservative bloggers have adopted the Rudy Giuliani stance. They say they oppose torture, but just aren’t ready to put waterboarding in that category. As Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters writes, “We are back to the issue of whether frightening terrorists amounts to torture, and whether the shocking nature of a technique that raises few safety risks outweighs the value of the lives it might save.” Or as Giuliani himself more succinctly put it, “It depends on how it's done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”

That agnostic approach has taken heavy flak from the big guns on the other side of the torture divide. Hunter at DailyKos offers a chillingly detailed description of waterboarding, "the things that are not torture." “Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period,” agrees terrorism expert Malcolm Nance at Small Wars Journal. “Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that…when done right is controlled death.” Eric Mueller, law professor at the University of North Carolina, cites decisions from Mississippi courts in the 1920s that found waterboarding to be torture, even in a case where it was used on a young black man charged with killing a white man. “If it was torture in Mississippi, then it's definitely torture, right?” Mueller asks?

For some on the right, though, agnosticism on waterboarding is only for wimps. “Cryptic statements, such as President Bush’s comment that ‘This government does not torture people,’ don’t cut it…,” Deroy Murdock declaims at National Review. “Today’s clueless anti-waterboarding rhetoric merits this tactic’s vigorous defense. Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.… Though clearly uncomfortable, waterboarding loosens lips without causing permanent physical injuries (and unlikely even temporary ones). If terrorists suffer long-term nightmares about waterboarding, better that than more Americans crying themselves to sleep after their loved ones have been shredded by bombs or baked in skyscrapers.”

Which prompts Joe Carter to wonder: “How degraded has conservatism become?” Noting the opposition to torture by McCain and other former military leaders, Carter, a former Marine and now director of web communications at the Family Research Council, writes at the Evangelical Outpost: “As Christians we must never condone the use of methods that threaten to undermine the inherent dignity of the person created in the image of God. Murdock may believe there is nothing “repugnant” about waterboarding. But there is something clearly repugnant about our unwillingness to distance ourselves from the fear-driven utilitarians willing to embrace the use of torture.”

Lest you think that all Christians agree, don’t stop with Carter’s post; read the comments, too. Monty Python had it right. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

"The manual also indicates some prisoners were designated as off limits to visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross, something the m

" No Access: No contact of any kind with the ICRC. This includes the
delivery of ICRC mail."
a. Phase One Behavior Management Plan (First thirty days or as directed
by JIG [Joint Intelligence Group]). The purpose of the Behavior Management
Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt
by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates
on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his
interrogator. During the first two weeks at Camp Delta, classify the
detainees as Level 5 and house in a Maximum Security Unit (MSU) Block.
During this time, the following conditions will apply:

(1) Restricted contact: No ICRC or Chaplain contact
(2) No books or mail privileges
(3) MREs for all meals.
(4) Basic comfort items only:
(a) ISO Mat
(b) One blanket
(c) One towel
(d) Toothpaste/finger toothbrush
(e) One Styrofoam cup
(f) Bar of soap
(g) Camp Rules
(h) No Koran, prayer beads, prayer cap.
(5) Mail writing and delivery will be at the direction of the J-2.
b. Phase Two Behavior Management Plan. The two-week period following Phase
1 will continue the process of isolating the detainee and fostering
dependence on the interrogator. Until the JIG Commander changes his
classification, the detainee will remain a Level 5 with the following:
(1) Continued MSU
(2) Koran, prayer beads and prayer cap distributed by interrogator
(3) Contacts decided by interrogator
(4) Interrogator decides when to move the
detainee to general population.

"Caution: the use of isolation as an interrogation technique requires
detailed implementation instructions, including specific guidelines
regarding the length of isolation, medical and psychological review, and
approvals for extension of the length of by the appropriate level in the
chain of command. This technique is not know to have been generally used
for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days. Those nations that
believe that detainees are subject to POW protections may view use of this
technique as inconsistent with the requirements of Geneva III, Article 13
which provides that POWs must be protected against acts of intimidation;
Article 14 which provides that POWs are entitled to respect for their
person; Article 34 which prohibits coercion and Article 126 which ensures
access and basic standards of treatment. Although the provisions of Geneva
are not applicable to the interrogation of unlawful combatants,
consideration should be given to these views prior to application of this
technique."