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Bush domestic spying program flawed, former FISA court chief says The former chief judge of a secret national security court took a swipe Saturday at the administration’s recently halted domestic spying program and said he insisted from the outset that the information gleaned must not be co-mingled with intelligence gathered under court warrants. Because of that precaution, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said, he never had to rule on whether President Bush had the power to launch the separate, warrantless spying program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Lamberth's seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ended in May 2002. In a rare public appearance, at the American Library Association’s annual conference and a brief chat afterward with reporters, Lamberth also said that the FBI could have avoided a huge flap over its mishandling of thousands of letter demands for phone, email, bank and other private records with a more centralized procedure. If FBI Director Robert Mueller had required that a supervisor at bureau headquarters approve each of those National Security Letters, he said, uniform standards could have been applied and mistakes eliminated. He also assured librarians that members of the secret court are sensitive to civil liberties. "The judges understand that the war has to be fought, but not at all costs," he said. Lamberth declined to say whether he believes the National Security Agency’s wiretap program was illegal. But he said he has "never seen a better way" to conduct domestic spying than under the national security court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court secretly approves warrants for wiretaps and searches in counterterrorism and espionage investigations. "I’ve seen a proposal for a worse way," Lamberth said. "That’s what the president did with the NSA program."....
'It is time to put right the wrongs' EVIDENCE against the Lockerbie bomber was fabricated and manipulated on both sides of the Atlantic, according to leaked defence documents which appear to undermine the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. Investigators for Megrahi claim to have compelling new evidence of widespread tampering with evidence, missing or overlooked statements, and a concerted attempt to lead investigators away from the original Iranian-backed suspects and towards Libya. Hundreds of new documents and photographs examined by Scotland on Sunday appear to show many aspects of the Lockerbie prosecution were at best incompetent and at worst amounted to an attempt to pervert the course of justice. Last night, legal experts and families of the victims reacted with astonishment and outrage to the revelations. Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, said: "Scottish justice obviously played a leading part in one of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history. The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution."....
Border fence delayed Technical problems have delayed the launch of a high-tech virtual fence designed to secure a 28-mile stretch of Arizona's border with Mexico. The cutting-edge fence has been touted as the model for controlling 6,000 miles of frontier with Mexico and Canada. The delay comes a week before the U.S. Senate is due to renew the supercharged debate over a proposed immigration-reform bill supported by both Arizona's senators. The bill will live or die on how well the government can guarantee its ability to secure the border. Until the border is secured, key provisions dealing with visas and guest workers would not be enacted. Boeing has installed all nine portable 98-foot towers, cameras, radar and ground sensors. It has fitted 50 patrol vehicles with computer links. Mobile and central command bases have also been linked to the network. The idea is to give front-line agents and commanders up-to-the-second pictures of all the activity in their areas. But the cameras and sensors convey inconsistent information. Software glitches and integrating all the information have proved challenging....
On the Rio Grande, Anger Swells Over Plans for Fence Since 1767, some 150 acres of wooded riverfront along the Rio Grande has belonged to the family of Cecilia Ramirez Benavides, land granted to her ancestors by Spanish settlers who colonized Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then known. Generations later, much of the Ramirez tract, with its mile of riverbank, remains undisturbed, overrun by huge mesquite and ebony trees, thick clusters of prickly pear cactus and chaparral. It is inhabited by the endangered ocelot -- only 100 are believed to remain in the United States -- the bright-orange Altamira oriole with its distinctive whistle and huge, pouchlike woven nests, and the green jay, with its bright-blue nape. Already, the modern world has intruded on this privately owned mini-nature preserve. Cecilia Benavides and her husband, Noel Benavides Sr., have given the Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Guard permanent access to their land to apprehend illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. But the Department of Homeland Security's latest entreaty is where the couple have decided they must draw the line. Their tranquil piece of riverfront -- owned by the Ramirez clan long before northern Mexico became Texas -- lies directly in the path of the federal government's plan to build 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border....
Your doctor could put you on no-gun list The House of Representatives has fast-tracked new legislation to "improve" the National Instant Criminal Background Check System by allowing doctors to now decide who can own firearms. The proposal, H.R. 2640, was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., in the wake of the April tragedy at Virginia Tech, when a gunman shot and killed more than 30 people, then killed himself. The plan is the first congressional effort to curtail gun ownership rights in a decade, but by being put on the fast track was exempted from the ordinary committee hearings and public scrutiny most proposals are sent through. If the Act passes in the Senate, it would provide grants so states can add the names of criminals to the NICS system, which would label them as unable to own firearms, but it also flags those with medical or psychological issues as unfit to possess a gun. The plan allows names to be entered into the NICS system based solely on a physician's diagnosis or prescription of a medication: adults who have taken Ritalin and soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be classified as mentally ill and given the same opportunity to own firearms as convicted felons: None....
CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests. A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation. Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964....
CIA reveals its tarnished past After fighting to keep them secret for more than three decades, the CIA released hundreds of documents Tuesday that catalog some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans. The records are part of a trove of jealously guarded documents long known within the agency as "the family jewels." Assembled in the early 1970s as part of an internal inquiry of potentially embarrassing or illegal activities, the records were subsequently turned over to Congress, prompting investigations and sweeping intelligence reforms. Indeed, many of the episodes detailed in the 693 pages of newly declassified text read like relics from another time, including elaborate attempts to enlist Mafia operatives to poison Cuban President Fidel Castro. But other documents seem remarkably relevant today, as the nation grapples anew with questions of how much latitude U.S. intelligence agencies should be given, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The documents describe secret CIA holding cells and the possibly illegal detention of a suspected Soviet spy who was held without trial for years at a CIA lockup facility in Maryland before it was determined he was a legitimate defector. They also detail plans to eavesdrop on international phone calls of U.S. residents, and aggressive efforts to root out leaks of classified information to reporters....
FBI Terror Watch List 'Out of Control' A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror. The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified. A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names," which is utilized by its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force. A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Many names are different versions of the same identity -- "Usama bin Laden" and "Osama bin Laden" for the al Qaeda chief, for example. In addition to the NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrorists -- abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group. Combined, the NCTC and FBI compendia comprise the watch list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for terrorists....
GAO: Lack of coordination may have 'compromised' US anti-terror efforts abroad A government oversight report has found a lack of coordination among US law enforcement agencies that in at least one case may have "compromised" efforts abroad to fight international terrorism. The report found more money is being spent fighting the war on drugs than the war on terror. The Government Accountability Office found that agencies tasked with combating terrorism had largely failed to implement formal policies that would guide and measure their progress against terror groups abroad. The GAO found that America's law enforcement community shifted its focus to fighting terrorism in the wake of domestic terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but little has emerged to guide and measure that shift in focus. "While the national strategies have articulated this change in direction and emphasis," the report says, " they have not provided specific roles, objectives, resources or mechanisms for determining success." GAO investigators visited four US embassies abroad, although the countries visited were not disclosed for national security reasons. Embassy personnel told the GAO that "despite counterterrorism being the embassy's highest priority, they received little to no guidance" on how to pursue those goals. "For example," the report notes, "in one country we visited, the lack of clear roles and responsibilities between two U.S. LEAs [law enforcement agencies] may have compromised several joint operations intended to identify and disrupt potential terrorist activities, according to U.S. and foreign nation LEAs involved in these efforts." In the countries GAO visited, the US government was dedicating more money to "combat illegal drugs and criminals than to combat terrorism," according to the report. Between 2002 and 2006, the report found the State Department spent more than $220 million on anti-drug efforts while spending less than $35 million on anti-terrorism assistance in one country visited....
Librarians Describe Life Under An FBI Gag Order Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone's privacy without a court order (NSLs don't require a judge's approval). That's when things turned ugly. The four librarians under the gag order weren't allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren't allowed to e-mail. After the ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, the librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing. Instead, they had to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. "Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security," Chase said. Forced to make information public as the case moved forward, the government resorted to one of its favorite tactics: releasing heavily redacted versions of documents while outing anyone who didn't roll over for Uncle Sam. In this case, they named Chase, despite the fact that he was legally compelled to keep his own identity secret. Then the phone started ringing. Pesky reporters wanted info. One day, the AP called Chase's house and got his son, Sam, on the phone. When Chase got home, he took one look at his son's face. "I could tell something was very wrong," he said. Sam told him the AP had called saying that Chase was being investigated by the FBI. "What's going on?" Sam asked his father. Chase couldn't tell him. For months, he worried about what his son must have been thinking....