Nobody Could Have Predicted

The warrantless wiretapping program collected information through far more than warrantless wiretapping.

A new internal government report says President George W. Bush authorized secret intelligence activities shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that went beyond wiretapping without court orders.

Details of those activities remain classified, but are referred to in the newly released report as the President's Surveillance Program.

Practically everyone in the Bush Administration associated with this program, including John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Andrew Card, David Addington and John Yoo, all declined to be interviewed by the Inspectors General for this report. One of the only on-the-record sources for this report is cheerleader Michael Hayden, who as NSA Director when this program was enacted thinks it stopped multiple terrorist attacks (how reliable a narrator is he, really?). As a result we get a pretty murky picture of what exactly happened, with the additional intelligence gathering still classified, and each Inspector General working on the report hitting a wall of difficulty at assessing the effectiveness or even scope of the program. NSA talks it up, CIA wasn't read into the system (although, as Spencer Ackerman reports, they had a deeper role than at first thought), DoJ couldn't really asses it, the Director of National Intelligence has less of a clear idea as well.

There is this, from the report:

The DOJ OIG review concluded that several considerations favored initiating the process of transitioning the PSP (President's Surveillance Program) to FISA authority earlier than had been done, especially as the program became less a temporary response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and more a permanent surveillance tool (emphasis mine). These considerations included the PSP's effect on privacy interests of US persons, the instability of the legal reasoning on which the program rested for several years, and the substantial restrictions placed on FBI agents' access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status of the PSP.

If I had to guess, I'd say all this mystery was intentional. Nobody really knew what was going on with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the NSA, by design. The only ones who knew directed the policy, and they aren't talking. After the fact they desperately tried to keep the scope of the program a secret. The bottom line is that we still do not know the nature of the program, even after this IG report. Incidentally one Senator who voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which indemnified the telecoms and expanded the intelligence-gathering capabilities under FISA, said that as a consolation to civil libertarians, at least we would get a full accounting of the Bush-era program through this investigation.

His name was Barack Obama.

...Spencer:

The Bush administration called its warrantless surveillance efforts “very, very important to protect the national security of this country,” in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2005. Today’s Inspectors General report on the President’s Surveillance Program doesn’t really substantiate that assessment. “[M]ost PSP leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism,” according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Former Bush administration officials gave the generic statement that the PSP was “of value,” to quote FBI Director Robert Mueller’s rather conspicuously understated judgment. But there’s no evidence given in the report about valuable contributions that the PSP uniquely provided to the counterterrorism fight, even when conceding that most of that stuff is classified.

Spygate II: Still Spyin'

Eric Lichtblau and James Risen's latest:

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

Well, at least it was unintentional.

"Overcollection" is a nice euphemistic phrase we're all going to have to get used to, I guess. What it means is that innocent Americans had their personal phone calls, emails and perhaps other communications targeted by this secretive shadow organization, because they couldn't determine if they were netting calls and emails from domestic sources or from abroad. But at the Times, they have a word limit, so, overcollection.

By all accounts, the Obama Administration discovered this overcollection right at the beginning of their tenure, and attempted to "resolve" it with new safeguards. Of course, the problem is having this expansive surveillance state at all, which was bound to result in mission creep.

Everything the ACLU and the left told you would happen by destroying the standards for domestic surveillance collection -- individualized suspicion, for instance -- has happened.

For some reason, this last bit was at the tail end of the story:

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

As Kevin Drum notes, this ought to focus the minds of those in Congress who had no problem allowing massive spying with the possibility of all kinds of privacy breaches and data collection. The NSA clearly has the technology to gather intelligence on every man, woman and child in the United States. We should simply not trust any governmental entity with that kind of power, it being so ripe for abuse. And some of us have been saying this for close to four years. Maybe those "right-wing extremists" who think Obama has us on the road to fascism might want to join us with their concerns at this point.

....Marcy Wheeler has a bit more. She thinks the violations were about minimization, "because there aren't many other civil liberties protections in FAA."

The Latest Twist on FISA: A New "Compromise" That's Anything But

Yeah yeah, I know, Joe Klein is an idiot and a dishonest hack, and Time Magazine did its best to shield him from criticism, even rejecting numerous counterpoints from Democratic legislators who took issue with Klein's smears. This is all well-documented. Unfortunately, it's also irrelevant to the new heart of the matter on FISA. Arlen Specter is pushing a bullshit "compromise" that actually does pretty much the same thing as telecom amnesty would do.

And voila! your wishy-washy compromise (Specter's statement; the bill):

"The legislation substitutes the U.S. in place of any electronic communication service company which provided communications in connection with an intelligence activity that was authorized by the President between September 11, 2001, and January 17, 2007, and designed to detect or prevent a terrorist attack against the U.S." [...]

But here's the killer:

"nothing in the bill is designed to increase or diminish the ability of the Government to assert the States Secret privilege"

Given that much of BushCo's motivation to give the telecoms immunity relates to BushCo's own exposure for illegally wiretapping Americans, and given that the telecom lawsuits were so important because they provided an angle around State Secrets, this pretty much sinks the lawsuits anyway.

In other words, the government becomes the substitute defendant in all the telecom lawsuits, the government can still invoke state secrets, meaning the lawsuits are very likely to be squashed, and ipso facto, the telecoms get away with lawbreaking. And more important, we never learn the extent of the spying on Americans.

There's a clause in there that leaves the telecoms on the hook for any spying prior to 9/11, but for the most part, this would be the end of any opportunity to reveal the breadth and scope of the President's warrantless wiretapping program. If Bush decided it was legal, then the telecoms get away scot-free.

And this will be voted on in the Senate Judiciary Committee TOMORROW.

So, as much as I agree that Joe Klein is a dick, I wish Glenn Greenwald would step away from that for a moment and back to the destruction of the rule of law that's about to occur under all of our noses. Substitution is just a kinder and gentler word for retroactive immunity. It's the kind of "bipartisan compromise" that the Broders of the world will love, but which is actually a far-right effort to indemnify participants in the surveillance of Americans. This has broad consequences for the surveillance state and the future of civil liberties. Mr. Greenwald, your country needs you. Refocus.

Wiretapping Update: House of Cards Crumbling

When we last left our story, we discovered that the NSA was seeking phone records for massive data mining well before 9/11. That's been corroborated by other lawsuits and filings.

...in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security [...]

But Mayer and Nacchio may not even be the only two arguing that the NSA started a program of collecting Americans' phone records before 9/11.

In a January 2006 Slate article that came out before the USA Today totally blew open the call records story in May 2006, Tim Naftali and THREAT LEVEL pal Shane Harris reported:

"A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and emails."

Now, this is specifically about data mining, taking in millions of calls and emails. There is no mention of actual access to the calls themselves until after 9/11. But clearly, the White House was ramping up for some kind of surveillance almost immediately, perhaps data mining from supposedly international sources which are routed through the United States. Today, it was revealed that Verizon executives have been giving up phone records on hundreds of occasions since 2005, an illegal act, by the way.

The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.

The words "good" and "German" come to mind.

Verizon also disclosed that the FBI, using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. Verizon does not keep data on this "two-generation community of interest" for customers, but the request highlights the broad reach of the government's quest for data.

The disclosures, in a letter from Verizon to three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the carriers' participation in government surveillance programs, demonstrated the willingness of telecom companies to comply with government requests for data, even, at times, without traditional legal supporting documents. The committee members also got letters from AT&T and Qwest Communications International, but those letters did not provide details on customer data given to the government. None of the three carriers gave details on any classified government surveillance program.

Verizon detailed 720 of these "emergency requests" from government agencies, and other telecoms may have detailed even more if they weren't barred by the Director of National Intelligence, who invoked the state secrets privilege.

We're getting a fairly clear picture of near-constant collaboration between spying agencies and corporate telecommunications firms, in a manner where the telecoms are almost an arm of the government, in rampant violation of the Fourth Amendment. Yet Fred Hiatt, in his infinite wisdom, sees nothing wrong.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President [...]

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass. It is not a defense to illegal behavior to say that one violated the law for "patriotic" reasons. That was Oliver North's defense to Congress when he proudly admitted breaking multiple federal laws. And it is the same "defense" that people like North have been making to justify Bush's violations of our surveillance laws -- what we call "felonies" -- in spying on Americans without warrants.

By definition, the "rule of law" does not exist if government officials and entities with influential Beltway lobbyists can run around breaking the law whenever they decide that there are good reasons for doing so. The bedrock principle of the "rule of law" is that the law applies equally to everyone, even to those who occupy Important Positions in Fred Hiatt's social, economic and political circles and who therefore act with the most elevated of motives.

Indeed, we already know that the federal government is willing to lie about intelligence failures, blaming them on restrictive wiretap laws, and they're willing to use their lapdogs in the media to exploit the same intelligence failures to push for this opportunity. We're not dealing with honest brokers, and therefore you must call into question their agenda for wanting these spying powers. The Fred Hiatts of the world would rather reward and facilitate lawbreaking than defend the Constitution. Again, those words "good" and "German" come to mind.

UPDATE: John Conyers has some questions.

Wiretapping Updates: Bush Sought Powers BEFORE 9/11

Right before the Congress makes updates to the FISA law and determines whether or not to give retroactive immunity to telecom companies who assisted in the efforts to wiretap Americans without a warrant, there's a lot of information coming out about just how pervasive Bush Administration surveillance has become, and how long they have sought these expansive surveillance powers.

We learned about Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio's contentions that his company was targeted by the NSA for refusing to participate in the wiretapping program back on Thursday. Today we learn more from the Washington Post:

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

That's really the key statement. All along we have heard that the warrantless wiretapping program was necessary to protect America from the kind of terrorist attacks that we saw on September 11. But months prior, in February 2001, the NSA was approaching telecoms to get them to cooperate on spying. This is only a month or so after Bush's inauguration. And we know that terrorism was nowhere close to being on their minds at that time. So the question must be asked, why would the NSA need these phone records back in February if the goal was not protection from terrorism.

There are a couple possible answers, based on recent news. First, we recently learned that Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama sought information from NSA intercepts on a Clinton-era CIA nominee back in the late 90s. This was in George Tenet's book and was virtually ignored until this week:

[Former CIA Director George] Tenet also wrote that, “National Security Agency officials told us that [Republican Senator Richard] Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on [Clinton CIA-nominee Anthony] Lake.”

But the NSA refused Shelby’s entreaties, two sources said, and there was no derogatory information in the FBI’s files.

Shelby also demanded, and got, the FBI’s raw files on Lake.

And Washington Democrats wonder why we’re suspicious of unregulated NSA/FBI wiretaps and other surveillance?

There's credible evidence that Republicans were interested in obtaining evidence on political enemies through wiretaps, but they were stymied in the Clinton years. The transfer of power offered an opportunity. And that opportunity has been realized. Today, news comes that a law firm in Vermont which has been representing detainees at Guantanamo has had their phones bugged.

A law firm that represents clients at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan is warning its Vermont clients that it believes the federal government has been monitoring its phones and computer system.

In a letter sent to clients of the St. Johnsbury firm of Gensburg, Atwell & Broderick, the three attorneys said they can’t guarantee their communications were confidential.

“Although our investigation is not complete, we are quite confident that it is the United States government that has been doing the phone tapping and computer hacking,” said the letter, dated Oct. 2.

The firm claims "hard evidence" that the government is tapping the calls. Verizon is the service provider, and a service technician did find "crossed lines" and disabled security software on all of their computers. Here's the key quote:

Sleigh said that under current federal law, he felt the U.S. Government could argue it was entitled to tap Gensburg’s phone and computer without a warrant.

This is precisely why the upcoming vote on surveillance is so important. Contrary to the stupidity of traditional media pundits, there are real concerns about spying on Americans without warrants, happening right now, with the legal protections conferred in the awful FISA bill passed back in August. What the Bush Administration seeks is the ability to eavesdrop on any phone call it wants, at any time, even if American citizens are caught up in that net, and they have wanted to do this since before 9/11.

Read what they write about government surveillance and the only argument one finds, literally, is that our Leaders need more power because they want to protect us. The very notion that such power should not be vested without oversight and safeguards is, to them, considered unserious, because we are talking here about officials who are good and responsible and would never abuse their power. That is why Congress in August all but gutted the Fourth Amendment and vested the Bush administration with the power of warrantless eavesdropping with barely a peep of protest from our Beltway elite. To the contrary, when they speak about it at all, they do so by warning Democrats not to impede these "important" protections.

The very real reason to be skeptical of these efforts is the lessons of history, when we saw warrantless surveillance without oversight abused and used to spy on political enemies. Which is why the Congress must hold the line in rejecting so-called "basket warrants," which allow the government to spy without a direct target, and rejecting retroactive immunity for those companies which illegally provided the means for the Bush Administration to spy on Americans. Dick Durbin today said he would not allow blanket immunity without knowing the scope of the program. What we're starting to learn is enough. There should be no immunity for breaking the law.

Just Weights And Measures

Yesterday I managed to get myself to services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The familiar rituals and rites of Judaism can be comforting but often lapse into rote recitation. But yesterday, the rabbi's sermon woke me up and put a new spin on the moral code that underpins all humanity, which is at the heart of not only Jewish teaching, but the foundational premises of our country, principles we are rapidly losing over the course of the Bush Presidency.

The rabbi talked about a little-remarked-upon section of the Old Testament. Leviticus is filled with a laundry list of commandments and guidelines for life in Biblical times. One section focuses on "just weights and measures."

35 Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. 36 Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.

An ephah is a unit of dry measure, roughly equivalent to about 23 liters. The way that business was conducted in this time was that every shopkeeper would have their own ephah, and their own stone, and would parcel out portions of products based on how they filled the ephah or balanced against the stone. It was stressed in the Old Testament that you have ONE ephah, and that it be clean and untainted, so that the measure was the same everywhere anyone traveled. What was commanded was that you never substitute "ephah v'ephah": having one measure for some people, and a different measure for others.

The rabbi made a strong statement paralleling this commandment for just measures with our present policies on immigration. "You deal with the person in front of you, and you have mercy on them and deal with them and provide for them and care for them as you would anyone else." This is not a political accomodation but a moral imperative; to do any different would be to put our thumb on the scale. And then the rabbi paused, and said, "I should stop there but I won't. For I must not be silent about torture." This is also a violation of "ephah v'ephah." He said that locking up suspects indefinitely and coercing their confessions through prohibited tactics is a sin against God, an "abomination," as the Old Testament calls it, and one that was held in the highest seriousness to Hebrew scholars. "We know a lot about that other thing called abomination," he said, a clear reference to the oft-used line by conservative Christians that homosexuality is an "abomination." Unlike sexuality, using separate ephahs for separate people CANNOT be rectified through penance. It is as serious a sin as there is in Judaism. And this is perhaps because it gets at the very heart of the measure of a man. If we cannot treat others the same, no matter what the circumstances, we have no basis to call ourselves moral human beings.

The United States has their own "ephah," called the Constitution. We cannot profess to follow the rule of law while breaking it whenever convenient. We not only damage our credibility, but we do violence to the ancient concept of just weights and measures. For six and a half long years we have seen an Administration throw morality out the window while claiming to have the word of God on their side. They have eliminated the Great Writ of habeas corpus, they have spied on their fellow citizens without warrants, they have incarcerated terror suspects at Guantanamo and secret prisons indefinitely and without charges, they have nullified federal statutes through the questionably legal means of signing statements, and more. And we cannot stand idly by while they use one ephah for their friends and allies, and another ephah for anyone they deem a threat, be it militarily or politically. We must stand up for just measures.

This week, the ACLU of Southern California, in partnership with Calitics, is launching The Campaign for Our Constitution. It is an aggressive effort to restore our Constitution and our civil liberties and reverse the extreme policies of the Bush Administration that have made us less safe and called into question just what freedom we're supposed to be fighting for abroad. Bloggers, constitutional scholars and activists are joining together in the fight to recapture basic constitutional values. There are going to be a lot of action items you can take in the future, but for now I want to give you the schedule for the coming weeks.

The campaign officially kicks off Monday, Sept. 17, with a conference call with Salon.com contributor and New York Times bestselling author Glenn Greenwald. He will discuss the future of the Constitution with Cenk Uygur, co-host of Air America’s “Young Turks” morning show, and take members’ questions. The conference call is open to anyone who RSVPs through www.ourconstitution.net.

In the next month, the campaign will hold conference calls on Sept. 20 with Dr. Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist, Huffington Post contributor, and author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” and on Oct. 4 with John Dean, former White House counsel for Richard Nixon and author of the new book “Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches,” just released by Viking Press. There also will be a free screening and discussion with director Robert Greenwald (“Outfoxed,” “Unconstitutional”) in Hollywood on Sept. 25.

“Southern Californians are itching for a fight,” said ACLU/SC field director Susanne Savage. “The U.S. Constitution is our core issue. We intend to lead a campaign that will expose the sad truths about our government’s policies, inspire people to act and give our electeds the political cover they need to stop legislating out of fear.”

There is no more important issue for our country moving forward than to regain the sense of justice and truth that's been sorely missing for too long. Please visit OurConstitution.net and see what you can do to help. We can and must return this nation to one where there are just weights and measures.

Civil Liberties, Checks and Balances Making A Comeback

This week we have seen a couple court cases that strike back at the Bush Administration's grabbing of new and extreme executive powers for the executive branch. A federal judge demanded that the Administration provide documents to the court relating to an ACLU lawsuit against the government's warrantless spying program. The government sought to dismiss the case based on the state secrets privilege, and denied even those in the court with security clearance to see the documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

While the court is certainly sensitive to the government's need to protect classified information and its deliberative processes, essentially declaring "because we say so" is an inadequate method for invoking Exemption.

Then, a major portion of the Patriot Act was struck down.

A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court's approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act "offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers."

This specifically deals with National Security Letters, which implements a gag order on those businesses summoned with one. No grand jury subpoena or judge's order was required to issue a National Security Letter, meaning the government could deploy them at will to force businesses to turn over customer records without oversight. These letters were previously shown to be misapplied by the FBI.

Even the long-ago-forgotten LEGISLATIVE branch got into the act by criticizing the new use of spy satellite technology.

Senior House Democrats called on the Bush administration yesterday to delay a planned Oct. 1 expansion of the use of powerful satellite and aircraft spy technology by local and federal law enforcement agencies, challenging the plan's legality and charging that the administration is failing to safeguard the privacy of Americans.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and two Democratic subcommittee chairmen jointly asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide the legal framework for the domestic use of classified and military spy satellites, and to allow Congress to review privacy and civil liberties protections.

"You let this thing go, it may be another blank check to the executive. It may morph into things that will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

Next thing you know, they'll start fighting efforts to give away massive new spying powers to the President!

The Second Program

Laura Rozen is absolutely right:

Why were FBI director Mueller and the FBI so involved in Comey’s decision-thinking on the NSA warrantless domestic spying program? Was this about a separate component of the program, that involved the FBI spying without warrants on Americans? Not just the NSA?

This would certainly get Gonzales off the hook for lying to Congress, although the Justice Department refused to retract his sworn testimony today. But it would be much worse. A purely domestic spying program run by the FBI would almost certainly be put to the use of spying on Americans, and for who knows what purpose. Digby has a clue:

How over-the-top must this have been for staunch Republican John Ashcroft to have risen from his ICU bed to argue against it and the entire top echelon of the DOJ were preparing to resign? These are not ordinary times and the law enforcement community has not been particularly squeamish about stretching the Bill of Rights. None of those people are bleeding heart liberals or candidates for the presidency of the ACLU. For them to be this adamant, it must have been something completely beyond the pale.

My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program --- or an entirely different program --- that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn't seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs.

Unbelievably, there's going to be 20 more months of this unless a bunch of defenders of the Constitution suddenly pop up.

UPDATE: Apparently Fred Hiatt is all scratching his head and wondering why this "Enzo the Baker" story with Ashcroft and Gonzales and Andy Card is only coming out now. Actually, it was out a year and a half ago, and you never reported on it, Fred. You were too busy defending Bush, ignoring violations of the law, and bashing Democrats. Greenwald has more.