The Washington Times’ Eli Lake has a great story today about how a close aide to Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi was detained by U.S. forces in 2008 “on suspicion that the aide served as a liaison to a Shi’ite group thought responsible for the 2007 execution-style slayings of five U.S. Marines and other violence against foreigners and Iraqis”:

The group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, also has been implicated in the kidnappings and slayings of four British contractors in 2007. The British government is negotiating for the release of a fifth abductee, Peter Moore. [...]

Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were discussing sensitive matters, accused Mr. Chalabi of providing crucial guidance to the league — charges that led the U.S. government to sever ties with the mercurial Iraqi in May 2008 and to arrest his aide three months later. Two of the U.S. officials and a third coalition official who also spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the aide was held for more than a month in a secret prison before being transferred to a facility at a U.S. base. The aide, Ali Faisal al-Lami, was released without charge earlier this month. [...]

One U.S. official said that Mr. Chalabi, through Mr. al-Lami, provided tactical intelligence to the leaders of the League of the Righteous in spring 2008 when U.S. and Iraqi forces began targeting Shi’ite militias in the aftermath of an offensive that restored central government control over the southern city of Basra. Mr. Chalabi had access to sensitive information about the campaign against the special groups through his relationship with the Iraqi government and U.S. military.

“This was a friendship killer,” the U.S. official said, leading the U.S. military to cut ties with Mr. Chalabi in May 2008.

Lake’s story contains several scoops — in addition to al-Lami’s detention on suspicion of aiding the special groups, there’s the continued operation of U.S. “black sites” in Iraq as late as last year, and al-Lami’s alleging of abuse at the hands of his U.S. interrogators — but it’s been clear for a long time now that Chalabi is an extraordinarily shrewd and shady self-dealer with close ties to Iran.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote about Chalabi’s close relationship with key members of Washington’s neoconservative faction based at the American Enterprise Institute (and later in the Pentagon) including Sen. John McCain’s campaign foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann (pictured above with Chalabi.)

I’ve always been a little surprised by the relative lack of attention by the mainstream media to the fact that a group of prominent foreign policy conservatives worked so intensively with and on behalf a man who turned out to have been working with Iran. Indeed, in 2004, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” It seems extremely likely that, were the situation reversed, that is, had a small faction of Democratic activists conspired with an Iraqi con man who was later revealed to have been cooperating with America’s enemies and likely gotten Americans killed, the sustained outcry from the right would have forced those activists, at the very least, to seek careers somewhere other than in American foreign policy. Yet Chalabi’s boosters remain, as far as I can tell, members in good standing of the D.C. policy elite. Very strange.

In June 2008, a federal appeals court ruled that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers can search travelers’ laptops and copy their entire contents without probable cause or “reasonable suspicion.” CBP officers “can review and analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, reenter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States,” including information from laptops and other electronic devices. A CBP official dismissed growing public concern regarding this draconian policy at the time, saying the policy is akin to simply searching one’s backpack (it’s not).

The Washington Post reports today that the Obama administration will largely continue this policy:

The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search — without suspicion of wrongdoing — the contents of a traveler’s laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.

The policy, disclosed Thursday in a pair of Department of Homeland Security directives, describes more fully than did the Bush administration the procedures by which travelers’ laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border.

Privacy law expert Peter Swire noted a number of problems with this severely intrusive policy, namely that it limits privacy, free speech and business secrets, sets bad precedent for other more untrustworthy regimes throughout the world, and could discourage foreign travel to the U.S.

Obama administration officials say that more protections have been put in place. In one new “oversight,” CBP officers “should now generally take no more than 5 days” to conduct searchers (more than enough time to copy the entire contents of large hard drives). Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new policy “strike[s] the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers.” Civil Liberties advocates disagree:

“Under the policy begun by Bush and now continued by Obama, the government can open your laptop and read your medical records, financial records, e-mails, work product and personal correspondence — all without any suspicion of illegal activity,” said Elizabeth Goitein, who leads the liberty and national security project at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Electronic Frontier Foundation mobilized action campaigns last year calling on citizens to urge the federal government to abandon this policy. The Post reports that according to DHS data, “[b]etween October 2008 and Aug. 11, more than 221 million travelers passed through CBP checkpoints. About 1,000 laptop searches were performed, only 46 in-depth.”