I can hear it now -- 10,000 wingnuts and administration flacks saying, "hmmmmmm... yeaaaaaah, Yeah!, that's what the pResident was trying to do. Thanks. Thanks for the talking point, Kev."

Rub out, or extrajudicial assassination. Lots of covert ops going on lately, all around the world. That's one reason SpecFor and Delta are stretched so thin. (They're not just in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

And mercs get paid really well these days too. Lots of work in that arena.

Dad: It's still illegal. I just wouldn't get too obsessed with the talking point that the program was completely useless. It probably wasn't.

Here's what I've been wondering about: Airline cargo hulls are essentially unprotected; same for chemical plants, ports, the border ... So why haven't these evil terrorists, this enemy that never sleeps, this menace on a par with the USSR -- why haven't they attacked us since 9-11? Hmmm, maybe it really ain't such a big threat after all? Maybe all of us, libs included, have been sold a bill of fear goods based on one lucky, once in a lifetime dramatic and awful tragedy?

Suck any harder Kevin and you'll choke on the bone.

Rub out, or extrajudicial assassination

Oh, greeeeaaat! Talk about your potential for mistakes. Here I was worried I'd just end up on a no-fly list because of my Bush-bashing and predilection for chicken shawarma, now I fear I'm going to have to quit my regimen of jogging on deserted railroad tracks.

I'm worried about this emerging mantra that the "searches can't be used as evidence in court", but otherwise are perfectly alright. I don't believe that it was the Founders or the 4th amendment only has in mind, and this seems like more of a judicial construction over the years as apologia for increasing state power and surveillance.

Yes, you need a search warrant to come in my house, and not just to collect evidence for legal action against me, but to come in my house at all. I'm sure the Founders weren't imagining that it would be perfectly okay for the state to come on your property at will, whenever they please, as long as they were just snooping around and didn't plan on using anything they noticed against you in court.

Indeed, if the state continually comes on my property, for whatever reason and without a search warrant, regardless of whether they intend to arrest or charge me, this action would have (and does have) lawsuit written all over it, for violating my rights.

This is just common sense. The government does not have unlimited right, or any right, to snoop on you without cause, and without doing so strictly by the terms which limits its action in the Constitution.

As for snooping on public property, the government probably is within the Constitution in doing that, if it chooses to do so, as long as this surveillance is not so onerous as to be construed as disturbing the security of the person according to the 4th amendment. And obviously "people watching" in the public square, whether it is a group sitting at a coffee shop or the government, does not violate the security of a person, but watching someone in their own house for longer than a moment would rightfully be called "snooping", "prowling", or whatever that word is that is eluding me right now that perfectly describes this act.

What exactly are the FISA standards for allowing a wiretap? I know the FISA law says the government must show probable cause that something is wrong in order to get a FISA warrant, but must that probable cause be that a crime was actually committed? Or does the FISA law mean simply that the government has probable cause that somebody has important counterintelligence information?

"Linked With" - - as in "With us or against us"

"Actually, I think there might be a fairly simple answer to this question: information gleaned from the NSA program can be used for purposes of counterintelligence, but it can't be used in court. In fact, the results of the NSA program can't even be used as the basis for a subsequent FISA wiretap warrant."

That assumes the Feds are honest about the source of their information, and don't just lie to the judge.

She 'heard' 1000 a year. There's no reason to trust that figure, up or down. Laura's good, but that's sloppy.

Maybe all of us, libs included, have been sold a bill of fear goods based on one lucky, once in a lifetime dramatic and awful tragedy?
Posted by: bluebird on December 23, 2005 at 1:20 AM | PERMALINK

True or not, look at their success rate.

Embassy bombings: Success, success.
USS Cole: Success.
9/11: Three unqualified successes, one semi-success - in one day.
3/11: stunning success (Spain election, withdrawl from coalition).
July 17, 2005 (Britain bombings):Success, failure.

I don't think they just got lucky on 9/11. I think we're looking at the limits of their capabilities.

Anyway - who cares if these searches can be used in court. You know how they can be used? Secret detentions, renderings, secret tribunals, and given how low the bar may be for evidence in those venues, I really wonder if Padilla isn't the tip of the iceberg.

Elrod, I'm not sure, but I would guess that if the standard was cause for counterintelligence, the target would still have to be linked to a foreign power or terrorist organization, in order to override normal citizen right protections, if even FISA allows for spying on citizens (I'm definitely open to legal language, whether it exists or not, that would enable this kind of activity, should there be cause to suspect a citizen is acting in concert with a foreign power or terrorist organization).

Nowhere in the Constitution is power given to just spy on American citizens without cause, for any reason, and Congress itself cannot pass such a law, as Scalia suggests (in the different circumstance of his suggestion that Congress must explicitly suspend habeas corpus). Congress cannot pass unconstitutional laws, or laws that assume power that is not given in the Constitution. Congress cannot suspend habeas corpus, by law, but only through amendment, as nowhere in the Constitution is there even a hint that the government has the power to suspend habeas corpus, which in many ways is the very foundation of our government and follows from the fact that the people are philosophically and legally established as the foundation of the state (and its owners).

Similarly there is no language in the Constitution that says the Congress or the executive or the judiciary or any apparatus of state power can override the Constitution outside of the amendment process, or override an amendment to the Constitution, or assume power that is not already explicitly given to the federal state. And nowhere in the Bill of Rights is there language that says that Congress can pass a law with a majority vote to suspend the rights of the citizen and the limits of state power that are written into the amendment.

This is all common sense, and we have clearly strayed from common sense over the decades in standing by silently as the federal government assumed more and more power, and made more and more unconstitutional assumptions about the scope and reach of its powers.

I've said this elsewhere last week. My guess is that most of these people were linked to al Qaeda the same way that Saddam was linked to al Qaeda only in the paranoid hallucinations of the administration.

If you combined a global NSA fishing net with the Able Danger 'friendster' approach, you might identify 4000 people in the US within 2-3 degrees of separation from some known/suspected al Queda members. Out of that you might get a hundred nodes of interest to investigate, assasignate, disappear, whatever...

If you combined a global NSA fishing net with the Able Danger 'friendster' approach, you might identify 4000 people in the US within 2-3 degrees of separation from some known/suspected al Queda members. .
Posted by: tinfoil on December 23, 2005 at 2:05 AM | PERMALINK

You are not worthy of your handle.

Come on, think! It depends on what the parameters of separation are. If you're, for instance, looking for people with an ideology similar to Al Qaeda (ie. oppose the US backing of Israel, oppose US occupation of muslim lands) - I'm sure you'd find WAY more Americans worthy of warrantless wiretapping. And I'm sure if you couldn't then find hard connections to Al Qaeda, you could certainly find evidence of SOME wrongdoing among some of them. (for instance, I've been known to exceed the speed limit on Highway 101 from time to time).

Absolute dynamite from William Arkin tonight on this very subject:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2005/12/the_pentagon_br.html

Given the volume of material NSA is capable of intercepting every single day and the fact that the FISA court would happily provide a warrant on a ham sandwich on short notice, I think the significance of the operation is not that it eavesdropping, or monitoring on anyone, but that it was a data-trolling effort --but even that doesn't explain the secrecy. They could explain data-mining to this very compliant court and they almost certainly would have given it their blessing or drafted a law themselves to allow it.

What's important here is that it's completely news to them. And the only thing they really might have objected to in a data-mining effort is if the Republicans farmed it out to a private company.

What of the Carlyle Groups sudden, uncharacteristic interest in Dunkin' Donuts?

Kevin - before I forget -stop by my blog - I'd be interested in your take on the 'conversation' between Bush and McClellan and Bush and Hitchens we just posted.

Regarding this evesdroping - recall the old spy cases, that were secretly monitored by electric codes (Venona) - Many went to court, not on that basis, but on manufactured incidents - Some were very controversial - recall the case of J. Coplon and a few others that were tried or re-tried because they could not use the secret evidence.

It also may be, and Charlie Peters has a long enough memory to recall, that they were spying on political opposition, not enemies - But much of Bush base now believes the opposition is an enemy - You can see what they say about Carter.

The full facts will not be known for 20 years, at least. If ever.

lol: not worthy

Perhaps. I was being simplistic, and just using a phone call to establish a relationship link.

I figure there might be at least 3 reasons why there are not more arrests -

1. We just are not hearing about them - that they can't base any public legal action on the illegally obtained evidence. Maybe people are disappearing quietly?

2. They are not 'acting' on the intelligence domestically, but rather using it to target international suspects.

3. The list has grown, but they have yet to pick up on any substantive domestic threat, and were trying to keep the capability quiet until then.

Clearly wast constitutes a "link", and what constitutes a "terrorist", need to be strictly defined, judging by, to give example, the move after 9-11 to denote anti-war protesters as "terrorists".

It's really reeally simple. I. will. speak. slowly. This. Time.

The 4000 al-Qaeda-connected individuals is a crock. The 4000 communications are people who have been targeted because of a "hit" - something they've said or a phone number they've called, or whatever - while they were being surveilled by way of a massive non-specific wiretap of tens or hundreds of thousands.

Read here:
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/013499.html#comment-186437

Bush has said that anyone who criticizes his policies is giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. By his logic, then, his domestic critics are "linked with" Al Qaeda, no?

His domestic critics include Deocrats in congress, journalists and ordinary citizen-protesters like Cindy Sheehan.

Was Cindy Sheehan wiretapped under this program? I would like to know, and I would like to hear someone asking.

Data mining on privately owned information may or may not be illegal, depending on the contract between user and service provider and the contract between the government and the service provider.

Data mining on public information is obviously not a problem.

Running data mining against communications that have been legislated, such as phone calls, to limit government surveillance, would be clearly illegal, as the government is doing nothing more than bugging thousands or millions of people instead of one, since you have to "capture" these communciations in order to data mine against them.

Data mining is nothing more than taking an accumulation of phone calls, each representing possibly a different citizen, and bugging them. There is no difference between the government "data mining" against one phone conversation with a warrant (the traditional bug), and "data mining" against a collection of phone conversations, other than that it does not gather a warrant for the so-called "data mining" operation.

In other words, to allow this to occur would open a pandora's box in which the government could just choose to "data mine" against a "slice" of phone calls that were guaranteed to have the conversations of a particular person who they want to do surveillance against, but don't want to gather a warrant.

I'm not saying that is what they're doing, but this is cerainly what we would be allowing them to do, and opening the door for them to do, if we fail to see that "data mining" against slices of phone calls is really no different than "data mining" a single phone call in the traditional sense of a "bug" (someone still has to process what is said on that line, and this processing is "data mining").

Probably rationalized as being used to track cell phones.

Let's say you have a collection of client medical information, gathered into a database. The government obtains a warrant to obtain the information you have for a particular client. You deliver the information to the government. They read the information and determine if it fits their criminal theories.

This is a very limited form of "data mining", just against one record, or against the records of only one person. The government may be looking for the name of a conspirator, and when they eyeball the records, this is what they're looking for. This pattern or identity matching is the essence of "data mining".

The only difference in what is traditionally called "data mining" is that usually there is a very large set of data, and usually far more complex search algorhythms for particular patterns and identities, and the actual search is automated by a machine (i.e. a computer), and not human eyeballs and reading comprehension.

So don't let the "data mining" argument mystify you into believing there is not illegality and unconstitutionality going on here, at least excused merely by the "data mining". To "data mine", you still have to "capture" the records, whether it is a single record, or the records of a single target, or a trillion records of a billion people. The process of "capturing" the records determines the legality, not the method of processing the information.

A bugged phone call is a "record". A trillion bugged phone calls are "records". Legality is determined by who owns the records, and the government's power to view these records.

Bush has said that anyone who criticizes his policies is giving aid and comfort to the terrorists.

Wow. You've actually got me contemplating this as a truly bizarre mafioso-style defense strategy concocted by attorneys before criminal behavior is implemented.

Still, it would be truly hard to believe that Bush or Cheney would make a legal argument that their belief that anti-war protesters (let alone people questioning the strategy and success of the war) were giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" constituted a "link" to the terrorists reasonable enough to spy on them.

I don't believe it, but it's fascinating nevertheless.

So if they have this mass of illegally obtained information they know they can't use, is there any way they could have rationalized that letting some third party have it, and then receiving information back from the third party created some kind of near-legality? Like laundered info?

Alberto Gonzales could manage to believe almost anything, I think.

One good sign is that Chart Krauthammer of Faux News and Washington Post is calling the impeachment talk nonsense.

Since Chucky is always wrong about everything, impeachment talk must not be that much off the mark.

Can you believe that we are talking about a government assault on the utility of the meaning of ordinary words and phrases? I can.

However, all is not lost. The christian broadcasting network is confirming that global warming is costing too much money.

I predict that the oil barons will soon be scapegoated, or deservedly punished, or both. Perhaps the good christians of middle america will get hybrid cars and vote for wind power.

We can hope.

>>In other words, the primary intent of this program wasn't to build criminal cases against persons in the U.S. Thus the low number of arrests.

(sorry, misposted)

>>In other words, the primary intent of this program wasn't to build criminal cases against persons in the U.S. Thus the low number of arrests.

Doesn't make sense. You're saying that if the NSA heard a conversation between a person in the US and a foreign Al Qaeda operative, that no action would be taken against the guy in the US? I know the government is incompetent at defending against terrorism, but certainly SOMETHING would be done with the guy in the US if he was conversing with a terrorist. Obviously that's the point of the program, to find people in the US in contact with foreign terrorists and stop them from exploding something. You think they're going to raid the foreign terrorists but leave the cell inside the US operational?

So if they have this mass of illegally obtained information they know they can't use, is there any way they could have rationalized that letting some third party have it, and then receiving information back from the third party created some kind of near-legality? Like laundered info?

Honestly, I don't know how stupid they are, or how duplicitous.

Kevin's benign view of wholesale collection of information on conversations between american citizens is quite disturbing.

I don't know of any other viewpoint except an authoritarian dictator's that would justify such snooping. I am baffled by Kevin's apparent endorsement of this practice. Perhaps he is too enamored of the technological gee whiz aspects of massive data mining.

I'm with Jimm. Lemme quote from Bill o' Rights:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Not "shall not be violated, except if the stuff's not going to get used in court anyway, otherwise the hell with it."

It says "shall not be violated."

I'm proud to be an American, because it means you need a warrant to tap my phone, motherfucker.

[i]The christian broadcasting network is confirming that global warming is costing too much money.[/i]

And it's all coming from Bill Clinton's pants.

Why aren't more people asking questions about how this all relates to Bolton and the NSA intercepts???

The Bush administration taps the phones of their political opponents.

In 2003, it was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency - whom the Washington Post described as a "top international diplomat who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq".

And, yeah, there were the other U.N. diplomats who had their phones tapped too.

That would explain why they didn't want court oversight...

I have to say, I actually could imagine a method of data mining that might meet the constitutional requirement of "probable cause", though "particularly describing the place" might be kind of hard to fathom in the networked era.

What I find really repugnant and disturbing about this whole affair isn't so much the fact of the monitoring itself - though that bothers me too - as the fact that the Bush Administration could so easily, by all accounts, have gone through proper channels, but just didn't. Just because it would have been a hassle, or something.

It's as if they actually prefer to break the law - like they're just looking for excuses to show that they think the law doesn't apply to them. That's what scares me most: the revelations this affair provides about the psychology of the people running the show. They seem to actively despise the law. To me, this whole debate has little or nothing to do with monitoring Al Qaeda. It's about whether it's okay to have a scofflaw president.

In some ways, the president, no matter who he is, seems always to be trying to expand the power of the executive, as if it's a competition or something. Democratic presidents are just as guilty, though perhaps not as egregiously.

This competitive nature wouldn't be so bad if the Congress would actually fucking push back, instead of being coopted by partisan political machines into rubber stamping the moves of the executive.

If the congressional branch doesn't compete, and if it doesn't push back, and if it doesn't seek to establish its territory (if not dominance), then it is not hard to predict the result, which looks much like the "results" of the past decades in terms of the gross expansion of the executive power.

The current situation is the worst we can have, because we have the worst and most egregious and most absolutist and most megalomaniacal violators in the Republicans and specifically Bush and Cheney, with the support of the "whipped into shape" partisan Congress which is controlled by the same fools.

We saw how Republicans pushed back under Gingrich against Clinton's expansion of federal power (if not everything that Clinton tried to accomplish period), by asserting the territory and prerogative and powers of Congress, if even only for cynical and partisan reasons, and it's not hard to now see the difference today.

Ultimately, this may be the best argument against the 2-party system, which far from working great as people like to claim, is perhaps leading to paralysis on the one hand to do anything about the real challenges (and the real problems we create ourselves), and on the other hand when bad things happen as a result of this lack of wisdom and/or paralysis we seek comfort in the president, who all along is taking advantage of the partisan winds when they are at his back to expand the power of the executive far further then it was meant to go.

Where is any real opposition to this? Have we got to the point where partisanship is far more important than the separation of powers, and that the ultimate objective is to get one's partisan team in charge of all the branches so that the desired actions can be coordinated?

That is not the founding vision, but it is the vision of today, and this sick 2-party clusterfuck of a system we are so obsessed with and proud of is the real problem.

This business of 4000 people within 2 or 3 degrees of al queda....

Look, it's true, that "six degrees of separation" between any two people on earth is an exaggeration. The study was limited to the United States. And there were serious flaws in the methodology anyway. All that said, the number of people in the United States within 2 or 3 degrees from al queda, even limited to personal contacts, will be huge - even much bigger than one would think from exponential logic, as social networks are scale-free, which shortens average paths greatly.

I really wonder if Padilla isn't the tip of the iceberg.

Wait - what did you just say? No, not that - the other thing. Right: iceberg. Iceberg. Iceberg!

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Perfect site for an extrajudicial detainment facility!!!

A 'degree of separation', let alone multiple degrees, does not itself give 'cause', either reasonable or "hunch", so we shouldn't get too far sidetracked on this notion anyway (I agree wholeheartedly with what Martin Bento is saying about networking theory however).

You may as well hand in your copy of the Constitution right now and sign up to be a jackboot if it's okay for the government to surveil you and suspend your 4th amendment rights based upon a 'degree of separation'.

Something that nobody seems to have noticed: There's an implicit assumption that actual terrorists communicate in English.

There's practically no-one at the NSA who can understand Arabic. The NSA is almost completely unable to interpret things which may be genuine communications between terrorists.

So not only is the program illegal, it's useless.

Bush and Cheney were no doubt informed of this, but in their typical "I don't care, just do it" fashion, the program went ahead anyway.

Terrorists have families, too...

We need a new name. This isn't the America I learned about in civics class. And we need a new flag, and new colors.

I think there's some red and black stuff that the Germans aren't using anymore we could have.

The intent was power period. the federal judiciary is beginning to see how they are being manipulated to give more power to the squatters in our house.

That is not the founding vision, but it is the vision of today, and this sick 2-party clusterfuck of a system we are so obsessed with and proud of is the real problem.Posted by: Jimm on December 23, 2005 at 4:05 AM | PERMALINK

Yes, I am obsessed with it - but certainly not proud. I am obessesed with its dysfunction, and the painfully obvious need to change it against the backdrop of what seems (to me) insurmountable odds. Everything about this system seems geared to keep it just a two party show.

You rig the rules, you control the game.

This is why I started to vote neither R or D a number of years back. But Bushie ended that, and I voted "against" rather then "for"" a candidate last time. Considering how the Left, temporarily defined as anything NOT far Right, is split, it would seem a good opportunity for a viable third party to emerge. But the control of the Right, and all the negative that comes with it, discourage this, and instead focus all opposition on unification in order to defeat the republican stranglehold.

It still may be a good opportunity, simply because I think it is going to take a long time for the left to coalesce a coherent long term strategy. Despite all the obvious failings of Bush and the right, I do not think the Dems are necessarily a leg up in electability.

Anyway, good post Jimm.

This business of 4000 people within 2 or 3 degrees of al queda...

I'm just saying that you might be able to discover that 2 seemingly unrelated people, with no suspicious activity or calls to each other or to the middle east themselves, are odd nodal points separated by a short path to people who DO call the same region of Pakistan regularly. Although the calls themselves might be unremarkable, the relationship and pattern itself is interesting.

It gives you a starting point for looking more closely. But I bet you need a lot of graph points to establish enough relationships to detect any interesting nodal points.

The guy who was going to "blow up the Brooklyn Bridge"? That wasn't the plan. He was thinking of disassembling it with blowtorches, a piece at a time. Seriously, this is what he is in fact charged with, not "blowing it up."

Oh, and I'm not saying I approve, just that I could see how NSA/Able Danger might have fused. And as we suspected with Able Danger, the number of false positives is likely VERY high, since you pick up family members and casual associates.

It's as if they actually prefer to break the law - like they're just looking for excuses to show that they think the law doesn't apply to them. That's what scares me most: the revelations this affair provides about the psychology of the people running the show. They seem to actively despise the law. To me, this whole debate has little or nothing to do with monitoring Al Qaeda. It's about whether it's okay to have a scofflaw president.

Word.

There's practically no-one at the NSA who can understand Arabic.

They have hundreds of people extremely fluent in the language. It's the FBI that can't find anybody who can speak foreign languages.

Yes, I am obsessed with it - but certainly not proud. I am obessesed with its dysfunction, and the painfully obvious need to change it against the backdrop of what seems (to me) insurmountable odds. Everything about this system seems geared to keep it just a two party show.

You rig the rules, you control the game.

Actually, a lot has to do with how our elections are run, and with voting schemes in general. We use a plurality voting system, where whoever gets the most votes wins. Also known as a "first past the post" system. There is actually a law that predicts such a voting system naturally leads to two-party systems. In short, a vote for a third party becomes a vote for the leader/vote against second place. Google on it...I continue to be amazed at wikipedia's depth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Think you missed the point. The database is not to create criminal cases. It's to find out what political moves groups opposed to the war are doing, what they know and what they plan to do about it.

If you have an Impeach Bush sticker on your car, or turned up some where at a protest they want to know about you. You are an enemy of the state because you don't support the US's actions with their troops, therefor you don't support the US troops, therefor you are against the US troop deployments and actions, therefor you are against the US. QED

Don't like the war, and done something about it? OK then you are an enemy of the president and therefor a person to be tacked in the enemies of the state database.

It does not matter that the information gathered can't be used in court. What they intend to do to you and your orgnization is not something they would want a court to look at. You will find undercover agents inside your group. You may find the undercover agents acting as provoctures.

You may find your name struck acedentaly from the voter database? Hay is there fellon anywhere in the US that has a similar sounding name as yours? OK, of with your vote!

Aggitating shows you have too much time on your hands, how about an IRS audit to entertain you. Now that don't take no court action to bring down.

cld's right-- the FISA judge who resigned said it was because he couldn't be sure of what the administration was telling him. He was afraid they were lying about probable cause in order to launder the evidence for legitimate use down the road. (Wonder what kinds of cases he got.)

The rest of the court is meeting next week to discuss this with "administration officials." Meaning, they don't want to be part of an evidence-laundering operation. I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of resignations soon.

Warrantless wiretapping is clearly illegal, period, and not all they want to do. All these claims they're making are BS. Daschle wrote today about how much of a power grab they were trying to pull off at the time. Congress balked on some of it, but they just decided to go ahead anyway.

I think they decided who to start with based on the most extravagant ideas of AQ connections-- like any donations to the newly forbidden charities, any business dealings with the honey importers or the family construction company (except there they had an automatic whitewash list), and so on. So the universe of surveillees is many times greater than the 4000 who are reported to have had suspect-enough communication to actually tap.

It's things like this that underline how smart the framers were to require independent sets of eyeballs passing judgment on what any set of these guys wants to do.

And another thing, apropos JM above: once mechanisms like these get set up, they need to be fed. First it starts with the "AQ-linked" people, then it's groups that "oppose administration policy," then it's people who make "seditious comments" [there's a famous WWI incident of some women watching a military exercise saying they weren't thrilled with the color of the uniforms-- they were charged under the Sedition Act], and there's no end in sight without a massive change in public opinion.

It isn't just surveillance, either. Once you have a Gitmo, you have to keep finding people to put into it. It becomes a process.

I think more people ought to be more worried about where this goes.

In spite of NSA wiretaps and the big bad facist push for executive authority, al Qaeda nevertheless remains alive and kicking.

Pretty useless - assuming arguendo fighting al Qaeda is the objective of all this.

tinfoil, the point is that because of the nature of social networks, there are short paths from anyone to a huge number of people. The "six degrees of separation" study for the United States was flawed, but it is possible to argue either that it overstated or understated the case. Chances are extremely good that at least one person you know knows a huge number of people. Once you traverse a central node like that, your "connections" are all over the network. It is quite likely, just randomly and not from any selection bias, that someone posting in this discussion is three degrees from al queda.

Or the purpose of the whole operation might not have been al qaeda at all. Maybe the thing works perfectly. After all didn't Bush get back to the White House?

Because this is the thing, Mr. Drum, the White House has said time and again, that they don't need no stinking trials or juries or even charges to annouce arrests of terrorist masterminds like Joseph Padilla. If this were an effective tool, even by these non-Constitutional Bush rules, we would be hearing about the Lakawanda Six and the poor saps they arrested here in Oregon for being Muslim and shooting guns.

This is not a program to stop terrorists, this is a program to spy on political enemies. Or do you really believe that acting of their own volition military officers would order surveillance of PETA, Quakers and Catholic Relief? Having spent some time with the Army, I would say no. But knowing the nature of Karl Rove's character, I would say that he's a guy who would love this kind of power.

Pale Rider: They have hundreds of people extremely fluent in the language. It's the FBI that can't find anybody who can speak foreign languages.

Nope.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031222&s=odonnell122203

"Even without training new government employees or retaining the linguists already in the public sector, government agencies could plug their translator holes with native speakers. Yet State, the FBI, the NSA, and other agencies have been unable to hire enough native speakers to fill the void. This is not entirely their fault: Arab nationals have an extraordinarily difficult time passing the security clearance process. (More than 90 percent of the applicants who sent resumés to the FBI and NSA after September 11 were rejected because they could not obtain clearance.) "The very best people are great because they grew up in Syria or Lebanon," says one Arabic linguist at the Defense Department. "But you can't clear those people for obvious reasons." There are native Arab-American speakers, however, who have lived in the United States for decades and who would make ideal candidates. "There's no shortage of Arab immigrants with all the language skills one could hope for," many of whom "are about as red, white, and blue as they come," says Dr. Kirk Belnap, director of the National Middle Eastern Language Resource Center. But Justice Department campaigns to track and register Arab-Americans have made many mistrustful of working for Uncle Sam. "The good news is these [Arab-American] communities ... have the numbers and language skills our government needs," says retired Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Franke, a former Army Arabic linguist. "The bad news is they've become so traumatized" that many of them--especially community leaders--now want very little to do with government recruiters. "

Karl Rove may be widely credited with being "Bush's brain." But when it comes to the administration's dangerous and unprecedented expansion of presidential war powers, John Yoo is the President's mouthpiece.

For the full story, see:

"Yoo Da Man."

George W. Bush is at most "three degrees of separation" from Osama bin Laden, and the case can be made for only 2 degrees of separation.

For the record.

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