Good post. I am looking into these issues on my blog.

Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !

They don’t get rid of the corruption, they just shuffle it.

Like I say though, this is a gift for progressives. Republicans obviously cannot shake this guy or they would. Believe it, Delay is NOT an asset, but they own him. Good.

It won’t be the hammer. His poll #’s suck in his district. He’s goin’ down.

Okay. I’m six feet tall.

Comment by Wayne A. Schneider #26

Wayne,

…now tell us something we DON’t know…

why thats just dumb.
makes the congress and justice dept subcomm look real ‘credible’

http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2006/02/senate-republicans-screw-veterans.html

The top one-fifth of the top one percent get tax cuts at the expense of our Veterans. Where are all the trolls and ultra-radical R’s who spout the words “We support the troops!”???? Huh? Why aren’t they shouting from the rooftops about their political party is screwing our honored Veterans? So, NOW who’s the self proclaimed party of “support the troops”? It sure as heck aint the Republicans! Their words do NOT match their deeds!

I guess it would take “ethics” and “honor” to stand up to the Republican party in control of our nation to ask them why they care for the ultra-rich over the needs of our Veterans.

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 9, 2006; A01

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush’s eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush’s program. The president’s secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.

James A. Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government’s failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.

Yet another problem in a 2005 warrant application prompted Kollar-Kotelly to issue a stern order to government lawyers to create a better firewall or face more difficulty obtaining warrants.

The two judges’ discomfort with the NSA spying program was previously known. But this new account reveals the depth of their doubts about its legality and their behind-the-scenes efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence. The new accounts also show the degree to which Baker, a top intelligence expert at Justice, shared their reservations and aided the judges.

Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president’s program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president’s power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.

It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court, the secret panel created in 1978 in response to a public outcry over warrantless domestic spying by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The court’s appointees, chosen by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, were generally veteran jurists with a pro-government bent, and their classified work is considered a powerful tool for catching spies and terrorists.

The FISA court secretly grants warrants for wiretaps, telephone record traces and physical searches to the Justice Department, whose lawyers must show they have probable cause to believe that a person in the United States is the agent of a foreign power or government. Between 1979 and 2004, it approved 18,748 warrants and rejected five.

Lamberth, the presiding judge at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Kollar-Kotelly, who took over in May 2002, have repeatedly declined to comment on the program or their efforts to protect the FISA court. A Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment.

Both presiding judges agreed not to disclose the secret program to the 10 other FISA judges, who routinely handled some of the government’s most highly classified secrets.

So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone’s calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully “tagged” as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.

According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.

Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly derived significant comfort from the trust they had in Baker, the government’s liaison to the FISA court. He was a stickler-for-rules career lawyer steeped in foreign intelligence law, and had served as deputy director of the office before becoming the chief in 2001.

Baker also had privately expressed hesitation to his bosses about whether the domestic spying program conflicted with the FISA law, a government official said. Justice higher-ups viewed him as suspect, but they also recognized that he had the judges’ confidence and kept him in the pivotal position of obtaining warrants to spy on possible terrorists.

In 2004, Baker warned Kollar-Kotelly he had a problem with the tagging system. He had concluded that the NSA was not providing him with a complete and updated list of the people it had monitored, so Justice could not definitively know — and could not alert the court — if it was seeking FISA warrants for people already spied on, government officials said.

Kollar-Kotelly complained to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and her concerns led to a temporary suspension of the program. The judge required that high-level Justice officials certify the information was complete — or face possible perjury charges.

In 2005, Baker learned that at least one government application for a FISA warrant probably contained NSA information that was not made clear to the judges, the government officials said. Some administration officials explained to Kollar-Kotelly that a low-level Defense Department employee unfamiliar with court disclosure procedures had made a mistake.

Kollar-Kotelly asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to ensure that wouldn’t happen again, government officials said.

Baker declined to comment through an office assistant, who referred questions about his FISA work to a Justice Department spokesman. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith also declined to comment and referred questions to Justice officials. Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department could not discuss its work with the FISA court.

“The department always strives to meet the highest ethical and professional standards in its appearances before any court, including the FISA court,” Roehrkasse said. “This is especially true when department attorneys appear before a court on an ex parte basis, as is the case in the FISA court.”

Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court’s probable-cause requirement, government officials said.

So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the “reasonable belief” standard is merely the “probable cause” standard by another name.

Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush’s assertion that the court was not “agile” or “nimble” enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court’s actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.

Whose better qualified to sniff out corruption than the “dawg” that started it?

Just think of this as the U.S. Congress being a credit card company that hires a former convicted felon/ computer hacker (Duuumb DeLay) to develop security software to prevent future hackers from breaking into their databases…

Now, feel better America?

Unfortunately, the elected Republicans only stand for “christian” (lower-c) values. They say the words, they completely ignore the deeds.

Don’t get me wrong! The Democrats are not paragons of virtue either! They are one heck of a lot closer to actual Christian values espoused by true Christians than the so-called “christian” Republicans we have running this country.

Very well said. Experience counts. I’ll listen and can respect someone whose been there, in some shape of form, and experienced what war is realy like.

Have you read Murtha’s latest words???
Rep. John Murtha: Is the World Safer Today?

Opinion
Rep. John Murtha: Is the World Safer Today?
Rep. John Murtha
Wed Feb 1

The President continues to use labels and rhetoric to define his national defense policy, but it simply isn’t working. In his State of the Union Address, the President defended his position to both the American public and the world by saying “we will continue to lead” but this does little to repair the damage done by the President’s failed policies. We must insist that this Administration provide the facts behind its labels.

Spreading democracy does not equate to or ensure stabilization. A safe world is a stable world. STABILITY is what is key here. Is the world safer today with the gains of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon? Is the world safer with an emboldened Iran? Is Iraq or the region more stable as a result of our military intervention in Iraq? What proof to we have that the President’s policies are working?

Iraq, the region and the United States and its neighbors will be safer, more secure and stable when we redeploy from Iraq and put the resources where they belong. Our country will be safer and more secure when we rebuild our overstretched military, so that we are able to decisively confront real threats in our future.

I am sharing with you this letter that I sent to the President this morning articulating exactly this:

Very articulate, direct, and too the point.
Damning at times, and still remained honest.

“you just dont get it?”.

When Boehner replaced De-Lay, with his record of shady dealings with lobbyists and now the revelation that Boehner’s landlord is in fact a lobbyist and who knows what is to made of that at a time when the nation seeks assurances that as jerry Brown once said

“Take Back America form Those Who would Run America as Though it Were A Private Club”

as DeLay is now slated for the appropraitons Commitee to replace a disgraced Cunningham?
I can only echo the theme from yet another movie of our time, “Apocalypse Now” where the echoed refrain calls across the land?

THEY JUST DONT GET IT!

Another Viet Vet is in the belly of the beast, John McCain, he is despised in some Republican circles as a reformer. He is “their”

(Those Who Would Run America As Though It Were A Private Club)

worst nightmare because he cant be bought, in fact he and Feingold have been coming after “them”

(Those Who Would Run America As Though It Were A Private Club)

for a long time.

Well, let them continue to play fast and loose with the court of public opinion, before hey come to play with the court of The People of their peers in a count of twelve?

There was time in this America when no party of either side would ever tolerate any such shenanigans nor dare to put forward such tainted individuals as DeLay and Boehner (who got more votes [Boehner]than voters when selected for the position)because the integrity of the Republic was the over arching directive , not as we see today the foul and rank smelling stemch of political corruption on the body politic we see in these deplorable excuses of Democracy!

Don’t you mean-
May God bless America?!?!?!?

God help us.