Live from Austin!

The 9/11 Commission recommended setting up an organization to help safeguard civil liberties. Sure enough the Bush administration has gone ahead and created a President’s Board on Safeguarding Americans’ Civil Liberties.

Ignoring for the moment the issue that civil liberties should, constitutionally, be protected for everyone and not just US citizens, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the people who are being put in charge of safeguarding your freedoms.

• The Deputy Attorney General, James B. Comey.

  Quote from Comey: A court of the United States has no jurisdiction…to enjoin the president in the performance of his official duties.

  He also explained at length why he thought it was right that Jose Padilla was thrown in a military jail indefinitely and not allowed to talk to a lawyer, even though he is a US citizen and was not officially charged with any crime. Comey’s position was overruled by the Supreme Court, thank goodness.

• The Assistant Attorney General (Civil Rights Division), R. Alexander Acosta.

  Acosta seems to be one of the Good Guys, having (amongst other things) defended a Muslim student’s right to wear her head scarf at school.

• The Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Policy), Daniel J. Bryant.

  Bryant is a strong supporter of a Constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Need I say more?

• The Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security, Asa Hutchinson.

  Hutchinson was formerly head of the DEA, that bastion of concern for the civil liberties of the individual. He pushed the “drugs support terrorism” angle, and favored intensifying the War On (Selected) Drugs. He also supports Constitutional Amendments to ban flag burning and allow official school prayer, and supports banning abortion and gay adoption.

• The Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, General Patrick Hughes. He was a member of the 9/11 Commission, and wrote a series of articles on the theme of global threats to the USA and its interests abroad, for various audiences. His major focus in recent years has been building a massive information sharing network to ensure that law enforcement, homeland security and private contractors at federal, state and local level share information freely, so I’m sure he’ll have something to say about preserving your privacy.

• The Assistant Secretary (Policy), Directorate of Border and Transportation Security, part of the Department of Homeland Security; that would be a Mr C. Stewart Verdery, I believe.

  Quote from his nomination speech: We all remember well the bipartisan effort which spawned a host of responses to the terrorist attacks, including the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Those days exemplified the kind of public service which is truly gratifying.

  His department is responsible for visa policy, and is pushing biometric passports—including forcing foreign countries to use biometric passports if they wish to take part in US visa waiver programs.

• The Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, Daniel W. Sutherland. He’s another of the good guys, having written in favor of immigration reform and against mandatory biometric national IDs.

• The Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Nuala O’Connor Kelly. She was the Chief Privacy Officer for…wait for it…DoubleClick. Joking aside, though, she seems to be on the side of light.

• The Counsel for Intelligence Policy, Department of Justice, James A. Baker III. You might recognize that name if you’ve seen Farenheit 9/11. He’s the Senior Counsel for the Carlyle Group, the 10th largest defense contractor in the US, heavily tied to ENRON and the Bin Laden family. He even has a bio page on the George Bush Foundation web site.

• The Under Secretary for Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Stuart Levey. Coincidentally, he’s was a partner in James Baker’s law firm.

• The Assistant Secretary (Terrorist Financing), Department of the Treasury, Juan Zarate. His job focus has been on stopping the flow of cash to terrorists—while assuring Muslim charities that Bush administration policies were not intended to hurt them.

• The General Counsel, Office of Management and Budget. I think that’s Raymond J. McKenna. His office is part of the General Services Administration, responsible for helping to improve government efficiency by providing office space, office supplies, technology, and services.

  I must confess to being unclear why he’s on this particular committee.

• The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, Larry C. Kindsvater. He’s strongly in favor of reorganizing the US intelligence system, which is probably why he was picked.

• The Chair of the Privacy Council at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I can’t find any record of a Privacy Council at the FBI; a search of their web site produces 0 hits.

• The General Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency. These are the people who advise the CIA on the legality of their assassinations, foreign government coup attempts, and drug running.

  The CIA OGC web site doesn’t provide any information naming anyone who works there. They do mention that you can’t work for the CIA OGC in any capacity without a Top Secret clearance, polygraph test, and 6 month background screening. I believe the current General Counsel is still Scott W. Muller. Interestingly, Muller had no intelligence background before getting the job; his background was investigating white collar crime.

  Muller apparently thinks the PATRIOT Act didn’t go far enough. As he said at his nomination hearing:

  Well, let me start, Senator, by saying that I think the changes that were made in the U.S.A. Patriot Act were clearly necessary in light of the events of September 11 and I think have gone a long way toward creating at the operational level the kind of sharing and collaboration that this Committee and the Intelligence Community and the Bureau and law enforcement think need to occur. There’s a lot of work left to be done.

• The General Counsel for the National Security Agency. I believe this is still Vito T. Potenza, though obviously it’s very hard to find any information on who the NSA’s General Counsel is, or even who Mr Potenza is.

• The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone. The Center for American Progress describe his qualifications as a fierce loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld and an unshakeable right wing ideology and note that he was responsible for sending Major General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq with orders to find more effective ways to interrogate prisoners.

• The General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William J. Haynes II

  Mr Haynes is the man who wrote the infamous memo listing “interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) authorized for use at Guantanamo Bay, and was also involved in numerous other dubious legal arguments.

• The Legal Adviser at the Department of State, James H. Thessin. I can’t find much of anything about him.

• The Director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, John O. Brennan, a 23 year CIA veteran. His is the department which is supposed to glue together all the other departments and make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It’s also the department that was blamed for embarrassing inaccuracies in the 2003 “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report. It was initially released to a fanfare of congratulation, as it showed that deaths from terrorist activity had fallen thanks to the Bush “War on Terror”. Then, the spurious figures were quietly revised to show that things had actually gotten worse. Brennan explained the errors by saying that their computers were too old and they were understaffed.

So, there we have it. Not a totally one sided panel, but definitely stacked carefully in a particular direction.

Authorities have located weapons of mass destruction. Actual weapons of mass destruction, enough illegal chemical weapons to kill thousands of Americans. The weapons were located on American soil.

For years, William Krar lived with his common-law wife Judith Bruey in New Hampshire. Krar first came to the attention of police in 1985, when he was arrested in New Hampshire for impersonating a police officer. In 1989, he started fighting back against the Federal government in the traditional New Hampshire style—he stopped paying taxes.

Then in 1995, Krar was investigated by authorities. They discovered he was linked to a network of anti-government and white supremacist organizations in New Hampshire. Still, nothing unusual about that, so they dropped the inquiry.

Soon, Krar and Bruey had moved to Tyler, Texas. Then in January 2003, Krar was stopped by a state trooper in Tennessee. Inside Krar’s rental car the trooper found 2 handguns, 16 knives, a stun gun, a smoke grenade, a gas mask, and 40 bottles filled with an unknown substance. Coded documents labeled “trip” and “procedure” listed rendezvous locations across the US. You might think that that would be suspicious enough to get the attention of Homeland Security, but you’d be wrong.

Krar’s schemes were finally revealed to the FBI by accident. Krar mailed five fake ID cards to a member of the New Jersey Militia. One was a fake ID for the Pentagon; another was a fake Social Security Card. Also enclosed was a note saying “We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands.” Unfortunately for Krar, the envelope was misdelivered, and the recipient called the police.

As a result, FBI investigators began monitoring Krar’s mail, as well as his (common law) wife’s. They discovered that Krar and Bruey were renting three lockup garages from Teresa Staples, and that they visited them every day. Each garage was piled high with clothing and garden equipment; Staples thought they were gardeners, or that they resold gardening supplies at flea markets.

FBI agents were more suspicious, and took a closer look. They discovered a cache of weapons hidden behind the gardening equipment. So they checked Krar’s home in Tyler, Texas, and discovered more.

The eventual haul totalled 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs, remote controlled briefcase bombs, machine guns, silencers, land mines, and plain old explosives. Krar wasn’t licensed to hold automatic weapons; I don’t know if Texas issues landmine licenses. The weapons cache wasn’t the disturbing part, however…

Teresa Staples realized something was seriously amiss when a team of agents turned up in HazMat suits. The FBI had opened an ammunitions canister and found nearly a kilo of sodium cyanide, packed next to a quantity of acid sufficient to dissolve it into cyanide gas. Enough cyanide gas to kill literally thousands of people, if released in an enclosed space like a stadium or subway.

There were also anti-Semitic, racist and anti-government publications in the lockups, in case you hadn’t guessed. The KKK had even left a business card.

Krar and Bruey have plead guilty to all charges, as has Edward Feltus, the person who was supposed to have received the fake IDs. While Feltus faces up to 15 years in jail, Bruey will be out in less than five. Krar’s crime of possessing dangerous chemical weapons is sufficiently rare that authorities don’t seem to have gotten around to setting minimum sentencing guidelines. Krar’s lawyer is pointing out that there’s no evidence he actually planned to use the cyanide bomb.

It could have been a bigger mass-murder than 9/11. The Justice Department seems keen to publicize victories in the war against terrorism, so why haven’t we heard more about this story?

Perhaps because the story isn’t over. More cyanide was found in Krar’s house, and in his car. Authorities think he might have already sold cyanide bombs to various right-wing militia organizations.

Last month, a letter laced with ricin nerve toxin was sent to the Senate. Last November, one was sent to the White House. The perpetrator of the anthrax attacks of 2001 is still at large. Sleep well.

[Guardian/Observer link]

New York Times:

Democrats and civil rights advocates condemned the Justice Department today for barring a gay pride event planned by department employees, and called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to reverse the decision. […]

A group of several hundred gay and lesbian Justice Department employees, called DOJ Pride, had budgeted $600 to hold an awards ceremony on June 18 at the department’s Great Hall to celebrate Gay Pride Month. The group has held similar events at the department each of the last six years, members said, and Mr. Ashcroft’s top deputy spoke at last year’s event.

But Justice Department officials have told the group that it cannot hold the ceremony at the department this year because of a new policy prohibiting events not recognized by White House proclamation.

Mr. Bush has issued hundreds of presidential proclamations, recognizing events like National African American History Month, National Prayer Day and Leif Erikson Day.

But unlike President Bill Clinton, Mr. Bush has not recognized Gay Pride Month.

It was recently uncovered that Denver Police Department’s intelligence database was being used to track members of Amnesty International and other similar groups, on the grounds that they were “criminal extremists”. None of the people being tracked had any criminal convictions or arrests on their records. The tracking began before 9/11.

Denver police blamed a secretary for the “mistake”. The “mistake” surfaced because Denver Police shared their database with neighboring cities, and someone with a conscience at one of the neighboring police departments leaked the documents to the press.

As a result, Denver was forced to delete 3,277 innocent people from its database, owing to a complete lack of evidence that they had ever been involved in any kind of criminal activity.

This is the same data which is now being shared with the FBI, and the Justice Department has told the FBI that they don’t need to check any of it for accuracy before adding it to their national database. (See earlier posting.)

If you’re reading this, please join Amnesty and the ACLU. As the saying goes, if we don’t hang together, we will all hang separately.

Yahoo news / AP:

The Justice Department lifted a requirement Monday that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country’s most comprehensive law enforcement database.

The system, run by the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats.

So, no need to require that that be accurate.

Still think you’ll be able to sleep? Check out This American Life from last week:

Act One. Until the End of the War. There are at least two American citizens being held without charges, unable to see lawyers, in military jails in the U.S. There may be more. Jack Hitt tried to find out everything he could about one of them: Jose Padilla, who will stay confined to a brig in South Carolina “until the end of the war” according to the White House.

Act Two. Secret Trials and Secret Deportations. In the war on terror, the government is rounding up foreigners, checking their immigration status, and then, sometimes, deporting them. It won’t give out their names. David Kestenbaum tried to find out everything that can be found out about who these new deportees are … and about what happened to them once they were seized and put on trial, in secret. To do this, he has to bypass the federal government (which won’t say much about the deportees) and head overseas, to talk with them firsthand.

Act Three. Secret Wiretaps from a Secret Court. For over two decades, there’s been a secret court in the United States called the FISA court (short for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Its job is to authorize wiretaps on possible foreign spies and foreign agents. In 24 years, it has never turned down a government request for a wiretap, as best as any outsider can tell—until this year. This past summer the court said issued an opinion that said Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department were going way too far in their zeal for wiretaps. It cited 75 cases in which the Justice Department tried to sneak around rules to protect Americans from surveillance. Blue Chevigny reports on attempts to loosen up the rules on who the government spies on here in the U.S., and on this first-ever glimpse inside this secret court.

[RealAudio playlist]

I hate to ruin everyone’s weekend, but the Justice Department is planning an even bigger, more sweeping sequel to the “PATRIOT” Act.

Among the ‘improvements’: They want the right to be able to expatriate and deport US citizens who assist any organization they declare ‘terrorist’.

A judge in Montana has ruled that suspects with Multiple Personality Disorder need to have their Miranda rights read separately to each personality.

Still, it may not matter. A case before the Supreme Court concerns a man who was riding his bike through a field where police were questioning someone suspected of selling drugs. Police ordered the man, Oliviero Martinez, to stop. When one cop found Martinez had a small knife used for cutting strawberries in a sheath on his belt, he decided to wrestle him to the ground. The cop’s partner allegedly saw Martinez reaching towards the cop’s gun, so he shot him five times—in the eyes, spine and legs. (Martinez is now permanently blind and paralyzed.)

The controversial bit is that while Martinez was screaming in agony in the ambulance, and later in the emergency room, the cop continued aggressively questioning him, and didn’t bother reading him his Miranda rights at any point. The cop eventually persuaded Martinez to agree that he was reaching for the gun, and that the shootings were justified, at which point the interrogation ended.

The Justice Department has filed a friend-of-court briefing saying that since Martinez was never charged with any kind of crime on the basis of the extracted testimony, the whole thing was completely OK.

The city has refused to pay any of Martinez’s medical bills.

“When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records.”

—Attorney General John Ashcroft

The LA Times reports that Microsoft lobbyists have been sending fake “grassroots” letters from people who are actually dead, begging the Justice Department to go easy on the poor monopolist.