Specter’s Sham Legislation Touted By The Media As A White House ‘Concession’
Specter’s Sham Legislation Touted By The Media As A White House ‘Concession’
Yesterday Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) announced that the White House had agreed to a court review of the warrantless wiretapping program.
But what Specter didn’t say is that his legislation does not require President Bush to submit the program to the FISA court; it merely gives the president the option. Under the FISA law, the administration can wiretap persons inside the U.S. But it is required to demonstrate that the targets are agents of a foreign power, like al Qaeda or their affiliates. Specter’s bill actually empowers Bush by making it optional for him to follow the law and rewards him for illegal conduct.
Nevertheless, the media has quickly picked up Specter’s line, calling the legislation a “compromise,” a “concession,” and even a “policy reversal” by the White House. Some examples —
Bush Poised To Accept 2 Curbs On His Authority, Houston Chronicle, 7/13/06:
In compromises crafted by the Senate, the White House was poised Thursday to change the way the United States prosecutes prisoners from the war on terror and to require court review of government eavesdropping on terror suspects.
Bush Agrees To Review Of Domestic Spying Program, LA Times, 7/14/06:
The tentative agreement would mark a concession by the administration, which has insisted the president has the constitutional authority to authorize the warrantless surveillance, initiated after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush Says Court Can Review Surveillance, Washington Post, 7/14/06:
Thursday’s agreement is the latest in a series of concessions Bush has made in his hard-line anti-terrorism tactics in recent days.
White House Agrees To NSA Review By Court: Senator, Reuters, 7/13/06:
The White House, in a policy reversal, has agreed to allow a secret federal court review of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, a top Senate Republican announced on Thursday.
Balkinization, Glenn Greenwald, and Horse’s Mouth all have more.
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Specter is just a Bush ass kisser > nothing more or nothing less! He does whatever Dubya asks of him > PERIOD.
July 14th, 2006 at 3:05 pmYou mean the liberal media just kicked the ball into its own goal, thus scoring for the other team… (sarcasm off)
July 14th, 2006 at 3:08 pmIf the rest of the GOP congress had some balls they would join Specter and call for ‘checks and balances’ before they lose their seats in November. But thankfully they are too dumb to see the cliff they are about to go off.
July 14th, 2006 at 3:14 pmAt least I get something done.
July 14th, 2006 at 3:22 pmPat Roberts is still trying to remember what he said he’d do.
Rubber Stamp Duckies all in a row ..do we like living among the dictatorship?
July 14th, 2006 at 3:41 pmJay: You don’t know that bush is channy’s Charle McCarthey. He doesn’t tell anyone what to do he just repeat what channy tells him to say
July 14th, 2006 at 3:50 pmWell in my neck of the woods, until we hear the story that they have stopped spying on Americans without warrant this is nothing but a bunch of horse shit.
All you have to do, TP, is post a thread titled “They are still spying on us”.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:01 pmIt is a concession within the redefined language of the Republican Party where compassion has become synonymous with hatred, Christianity has no relationship to Christ, patriotism is associated with loyalty to the Party regardless of the destruction it has wrought on American principles and values, and apparently executive concessions means further erosion of legislative oversight.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:12 pmI bet he carry’s a list around…
1. Feign Oversight.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:22 pm2. Cave to Bush.
[...] Plus “any reason” would be reason enough for cases to be dismissed. Oy Specter “gives the Administration everything it ever wanted, and much, much more.” One call does it all: ” . . .this bill expressly removes all limits on the President’s eavesdropping powers. And a few points about missing the point. The Bush administration concedes little. If anything. At all. [...]
July 14th, 2006 at 4:23 pmFighting back against the PR presidency
July 14th, 2006 at 4:23 pmCOMMENTARY | July 13, 2006
The Summer 2006 issue of Nieman Reports is about ‘Reflections on Courage.’ Veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus thinks that Washington editors and reporters should be brave enough not to cover any statements made by the president or any other government official that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public.
Does anyone know where the text of Specter’s bill can be found? I’d like to cut out the part about making the FISA review optional and forward it to each of these papers via email requesting a correction. I’d prefer to read facts rather than talking points.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:58 pmDear Pellinore and everyone else.
Here is the link to the original Specter billhttp://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/s2453.html
Here is the link to the amendment to the bill
http://action.eff.org/site/DocServer/Specter_Am_HEN_6824_6.15.06.pdf?docID=342
Hope this helps
July 14th, 2006 at 6:00 pm[...] And a compendium of headlines from Think Progress. [...]
July 14th, 2006 at 6:22 pmanother dickless wimp sells out to the antichrist
July 14th, 2006 at 8:58 pmanother dickless wimp sells out to the antichrist
Wow how many democrats were they?
July 14th, 2006 at 9:50 pmGiven that President has and will attach signing statements to whatever legislation is passed saying that he will choose to disregard anything that he declares is unconstitutional (regardless of the merit of his views), it is useless for congress to pass even this watered-down little piece of claptrap. Bush will just sign it, dismiss it with a signing statement, and do whatever he pleases. In effect, Congress has no more legislative power, and without budgetary oversight, no more budgetary power either.
Until Congress turns around, says “this is unacceptable and unconstitutional” and impeaches Bush AND Cheney, we are no longer living in even a representative democracy. Sadly, this Congress (Specter included) is part of the silent “coup d’Etat”, and if we continue to let Diebold and Karl Rove count the vote, we’re not going to get another congress this year, or ever.
July 15th, 2006 at 9:30 amWell in my neck of the woods, until we hear the story that they have stopped spying on Americans without warrant this is nothing but a bunch of horse shit.
July 16th, 2006 at 3:16 amanother dickless wimp sells out to the antichrist
July 16th, 2006 at 11:18 amEx-CIA Big: Bill Clinton Authorized Extralegal Interrogations
The man who ran the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bin Laden desk during the 1990s is accusing President Clinton of giving the CIA carte blanche to circumvent U.S. law and interrogate terrorist suspects in any way the agency saw fit – a directive that led to the establishment of secret CIA prisons on foreign soil.
“We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture,” recalled Michael Scheuer, who headed up the agency’s Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, in an interview Wednesday with the German newsmagazine Die Zeit.
Scheuer said Clinton replied: “That’s up to you.”
According to an Agence France Press summary of the Die Zeit interview, Scheuer explained that the Clinton administration “had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.”
The top Bin Laden hunter recalled that the extralegal directive came after “President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda.”
The secret CIA interrogation process became known as “renditioning,” Scheuer said, explaining that it included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.
“In Cairo, people are not treated like they are in Milwaukee,” he told Die Zeit. “The Clinton administration asked us if we believed that the prisoners were being treated in accordance with local law. And we answered, yes, we’re fairly sure.”
Scheuer’s revelations contradict a much ballyhooed Nov. 2, 2005 report in the Washington Post, which insisted that “the secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
After mistakenly claiming that renditioning began under President Bush, the Post noted that “considerable concern lingers [within the CIA] about the legality, morality and practicality” of the program.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:22 pmAugust 9th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
Victoria Toensing: FISA Fears Shielded 9/11 Plotters
Contrary to the claims of Bush administration critics, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has seriously hampered U.S. counterterrorism efforts – and actually helped to shield at least two key 9/11 plotters from detection by U.S. law enforcement.
The stunning analysis comes from former Reagan-era Justice Department official Victoria Toensing, who explains on OpinionJournal.com: “I have extensive experience with the consequences of government bungling due to overstrict interpretations of FISA.”
As deputy assistant attorney general one of Toensing’s chief responsibilities was the terrorism portfolio, which included working with FISA.
She recalled having to terminate a FISA wiretap in the midst of the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which ended in the murder of passenger-hostage Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem.
“We had a previously placed tap in the U.S. and thought there was a possibility we could learn the hostages’ location,” Toensing explained. “But Justice Department career lawyers told me that the FISA statute defined its ‘primary purpose’ as foreign intelligence gathering. Because crimes were taking place, the FBI had to shut down the wire.”
Toensing notes that the vaunted FISA law became the basis for former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick’s notorious wall of separation in 1995 – which prohibited intelligence agencies from sharing information on terrorists with U.S. law enforcement.
She recalled that when “the wall” was finally removed in 2001 by the Patriot Act, the FISA appeals court upheld the new law’s constitutionality with a ruling that characterized the rigid interpretation of the FISA statute as “puzzling.”
“The court cited an FBI agent’s testimony that efforts to investigate two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were blocked by senior FBI officials, concerned about the FISA rule requiring separation.”
Toensing said that if intelligence agencies had been able to wiretap terrorists operating inside the U.S. as they do under the Bush program, “we could have detected the presence of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego, more than a year before they crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.”
The former Reagan deputy AG dismantles another canard frequently touted by FISA supporters: That the Bush surveillance program could have been just as effective if he’d utilized the provision for retroactive court orders up to 72 hours after the surveillance begins.
Noting that FISA still requires that probable cause be established over that three day period, she offers the following example:
“Al Qaeda Agent A is captured in Afghanistan and has Agent B’s number in his cell phone, which is monitored by NSA overseas. Agent B makes two or three calls every day to Agent C, who flies to New York.”
That chain of facts, without further evidence, says Toensing, “does not establish probable cause for a court to believe that C is an agent of a foreign power with information about terrorism.”
If Bush critics had their way, however, U.S. monitoring of Al Qaeda Agent C’s phone calls would have to cease the moment he landed on U.S. soil – allowing him to continue receiving instructions in secret from his terror masters abroad right up to the day he carries out the next 9/11.
Wiretaps Are a Winner for W
By D i c k M o r r i s
January 24, 2006
Democrats who criticize President Bush for using warrantless wiretaps to elicit information about potential terrorist activity should be aware that the American people strongly support his decision to do so. Believe it or not, they trust their own government and the president they elected to use the information wisely and for our own protection.
The Fox News poll of Jan. 11 asked voters whether the president “should have the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor electronic communications of suspected terrorists without getting warrants, even if one end of the communication is in the United States?” By 58 percent to 36 percent, the answer was “yes.” Indeed, 42 percent of the nation’s Democrats agreed that the president should have this power.
The poll also tells us that Americans attribute the absence of terrorist attacks over the past 41/2 years to our government’s efforts to protect us. Asked if the fact that there has been no major terror attack since 9/11 was due to “security measures working” or to “no attack having been planned” by terrorists, Americans credited government efforts by 46 percent (to 22 percent for the terrorists, with another 20 percent saying both factors contributed).
Other results: Some 61 percent — including a majority of the Democrats — said they’d be willing to surrender some of their own privacy to help prevent terror attacks. Respondents support renewal of the Patriot Act by 57 percent to 31 percent. (Even Democrats only oppose renewal by 40-47.)
And those who called attention to the NSA policy of warrant-less wiretaps are called “traitors” by 50 percent of the voters and “whistleblowers” by only 27 percent. Democrats opted for “traitors” by 42 percent to 34 percent.
In other words, Ann Coulter represents the Democratic mainstream better than Al Gore on this one! These statistics tell us that Democratic politicians are just hurting themselves by raising and dwelling on the wiretap issue. Americans don’t fear giving their government the power to monitor conversations between Americans and foreigners even if no warrant sanctions the intrusion — we’re more afraid of al-Qaeda than of our own elected officials.
No wonder President Bush is willing to let Congress hold hearings about the NSA intercepts and the legal basis that allows them. The more focus this issue gets, the more it helps his administration.
This time, left-wing bias in the media helps moderates and conservatives — no pol should mind being attacked for doing things that the public approves.
Once again, leftists are misreading the public’s heavy doubts about the wisdom of the war in Iraq and our ability to win. These are pragmatic concerns, not an embrace of the Left’s take on national security. In fact, there is a broad and deep consensus when it comes to homeland security, which any politician defies at the risk of losing support.
Nor did the NSA wiretaps break the law. The president’s inherent power as commander in chief allows them. Warrantless wiretaps for tax, drug, or even organized crime investigations would clearly be illegal. But to protect our country in the War on Terror, they are extensions of military action and are as legal as any wartime intelligence gathering would be. The fact that there has been no declaration of war is a distinction without a difference. Congress has approved military action and within that approval lies an implicit assumption that the president will use our intelligence services to prevail militarily, on the home front as surely as he does in Iraq and Afghanistan.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:25 pmAugust 9th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
National Security: With the Feb. 3 deadline for renewing the Patriot Act looming, kicking the can down the road again is not an option. Had it been in place on Sept. 10, 2001, Sept. 11 might not have happened.
If your house were on fire, and firemen had to kick your door down and break a few windows to save you and your family, would you consider that an invasion of your privacy or a violation of your civil liberties?
Yet that is precisely the attitude Senate Democrats take regarding the Patriot Act despite evidence that it has infringed on no one’s rights, except perhaps on the freedom of terrorists to plot mass murder undetected and unmolested.
Democrats say the Patriot Act, approved 99-1 four years ago, was enacted in a fit of rage and panic and needs fixing lest its powers be abused. But as Rep. Vito Fosella, R-N.Y., notes, Congress has scrutinized the act in 115 hearings, and there have been more than 100 pages of responses to specific questions by members of the House.
As we have reported, the Justice Department in January 2004 conducted a six-month review of the law in which 1,266 complaints filed after its passage were examined. The conclusion was that not a single American’s rights had been violated. No American disappeared after a midnight knock on the door. No library was stormed by a SWAT team.
There are, however, terrorists who’ve had their lives and plans disrupted. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last July, since 9-11 five large terrorist cells have been broken up, from Lake Erie to Puget Sound. The Justice Department reports that under the Patriot Act, charges have been filed against 401 people, with 212 being convicted or pleading guilty.
Could the act have prevented 9-11? Section 218 eliminated the “wall” that had been erected between intelligence agencies and criminal investigations. In August 2001, FBI headquarters barred a New York intelligence agent looking for future hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar from consulting colleagues in the bureau’s criminal division.
Responding to an email from FBI brass, the agent was prophetic: “Someday someone will die and — wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective” against terrorists. Apparently some Democrats still don’t understand.
Take the oft-cited “library provision,” officially Section 215, which in fact does not use the word “library” at all. Under this provision, FBI agents might have visited New Jersey’s William Patterson University and discovered that al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar had used that state institution’s computers to purchase tickets for American Airlines Flight 77, which they plowed into the Pentagon.
According to Debra Burlingame, whose brother piloted Flight 77 and was one of the first to die that day: “The Patriot Act would have saved 3,000 lives, and what’s scary about this is once they start tinkering with it, it could cost not just 3,000, but tens of thousands of lives.” It could cost us an entire city next time.
When Sen. Harry Reid successfully led a Dec. 16 filibuster blocking reauthorization, he reportedly bragged: “We killed the Patriot Act.” If he and his colleagues prevail in blocking its renewal, or succeed in gutting its effective provisions, that may be the epitaph on the tombstones of Americans killed in the next attack.
Millennial Mistake
Jamie Gorelick’s dangerous “wall of separation.â€
In his public testimony before the 9/11 Commission the other day, Attorney General John Ashcroft exposed Commissioner Jamie Gorelick’s role in undermining the nation’s security capabilities by issuing a directive insisting that the FBI and federal prosecutors ignore information gathered through intelligence investigations. But Ashcroft pointed to another document that also has potentially explosive revelations about the Clinton administration’s security failures. Ashcroft stated, in part:
… [T]he Commission should study carefully the National Security Council plan to disrupt the al Qaeda network in the U.S. that our government failed to implement fully seventeen months before September 11.
The NSC’s Millennium After Action Review declares that the United States barely missed major terrorist attacks in 1999 — with luck playing a major role. Among the many vulnerabilities in homeland defenses identified, the Justice Department’s surveillance and FISA operations were specifically criticized for their glaring weaknesses. It is clear from the review that actions taken in the Millennium Period should not be the operating model for the U.S. government.
In March 2000, the review warns the prior Administration of a substantial al Qaeda network and affiliated foreign terrorist presence within the U.S., capable of supporting additional terrorist attacks here.
Furthermore, fully seventeen months before the September 11 attacks, the review recommends disrupting the al Qaeda network and terrorist presence here using immigration violations, minor criminal infractions, and tougher visa and border controls.
These are the same aggressive, often criticized law enforcement tactics we have unleashed for 31 months to stop another al Qaeda attack. These are the same tough tactics we deployed to catch Ali al-Marri, who was sent here by al Qaeda on September 10, 2001, to facilitate a second wave of terrorist attacks on Americans.
Despite the warnings and the clear vulnerabilities identified by the NSC in 2000, no new disruption strategy to attack the al Qaeda network within the United States was deployed. It was ignored in the Department’s five-year counterterrorism strategy.
I did not see the highly-classified review before September 11. It was not among the 30 items upon which my predecessor briefed me during the transition. It was not advocated as a disruption strategy to me during the summer threat period by the NSC staff which wrote the review more than a year earlier.
I certainly cannot say why the blueprint for security was not followed in 2000. I do know from my personal experience that those who take the kind of tough measures called for in the plan will feel the heat. I’ve been there; I’ve done that. So the sense of urgency simply may not have overcome concern about the outcry and criticism which follows such tough tactics.”
What is Ashcroft talking about? An article in Reader’s Digest, “Codes, Clues, Confessions” (March 2002; by Kenneth R. Timmerman), provides some valuable insight. It states, in part:
French counter-terrorism magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, first began tracking Ahmed Ressam back in 1996. As a Magistrate, he was allowed to use prosecutorial evidence, as well as share intelligence gathered by French intelligence agencies in his investigations and prosecutions. Between 1996 and 1999 he had gathered enough evidence to know that Ressam was part of al-Qaeda, what he called the “spider web.” And that Ressam and al-Qaeda had made the U.S. a target, and that Ressam had moved from Europe to Canada at some point in 1999 to prepare his attack. Bruguiere shared this information with both Canadian and U.S. intelligence some time prior to 1999.
By March 1999, Bruguière had gathered enough information from terrorist cells he had broken up in France, Jordan, and Australia, to send a thick file to Canadian authorities, asking that they arrest Ressam and hold him for interrogation, but Ressam had already gone underground. ‘On December 14, 1999 the news came of Ressam’s arrest [near Seattle]. As you know, it was completely by chance. Just plain luck!’
U.S. Customs officer Diana Dean told the Digest she found the olive-skinned Canadian who identified himself as “Benni Norris” unusually nervous. The ferry from Vancouver had just chugged up to its slip at Port Angeles, Washington on the afternoon of December 14, 1999, and Norris lowered the window of his Chrysler 300. Despite the chilly air, he was sweating, Dean noticed. When she asked him to open his trunk, he bolted. After a brief chase, “Norris”/Ressam was arrested. In the trunk, they found 130 pounds of plastic explosives, two 22 ounce plastic bottles full of nitro glycol, and a map of LAX.
When the Department of Justice began interviewing “Norris”/Ressam, they didn’t have a clue who he was. But Judge Bruguière did. He called the Department of Justice, and offered prosecutors his file on Ressam and his ties to al Qaeda. At the time, Bruguiere said, DOJ had no idea what a big catch they had, nor did DOJ have access to any intelligence about Ressam’s ties to al-Qaeda. Ultimately, because of “The Wall” Bruguiere had to testify for seven hours in Seattle to lay out the al Qaeda connection to help U.S. prosecutors make their case against Ressam.
In other words, the “wall of separation” constructed by Jamie Gorelick made it virtually impossible for U.S. authorities to stop Ahmed Rassam, the “Millenium Bomber,” by design or intention. It was left to blind luck. The NSC’s Millennium After Action Review — which, based on Attorney General Ashcroft’s testimony, must be devastating in its analysis of not only this event but of the Gorelick policy — remains classified. And, most significantly, it’s likely the Review’s criticisms and warnings were either ignored or rejected by the Clinton Justice Department.
Given all the past intelligence information that has been made public by the 9/11 Commission — including the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief, which had never before been released — there appears to be no legitimate basis for the 9/11 Commission keeping the Review under lock and key. It’s time to release it.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pmThe NSA Straddle
Dems support it while they’re outraged by it.
Democrats are both outraged by President Bush’s National Security Agency surveillance program and content to see it continue. They are at this incoherent pass because their reflexive hostility to the program is tempered by the dawning suspicion that they might be on the wrong side politically of yet another national-security issue — thus, the NSA Straddle.
Asked on ABC’s This Week to respond to a Karl Rove speech saying that Democrats disagree with President Bush that al Qaeda members should be monitored when they call somebody in America, Sen. John Kerry declared, “We don’t disagree with him at all.” But he went on to blast the NSA program as illegal. Why not, therefore, cut off funding for it? “That’s premature,” Kerry insisted.
Democrats are the first party ever to talk of impeaching a president for creating a program they themselves seem to support. It’s as if they had denounced Watergate, but stipulated that there was nothing wrong in principle with breaking into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychologist. “We’re prepared to eavesdrop wherever and whenever necessary,” said Kerry, sounding ready to don earphones himself. Howard Dean agrees: “I support spying on al Qaeda, and I think every Democrat in America thinks we ought to attack al Qaeda, and spy on them.”
Of course, Democrats say such spying has to be legal. Who disagrees with that? The wiretapping programs in the Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations that were so famously abused were extremely closely held. The Bush administration kept the NSA program secret, to be sure, but it was routinely reviewed by the top career lawyers at the NSA and the Department of Justice, who have no truck with lawbreaking.
The Democrats’ confusion extends to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which they argue the administration is violating. On the one hand, they praise the act as a bulwark of liberty. On the other, they suggest that warrants from the FISA court are an easily obtained fig leaf. Howard Dean notes incredulously that the administration isn’t operating the NSA program under the auspices of FISA, when for more than 25 years the FISA court has approved 19,000 warrant requests and turned down only five.
Democrats want to portray the FISA regime as readily stretched to encompass the spying program in order to accommodate their NSA Straddle. It allows them to denounce the program as flagrantly illegal, while supporting the program in theory, because with a little cover from FISA, it would be perfectly legal. Would that it were so easy. If the NSA program is compatible with FISA, surely the administration would avail itself of that law. It hasn’t been reticent about obtaining FISA warrants, the number of which has jumped since Sept. 11.
To obtain such a warrant requires a showing of probable cause that the person to be monitored in the U.S. is a member of a terrorist group. There are two reasons for the administration not to go this route with the NSA program. One is speed. It takes time to assemble the warrant application and get the official sign-offs. The other is that the evidence for a showing of probable cause might not exist. If a member of al Qaeda calls someone, it doesn’t necessarily make him a terrorist. The administration is monitoring the call anyway, and if evidence shows up to support a finding of probable cause, presumably then it will get a FISA warrant on the call’s recipient.
The NSA program exists outside of FISA, but it needn’t be in violation of it, if the target of the surveillance is a person outside the U.S. and the surveillance itself is taking place overseas. But there is no doubt that it is an aggressive program, and as the debate over it ripens, a key question will likely be whether it is acceptable to monitor calls to people in the U.S. we have no reason to believe are terrorists. Expect the Democrats’ answer to be — another straddle.
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pmAugust 9th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Goss: NSA Program Leak Hurt Hunt for Terrorists
Thursday, February 02, 2006
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence officials told Congress on Thursday that disclosure of once-classified projects like President Bush’s no-warrant eavesdropping program have undermined their work.
“The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing disclosures about a variety of CIA programs that he suggested may have been compromised.
Goss said a federal grand jury should be empaneled to determine “who is leaking this information.”
But Democratic members of the panel accused the Bush administration of wanting to have it both ways.
“The president has not only confirmed the existence of the program, he has spoken at length about it repeatedly,” while keeping Congress in the dark, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the panel’s senior Democrat.
Rockefeller suggested that such “leaks” most likely “came from the executive branch” of the government.
That brought a terse response from FBI Director Robert Mueller, who said, “It’s not fair to point a finger as to the responsibility of the leak.”
The sometimes pointed exchanges came as leaders of the nation’s intelligence agencies appeared before the panel in a rare public session to give a rundown on threats facing the world.
Committee Democrats sought to change the focus to the president’s decision to authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop — without first obtaining warrants — on communications to and from those in the United States and terror suspects abroad.
National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who oversees all intelligence activities, strongly defended the program, calling it crucial for protecting the nation against its most menacing threat.
“This was not about domestic surveillance,” he said.
Negroponte called Al Qaeda and associated terror groups the “top concern” of the U.S. intelligence community, followed closely by the nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea.
Goss complained that leaks to the news media about classified CIA programs — such as reported CIA secret prisons abroad — had damaged his own agency’s work.
“I use the words ‘very severe’ intentionally. And I think the evidence will show that,” he said.
Goss cited a “disruption to our plans, things that we have under way.” Some CIA sources and “assets” had been rendered “no longer viable or usable, or less effective by a large degree,” he said.
The revelations have also made intelligence agencies in other countries mistrustful of their U.S. counterparts, Goss said.
“I’m stunned to the quick when I get questions from my professional counterparts saying, `Mr. Goss, can’t you Americans keep a secret?”
Goss, when pressed, said he was speaking of programs run by the CIA, and would let NSA officials speak for themselves.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence and a former NSA director, said it was hard to characterize any damage done to his agency in an open session.
But, he said, “Some people claim that somehow or another o intelligence agencies
Negroponte said great strides had been made in fighting global terrorism.
“We have eliminated much of the leadership that presided over Al Qaeda in 2001,” he said, “and U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts in 2005 continued to disrupt its operations, take out its leaders and deplete its cadre.”
But, Negroponte added, the terror organization’s core elements still plot and make preparations for terrorist strikes.
He suggested that “high impact attacks” would continue, and said Al Qaeda continues to pursue chemical, biological and atomic weapons in hopes of attacking the United States.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:33 pmThe Media’s Partisan “Domestic Spying†Fight
by L. Brent Bozell III
February 8, 2006
The debate over the propriety of intelligence-gathering by the Bush administration is complicated, and the programs themselves can lose their secrecy (and effectiveness) the more they are debated. The media aren’t monitoring the debate. They started the fight by blowing the lid off the NSA activity in the New York Times, and they’re pushing the fight day and night, clearly coming down against Bush, that arrogantly unconstitutional rogue.
When given a choice between more information about our intelligence-gathering methods and less safety, or less information about our intelligence-gathering and more safety, which do the public choose? The public tends to prefer more safety. The media prefer more information. And the media would prefer the public believe it agrees with them, even if it has to cook a few surveys to establish that canard.
A recent CBS News/New York Times poll brilliantly illlustrated how the public shifts sides on this question depending on how the question is framed. First question: “In order to reduce the threat of terrorism, would you be willing or not willing to allow government agencies to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans on a regular basis?â€
“Ordinary Americans�!? The only Americans being tapped would be those suspected of helping wage war on America – hardly “ordinary Americans.†Who could support secret government surveillance of ordinary Americans? It’s not surprising that this idea was rejected: 70 percent say they’re not willing to allow that, and only 28 percent say yes.
Then the CBS/Times pollsters changed the wording to be much more precise in who is being monitored: “In order to reduce the threat of terrorism, would you be willing or not willing to allow government agencies to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of Americans that the government is suspicious of?” When the targets are suspected terrorists or sympathizers, the poll numbers completely flipped: 68 percent support monitoring them, and only 29 percent say no.
Now consider that according to the CBS/New York Times pollsters, President Bush has a 42 percent job approval rating, and a 52 percent approval rating in fighting terrorism. It’s shocking to see that almost 70 percent – including a big chunk of people who aren’t wild about Bush — support keeping electronic tabs on our enemies.
It’s also somewhat shocking that our supposed accuracy-lauding media have preferred the first, more inaccurate phrasing – spying on “ordinary Americans†– over the second phrasing about terrorist suspects. In an eye-opening study of the 69 stories on the last seven weeks of ABC, CBS, and NBC evening-news coverage, Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that the TV reporters described who was being monitored.
Most correspondents in those stories portrayed the NSA as casting a wide net, targeting “Americans†or “U.S. citizens†(53, or 40 percent), or used terms such as “domestic†or “communications inside the U.S.†(60, or 45 percent). ABC’s Dan Harris even began on December 24 by hyping “the spying was much more widespread, with millions of calls and e-mails tracked — perhaps even yours.â€
Perhaps – if you’ve got al-Qaeda on your cell-phone’s speed-dial.
By contrast, only about a sixth of these descriptions (21, or 16 percent) stated that the government was focused on persons contacting suspected terrorists (12) or the suspected terrorists themselves (nine). For example, NBC’s Pete Williams described monitoring of “suspected al-Qaeda members†on December 29.
There are more findings. Fully 83 percent of network stories suggested the NSA program was illegal, or legally questionable. Reporters framed the story as the government violating “civil liberties†in 42 percent of stories, but the NSA program’s role in the war on terror surfaced in only seven stories (ten percent). The supposed nonpartisan legal experts quoted on the ethics or legality of the NSA program were a slanted cast: 30 (or 56 percent) condemned the program, while only four (seven percent) found the program justifiable, an eight-to-one disparity.
One aspect of the story was almost completely ignored by TV reporters: the leak of classified information to the New York Times. Only five network stories focused on the leak probe, and those five mostly painted it as an act of retribution from an enraged Bush administration. And you certainly couldn’t expect a New York Times poll on the propriety of the New York Times.
In April of 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton called for more agents to investigate domestic terror suspects, and more power to infiltrate terrorist plots and examine suspects’ “phone, hotel, and credit card records,†as CBS explained at the time. CBS didn’t shriek about “domestic spying†or commission a poll then questioning Clinton’s commitment to civil liberties. They noted Clinton’s handling of Oklahoma City “sent his approval ratings soaring.â€
This story is extremely politicized. Americans can’t trust a liberal media, so partisan in this debate, to tell it to them straight.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:33 pmJustice Department: The NSA Program – Myth vs. Reality
US Justice Department – The President’s authority to authorize the terrorist surveillance program is firmly based both in his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, and in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress after the September 11 attacks.
Read it for yourself.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:34 pmhttp://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/nsa_myth_v_reality.pdf
Office of Public Affairs
U.S. Department of Justice
Washington, DC 20530
Justice
1
Department
THE NSA PROGRAM TO DETECT AND PREVENT TERRORIST ATTACKS
MYTH V. REALITY
January 27, 2006
Myth: The NSA program is illegal.
Reality: The President’s authority to authorize the terrorist surveillance program is firmly
based both in his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, and in the
Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress after the September
11 attacks.
• As Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive, the President has legal authority under the
Constitution to authorize the NSA terrorist surveillance program.
The Constitution makes protecting our Nation from foreign attack the President’s
most solemn duty and provides him with the legal authority to keep America safe.
It has long been recognized that the President has inherent authority to conduct
warrantless surveillance to gather foreign intelligence even in peacetime. Every
federal appellate court to rule on the question has concluded that the President has
this authority and that it is consistent with the Constitution.
Since the Civil War, wiretaps aimed at collecting foreign intelligence have been
authorized by Presidents, and the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance for
foreign intelligence purposes has been consistently cited and used when necessary.
• Congress confirmed and supplemented the President’s constitutional authority to
authorize this program when it passed the AUMF.
The AUMF authorized the President to use “all necessary and appropriate military
force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned,
authorized, committed, or aided in the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11,
2001.â€
In its Hamdi decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the AUMF also authorizes the
“fundamental incident[s] of waging war.†The history of warfare makes clear that
electronic surveillance of the enemy is a fundamental incident to the use of military
force.
• A crucial responsibility of the President—charged by the AUMF and the Constitution—is
to identify enemies who attacked us, especially if they are in the United States ready to
strike against our Nation.
We are at war, and al Qaeda is not a conventional enemy. Since the September 11
attacks, it has promised again and again to deliver another, even more devastating
attack on America. In the meantime, it has killed hundreds of innocent people around
the world through large-scale attacks in Indonesia, Madrid, and London.
Al Qaeda’s plans include infiltrating our cities and communities and plotting with
affiliates abroad to kill innocent Americans.
The United States must use every tool available, consistent with the Constitution, to
prevent and deter another al Qaeda attack, and the President has indicated his intent to
do just that.
Myth: The NSA program is a domestic eavesdropping program used to spy on innocent
Americans.
Reality: The NSA program is narrowly focused, aimed only at international calls and
targeted at al Qaeda and related groups. Safeguards are in place to protect the civil
liberties of ordinary Americans.
• The program only applies to communications where one party is located outside of the
United States.
• The NSA terrorist surveillance program described by the President is only focused on
members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups. Communications are only intercepted if there
is a reasonable basis to believe that one party to the communication is a member of al
Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda.
• The program is designed to target a key tactic of al Qaeda: infiltrating foreign agents into
the United States and controlling their movements through electronic communications,
just as it did leading up to the September 11 attacks.
• The NSA activities are reviewed and reauthorized approximately every 45 days. In
addition, the General Counsel and Inspector General of the NSA monitor the program to
ensure that it is operating properly and that civil liberties are protected, and the
intelligence agents involved receive extensive training.
Myth: The NSA activities violate the Fourth Amendment.
Reality: The NSA program is consistent with the Constitution’s protections of civil
liberties, including the protections of the Fourth Amendment.
• The Supreme Court has long held that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless
searches where “special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement,†exist.
Foreign intelligence collection, especially in a time of war when catastrophic attacks have
already been launched inside the United States, falls within the special needs context.
2
• As the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review has observed, the nature of the
“emergency†posed by al Qaeda “takes the matter out of the realm of ordinary crime
control.â€
• The program easily meets the Court’s reasonableness test for whether a warrant is
required. The NSA activities described by the President are narrow in scope and aim,
and the government has an overwhelming interest in detecting and preventing further
catastrophic attacks on American soil.
Myth: The NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Reality: The NSA activities described by the President are consistent with FISA.
• FISA expressly envisions a need for the President to conduct electronic surveillance
outside of its provisions when a later statute authorizes that surveillance. The AUMF is
such a statute.
• The NSA activities come from the very center of the Commander-in-Chief power, and it
would raise serious constitutional issues if FISA were read to allow Congress to interfere
with the President’s well-recognized, inherent constitutional authority. FISA can and
should be read to avoid this.
Myth: The Administration could have used FISA but simply chose not to.
Reality: In the war on terrorism, it is sometimes imperative to detect—reliably,
immediately, and without delay—whether an al Qaeda member or affiliate is in contact
with someone in the United States. FISA is an extremely valuable tool in the war on
terrorism, but it was passed in 1978 and there have been tremendous advances in
technology since then.
• The NSA program is an “early warning system†with only one purpose: to detect and
prevent the next attack on the United States from foreign agents hiding in our midst. It is
a program with a military nature that requires speed and agility.
• The FISA process, by design, moves more slowly. It requires numerous lawyers, the
preparation of legal briefs, approval from a Cabinet-level officer, certification from the
National Security Advisor or another Senate-confirmed officer, and finally, the approval
of an Article III judge. This is a good process for traditional domestic foreign
intelligence monitoring, but when even 24 hours can make the difference between
success and failure in preventing a terrorist attack, a faster process is needed.
Myth: FISA has “emergency authorizations†to allow 72-hour surveillance without a court
order that the Administration could easily utilize.
3
Reality: There is a serious misconception about so-called “emergency authorizationsâ€
under FISA, which allow 72 hours of surveillance without a court order. FISA requires the
Attorney General to determine in advance that a FISA application for that particular
intercept will be fully supported and will be approved by the court before an emergency
authorization can be granted, and the review process itself can and does take precious time.
• The Justice Department does not approve emergency authorizations without knowing it
will receive court approval within 72 hours.
• To initiate surveillance under a FISA emergency authorization, it is not enough to rely on
the best judgment of our intelligence officers alone. Those intelligence officers would
have to get the sign-off of lawyers at the NSA that all provisions of FISA have been
satisfied, then lawyers in the Department of Justice would have to be similarly satisfied,
and finally, the Attorney General would have to be satisfied that the search meets the
requirements of FISA. The government would have to be prepared to follow up with a
full FISA application within 72 hours.
• A typical FISA application involves a substantial process in its own right: The work of
several lawyers; the preparation of a legal brief and supporting declarations; the approval
of a Cabinet-level officer; a certification from the National Security Advisor, the Director
of the FBI, or another designated Senate-confirmed officer; and, finally the approval of
an Article III judge.
• The FISA process makes perfect sense in almost all cases of foreign-intelligence
monitoring in the United States. Although technology has changed dramatically since
FISA was enacted, FISA remains a vital tool in the war on terrorism — one that we are
using to its fullest and will continue to use against al Qaeda and other foreign threats.
• But the terrorist surveillance program operated by the NSA requires maximum speed and
agility to achieve early warning, and even a very brief delay may make the difference
between success and failure in detecting and preventing the next attack.
Throughout this document, the “terrorist surveillance program†and “the NSA program†refer
to the NSA activities described by the President.
4
Bush Addresses Thwarted 2002 Terrorist Plot in Calif.
Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush said Thursday a 2002 al-Qaida plot against the tallest building on the West Coast was foiled by U.S. counter terrorism efforts.
Speaking at the National Guard Memorial Building in Washington, the president said plotters planned to use hijacked commercial airplanes to strike the Library Tower in Los Angeles, now known as the US Bank Tower.
Bush has referred to the plot before, but White House officials had said would provide more specifics in a speech Thursday.
In an address last October, Bush said the United States and its allies had foiled at least 10 serious plots by the al-Qaida terror network in the last four years, including plans for Sept. 11-like attacks on both U.S. coasts.
The White House initially would not give details of the plots but later released a fact sheet with a brief, and vague, description of each.
Three targets cited were in the United States, including plans to use hijacked airplanes to attack the West Coast in mid-2002 and the East Coast in mid-2003. The White House said at least one planner of the West Coast attack was a key figure behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Washington Post has reported that the West Coast plot targeted the tallest building in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, and involved Malaysian militants and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who was captured in 2003.
The third was the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and allegedly plotted with top al-Qaida commanders to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested May 8, 2002, at O’Hare International Airport on a material witness warrant and was designated an enemy combatant, held without criminal charge at a Navy brig in South Carolina.
Padilla was charged in November on terrorism charges and transfered to the federal court system before the Supreme Court had an opportunity to take up his case contesting his detention as an enemy combatant. He remains in federal custody in Miami awaiting trial.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:35 pmAugust 9th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Carter, Democrats Asked Soviets to Stop Reagan
October 17, 2002
Remember the old conservative charge that many of the Democrats here in America were playing footsie with the Soviets? Some Republicans even said the Russians viewed the Democrats as their favorite party.
Now bombshell revelations prove these accusations beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution research fellow, has just written a new book, “Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism.”
This book may well force historians to revise the history of the Cold War.
Schweizer, after scouring once-classified KGB, East German Stasi and Soviet Communist Party files, discovered incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets not only played footsie with high-ranking Democrats, they also worked behind the scenes to influence American elections.
In “Reagan’s War,” Schweizer shows how the Democrats worked with Moscow to try to undermine Reagan before and after he became president.
Jimmy Carter’s Dirty Tricks
Soviet diplomatic accounts and material from the archives show that in January 1984 former President Jimmy Carter dropped by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s residence for a private meeting.
Carter expressed his concern about and opposition to Reagan’s defense buildup. He boldly told Dobrynin that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, “There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power.”
Using the Russians to influence the presidential election was nothing new for Carter.
Schweizer reveals Russian documents that show that in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched businessman Armand Hammer to the Soviet Embassy.
Hammer was a longtime Soviet-phile, and he explained to the Soviet ambassador that Carter was “clearly alarmed” at the prospect of losing to Reagan.
Hammer pleaded with the Russians for help. He asked if the Kremlin could expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter’s standing in the polls.
‘Carter Won’t Forget That Service’
“Carter won’t forget that service if he is elected,” Hammer told Dobrynin.
Carter was not the only Democrat to make clear to the Russians where their loyalty lay. As the election neared in 1984, Dobrynin recalls meetings with Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill.
O’Neill told Dobrynin that no effort should be spared to prevent “that demagogue Reagan” from being re-elected.
Soviet documents report that O’Neill told Dobrynin: “If that happens, Reagan will give vent to his primitive instincts and give us a lot of trouble, probably, put us on the verge of a major armed conflict. He is a dangerous man.”
August 9th, 2006 at 10:39 pmAugust 9th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
ECHELON is a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network run by the UKUSA Community (otherwise described as the “Anglo-Saxon alliance”) [1]. ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts [2].
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Organization
3 Hardware
4 Ground stations
4.1 The largest and best-attested ground stations
4.2 Various other ground stations
4.3 Former ground stations
5 See also
6 Further reading
7 Sources and notes
[edit]
History
Reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early sixties, ECHELON is today believed to also search for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealers’ plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. But some critics claim the system is also being used for large-scale commercial theft and invasion of privacy.
In May 2001, the European Parliament produced a report on ECHELON [3] which, among other things, recommended that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy. In the UK, the government introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which gives authorities the power to demand that citizens hand over their encryption keys, without a judge-approved warrant. In April 2004, the European Union decided to spend 11 million EUR developing secure communication based on quantum cryptography — the SECOQC project — a system that would theoretically be unbreakable by ECHELON or any other espionage system.
ECHELON monitoring of mobile phones in Pakistan was reportedly used to track Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before he was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003[citation needed].
US intelligence agencies are generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US, and other Western countries’ intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilities spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data (perhaps even automatically through the ECHELON system without human intervention). The proposed US-only “Total Information Awareness” program relied on technology similar to ECHELON, and was to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the “taps” already compiled by ECHELON. It was cancelled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.
[edit]
Organization
The members of the English-speaking alliance are part of the UKUSA intelligence alliance that has maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Various sources claim that these states have positioned electronic-intercept stations and space satellites to capture most radio, satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic[citation needed]. The captured signals are then processed through a series of supercomputers, known as dictionaries, that are programmed to search each communication for targeted addresses, words, phrases or even individual voices[citation needed].
Each member of the UKUSA alliance is assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada’s main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.
Supporters stress that ECHELON is simply a method of sorting captured signals and is just one of the many arrows in the intelligence community’s quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated bugging and communications interception techniques, satellite tracking, through-clothing scanning, automated biometric recognition systems that can recognize faces, fingerprints & retina patterns.
The U.S. communications-intelligence agency is the National Security Agency (NSA), which is headquartered at Fort Meade, just outside Washington, DC. Although the NSA budget is classified[8], as of 1996 the agency was estimated to have a global staff of roughly 38,000 and a budget of approximately US$3.6-billion[9]. The UK equivalent organisation is the Government Communications Headquarters GCHQ based near Cheltenham. Further, smaller organisations exist to provide communications technology and expertise (e.g. Her Majesty’s Government Communication Centre HMGCC).
By comparison, Canada’s communications-intelligence operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a branch of the Canadian Department of National Defence. It has a staff of 890 people and an annual budget of $110 million CAD[citation needed]. The CSE’s headquarters is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in the nation’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario, and its main communications intercept site is located on an old armed-forces radio base in Leitrim, just south of Ottawa.
On July 6, 2000 the BBC published an article called Echelon: Big brother without a cause? that said:
The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute. [...] Echelon evolved out of Cold War espionage arrangements set up by the US and UK in 1948, and later bringing in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, in their capacity as Britain’s Commonwealth partners. The biggest of Echelon’s global network of listening posts is at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, where about 30 “giant golf balls” called radomes litter the landscape. The system also boasts 120 American satellites in geostationary orbit. Bases in the five countries are linked directly to the headquarters of the secretive US National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Mead, Maryland. The system’s superpowerful voice recognition capability enables it to filter billions of international communications for whatever key words or word patterns are programmed in.[10]
“The United States will occasionally have the United Kingdom keep an eye on individuals in this country [meaning inside the US], with the understanding that if Britain turns up any interesting tidbits, it will slide them across the table.” – from the book, “CHATTER: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping”
[edit]
Hardware
According to an article in UK’s Techworld, Echelon may be similar to a Texas Memory Systems SAM supercomputer, which incorporates a solid state disk (SSD) and a digital signal processor (DSP)[11].
Margaret Newsham claims that she worked on the configuration and installation of some of the software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, for whom she worked from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California and in Menwith Hill, England[12]. At that time, according to Newsham, the ECHELON system was based on a VAX, and code named P415 . Its two main programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX would intercept communications. Alongside VORTEX were NEXUS, SCOUT, and NOSTRADAMUS, widely reputed to be the first satellite deployed with a 64-bit processor.
Jonathan Meier, in his acclaimed biography, has stated of his time at the NSA that:
“Conjecture and speculation were rampant on the [ECHELON] projects, even internally. Truthfully, very few individuals were privy to the logistics involved.”
[edit]
Ground stations
Some of the known or suspected ground stations belonging to or participating in the ECHELON network include the following:
[edit]
The largest and best-attested ground stations
Fort Meade (Maryland, US) (headquarters of NSA)
Geraldton (Western Australia, Australia)
Menwith Hill (Yorkshire, UK)
Misawa Air Base (Japan)
Morwenstow (Cornwall, UK)
Pine Gap (Northern Territory, Australia – close to Alice Springs)
Sabana Seca (Puerto Rico – US)
Shoal Bay (Northern Territory, Australia)
Sugar Grove (West Virginia, US)
Yakima (Washington, US) Map
Waihopai (New Zealand)
Tangimoana (New Zealand)
Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt (Western Australia, Australia – close to Exmouth)
[edit]
Various other ground stations
The following are various intelligence gathering stations of US intelligence agencies and armed forces or their allies.
Alert (Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada)
August 9th, 2006 at 10:47 pmAgios Nikolaos (Cyprus – UK)
Bremerhaven (Germany – UK)
Buckley Air Force Base (Colorado, US)
RAF Chicksands (Bedfordshire, UK)
Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean – US-UK)
Digby (Lincolnshire, UK)
Elmendorf Air Force Base (Alaska – US)
Feltwell (Norfolk, UK)
Fort Gordon (Georgia, US)
Gander (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)
Gibraltar (UK)
Griesheim (near Darmstadt, Germany – US)
Guam (Pacific Ocean, US)
Karamursel (Turkey – US)
Kunia (Hawaii, US)
Leitrim (south of Ottawa, Canada)
Malta (Malta – UK)
Masset (British Columbia, Canada)
Medina Annex (Texas, US)
Osan Air Base (South Korea, US)
Rota, Spain (Spain – US)
Scampton (Lincolnshire, UK)
[edit]
Former ground stations
Augsburg (Germany – US) – closed in 1993
Bad Aibling (Germany – US) – moved to Griesheim in 2004
Clark Air Base (Philippines – US) – closed in 1997
Edzell (Scotland, UK) – closed in 1997
Kabkan (Iran – US) – closed in 1979
Little Sai Wan (Hong Kong – UK) – closed in 1984
Nurrungar (South Australia, Australia – south of Woomera, South Australia) – closed in 1999
San Vito dei Normanni (Italy – US) – closed in 1994
Teufelsberg (West Berlin, Germany – US) – closed in 1989
Silvermine (near Cape Town, South Africa – US)
There was voter fraud during the 2004 elections, but it was proven to be by DemocRATS:
At least 16 St. Louis area Democrats have been found guilty of election crimes in the last 7 months!
5 Democrats were convicted of vote fraud Wednesday in East St. Louis
Sheila Thomas hugs Defense Attorney Paul Sims yesterday. Thomas was convicted of conspiracy and vote fraud and faces up to five years in prison for each charge.
The jury in the East St. Louis vote fraud case gave out guilty verdicts for all five defendents yesterday in the biggest vote fraud case in the St. Louis area’s history:
Convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit vote fraud during the Nov. 2 election was Charlie Powell Jr., head of the city’s powerful Democratic Central Committee and a former city council member. He faces five years in prison.
Convicted of conspiracy and vote fraud and facing five years on each count were:
• Kelvin Ellis, a Democratic precinct committeeman and former East St. Louis city government department head who served a federal prison term for extortion in the early 1990s.
• Yvette Johnson, secretary to the city Democratic organization.
• Democratic precinct committeemen Sheila Thomas and Jesse Lewis.
Rudy McIntosh lost his job as a police officer last month. He testified against the defendents in the vote fraud case. He has lost his job in the police department.
The undercover tapes obtained by Rudy McIntosh convinced the jurors of guilt.
With the authorities still investigating this may not be the end of the indictments.
Democrats are saying the convictions announced Wednesday do not represent their party.
I beg to differ!!
In the last 7 months in the St. Louis Metro Area here is a slice of what we have witnessed:
Nov. 18: Nine precinct committeemen appear before a federal grand jury probing vote fraud during the Nov. 2 election.
December: In St. Louis Six volunteers pleaded guilty in December of dozens of election law violations for filling out the cards with names of the dead and other bogus information. One still faces charges.
January 21: Kelvin Ellis, a top administrator at East St. Louis City Hall, was indicted for plotting to kill a witness in the year long East St. Louis, Illinois federal vote fraud investigation.
February 10: In St. Louis Nonaresa Montgomery was found guilty by a jury of perjury in a trial in St. Louis Circuit Court in the St. Louis vote fraud trial.
March 22: Precinct committeemen Leroy Scott Jr., 46; Lillie Nichols, 51; Terrance R. Stith, 43; and his wife, precinct worker Sandra Stith, 54; plead guilty to one count each of vote-buying.
March 23: The chairman of the East St. Louis Democratic Central Committee and councilman Charles Powell Jr. is charged with conspiracy to commit election fraud. Charged with conspiracy as well as election fraud are East St. Louis City Hall employees Jesse Lewis, Sheila Thomas, Kelvin Ellis, and Yvette Johnson.
June 29: All five defendants are convicted on all counts.
That comes out to 16 different Democrats convicted of election violations in the last 7 months in the St. Louis area!
That does not include all of the convictions.
And, one Democrat is still being held for attempted murder (trial scheduled for Oct. 17) of a government witness!
The Chicago Sun Times reported on the story yesterday.
File this post under “As seen only in the blogs, right at that!”
* Much more background on the latest conviction HERE. *
The Prosecution told the jury “You cannot hide from the tapes.”
And they didn’t!
VIDEO CLIP OF VERDICT ANNOUNCEMENT TODAY, HERE
A terrific clip that shows federal agents raiding East St. Louis City Hall!
** All five defendants are found guilty! **
Kelvin Ellis (on left) will also be tried for attempted murder of a government witness. The witness had threatened to expose a prosititution ring Ellis was running out of East St. Louis City Hall. Mr. Ellis spent time in prison for abusing a city post before becoming the Director of Regulatory Affairs in East St. Louis.
Charles Powell, Jr. (on right) is the Democratic Party Chairman in East St. Louis.
* The defendants were found guilty on all counts! *
“This is a wake-up call for East St. Louis,” said juror LaMont Reed Jr. of East St. Louis. “I’ve seen this corruption all my life.”
The defendants were found guilty on all counts following a four-week trial in U.S. District Court in East St. Louis.
Four of the defendants — Jessie Lewis, Sheila Thomas, Yvette Johnson and former city official Kelvin Ellis — were found guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud and election fraud. All worked for the Democratic Party during the election last November.
Democratic Party boss and former City Councilman Charlie Powell was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit election fraud.
The five were charged with paying voters up to $10 a vote to vote for Democratic candidates during the Nov. 2 general election.
The jury deliberated about five and a half hours before returning the verdicts.
The Federal Court Trial started on June 1, 2005 on the 5 East St. Louis Democrats accused of voter fraud. The East St. Louis Democratic Party was given $67,000 before the November 2nd election to “Get Out the Vote!”
More on the verdict here and here.
This is how the prosecution left the jurors yesterday in the East Louis Voter Fraud Trial.
In closing arguments on Tuesday, the prosecution again went over the evidence presented during the trial including the taped recordings by the federal witnesses and East St. Louis Democratic election workers:
Carr replayed many of the audiotapes the jury had previously heard of conversations Youngblood and McIntosh had with the defendants. Carr used the tapes to support his theory the five defendants conspired to buy votes for $5 and $10 apiece to elect Democrat Mark Kern the St. Clair County Board chairman in the Nov. 2 election.
“But there was a perception in East St. Louis he was racist,” said Carr, adding this had upped the price for bringing voters to the polls on Election Day.
Which explains why the St. Clair County Democratic Central Committee sent $79,000 to East St. Louis Democratic precinct committeemen just before the election, Carr said.
“To make sure Mr. Kern was elected — that’s what this conspiracy was about,” Carr said. “This was business as usual in East St. Louis on election day.”
Kern, the former mayor of Belleville, narrowly won the race for County Board chairman, thanks to winning more than 82 percent of the vote in East St. Louis.
Kern, who has not been charged with a crime, has denied any wrongdoing.
Previous posts on the Democratic Voter Fraud Trial in East St. Louis:
East St. Louis makes Voter Fraud a Business
$5 for Non-Racists; Racists are $10
ESL Prosecution Witness Falters
Damning Tapes in East St. Louis Voter Fraud Trial
Witness Grilled at ESL Vote Fraud Trial
How to Buy Votes at ESL Vote Fraud Trial
“Showing Appreciation” at ESL Voter Fraud Trial
Democratic Vote Buyers May Get Pass
ESL Vote Fraud Trial Gets Nasty
Ugly Politics, Ugly Trial in ESL
Closing Arguments Wrap Up in ESL Voter Fraud Trial
Democratic Mayor in Orlando Indicted for Voter Fraud
Orlando’s Democratic Mayor – INDICTED
The AP will not tell you that Orlando’s Mayor Buddy Dyer is a Democrat, but Scared Monkeys will.
In another pattern of democratic voting fraud, Democratic mayor Buddy Dyer allegedly (updated, Thanks David) paid solicitors to collect absentee ballots in the Orlando community. This is 3rd Degree Voter Fraud in Florida.
Story from WESH
UPDATE: keeping with the Voter Fraud theme of the day, Washington State “Republicans have released 1,135 names of alleged felons who they say illegally cast ballots in the governor’s race that Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.†Think this would have affected the outcome of the election… nah…
Update: Entry in the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam
August 9th, 2006 at 10:54 pmWas the 2004 election stolen? No.In Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that new evidence proves that Bush stole the election. But the evidence he cites isn’t new and his argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions.
By Farhad Manjoo
Jun. 03, 2006 | “After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declares in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. And so, 19 months after the election, let us head once again into this breach.
To date, dozens of experts, both independently and as part of several research panels, have spent countless hours examining 2004’s presidential election, especially the race in Ohio. Many of them have concluded that the election there strains conventional notions of what a democracy ought to look like; very little about that race was fair, clean or competent. Way back in January 2005, a panel headed by Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan reported that it had found enough irregularities in Ohio to call into question the state election results and the entire presidential vote. A report by the Democratic Party released last year found “evidence of voter confusion, voter suppression, and negligence and incompetence of election officials.” Then there are the legions of activists, academics, bloggers and others who’ve devoted their post-Nov. 2 lives to unearthing every morsel of data that might suggest the vote was rigged; their theories, factoids, and mountains of purportedly conclusive data likely take up several buildings’ worth of hard-drive space in Google’s server farms.
One has to wonder what, after all of this, Kennedy might have brought to the debate. There could have been an earnest exploration of the issues in order to finally shed some light on the problems we face in elections, and a call to urgently begin repairing our electoral machinery. Voting reforms are forever on the backburner in Congress; even the 2000 election did little to prompt improvements. If only someone with Kennedy’s stature would outline this need.
If only. Whatever his aim, RFK Jr. does not appear intent on fixing the problem. He’s more content to take us through a hit parade of the most popular, and the most dismissible, theories purporting to show that John Kerry won Ohio, theories that have been swirling about the blogosphere ever since the race was called. I scoured his Rolling Stone article for some novel story or statistic or theory that would prove, finally, that George W. Bush was not the true victor. But nothing here is new. If you’ve spent time on Democratic Underground or have read Mark Crispin Miller’s “Fooled Again,” you’re already familiar with everything Kennedy has to say.
If you do read Kennedy’s article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, “In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.” To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites “Democracy at Risk,” the report the Democrats released last June.
That report does indeed point out that many people — 26 percent — who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn’t say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn’t find their names listed. The Democrats’ report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a “provisional” ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same — a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy’s claim of “astounding” partisanship.
Such techniques are evident throughout Kennedy’s article. He presents a barrage of seemingly important, apparently damning data to show that Kerry won the race. It’s only when you dig into his claims that you see what thin ice he’s on.
Kennedy’s headlining claim is that 357,000 voters, “most of them Democratic,” were either prevented from voting or had their votes go uncounted, making Kerry (who lost by 118,000) the likely true winner. Kennedy finds these “missing votes” in the damnedest places. He counts 30,000 voter registrations that were deleted from voter rolls, in keeping with state law, as mostly Kerry voters, though it’s impossible to know if those were even real people. He says that 174,000 mostly Kerry voters didn’t vote because they were put off by long lines. But the source states it was actually 129,543 voters, and that those votes would have split evenly between Kerry and Bush. And that same source — the Democratic Party’s report once again — notes conclusively: “Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio.” But Kennedy doesn’t tell you that.
Worse, Kennedy relies on a band of researchers whose research on election fraud has long been called into question by experts. Especially in his section on Ohio’s exit poll, Kennedy reports his sources’ theories uncritically, even though many have been debunked, or have at least been the subject of tremendous debate among experts. Reading Kennedy’s article, you’d never guess that some of his star sources’ claims have fared quite badly when put to people in the field.
Certainly you can find some good in Kennedy’s report. His section on Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s right-wing secretary of state, nicely sums up the reasons why people have been suspicious of the voting process in the state. Blackwell, Kennedy notes, “had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws — setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.” There’s no argument that he used those powers for partisan gain. As Kennedy documents, in the months prior to the election, Blackwell issued a series of arbitrary and capricious voting and registration rules that could well have disenfranchised many people in the state.
But to prove Blackwell stole the state for Bush, Kennedy’s got to do more than show instances of Blackwell’s mischief. He’s got to outline where Blackwell’s actions could possibly have added up to enough votes to put the wrong man in office. In that, he fails. In the following pages, I match Kennedy’s claims with the reality of the 2004 election.
Claim: In rural counties in Ohio, more than 150,000 votes meant for Kerry were somehow switched to Bush.
“An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud — and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes — in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio,” Kennedy writes. The counties he suspects are Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. “One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot,” he writes. “By this measure, John Kerry’s numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties — and George Bush’s were unusually high.”
Kennedy points to vote results for Ellen Connally, a liberal Democrat who ran for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Kennedy contends that Kerry’s vote totals in the presidential race should have exceeded Connally’s in the Supreme Court race in these rural counties; you wouldn’t expect a relatively unknown liberal to win more votes than a well-known moderate in a rural area.
“Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent,” Kennedy writes. To Kennedy, this indicates that a lot of the people who voted for Connally also intended to vote for Kerry, but their votes somehow didn’t show up. Rep. Dennis Kucinich tells Kennedy, ”Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that. That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”
Kennedy says Kerry’s votes “were fraudulently shifted to Bush.” He points out that “statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by 21 percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush’s margin over Moyer was 50 percent — a strong indication that the president’s certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That’s a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush — more than enough to alter the outcome.”
Reality: Kennedy’s pattern sounds intriguing. But as Mark Lindeman, a political scientist at Bard College, pointed out to me, the whole story dissolves when you look at results from previous elections.
Contrary to Kucinich’s assertion, down-ticket candidates do indeed sometimes win more votes than presidential candidates of their own party in some places — sometimes a lot more. In 2000, Democratic state Supreme Court candidate Alice Resnick won more votes than Al Gore in dozens of counties — in 81 counties, which makes the 12 counties where Supreme Court candidate Connally outperformed Kerry in 2004 look not very suspicious at all. (I arrived at these numbers using Excel and Ohio’s 2000 county-by-county results, available here.) If Kennedy considered Connally’s 19,000 vote margin over Kerry in 12 counties a “thumping,” I wonder what he’d think of Resnick’s margin over Gore — she won 126,000 more votes throughout the state than did the incumbent vice president (she won her race against her opponent, too). Tim Black, another Democratic Supreme Court candidate, lost his race, but he too managed to outperform Gore in 40 counties.
Lindeman points out that the numbers work out this way for a very specific reason — ballots in Ohio don’t list party affiliations for Supreme Court races. Kennedy finds it unlikely that someone in a rural Ohio county would have cast a ballot both for Bush and for a liberal justice like Connally. But if you consider that those voters might never have heard of Connally and had no idea she was a Democrat, there’s no surprise why they might have chosen her. Therefore, Kennedy’s assertion that 162,000 Kerry votes were switched to Bush falls apart.
It’s worth noting, too, that a team of political scientists hired by the Democratic Party to investigate what happened in Ohio also used statistical analysis to search for any pattern of obvious shifts from Bush to Gore in the vote count. That group saw no evidence of fraud (PDF). “The tendency to vote for Kerry in 2004 was the same as the tendency to vote for the Democratic candidate for governor in 2002,” their report noted. “That the pattern of voting for Kerry is so similar to the pattern of voting for the Democratic candidate for governor in 2002 is, in the opinion of the team’s political science experts, strong evidence against the claim that widespread fraud systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”
They added: “Kerry’s support across precincts also increased with the support for Eric Fingerhut, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, and decreased with the support for Issue 1 (ballot initiative opposing same-sex marriage) and increased with the proportion of African American votes. Again this is the pattern that would be expected and is not consistent with claims of widespread fraud that misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”
Kennedy cites parts of their report several times, but he does not mention this conclusion.
Claim: Blackwell engineered a “purge” of 300,000 voters in Ohio’s major cities.
Kennedy writes that “Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections. In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.”
He concedes that there were “legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote — often without any notification — simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.” Kennedy estimates that 10 percent of these 300,000 voters represented actual voters who were disenfranchised. He concludes that Blackwell’s actions put 30,000 votes in the missing column.
Reality: Scrubbing the voting rolls of people who hadn’t voted in prior elections isn’t an arbitrary move. It’s the law. Here’s the relevant section of the Ohio code, 3503.19, which states that a person who “fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections” shall have his registration “canceled.” To be sure, people who intended to vote and weren’t aware of this rule could have been cut from the rolls, and you might say that’s unfair. But that’s an argument for a better election law, and not proof that the purges were part of a Republican election-theft plot.
Claim: Republican officials deliberately rigged voting procedures to create the long voting lines seen in Kerry strongholds.
Kennedy says that “more than 174,000 voters” in Ohio did not cast a ballot due to long lines at the polls. He considers the GOP directly responsible for this failure. “The long lines were not only foreseeable — they were actually created by GOP efforts,” he says. He says that Republicans in the state legislature pushed county election boards to reduce the number of their voting precincts, and that Republicans also failed to “distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts.”
As one example, Kennedy cites the case of Matt Damschroder, who was chair of both the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus. Instead of buying equipment to deal with an influx of new voters, “Damschroder decided to ‘make do’ with 2,741 machines,” Kennedy writes. “And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines.”
Kennedy says that these allocations harmed Kerry voters more than Bush voters. “The result was utterly predictable,” he writes. “According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes. ‘The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,’ concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.”
Reality: Kennedy is right to highlight the problem of long lines; every single study of the Ohio race done so far has fingered this problem as by far the single biggest cause of disenfranchisement. And he’s right, too, that the problem affected minorities disproportionately. Many, though not all, political scientists who’ve looked at the question agree that the voters who were turned away would have broken toward Kerry. But the relevant question is how many voters didn’t get to vote due to long lines, and who is to blame?
For his numbers, Kennedy cites the Democratic Party’s comprehensive report on the question, so it’s difficult to see where he comes up with the idea that “more than 174,000 voters” were turned away from the polls due to long lines. In fact, the DNC report — here is the enormous PDF — says “two percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines. This resulted in approximately 129,543 lost votes.” The report adds that “these potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry.” But even if Kerry got two-thirds of those ballots — a huge margin, matching what he got in Ohio’s bluest counties — he’d have won about 86,000 more votes, while Bush would have won 43,000 more. This would have reduced the final 118,000-margin in Ohio to about 75,000 — that is, Bush would still have been comfortably in the lead.
As to Kennedy’s argument that Republicans deliberately engineered the long lines, he’s on pretty shaky ground. To be sure, there is ample evidence that election officials throughout the state failed to respond to the surge in voter registration seen in the 2004 race. But it is far more accurate to see their actions as part of a larger picture of incompetence in the midst of massive changes in election procedures — especially changes in voting technology — than as part of a GOP plot. Kennedy elides the fact that in Ohio, decisions about voting-machine allocation and precinct location are determined by local boards of elections, which are bipartisan; any Republican effort to allocate machines in a way meant to harm Democrats would have necessarily involved Democratic officials.
The case of Matt Damschroder, the Republican chair of elections in Franklin County whom Kennedy cites, is instructive. As Cornell’s Walter Mebane determined, Franklin County’s allocation of voting machines was clearly biased against African-Americans. But Mebane’s report (PDF) contains some important caveats. Franklin County’s allocation of voting machines can be seen as biased if you look at the number of black voters who were registered by Election Day, but decisions about how to allocate voting machines are made months before then. That’s why Mebane also notes that “if the allocation of voting machines is compared to information about the size of the active electorate that was available to Franklin County election officials at the end of April, 2004, then the allocation of machines is not biased against voters who were active at that time in precincts having high proportions of African Americans.”
The difference reflects the reality that in the last few months of election season, registration surged in Ohio. That Franklin County’s voting-machine allocation was considered unbiased in the spring and biased in the fall arises from the fact that the county failed to respond to these electoral changes.
Mebane doesn’t let Damschroder off the hook. He says county officials “ignored information during the late summer and fall that should have showed them that the November electorate would be substantially larger. Between April and November, the active voter population in the county increased by more than 15 percent. If nothing else, the surge of new registrants should have indicated that their plans made in mid-summer would prove woefully insufficient.”
But the fact that the county once had an unbiased distribution of voting machines would seem to clear them of the kind of deliberate vote-rigging that Kennedy sees. You can call them incompetent for not responding to new registration in the county. But can you really call them election thieves?
Listen to the chairman of the board of Franklin’s election office, an African-American man named William Anthony, who also headed the county’s Democratic Party. As I first pointed out in my review of “Fooled Again,” any effort to deliberately skew the vote toward Bush in Franklin would have had to involve Anthony — and he has rejected the charge that he’d do such a thing. “I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?” Anthony told the Columbus Dispatch. “I’ve fought my whole life for people’s right to vote.”
Claim: Exit polls are usually accurate.
“Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science,” he writes. “The results are exquisitely accurate.” Kennedy points out that exits are often used to verify the integrity of an election — he refers to Ukraine, where in 2004 exit polling “exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.”
Essentially, Kennedy’s argument goes like this: Exit poll numbers — which are derived from interviews with voters after they’ve cast their votes — showed us what voters actually wanted. The discrepancy between the exits and the final count indicates that something funny happened in the casting or counting of ballots in Ohio. If the Ukranian exits proved fraud, why don’t those in the U.S?
Reality: “Nonsense,” says Mark Blumenthal, the professional Democratic pollster who runs Mystery Pollster, the poll-scrutinizing blog that has comprehensively covered the exit poll story since Election Day. Anyone who says that exit polls are the most reliable kind of survey “only demonstrates that the person making that statement knows very little about how surveys are done,” Blumenthal says.
Warren Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who conducted the exit poll for the networks, told me last year that he doesn’t think the exits represent the gospel truth of what happened during an election. The ACE Project, a group that advises democracies on how to conduct elections that is spearheaded by, among other groups, the United Nations, says this of exit polling: “Their reliability can be questionable. One might think that there is no reason why voters in stable democracies should conceal or lie about how they have voted, especially because nobody is under any obligation to answer in an exit poll. But in practice they often do. The majority of exit polls carried out in European countries over the past years have been failures.”
As the MIT political scientists Charles Stewart has pointed out, it’s not useful to compare the role of exit polls in Ukraine’s 2004 election with exit polls in the U.S race. The two elections, and the two nations, are too different to come to any meaningful conclusion from such a comparison. In Ukraine, one exit poll showed opposition candidate and eventual president Viktor Yushchenko winning 54 percent to 43 percent nationally. Mitofsky’s final national poll put Kerry at 51 percent and Bush with 48 percent. Compare this to the actual result, which had Bush at 51 percent and Kerry with 48 percent. The difference is not that significant.
Moreover, Stewart notes, pre-election polls in Ukraine agreed with the exits, bolstering the case that Yushchenko was the true winner. In the United States, though, the polls taken before the election tended to show either a very close race or a Bush win. (You can read Stewart’s paper in PDF format here.)
When you talk to pollsters about what to make of the 2004 American exit polls — as I have done, on and off, for the past year and a half — you don’t hear the degree of trust in the surveys that Kennedy suggests. Exit polls are sometimes wrong; indeed, examples abound. In 1992, the exits showed almost as great a pro-Clinton bias as the 2004 poll’s pro-Kerry bias — in other words, the poll showed Clinton with a lot bigger win than he ultimately had. The reason that poll didn’t cause a firestorm is because the race wasn’t as close as the one in 2004.
Claim: The exit polls showed an insurmountable Kerry lead, one that made a Bush win impossible.
“As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally.” Kennedy adds, “Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.”
Kennedy then includes a blockbuster quote from Steven Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, who puts the odds of the polls being as wrong as they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida at 1 in 660,000. ”As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” Freeman says, ”it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”
Reality: Kennedy is right that the polls in battleground states showed Kerry ahead. What he fails to say is that in many states, the exits didn’t show Kerry ahead by the margin of error, meaning, statistically, that his lead wasn’t secure. Way back in December of 2004, pollster Mark Blumenthal pointed out the key fact in this debate. Of the ten battleground states that the exit poll showed Kerry winning, he ultimately lost four — states that, you could say, cost him the election. These were Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. But in none of those states was Kerry’s lead outside the poll’s margin of error. In other words, the poll results showed a race that was too close to call, and it is impossible to use such a poll to prove that fraud occurred. As Mitofsky told me, television news networks, looking at the exit poll data, seemed to understand that Kerry did not top the margin of error, and so did not call these states for him.
As for Freeman’s 660,000 to 1 statistic, it is irrelevant. (His comment to Kennedy — “As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible…” — appears almost verbatim in the paper he put out in December 2004; I included it in a story on exit polling a year and a half ago.) The statistic measures the probability that the errors in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida occurred due to chance or random error, and according to Freeman, that probability is very low. But nobody argues the errors happened by chance. Everyone in the exit poll debate agrees that there was a systematic cause for the errors in the poll. Freeman, Kennedy, et al., claim that the systematic cause was fraud, while Mitofsky and many in the polling community claim the cause was a problem with the poll. So Freeman’s argument that it would take preposterous odds to produce a random sampling error is a straw-man assertion.
Claim: The exit pollsters can’t explain how their poll failed.
Kennedy says that Edison/Mitofsky, Warren Mitofsky’s polling group, “was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology — so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate.”
Reality: This claim is misleading. In January 2005, Mitofsky released a 77-page report detailing how his poll performed on Election Day. You can read the PDF here. It is not stingy about possible methodological flaws in the survey: “Our detailed analysis by polling location and by interviewer has identified several factors that may have contributed to the size of the Within Precinct Error that led to the inaccuracies in the exit poll estimates. Some of these factors are within our control while others are not.”
As I reported last year, Mitofsky has outlined a clear and convincing explanation for what went wrong with his survey. According to Mitofsky, interviewers assigned to talk to voters as they left the polls appeared to be slightly more inclined to seek out Kerry voters than Bush voters. Kerry voters were thus overrepresented in the poll by a small margin. According to Mitofsky’s report, the polling error tended to be larger in precincts where interviewers had been recently hired or reported being insufficiently trained; where precinct officials, lawyers or other vote observers interfered with pollsters’ opportunity to approach the voters as they left the precinct; where pollsters were made to stand far away from the precinct; and where the weather wasn’t great (remember the rain in Ohio?). The report went on to outline various fixes in polling practices that might mitigate such flaws in the future.
Claim: Researchers have conclusively disproved the official explanation for the exit poll’s error.
Kennedy says that Mitofsky’s theory that Kerry voters were oversampled in the poll — thus leading to a pro-Kerry poll bias — doesn’t hold water. “Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey — compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds. ‘The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,’ observes Freeman, ‘but actually contradicts it.’”
Reality: To begin with, Freeman and his team did not “find” the survey-completion rates that Kennedy cites. Mitofsky released that data in a public report. This data was not discovered “now” — Freeman and others have been touting it ever since Mitofsky put it out in January 2005. You can see the data on page 37 of Mitofsky’s report. There, Mitofsky indeed shows that in precincts where Bush got 80 percent or more of the vote, an average of 56 percent of people who were approached volunteered to take part in the poll, while in precincts where Kerry got 80 percent or more of the vote, a lower average of 53 percent of people were willing to be surveyed. But these numbers don’t reveal how Bush voters or Kerry voters behaved, they only show how all voters, taken together in average, responded in certain precincts. They are irrelevant to the question of whether fraud occurred.
As Mark Lindeman, a political scientist at Bard College, explained to me, the numbers Kennedy cites fit the theory that Kerry voters were more likely to respond to pollsters than Bush voters. For instance, in the Bush strongholds — where the average completion rate was 56 percent — it’s possible that only 53 percent of those who voted for Bush were willing to be polled, while people who voted for Kerry participated at a higher 59 percent rate. Meanwhile, in the Kerry strongholds, where Mitofsky found a 53 percent average completion rate, it’s possible that Bush voters participated 50 percent of the time, while Kerry voters were willing to be interviewed 56 percent of the time. In this scenario, the averages work out to the same ones Kennedy cited: a 56 percent average response rate in Bush strongholds, and a 53 percent average response rate in Kerry strongholds. But in both Bush strongholds and Kerry strongholds, Kerry voters would have been responding at a higher rate, skewing the poll toward Kerry.
What’s more, these numbers are not set in stone. That’s because, as Mitofsky has pointed out, it’s not possible to measure the actual completion rate by Kerry voters and by Bush voters. (When someone refuses to talk to a pollster, it’s not possible to say whether he was a Bush voter or Kerry voter.) Mitofsky says that a hypothetical completion rate of 50 percent for Bush voters and 56 percent for Kerry voters would have led to the error we saw in the poll. In other words, Kerry voters were very slightly more likely to talk to pollsters than were Bush voters.
Ultimately, nothing in Kennedy’s article, and nothing in the research he cites, refutes Mitofsky’s theory that there was a true difference in the willingness of Kerry voters to participate in the poll compared to that of Bush voters. Mitofsky noted a broad array of methodological errors that could have contributed to this difference in participation rate by Kerry and Bush voters. Such a difference would not have been a surprise; Democrats have historically been overrepresented in exit polls. There is no reason to think that the error in 2004 was anything substantively different.
Claim: Tens of thousands of people were disenfranchised due to voter registration errors.
Kennedy points to an analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition. He says it showed that “16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials, and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards.” He adds the study concludes that statewide, “a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors — one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent.”
Reality: Kennedy has misread the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition report in a small but important way. The report examines the numbers of people whose registrations were bungled due to their own or their county officials’ error. Some of those errors — for instance, submitting a registration form without an address — disqualified people to vote. Other errors, such as someone’s making a mistake while typing in your name, might or might not have disqualified you. So not all of the 16,000 people in Cleveland whose registrations included data-entry errors were disenfranchised. In fact, many of them got to vote. (You can read the coalition’s PDF report here.) http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Analyses_Full_Report.pdf
Kennedy’s error is important when you consider the number of people disenfranchised through registration errors statewide, which he puts at 72,000. In fact, the coalition reports the number as an estimate of about 42,500 votes that were “lost,” and 30,000 votes it says were “at risk” of being lost; it is not clear how many of those that were “at risk” were actually lost.
The report simply does not say that 72,000 people were disenfranchised.
– By Farhad Manjoo
August 9th, 2006 at 10:56 pmDemocRATS fav excuse:
August 9th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
The Persistent Myth of the Stolen Election
Posted by McQ
Its an article of faith on the left that George Bush “stole” the 2000 election with the aid of the Supreme Court which gave him a win in FL that he didn’t earn and thus a Presidency he didn’t earn.
To this day, the myth is still perpertrated by the likes of Jesse Jackson, John Edwards and John Kerry:
There are many issues to debate and argue about the sordid Florida experience, but one of the most intriguing is how a cottage industry has sprung up among liberals to perpetuate this myth. (Jesse Jackson still refers to Florida as “the scene of the crime” where “we were disenfranchised. Our birthright stolen.”) As the 2004 election grew closer, the distortions spread beyond Moore’s fantasy to the presidential campaign itself. Senator John Kerry told crowds that “we know thousands of people were denied the right to vote.” His running mate, former trial lawyer John Edwards, ended speeches with a closing argument about “an incredible miscarriage of justice” in Florida.
The problem for the left is that there are no facts to support the myth. Unlike Michael Moore’s claim in his factually challenged film “Fahrenheit 911″, none of the recounts which were conducted post election showed that Al Gore would have won:
But in fact, every single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state’s twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency. This includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a consortium of news organizations, among them the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. As the New York Times reported on November 21, 2001, “A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.” The USA Today recount team concluded: “Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush.”
Despite evidence to the contrary in the form of that presented by the consortium of news organizations, the myth persists among the left. It is the origin of the hate which they feel for Gerorge Bush.
When confronted by the fact that the news consortium could find no basis for the claim that Bush and the Supreme Court had “stolen” the election, many on the left then made the claim that certain minorities had been illegally “disenfranchised” (by not counting their vote) and others had not been allowed to vote … in fact, per the claim, prevented by police from voting. Enough, those critics claim, to have easily made the difference for Al Gore.
After all the media recounts of 2001 showed that George W. Bush would still have won under any fair standard, Democratic activists have narrowed their charges to the purported disfranchisement of black voters. The Civil Rights Commission, led by Democrat Mary Frances Berry-with only two Republican commissioners at the time-issued a scathing majority report in 2001 alleging “widespread voter disenfranchisement” and accusing Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush of “failing to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement.”
So by what means did the Civil Rights Commission prove these charges? Well, in fact, they really never did.
But when it comes to actual evidence of racial bias, the report draws inferences that are not supported by any data and ignores facts that challenge its conclusions. Since we have a secret ballot in America, we do not know the race of the 180,000 voters (2.9 percent of the total number of ballots cast in Florida) whose ballots had no valid vote for president. Machine error cannot be the cause of discrimination, since the machine doesn’t know the race of the voter either, and in any case accounts for about one error in 250,000 votes cast. (And, as some have asked, is it not racist in the first place to assume that those who spoil ballots are necessarily minority voters?)
The Commission simply assumed that the invalid ballots were those of minorities. That somehow blacks and other minorities were shut out of voting based on the evidence that 180,000 ballots had no valid vote for president. That somehow those counting the ballots knew the voters were black.
Sounds absurd, but that’s the core of the claim.
The question then is: was the commission able to come up with “a consistent, statistically significant relationship between the share of voters who were African-American and the ballot spoilage rate?”
The answer is a flat “no”. In fact, a study showed something else entirely:
John Lott, an economist and statistician from the Yale Law School now with the American Enterprise Institute, studied spoilage rates in Florida by county in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections and compared them with demographic changes in county populations. He concluded that “the percent of voters in different race or ethnic categories is never statistically related to ballot spoilage.”
Lott found that among the 25 Florida counties with the greatest rate of vote spoilage, 24 had Democratic election officers in charge of counting the votes. He concluded that “having Democratic officials in charge [of county elections] increases ballot spoilage rates significantly, but the effect is stronger when that official is an African-American.”
In other words, the possibility of disenfranchisement as charged by the Civil Rights Commission took place in counties with Democratic officials in charge of the elections and counting.
How then is it possible for Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush in particular and the Republicans in general, to have “disenfranchized” minority voters in those counties?
In fact, ballot spoilage at the rate indicated in the 2000 election is about average and happens in every election:
Ballot-spoilage rates across the country range between 2 and 3 percent of total ballots cast. Florida’s rate in 2000 was 3 percent. In 1996 it was 2.5 percent.
Another of the charges leveled was that blacks were kept away from the polling places by police.
Other charges from Democratic activists turned out to be “falsehoods and exaggerations.” For instance, when the commission investigated the charge that a police traffic checkpoint near a polling place had intimidated black voters, it turned out that the checkpoint operated for ninety minutes at a location two miles from the poll and not even on the same road. And of the sixteen people given citations, twelve were white.
And last, but not least, “the Florida attorney general Bob Butterworth-a Democrat-testified that of the 2,600 complaints he received on Election Day, only three were about racial discrimination.”
The myth’s foundations are easily destroyed with fact, but not as easily dismissed by those who badly want to believe George Bush was “selected not elected”. Although false, the myth gives them a basis for their claim to the illegitimacy of Bush’s presidency and a reason for their hate. Whether its true or not apparently doesn’t matter anymore (and I’m not so sure it mattered then) as the hate is now so rooted within them that it is a part of their political being. ABB is their mantra and ABB is who they’ll vote for, regardless of whether that’s good for the country or not.
The excerpts are from James Fund’s new book Stealing Elections, via RealClear Politics.
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