Filling In The Blanks

ABC has some news on what was inside those blocks of redacted text in the CIA Inspector General report:

The CIA and the Obama Administration continue to keep secret some of the most shocking allegations involving the spy agency's interrogation program: three deaths and several other detainees whose whereabouts could not be determined, according to a former senior intelligence official who has read the full, unredacted version.

Of the 109 pages in the 2004 report, 36 were completely blacked out in the version made public Monday, and another 30 were substantially redacted for "national security" reasons.

The blacked-out portions hide the Inspector General's findings on the circumstances that led to the deaths of at least three of the detainees in the CIA's program, the official said. Two of the men reportedly died in CIA in Iraq and the third died in Afghanistan.

The Inspector General's findings about a fourth death involving a prisoner in Afghanistan were made public in the report. A CIA contract employee was convicted of assault in that case and is now in prison.

The still-secret portions of the Inspector General's report also describe fears that the waterboarding of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed came close to killing him. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 separate times, according to the report.

The unredacted version of the report makes a reference to the "unsafe" nature of waterboarding but makes no mention of its actual effects on Mohammed or the two others who were subjected to the technique.

Again, much of this is not new information. We know quite a bit about deaths in American custody. They made an Academy Award-winning movie about one of these deaths. We've known for several months that the Bush regime suddenly changed their policies on waterboarding to require a medical doctor and a tracheotomy kit, suggesting that they were well aware of the dangers of the technique. The Bradbury memo from 2005 describes what appears to be a near-death experience on the waterboard:

In our limited experience, extensive use of the waterboard can introduce new risks. Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness. An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required. Any subject who has reached this degree of compromise is not [censored hereafter].

Abu Zubaydah has admitted that he lost consciousness on at least one occasion during waterboarding.

Later on in the report, ABC describes how the CIA flat-out lost detainees in its maze of black sites:

Also hidden from public scrutiny, according to the official, was the discovery by the CIA Inspector General that the CIA could not adequately account for several of the 100 al Qaeda suspects who were part of the detainee program that the CIA maintained had been well administered.

The official said "a few just got lost and the CIA does to know what happened to them."

Other detainees, said the official, were transferred to other countries and their whereabouts are still unknown. In other cases, "incomplete records" were to blame for the failure to account for the detainees' status after leaving the program.

As the report says later, Hassan Ghul is one such "missing" detainee, and his name inadvertently showed up in an OLC memo released earlier this year, the first acknowledgement that the CIA even had him in custody. He either got transferred to a third party or simply got lost in the shuffle.

These were the serious adults in charge of your safety.

Maybe it's fine that these revelations have to get uncovered over and over and over again. But it would be nice if the Administration simply came clean and acknowledged what everyone already knows, that American interrogators murdered detainees in their custody. He's being opportunistic, but Pete frickin' Hoekstra agrees with all this:

The ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), said he thinks more of the CIA's blacked out information should be made public. "If the sections of the report don't talk about sources and methods, at this point in time, my bias would be toward transparency and toward releasing more information." Hoekstra, who has read the unredacted version of the CIA report, said he could not comment on its contents.

Since most of this material is already out, the repeated discovery of it just leads to further outrage around the world and at home. This is a cover-up where everyone already knows the crime.

The Reductio Ad Absurdum Of Armchair Warblogging

In general, I have a wide degree of latitude for US bloggers or commentators reporting on the events in other countries. We're allowed to have an opinion. Occasionally, however, it does fall into this kind of self-regarding feedback loop, where clicking on a petition or changing your background color on your blog to green becomes a revolutionary act. And the worst example of that actually comes from US Rep. Pete Hoekstra:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

He's relating millions of people in the streets in Iran, risking death, to the GOP playing model Congress during the #dontgo movement to drill offshore for oil. You know, because the House turned off the microphones when it was out of session, and Iranian protesters were beaten to death.

Twitterers are killing Hoekstra in replies. More from Greg Sargent and Spencer Ackerman.

Blabbermouths

So Republicans walk out of a closed intelligence briefing and directly into a waiting microphone, and Democrats are the ones who hate America?

Republicans ignited a firestorm of controversy on Thursday by revealing some of what they had been told at a closed-door Intelligence Committee hearing on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Democrats immediately blasted the GOP lawmakers for publicly discussing classified information, while Republicans said Democrats are trying to hide the truth that enhanced interrogation of detainees is effective.

GOP members on the Intelligence Committee on Thursday told The Hill in on-the-record interviews that they were informed that the controversial methods have led to information that prevented terrorist attacks.

When told of the GOP claims, Democrats strongly criticized the members who revealed information that was provided at the closed House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. Democrats on the panel said they could not respond substantively, pointing out that the hearing was closed [...]

“I am absolutely shocked that members of the Intelligence committee who attended a closed-door hearing … then walked out that hearing — early, by the way — and characterized anything that happened in that hearing,” said Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairwoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “My understanding is that’s a violation of the rules. It may be more than that.”

The culprits are John Kline (R-MN) and Crazy Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who has been pushing this propaganda for weeks and frankly cannot be trusted. In fact, it would be just like him to make a wild claim, knowing that Democrats cannot respond because they actually give a crap about things like the meaning of the word "classified."

As Marcy Wheeler notes, Kline's claim that "we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots," disassociated from which techniques elicited what information, means nothing, and thus the entire story is pretty bogus. As for Hoekstra:

It seems to me the story from these quotes ought to be:

The Ranking Member of HPSCI thinks people should immediately talk about the content of classified briefings
The Ranking Member of HPSCI treats hearsay--the comments of his members who attended a briefing--as proof
The Ranking Member of HPSCI is politicizing intelligence

But instead, Allen seems to have followed Hoekstra down the road of taking hearsay evidence as clear proof (it's not even clear that Allen asked Hoekstra who he had talked to about the briefing).

And all of those are par for the course for Republicans. They skillfully use both the classified nature of intelligence briefing and the gullibility of the media to push BS narratives.

The Rare Reverse Kabuki

I don't know who fed the media this point, or maybe they just couldn't ignore the wealth of hypocrisy surrounding the right-wing hissy fit over Nancy Pelosi, but they have started to inexplicably push back. It started last week when Marcy Wheeler noted that Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, accused the CIA of providing insufficient briefings and even lying to Congress, regarding a separate investigation. In the interim, a host of elements of the CIA's story started to fall apart - their briefing record document included people who weren't in the meetings, people who lacked the security clearance to attend, and even stated Porter Goss was briefed in 2005 when he was the Director of the CIA at the time. The invaluable ThinkProgress dug up a copy of the letter Hoekstra sent to the CIA, and added this:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.

Maybe this was simply the easiest way for journalists to understand the emptiness of the hissy fit - Hoekstra said "lied," too - but for some reason they're off and running with this today. Wolf Blitzer confronted John Boehner with this and he had to concede the point. Newt Gingrich tried to play this off when called on it by Diane Sawyer, of all people, but it didn't work ut too well for him.



(not that anyone should give a crap what Newt Gingrich thinks.)

And here comes none other than Arlen Specter, calling 'em how he sees 'em with respect to the CIA:

Sen. Arlen Specter took the opportunity Wednesday to defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has come under fire in recent weeks over a controversy surrounding when she was told of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques being used by the CIA.

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to — I was about to say ‘candid’; that’s too mild — to honesty,” Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law Institute. He cited misleading information about the agency’s involvement in mining harbors in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra affair.

I have no idea why the worm turned today, but this controversy is basically over. The CIA's theory is full of holes, and the Pelosi spat has turned into he said/she said, with the media willing to explore Republican hypocrisy on the issue.

Of course, defusing this time bomb has an added benefit - it ends any rising calls for investigations, perhaps starting with what Pelosi knew but encompassing the entire breadth of the torture regime from top to bottom. The Village certainly wants no part of that. So they had to play rough with Republicans for a couple days. It's almost a Kabuki dance in reverse - the media pretends to delve deep and fact-check precisely to pre-empt anyone else getting to actually delve deep and fact-check.

Pretty sharp. Meanwhile the whole "we tortured detainees to justify the war in Iraq" storyline has faded off into the distance as well. Maybe Jonathan Landay will drop yet another McClatchy bombshell soon.

Terrorizing The Rule Of Law

The GOP geniuses think they've found an issue they can run with. This has slowly built over the past several weeks, but now they've done a full rollout. It starts with the movie trailer, a preview of coming attractions.



Then they followed through with the main event, a bill literally called “The Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act,” which would prohibit the transfer of any "Terrorist" from Guantanamo Bay into a prison facility in the United States, without approval from the state's Governor and legislature, and some other legislative hoop-jumping.

Taken to its extreme, Republicans would call for the immediate closure of all prisons ("criminals... in your community!"), and the dispatching of all 2.3 million prisoners to some offsite floating barge, Australia, or that island of plastic in the Pacific. To suggest that a maximum-security prison could not possibly hold a Dangerous Terrorist is an insult to the men and woman of the federal corrections system, who already hold convicted terrorists in custody who received justice through a court of law, and basically acknowledges that those facilities are completely insecure, and should be feared by local residents. I'm sure the RNC and the Republican members of the House will pick up the costs of moving every single prisoner over to that plastic island. Because think of the children.

When pressed on the point that Americans held 425,000 German POWs at the height of WWII, bill sponsor Pete Hoekstra, who is crazy, incidentally, casually remarked that the threat of Al Qaeda surpasses the Nazis.



A substantial chunk of the Republican Party believes that people who live in caves represent a greater threat to the American way of life than the Third Reich. Just so you know.

However, I'm convinced that this is a bit of misdirection and Overton Window-lifting. Of course the idea that Scary Terrorists would endanger local communities while in prison is absurd and should be rejected. But that's not really the ultimate plan. John McCain and Lindsey Graham posted on the conservative blackboard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, with the more "sensible" view - that we must hold suspects indefinitely without trial for as long as we please, in violation of habeas corpus statutes, until they are tried in sham courts without Constitutional criminal justice protections.

• Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts. By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.

Our domestic criminal laws -- including their treatment of classified information -- are ill-suited for the complex national security issues inherent in the trial of enemy combatants. We have great faith in our military justice system -- appropriately modified for war crimes trials -- and we believe that military judges and lawyers render fair and impartial justice not only for our troops, but for enemy combatants as well.

• Third, preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror . Under the law of war, the idea that an enemy combatant has to be tried or released is a false choice. Rather, it is well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.

While there is little doubt that we initially cast the net too broadly in determining who merited enemy combatant status, the Department of Defense estimates nearly one in 10 detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield, including Said Ali al-Shihri (al Qaeda in Yemen's second-in-command), and Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, who reportedly now serves as the Taliban's operational commander in southern Afghanistan. We cannot let this continue.

A significant group of detainees still in custody at Guantanamo may be too dangerous to release, but they are not suitable for war crimes trials. In these cases, a system needs to be devised in which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

"Preventive detention" is a nice turn of phrase. "I think you may steal a candy bar later. Better put you in jail for a few months until everything blows over."

And unbelievably, this "fallback" position, which I always considered the reason to close Guantanamo in the first place, has gained traction inside the White House.

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system [...]

In a news conference this week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. emphasized that if the administration did use military commissions, the rules must give detainees “a maximum amount of due process.”

But, speaking of detainees whom American officials have accused of involvement in major terrorist plots, Mr. Holder added, “It may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.”

These military commissions represent a total obviation of the rule of law, an attempt to gather convictions they could not otherwise get. And what's left unsaid is the always shaky phraseology of the Obama plan, where some Gitmo detainees would be tried, some released, and this vague "third category," where the legal black hole of Guantanamo apparently remains.

It does no service, particularly in relating to our allies, to just insource Guantanamo with the same methods. People weren't angry about the site or the symbol, but the policies. But because the Republicans are being so transparently ridiculous with their "Eek! Prisoners going to prison, they'll kill us all!!!" pose, there may be a tendency to back up the White House's viewpoint. Not until they make perfectly clear that they intend to either try Gitmo prisoners in American courts, or release them. Any other options are unacceptable.

Commanding Officer Of The Army Of Stupids

Can I just say that I love wingnut Congressman Pete Hoekstra's Twitter feed? Not just because he responds to the fact that he doesn't know how to spell the names of people he's worked with for decades on Capitol Hill by saying "lighten up, it's called Twitter" (hm?), but because he uses it to leak unauthorized national security information:

Rep. Pete Hoeksra (R-MI), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, revealed classified intelligence information on Twitter when he reported on his “congressional trip to Iraq this weekend that was supposed to be a secret.” “Just landed in Baghdad,” messaged Hoekstra, who was part of a delegation led by John Boehner (R-OH). CQ reports, “Before the delegation left Washington, they were advised to keep the trip to themselves for security reasons."

The ironies here are rich. First, Hoekstra is the former head of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee. He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of revealing national security information, and wanted to eliminate whistleblower protections because it would "compromise national security." Also, this isn't the first time Hoekstra has inadvertently revealed national security secrets. That was back in 2006 in perhaps my favorite wingnut FAIL. Hoekstra, who was convinced that we found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pushed the National Intelligence Director to put internal Iraqi documents on the Web, so the "Army of Davids" could sort through them and prove, PROVE, that Iraq had WMD and ties to al Qaeda. And this is how Pete Hoekstra put nuclear secrets on a public website:

Yesterday Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed the New York Times and the IAEA for the leak of sensitive Iraqi documents — a “nuclear primer” on how to build an atomic bomb — on a public government website:

Concerns by the New York Times and the IAEA prompted the government to shut down the website. The IAEA, “fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms,” privately protested last week to the American ambassador. The Bush administration shut down the site on Thursday evening, only after the New York Times “asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.”

Hoekstra, on the other hand, was responsible for making that information public in the first place. Last November, he and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) wrote to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and asked him to the post the Iraqi documents.

The fact that Hoekstra is retiring means that my favorite Twitter feed will be less vital, but also that American secrets won't be constantly revealed to the world, so it balances out.

Scenes From The Class Struggle In Capitol Hill

If you're on Twitter, I strongly recommend you find a right-wing mouth-breather Congressman to follow on the site and read them carefully. You'll get the talking points hours or even days before they show up on the teevee. For example, my favorite right-wing Twitterbug, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), has offered his sage thoughts on this Tom Daschle tax story.

Daescle(sp?)/Geitner/Rangel all avoided/cheated on taxes!Daescle latest!They don't mind raising taxes because they don't pay them.

He got two of the three names wrong, including Daschle, who was Senate Majority Leader when Hoekstra chaired the Intelligence Committee (!) and therefore was in all the Gang of Eight meetings with him.

But let's get off spelling for a second. The soundbite is that Democrats don't mind raising taxes because they don't pay them. Har giggle snort glorf!! So let's pre-but this statement in case it's used by George Will or David Brooks tomorrow morning.

Because, sigh, if only failure to pay taxes or disclose income had anything to do with party and not class. And this happens through both illegal and legal means.

The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.

The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although the richest 400 Americans paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than any year since 2000.

The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

And as long as we're talking about tax dodgers, let's bring in the biggest group of them bar none, corporations.

The news that more than 60 percent of U.S. corporations failed to pay any federal taxes from 1996 through 2000 when corporate profits were soaring and that corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 7.4 percent of overall federal tax revenue in 2003 – the lowest since 1983 and the second-lowest rate since 1934 – is an outrage. But it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to national tax policy over the past few years. The General Accounting Office (GAO) report also found that an astonishing 94 percent of corporations reported tax liability of less than 5 percent of their total income during the same time period. Corporate tax dodging has gone on for far too long. But the policies of the Bush administration have exacerbated the problem by furthering the culture of tax avoidance by big corporations and creating a pervasive unfairness in our tax code.

We have a problem in this country with people not paying their taxes. And irrespective of anything else, those people are by and large rich and connected. They influence politicians in Washington to write breaks and favors into the tax code. They pass special gifts back and forth to one another. They claim that their corporate headquarters can fit into a mailbox in the Cayman Islands.

The tax code is multi-layered and complex. These tax problems happen at confirmation hearings every four years as a result. Because it's easy to evade taxes, by either legitimate oversight or outright theft, and for the wealthy that likelihood is multiplied. Don't take my word for it - take the leader of the Republican Party from 2000 to 2008:

WALLACE: How does [McCain] overcome all of that and...

BUSH: Because there's two big issues. One is, who's going to keep your taxes low? Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat [sic] party is going to field a candidate who says I'm going to raise your tax.

If they're going to say, oh, we're only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We've had -- we've been through this drill before. We're only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

He said this over and over during the 2004 campaign. His team must have thought it was a mighty clever talking point. It was so much fun to see the President of the United States, with control over the IRS, helpfully explain that the rich evade taxes and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

7/14/2004 THE PRESIDENT: ...People need to be aware of this talk out of Washington, D.C. that says, oh, don't worry, we're just going to tax the rich. That's not the way it works in the tax code. The big rich dodge taxes, anyway. It's companies like this who end up paying more taxes.
8/3/2004 THE PRESIDENT: ...He said, tax the rich. You've heard that before haven't you? You know what that means. The rich dodge and you pay.
8/13/2004 THE PRESIDENT:...I'll give you one other thought. Let me just leave you with one other thought about taxing the rich. You know how that works. A lot of the rich are able to get accountants, so they don't -- they're able to dodge. You've seen it before. We're going to tax the rich, and then they figure out how not to get taxed.
8/28/2004 THE PRESIDENT: ...Every time they say, tax the rich, the rich dodge and you pay.
9/1/2004 THE PRESIDENT: ...You know what it means, tax the rich. It means the rich dodge and you get stuck with the bill.
9/3/2004 THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, we've heard that before, haven't we? First of all, you can't raise enough money by taxing the rich to support all his programs. Secondly, the rich figure out a way to dodge it, and you get stuck with the bill.
9/7/2004 THE PRESIDENT:Yes. Oh, don't worry, we'll tax the rich. Well, that's why the rich hire accountants and lawyers. They dodge, you pay...
10/11/2004 THE PRESIDENT: ...Something else about taxing the rich -- the rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason, to dodge the tax bill and stick you with it.

This is the same guy who eliminated half of the IRS lawyers who audit the rich, and went after the middle class more often with audits and scrutiny.

Since 2000, authorities at the Internal Revenue Service have nearly tripled audits of tax returns filed by people making $25,000 to $100,000 as part of a broad change in audit strategy.

Audits of these middle-class taxpayers rose to nearly 436,000 last year, up from about 147,000 returns in 2000. For these 61 million individuals and married couples, who make up nearly half of all taxpayers, the odds of being audited rose from 1 in 377 to 1 in 140.

I'd be willing to bet that practically everyone of means in Capitol Hill has cheated on their taxes in one way or another. They're the Masters of the Universe and they see it as their due. If Republicans have gotten religion and suddenly want to end the practice, sounds good to me. We'll just put those auditors back to work and start poring over the returns of every corporation and every man and woman of wealth. We can even get rid of those loopholes and complexities that cause a lot of these problems. But don't tell me that this is an issue of party in any way. This is a class issue.

Now We Know The Source

Lots of forward movement in the Joe Klein/FISA debacle today. First of all, Peter Hoekstra, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, has outed himself as a source for Klein's mendacious article, and tried in the National Review to feed the public the same crap Klein lapped up:

As one of Klein’s sources for the complex technical and legal points that seem to be in contention — and because Klein, his critics, and Democrats in Congress have accused Republicans of trying to “misrepresent” these issues — it is important to correct and clarify the record on three critical points, which also bear heavily on the broader debate currently at hand.

First, the issue in both the Protect America Act that became law in August and the legislation currently under consideration in Congress, is how to ensure effective surveillance of foreign intelligence targets in foreign countries. The issue is not nor has it ever been about surveillance of Americans, as some Democrats have irresponsibly suggested. Under any of these bills, if the intelligence community wanted to target an American in the United States for surveillance, it would need to obtain an individualized court order.

This is completely untrue, but it's a Republican acting in bad faith, so never mind that. What's important here is that we now know who got to Klein. We know who he listens to. And we know how he forms his opinions.

Here on Planet Earth, people understand that letting telecoms off the hook for enabling lawbreaking would be a devastating threat to the rule of law.

ROBERT REICH: You'd think anyone who remembered J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and Nixon's CIA, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 -- let alone the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution -- might be concerned about the government illegally snooping on Americans.

But executives at the nation's biggest telecoms didn't blink an eye when the NSA, America's biggest spy agency, came knocking. You want records of domestic phone calls? Sure, help yourself. Emails? Yeah, we got tons -- they're yours.

When word of this leaked out and the companies got sued by Americans who didn't particularly like the idea of government rummaging through everything they said or wrote, the telecoms went to Congress and complained it wasn't their fault. They deserved immunity from such lawsuits. They were only following orders.

Only following orders? What if the government told telecoms to use their technologies to spy on American bedrooms, or turn over our bank accounts, or our personal photographs, home videos, anything else we store on computers or transmit through cables or over the Internet? The "only following orders" excuse would make telecoms extensions of our spy agencies.

It's just common sense, which is lost on some of our elected leaders. And we're about to find out which ones are being bought off by the industry.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won another significant legal battle, as a federal judge in California yesterday ordered the Bush administration (.pdf) to comply with EFF's FOIA demand and disclose documents revealing its "communications with telecommunications carriers and members of Congress" regarding efforts to amend FISA and provide amnesty to telecoms. Better still, the court imposed an extremely quick deadline for release of these documents -- December 10 -- so that "the public may participate in the debate over the pending legislation on an informed basis."

Needless to say, the Bush administration raised every argument it could to avoid having to disclose this information. These disclosures will reveal -- among other things -- which telecom lobbyists and other representatives were meeting with DNI Michael McConnell in order to secure telecom amnesty, as well as which members of Congress McConnell and other Bush officials privately lobbied. As an argument of last resort, the administration even proposed disclosing these documents on December 31 so that -- as EFF pointed out -- the information would be available only after Congress passed the new FISA bill. The court rejected every administration claim as to why it should not have to disclose these records.

We're going to find out which senators are meeting privately with lobbyists and the Director of National Intelligence to give away the rule of law in preference for telecom industry love. That's going to be a very interesting disclosure, much like Hoekstra's disclosure of lobbying Joe Klein. It's an incestuous little village in Washington and we're just starting to see it uncovered.

UPDATE: By the way, this is what a correction looks like, Time.

UPDATE II: It's important to note that Pete Hoekstra is crazy, and shouldn't be trusted in any way on national security, considering it was his bright idea to put Iraq and Al Qaeda documents online for wingnuts to peruse that included plans on how to build a nuclear bomb. This is Joe Klein's go-to source for national security questions.