"The problem is," Scheppele said, "The overall memo was rescinded, but based on the behavior of the administration, you wonder if only certain parts were rescinded." Scheppele, who has studied constitutional courts in Russia, said, "As a kid of the Cold War, I would never have imagined that a Russian judge would come up to me and say, 'Can you get your country to stop torturing people because we're trying to get our police to stop doing that here. As long as you guys are doing it and doing it publically, we can't stop them.' "

That paragraph jumped out at me when I read Derrick Jackson's Boston Globe op ed this morning, which has the same title as this diary.  I apologize for not posting about it until now, but my laptop was being repaired.

You need to read the Jackson.  But let me offer a few more thoughts.

With the excellent analysis today here and the story about Talon here, I wanted to share my little bit of research regarding what John Poindexter has been doing lately. I posted this diary back on June 17th but it got little notice. So with that, I am posting it again with a few additions.

The recent debacle of Alberto Gonzales testifying before Congress just illustrates the lengths to which the Bush Administration will go to protect it’s newly gained fascist powers. Daniel Schorr had it right in his NPR Commentary yesterday (7-30-07), Selective 'Leaks' from the Bush Administration, when he said:

In an investigation of a major leak the first question asked is, "who benefited?"

Who benefitted, indeed...

Karl Marx famously remarked that historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.  In the case of President Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence, Marx had it half-right.  Americans are reliving George H.W. Bush's 1992 Iran-Contra pardons, with the same tragic consequences for the rule of law in the United States.  All that's missing in 2007 is the convenient death of one of the principal conspirators.

This story, from a few days ago on Think Progress , jumped out at me:

In the name of fighting terrorism, the FBI is seeking to create a massive new data-mining program which "bears a striking resemblance" to the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program:

The FBI is seeking $12 million for the [National Security Branch Analysis Center] in FY2008, which will include 90,000 square feet of office space and a total of 59 staff, including 23 contractors and five FBI agents. Documents predict the NSAC will include six billion records by FY2012. This amounts to 20 separate "records" for each man, woman and child in the United States. The "universe of subjects will expand exponentially" with the expanded role of the NSAC, the Justice Department documents assert.[my bold]

Of course it never stops...............

more below

I'm sure most everyone here is familiar with the Total Information Awareness program originally proposed by Adm. John Poindexter, partially implemented by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Information Awareness Office and allegedly terminated after it came to light in 2003.  I'm also sure most here know that various parts of the program weren't really terminated, only moved to assorted black programs in other agencies.

But what you may not have known is that the whole thing was outsourced to Singapore and they have now rolled out an even bigger badder program than the original TIA.

Santa Clause is Coming Town <-- Watch movie first.
And if you know what's good for you, you'll lay low. Operating from a secret, undisclosed location, Claus' Dark Ops program is without parallel. That might explain Dick Cheney's frequent visits. There has never been a credible sighting of the mysterious man and it is said that he never ventures out in daylight.

Still, he manages to maintain an impenetrable network of personnel and data. Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness initiative pales by comparison.
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Paranoid conspiracy follows below the fold.

Cross-posted at...
News Corpse, The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

The furor over New York Times reporting on international banking monitors via the Belgium SWIFT system are just blow-hards spitting dust into the wind.

If this was such a double-secret burn-before-reading program, then why did I learned of this "classified" method two years before GwB himself announced "his" initiative a few short months after 9-11 and four years before his Treasury Dept takes a gaggle of reporters overseas just to strut the money-tracking acumen "they" created...
These goats gloat when the "leak" is on their to-do list, but clutch chest and fein mortal wounds to the sheep when "leaks" aren't.

Maybe Steve Colbert can start minting the political version of an Oscar.

I think that there are a few more but I don't have Haynes Johnson's Sleepwalking Through History handy. If you know of any other convictions, I'd like to add it to the list.

Use it in good health!

Oh, and here's the money quote from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Haynes Johnson:

"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations."

The National Journal has a story that just came out about what happened to John Poindexter's old Total Information Awareness project after Congress cut off its funding in 2003.  The answer: it didn't go anywhere.

Some excerpts:

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA....

More below the fold...

Impeachment. The "I word." We've been over that ground more than once here. And there's been something of an evolution in my thinking on the subject, and probably yours, too.

But it seems every time I pick up the subject and start a discussion, I'm met with the same objections, almost always centering on the mechanics of impeachment as opposed to its propriety or necessity. I'd like to dispense with two of these objections before beginning with the rest of the series.

1. That impeaching George W. Bush presents us with the problem of President Cheney, or that even in the event that both should be impeached, President Hastert.

2. That "we need to focus on winning back Congress in 2006 before we do anything."

There appears to be a major misconception in the framing of the "wiretapping" debate.  It is not about proper warrants for a small number of Americans.  It is Millions of Americans.

It hinges on the difference between a "wiretap" and data mining.

A wiretap is recording a call or calls made by or received by a suspect (however suspect is defined with or without warrant).  The administration has been successful at framing the discussion in these terms.  As such, people can debate whether such a person should be monitored.

However, data mining is a totally different endeavor.  In this case, you cast an enormous digital "dragnet", with millions of victims looking for a needle in a haystack.

The administration didn't have an issue with FISAs time limits, it had an issue with the whole concept of having to pick people to spy on.  

Since James Risen's story about eavesdropping/data mining/wiretapping broke, I've been struck by the possibility that what we're really looking at is a cover for John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program, killed by Congress in 2004.  Note a salient comment in the Statute:

(b) None of the funds provided for Processing, analysis,
     and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign
     intelligence shall be available for deployment or
     implementation except for:
       (1) lawful military operations of the United States
     conducted outside the United States; or
       (2) lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly
     overseas, or wholly against non-United States citizens.

Did they have to stop?  No, apparently, they had to modify the program.

Another terrific opinion by Molly:

Creator's Syndicate - 12/28/05

For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

More gems below...

BACKGROUND
The Iran-Contra Affair (also known as "Irangate") was a mid-1980s political scandal in the United States. President Ronald Reagan's administration sold arms to Iran, an avowed enemy. At the time, Americans were being held hostage by Islamic terrorists in Lebanon, and it was hoped that Iran would influence the terrorists to release the hostages; at the same time, Iran, which was in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, could find few nations willing to supply it with weapons. The U.S. diverted proceeds from the sale to the Contras, anti-Communist guerrillas engaged in an insurgency against the democratically elected socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Both the sale of weapons and the funding of the Contras violated stated administration policy as well as legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, which had blocked further Contra funding.

Now, I've been rather perservating on the Iran-Contra connections of past and present for the past few days, so, naturally, I started googling Judith Miller's past and how it intersects in 1986 with the crew now at the helm of the Bush II Titanic.

Not surprisingly, of course, there was at least one glaring intersection.  But more important, looking through Miller's past opens up many more questions than it provides answers.  I haven't come to any definite conclusions myself, but I do see some patterns.  

Challenged by a conservative to present evidence that Reagan ran the most corrupt administration of the 20th century, I assembled this list of convicts from Reagan's ranks.

If anybody can provide additional info, it would be appreciated. I do know there were many others convicted, but I'd like to keep it to people who were actually employed by the administration, and to crimes that were actually related to the office they served. I've never been able to find a good list online anywhere, and so I assembled this hoping to provide a resource for others as well. As far as I know, Nixon only had eight staffers convicted of crimes against their office. Clinton, of course, only had one.

Gannon Kossacks! Get out your tin foil hat and enjoy the ride!

The players who brought us Iran/Contra and the Iraq War are doing Psy Ops in the USA through NORTHCOM under command of General Ralph Eberhart.  

What are Psy Ops?  The methods include: