Last November, a group of U.S. Marines apparently went on “the worst rampage by U.S. service members in the Iraq war, killing as many as 24 civilians in cold blood.” Today on ABC, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said that U.S. officials learned of the alleged massacre in Haditha “a few days” after it happened and organized a cover-up:

MURTHA: This is what the Marine Corps told me at the highest level. The Commandant of the Marine Corps was in my office just last week, so you know. I know there was a cover-up someplace. They knew about this a few days afterwards and there’s no question the chain of command tried to stifle the story. I can understand why, but that doesn’t excuse it. Something like this has to be brought out to the public, and the people have to be punished.

Watch it:

Murtha was also asked whether he thought the alleged massacre would have been made public if not for the Time magazine investigation published in March (read Time’s new follow-up report) His response: “No, I do not think it would have come out, and it’s unfortunate because this is how you lose the Iraqi people.”

Full transcript below: Read more

This weekend, President Bush delivered the commencement address at West Point and declared that his global war on terror is helping to spread freedom in the Middle East:

Decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe. So long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place where terrorists foment resentment and threaten American security. So we are pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.

This morning on Meet the Press, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered a strong rebuke of Bush’s assessment of what’s going on in the Middle East:

I think you could make a pretty strong case that things are worse off in the Middle East today than they were three years ago. By measurement of Iraq, by Iran, by the Palestinian-Israeli issue, what’s going on in Egypt. And, I think the United States must use its force of diplomacy to engage Iran.

Hagel isn’t alone in making his argument that the Middle East is worse off since the Iraq invasion. Read more

On the eve of the meeting between President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair today to discuss the next steps in Iraq, Iraq’s new prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki stated for the second time in the past week that Iraqi forces should be able to take over security within 18 months – by the end of 2007.

This is the same period of time outlined in Strategic Redeployment 2.0, the progressive plan for Iraq written by Larry Korb and myself at the Center for American Progress.

Signs are that Bush and Blair will avoid setting down a clear marker for withdrawing troops – yesterday White House spokesman Tony Snow pushed back against suggestions that President Bush might finally listen to the Iraqis and set a timeline.

But the call for a timeline for withdrawing troops should not come as a surprise. This is exactly what most Iraqis want. Last fall, Iraqi leaders from across the ethnic and sectarian spectrum called for a timetable for troop withdrawals at a conference in Cairo.

These leaders are voicing the opinions of their constituents – a recent poll found that 70 percent of Iraqis support withdrawing U.S.-led forces by the end of 2007.

– Brian Katulis

This week, six private citizens — including author Studs Terkel — joined the ACLU in a lawsuit against AT&T, claiming the company gave the NSA “sensitive information about massive numbers of domestic phone calls.”

But AT&T and the government may force the courts to shut down the case. With increasing frequency, the Bush administration is employing the state secrets privilege, “a once-rare tactic that essentially gives the government a blank check to kill civil suits.” (Verizon picked up the administration’s lead and invoked the privilege to shield itself from public scrutiny over the NSA surveillance program.)

A look at the government’s increasing abuse of the practice:

– A recent study found that the federal government “has successfully asserted the secrets privilege at least 60 times since the early 1950s and has been stymied five times.”

– “It was invoked only four times in the first 23 years after the U.S. Supreme Court created the privilege in 1953, but now the government is claiming the privilege to dismiss lawsuits at a rate of more than three a year.”

Even more troubling is that the state secrets privilege is based on a 1953 Supreme Court decision that was “based more on concealing negligence than preserving national security.”

Kevin Drum has more.

This morning on CNN’s Reliable Sources, ABC’s chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross — who this week learned he was the target of federal surveillance operations — described the effect that unchecked spying is having on journalists:

ROSS: [I]t makes me feel, in a way “” and this is, I think, the disturbing part “” as if we are drug dealers or terrorists trying to traffic in information, and should we be using bags full of quarters like old Mafia capos to avoid having our phone calls traced? I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong; I don’t think any other reporter is, either. We’re trying to cover these stories, which are difficult, but which are very important.

Ross also revealed that the surveillance has had a chilling effect on his sources, who now risk being exposed:

I’m working on a big story now with people who are confidential sources inside the Federal Air Marshal Service. They were all alarmed that they might be exposed as talking with me in violation of rules. So it’s of great concern.

Watch it:

Full transcript below: Read more

Today, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. has been “secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.”

The Bush administration is “backing the warlords as part of its global war against terrorism,” even though some of these warlords “reportedly fought against the United States in 1993 during street battles that culminated in an attack that downed two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and left 18 Army Rangers dead.”

At today’s press briefing, Tony Snow all but confirmed the report:

[Y]ou’ve got instability in Somalia right now, and there is concern about the presence of foreign terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda, within Somalia right now. In an environment of instability, as we’ve seen in the past, Al Qaeda may take root, and we want to make sure that Al Qaeda does not in fact establish a beachhead in Somalia. ["¦] The United States – we will continue to work with regional and international partners wherever we can to crack down on terrorism and also to try to prevent its rising.

Somalia’s interim government has warned the U.S. that this policy is “shortsighted and dangerous,” and is causing more violence in an already anarchic country:

“We would prefer that the U.S. work with the transitional government and not with criminals,” the prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, said in an interview. “This is a dangerous game. Somalia is not a stable place and we want the U.S. in Somalia. But in a more constructive way. Clearly we have a common objective to stabilize Somalia, but the U.S. is using the wrong channels.”

Shortsighted and dangerous: a good way to describe much of the administration’s foreign policy.

“Consent” appears to be the right wing’s favorite defense for the apparent decision by major phone companies to hand over millions of customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. As reported in the Washington Post, “the Bush administration has argued that a company can turn over its entire database of customer records — and even the stored content of calls and e-mails — because customers ‘have consented to that’ when they establish accounts.”

ThinkProgress has been compiling legal answers to all the questions about telco liability, here and here. Here’s why the consent argument won’t work:

1. The telco language terms of service provide no basis for “consent.” The terms of service of AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon highlight that they will turn over records in response to court orders or subpoenas, which did not exist, according to USA Today. Verizon also mentions “exigent circumstances” – a very slim reed on which to conclude that customers gave actual consent to having all their phone calls disclosed to the government.

2. Consent is for a specific action, not a blanket permission. As explained by former prosecutor and law professor Orin Kerr, cases under the wiretap laws require that “the user actually agreed to the action, either explicitly or implicitly based on the user’s decision to proceed in light of actual notice.” You give consent for a call when you have actual notice. That’s why we always hear that “this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

Read more

In January, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell asked James Risen, the New York Times author who disclosed the NSA wiretapping program, whether CNN’s Christiane Amanpour had been eavesdropped upon.

MITCHELL: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
RISEN: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the questions we’ll have to look into [in] the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don’t know the answer to that.
MITCHELL: You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
RISEN: No, no I hadn’t heard that.

The question-and-answers were soon deleted from NBC’s website, but NBC did confirm that it was conducting an inquiry into whether reporters had been targeted. CNN’s David Ensor received an official response from the NSA:

I’m told considerable manhours today went into making sure the answer to CNN would be accurate. A senior US intelligence official tells use that our colleague Christiane Amanpour has never been targeted by the National Security Agency, and nor has any other CNN journalist. Now, the NSA as you know is the eavesdropping intelligence agency, the US government’s big ear, and from time to time, the official says, wiretaps overseas or other intercepts turn out to include Americans, or what they call ‘US persons’, which includes people who works for US companies, it does so inadvertently.

The response Ensor received from the NSA related specifically to eavesdropping — i.e., the monitoring of the contents of a phone call. According to a report today from ABC’s Brian Ross the government is tracking reporters’ phone records — but not the contents of their phone calls — in an effort to root out confidential sources. If the ABC story is true, it raises the question of whether Amanpour’s — or any other journalist’s — phone records were monitored by the government.

During a prime-time address tonight, President Bush will “outline immigration reform proposals,” including a controversial plan to deploy several thousand National Guard troops to the US/Mexican border.

Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America a few minutes ago, White House Counselor Dan Bartlett was asked about concerns that the National Guard was under strain:

GIBSON: So you reject the argument that some Republicans made yesterday that the Guard is already stretched too thin?

BARTLETT: Well, absolutely.

Here are the facts about the state of the National Guard:

- 20 percent of the approximately 130,000 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq are members of the Guard and Reserve.

- 352 National Guard soldiers have died in Iraq.

- The National Guard Bureau estimated that “nondeployed units had only about 34 percent of their essential warfighting equipment as of July 2005.”

- The Army National Guard “reported that it had less than 5 percent of the required amount of more than…220 critical items.”

Read more

Yesterday, Bush said this in his weekly radio address:

The intelligence activities I have authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.

Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter (R-PA) disagreed with that assessment this morning. On Face the Nation, Specter said that Bush and others in the administration “still haven’t complied with the act to inform the full intelligence committees as required by law.”

“[T]here really has to be in our system of law and government, checks and balance, separation of powers, congressional oversight,” Specter added, and “there has been no meaningful congressional oversight on these programs.”

Full transcript: Read more

CongressDaily reports that former NSA staffer Russell Tice will inform the Senate Armed Services Committee next week that not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Tice will tell Congress that former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush’s nominee to be the next CIA director, oversaw more illegal activity that has yet to be disclosed:

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. “¦

[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. “¦ “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” Tice said. “I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now.” …

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said. “¦ He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he “will not confirm or deny” if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.

Tice has a history for blowing the whistle on serious misconduct. He was one of the sources that revealed the administration’s warrantless domestic spying program to the New York Times.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), in a speech yesterday to the National Press Club:

The consultants and the pundits and others will tell you…that it is dangerous to let there be any real light between our position and the White House’s position, or else you’ll get called soft on terrorism. You already hear people saying that the Michael Hayden nomination will be a great opportunity for the White House to show the Democrats are soft on terrorism. And you bet the pundits in this town will somehow suggest that this, too, just like my censure resolution, will cause the President’s numbers to shoot up. You remember that happening, right? It didn’t happen at all, but that’s what they’re gonna say, but it’s not right.

Watch it:

Feingold is right. He announced his plans to introduce a censure resolution on March 12. President Bush’s Gallup rating at the time was 37 percent. Today it’s 31 percent.

Read the full transcript below: Read more

Confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden to be CIA Director are sure to renew the debate over President Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance and the balance between civil liberties and national security.

Prominent conservatives working to stifle oversight of the program, including Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS) and John Cornyn (R-TX), have taken to repeating the line that civil liberties don’t matter much “after you’re dead.” Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned this past February that “terrorists and criminals…would exploit our open society to do us harm.”

John Gannon, former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence, has a different view. In testimony last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gannon said that Americans’ Constitutional freedoms “work against the development of domestic terrorist networks that could be exploited by foreigners.” In an email published today to the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News, he offered some more thoughts:

Americans have unparalleled Constitutional and legal protections to express grievances and to openly criticize government at all levels. … It means that the terrorists or other extremists would find less fertile ground to build networks in the US because local support would be harder to come by and because local opposition would be more certain.

In this sense, our liberties are a powerful antidote to violent extremism.

This is not an academic point for me. It is an observation from a career of watching the domestic consequences of repressive regimes elsewhere in the world–including US-friendly Islamic governments such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Read Gannon’s full statement HERE.

Yesterday, the Senate unanimously passed an amendment to the Iraq supplemental spending bill proposed by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) that would require the Bush administration not to use any appropriated funds for the construction of permanent bases in Iraq. The amendment also called for the U.S. not exercise control over Iraqi oil. Biden’s amendment reads as follows:

To provide that no funds made available by title I of this Act may be made available to establish permanent United States military bases in Iraq or to exercise control by the United States over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq.

Earlier this year, the House passed an amendment offered by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) that similarly stated no funds should be used for permanent base construction.

Congress has now spoken with a clear and unambiguous voice a time when there are troubling signs that the administration wants to make the U.S. presence permanent in Iraq. For example, the administration is currently constructing a $592 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad that spans the size of 80 football fields.

Will this be yet another law that the administration chooses to ignore?

UPDATE: Atrios believes Bush won’t listen.

The Senate is expected to approve a nearly $109 billion spending bill today. The legislation provides some useful insight into the priorities of our current Congress.

The bill includes $700 million for the “railroad to nowhere“:

The project, which was added to a $106.5 billion emergency defense spending bill in the Senate, would relocate a Gulf Coast rail line inland, to higher ground. Never mind that the hurricane-battered line was just repaired at a cost of at least $250 million. Or that at $700 million, the project championed by Mississippi’s two US senators is being called the largest “earmark” ever.

Meanwhile, a paltry $173 million has been appropriated for peacekeeping efforts in Darfur, where violence is “horrendously bad and worsening” according to the U.N.’s top humanitarian official.

After three years of genocide — 400,000 dead, 2.5 million driven from their homes, razed villages, rape campaigns, and mass starvation — our government still doesn’t get it. So much for “Never Again.”

On a positive note, at least the Senate passage of the $173 million today was unanimous. When the funding was voted on in the House, it was opposed by the White House (which wanted even less) and passed by only five votes, 213-208, thanks to strong opposition from conservatives, including House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH).

Lt. Gen. Victor Renuart, the director of planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spoken out on Iran:

Military action against Iran would be fraught with risk and would have repercussions across the region, a leading American general conceded.

“Any action militarily is very complicated,” Lt Gen Victor Renuart, the director of planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Daily Telegraph.

“And any action by any country will have second-order effects, and that is a strong case to continue the diplomatic process and make it work.“

Gen. Renuart is the latest in a long line of national security experts and others warning of the dangers of a military strike on Iran, and emphasizing the importance of making diplomacy work. (Read the full list HERE.)

The Bush administration ignores this advice at the peril of U.S. national security. Just today, the respected Arms Control Association warned that if Iran and the U.S. continue to move “further away from the diplomatic solution both say they want, we may eventually see a military confrontation, a nuclear weapons-capable Iran, or both. If such perilous outcomes are to be averted, Washington and Tehran need to engage in direct talks aimed at a grand bargain that addresses each of their concerns.”

Our guest blogger, Tom Lantos (D-CA), is the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and the founding co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

More than ever, attention is focused on Darfur. Thousands came to rallies across the country this weekend, George Clooney has added his tremendous star power to the chorus of voices, and the White House has made pronouncements on the matter three times within two weeks. But actions speak louder than words, chants, and songs. We need to harness this surge of interest in the issue and bring the suffering in Darfur to an end.

I was asked to take a prominent part in the events of the last few days because I have been pushing for NATO involvement in civilian protection in Darfur for two years, because I have been engaged in human rights causes for several decades, and because I am a survivor of genocide.

After the Holocaust, the world declared that never again would we stand by and let genocide take place. Yet, during the past three years in Darfur, the government of Sudan and its criminal militia, the Janjaweed, have slaughtered an estimated 400,000 people because of their African identity, displaced more than two million, and driven 200,000 into refugee camps in neighboring Chad.

As the Holocaust taught us, a villainous government that persecutes its own people cannot be counted on to protect them; it must be compelled to do so. Read more

On the third anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the end of major combat operations underneath a “mission accomplished” banner, a new poll of Iraqis conducted in late March 2006 for the International Republican Institute offers grim reminders of the troubles regular Iraqis continue to face.

– Less secure. The vast majority of Iraqis – 76 percent – rate their security situation as “poor.” More than half of all Iraqis (55 percent) say the security situation has gotten worse in the last three months, a 26-point increase since last fall.

– More divided. Six in 10 (62 percent) of Iraqis say that the country is more divided than in the past.

– Facing economic freefall. Fully three quarters of Iraqis (76 percent) say that wages have gotten worse in the last three months, a stunning 58-point increase since last fall.

– More corrupt. Nearly seven in 10 Iraqis (68 percent) say that corruption has gotten worse in the last three months, a 19-point increase since last fall.

When asked whom they trusted the most to protect their personal safety, a plurality said the Iraqi police (43 percent), followed by the Iraqi army (35 percent). Hardly anyone — one percent — picked the multinational forces.

The time has come for the United States to take control of its interests and change the course in Iraq, as proposed in the Strategic Redeployment plan offered by the Center for American Progress.

– Brian Katulis