Yes, Joe Lieberman’s attempt at a combined police state wet dream/vanity legacy project, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, failed failed to break a filibuster, and so it’s dead for this session.
I’m happy, but Barack Obama is bumming, because, well, the worlds worst constitutional law professor wants to be able to spy on people without any independent review.
Because our defense contractors are eager to sell them our defense secrets. It’s kind of ironic, they are outsourcing their espionage to us:
United Technologies and two of its subsidiaries sold China software enabling Chinese authorities to develop and produce their first modern military attack helicopter, U.S. authorities said June 28.
At a federal court hearing in Bridgeport, Conn., United Technologies and its two subsidiaries, Pratt & Whitney Canada and Hamilton Sundstrand, agreed to pay more than $75 million to the U.S. government to settle criminal and administrative charges related to the sales.
As part of the settlement, Pratt & Whitney Canada agreed to plead guilty to two federal criminal charges – violating a U.S. export control law and making false statements. The charges were in connection with the export to China of U.S.-origin military software used in Pratt & Whitney Canada engines, which was used to test and develop the new Z-10 helicopter.
Also as part of the deal, United Technologies and Hamilton Sundstrand admitted to making false statements to the U.S. government about the illegal exports.
Hamilton Sundstrand and Pratt & Whitney Canada also admitted that they had failed to make timely disclosures, required by regulations, to the U.S. State Department about the exports.
The government said that the $75 million settlement breaks down into roughly $20.7 million in criminal fines, forfeitures and other penalties to be paid to the Justice Department and roughly $55 million in payments to the State Department as part of a consent agreement resolving more than 500 administrative export control violations.
About $20 million of the fines will be suspended, to be used by the company for continuing to improve its export control procedures, and for hiring an independent monitor, United Technologies said.
As part of the agreement, the U.S. State Department also will impose a partial debarment of Pratt & Whitney Canada for new export licenses, although the company can request licenses on a case-by-case basis. The debarment does not affect United Technologies or Hamilton Sundstrand, and the Canadian unit can request full reinstatement in one year.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case said investigators believe United Technologies and its subsidiaries deliberately set out to provide the embargoed military technology to China to ingratiate themselves with Chinese authorities, hoping to win them entree into China’s lucrative civilian helicopter market, worth an estimated $2 billion.
To quote Karl Marx, “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
H/t my Dad.
I understand that he fears that he will be immediately put on a plane to the US when he sets foot in Sweden, what I don’t get is why he has to go to Sweden for that. After all, the UK is the United State’s eager bottom, so why wait until he hits Sweden?
The current administration has a paranoia about leakers that rivals that of Nixon.
The CIA is touting its green credentials by revealing that they generate heat by burning shredded documents:
A press release from the CIA explains that their “burn after reading” practice conserves energy because the exhaust from their incinerator generates steam to heat water at CIA headquarters. Says the CIA:In addition to saving fuel, that process reduces the amount of waste–which would otherwise be destined for landfills–by nearly 1,000 tons per year. The CIA increases its recycling efforts each year, annually collecting over three tons of plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, construction debris, and other waste.
I dunno, I find this kind of …… odd.
He’s currently being investigated for a double murder in Lahore, Pakistan, and the US government is claiming that he has diplomatic immunity, and so must be released.
There are a number of peculiarities here. As constitutional lawyer
Scott Horton notes, the issuance of a diplomatic passport does not convey diplomatic immunity, the host country formally recognize and accept their diplomatic status.
Also, it’s unclear if he was a diplomatic or a consular officer and if the latter, then the charge, double murder, would certainly not be covered by any immunity.
In fact, immunity might not apply in either case, since the Vienna convention does not apply to serious crimes, like, for example, murder.
Additionally, thanks Dave Lindorff of Eurasia review for this, it appears that Mr. Davis was not a consular or embassy employee, but rather the employee of a defunct security firm, Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, which makes his status even more suspicious.
Also, when caught, he had at least two guns in his car, a number of cell phones and batteries, and a telescope.
Linhoff also reports that the two Pakistanis were shot in the back, and that he has received reports that they were not just two guys on a motorbike, but in fact operatives of Pakistan’s security service, the ISI.
Given the circumstances, and the fact that a heavily armed strike team in the SUV rushing from the US consulate to try to snatch him from police immediately following the incident, and running down and killing a person in the process, I would be inclined to believe that whatever he was doing there had nothing to do with diplomacy.
One interesting factoid in all of this is that his arrest has corresponded to an unusual lull in drone strikes, which would be consistent with his having a senior managerial role in those operations:
A mysterious halt to U.S Predator strikes on Pakistan after the Raymond Davis incident in Lahore has led to intense speculation the American “diplomat” was connected to the Drone program even as Washington and Islamabad are going eyeball-to-eyeball over his status.
Davis, 36, was apprehended by Pakistani police after he shot dead two Pakistanis on a busy Lahore thoroughfare on January 27, four days after the last drone U.S Drone strike in Pakistan. There has not been a single strike in the 25 days since then, making it the third-longest period of inactivity since the U.S ramped up the Predator program to take out terrorists infesting Pakistan’s frontier regions, according to Long War Journal (LWJ), a blog that tracks U.S Predator attacks.
Speculation is now rife that Davis was somehow connected to the Predator program since he was reportedly carrying a GPS, telescope, camera and assorted equipment not usually associated with thoroughbred diplomats. Pakistani authorities have also accused him of unauthorized travels to the Frontier region and being in touch with extremist elements in Waziristan, which suggests he might have been coordinating the attacks with U.S moles in the region.
While Davis claimed that he shot the two Pakistanis in self-defense when they were trying to rob him, some reports have said they were ISI tails assigned to follow him because the Pakistani intelligence felt he had crossed certain unspecified “red lines.” Those red lines may have involved discovering the Pakistani establishment’s links with terrorists group, a pursuit which led to the death of Wall Street Journalist Danny Pearl.
I’m thinking that Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, is about as real as Brewster-Jennings was for Valerie Plame, and that he works for the CIA, some other TLA (three letter agency), or a contractor hired by some arm of the US government.
It would explain why heads have been exploding at Foggy Bottom (State), and probably Langley (CIA) as well, for the past few weeks.
Yes, someone at the CIA has a sense of humor.
They have assigned a group to look at the fallout from Wikileaks cable releases, and they are calling it the Wikileaks Task Force, generally abbreviated as WTF:
The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.
The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.
“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”
Heh.
On the other hand, he would be worried about finding Polonium in his coffee, courtesy of the Russian FSB:
Yesterday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Security Agency is aware that the FSB — the post-Soviet KGB — is closely monitoring Wikileaks, though the U.S. has no “direct evidence” that the Russians are behind the days-long denial-of-service attacks that have brought down the Wikileaks website over and over again.
But why would the Russians care that much? In part, because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said that between the leaked cables and other information he got separately, high-level corrupt Russian officials should be worried. And some observers think that Assange’s efforts to expose corruption in Russia could be more harmful to his site and himself than exposing America’s secrets have been. One law enforcement source told The Daily Beast, “The Russians play by different rules,” adding that they would be “ruthless” in their attempts to stop him.
(emphasis mine)
Russian leaders don’t get worried, they get proactive, as in the subject of their concern ends up mailed to his family in a dozen parcel post packages, or they die mysteriously.
Well, when I wrote about the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a major actor in the military wing of Hamas in Syria, I suggested that it was not a result of is day job, where he worked in textiles, and gave the three alternatives as the Mossad, a dispute internal to Hamas, and the consequence of some sort of kinky sex.
Well, I think that we can rule out the last two:
Dubai police released names and photographs of 11 suspects they say took part in the murder of a senior Hamas official there last month, and separately detained two Palestinians in connection with the killing.
The suspects, who entered the emirate from a number of European Union countries, carried out the assassination, Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim said at a press conference today. The suspects included six British passport holders, three Irish, one German and one French, Tamim said. Dubai will submit their names to Interpol for arrest warrants, he said.
Hamas would not have used so many people under different passports.
It’s odd though that Hamas was so caught off guard by this.
Could it be ………… the Mossad?Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was one of the founders of Hamas’ Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and was believed to be a major conduit of weapons to Gaza.
On January 19, he was found dead in his hotel room, and authorities in Dubai are saying that he was done by a hit squad with “European passports”, and these people were already out of the country before the body was discovered.
Among other oddities: His bodyguard was not with him because the plane was full, which is kind of a “WTF” thing.
Additionally, the cause of death is unclear, with reports, according to the Wiki, of suffocation, electrocution (unlikely, it’s a stupid way to off someone), and, “a heart-attack inducing drug”.
What is interesting (quoting the Wiki) is just how much Hamas is not on the same page about this:
Hamas officials made diverse and conflicting statements regarding the circumstances of their leader’s death. On the day of the incident, Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, announced that he died of terminal cancer in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates.
On 29 January, top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said that it was possible that members of the entourage of Israeli infrastructure minister Uzi Landau were involved in Mabhuh’s death. Landau was visiting the United Arab Emirates at the time for a renewable energy conference. Landau dismissed the claim, stating that his delegation was in Abu Dhabi, some 120 km from Dubai, and was escorted by 8-man UAE security team at all times.
Also on 29 January, Hamas’ deputy politburo chief Moussa Abu Marzouk said, “Mossad agents are those who assassinated al-Mabhouh”.
On 2 February, Hamas representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan said that Palestinian Authority security forces might have been involved in the death. He stated that “The Palestinian Authority security forces are pursuing [our] fighters and they have killed dozens of them since 1994.” The same day, Haaretz reported that a Hamas investigation suggested Mabhuh was assassinated by agents of an Arab government, and that al-Mabhouh was wanted by Egypt and Jordan.
Seeing as how his “day job” was running a textile firm, I see only four possibilities, the Mossad, some sort of internecine warfare amongst members of Hamas, some sort of natural death while in a sexually compromised position (which would explain the absence of body guards as well as the confusion from Hamas), or the textile industry in Syria is more cut-throat than I previously understood.
My money is on the Mossad.
That whole “silk merchant gone bad” thing ……… not so much.
I’m reading conflicting stories about what happened to the Russian freighter that was captured by pirates, but there are also reports that the ship was carrying S-300 SAMs (Probably the NATO designation SA-12) to Iran, and that the capture of the ship by “pirates” was a ploy by Russia to avoid delivery of missiles that had already been sold by someone who should have sold them.
In any case, it is definitely weird.
The CIA is launching a recruitment drive among laid off investment bankers, because, well, I guess they are sick and tired of people who can learned Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, and Chinese from their parents, because they don’t fit in at the country club.
Great googly moogly, their latest brief in court is even more absurd than their DOMA brief.
Hell, it’s more absurd than the Twinkie Defense, it’s the Jon Stewart Defense:
A federal judge yesterday sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney’s political enemies or late-night commentary on “The Daily Show.”
…
….He told the judge that if Cheney’s remarks were published, then a future vice president asked to provide candid information during a criminal probe might refuse to do so out of concern “that it’s going to get on ‘The Daily Show’ ” or somehow be used as a political weapon.
Gee, I wish that I could tell police investigating a crime to go pound sand because somehow it might be embarrassing.
Making this even more absurd is that this argument was first put forward by Bush’s now disgraced acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel Stephen Bradbury. (See also here and here)
It turns out that some of the people’s notes on the briefings could not have been made contemporaneously, as the term enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) was used extensively throughout, and this term was not used before 2004, and the briefing was given in 2002.
This does not mean that anyone at the CIA is lying, though my guess is that some of them are, but it means that the notes used are not those made at the time.
So, you have every Dem who was briefed on that day saying that the CIA did not say then that it was torturing, and you have numerous errors in attendance, staffers being called present, Rep. David Obey challenging the accuracy of the documents, and notes that Porter Goss was briefed along with members of Congress after he became head of the CIA.
As Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman would say, “This one’s busted.”
Some data points:
Indeed, my read of a more recent CQ piece about then DNI John Negroponte also telling Goss not to brief the House leadership about Harman caught on the wiretap is that Negroponte was also trying to shut down what he thought was a rogue effort to pursue investigation of Harman. One now wonders if the reported Negroponte-Goss tensions that ultimately ended in Goss being forced to resign were also fueled by his concerns about Goss’s and the Gosslings’ actions on the Harman matter, and not just the Foggo matter. As we now know, by the way, the Foggo matter is not at all unrelated to the Cunningham case and the HPSCI report that Harman released. Remember: Foggo got the number 3 job at CIA because Goss’s staff recommended him to Goss. Indeed, many members of Goss’s staff had played poker with Foggo and the Cunningham case defense contractors for years (remember the Watergate poker parties?). And my understanding is that when Goss was chairman of HPSCI, Foggo had served his staff as a kind of mole against Tenet and other suspected-unloyal-to-Bush types inside the CIA. So Team Goss and the Gosslings had reasons to squirm when Harman released that report. I need to check when the Foggo indictment actually came down, but I don’t believe he was indicted yet at the time Harman released that report in October 2006. So that case against Foggo and the wider Cunningham investigation still moving may have unnerved people in Goss-land for multiple reasons when Harman released that report.
….
October 2006 is one month before the midterms when the Democrats would retake the House. And with the Democrats expected to win, who would get the chairmanship of HPSCI would have been a live issue for those who cared about these things, including about what kind of oversight even of past actions at CIA might have occurred. Oversight – and in particular Democratic-led oversight – that might have included looking into actions taken during Goss’s tenure as CIA director from 2004-2006. That tenure included, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the CIA’s destruction of videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects — which Harman may have been briefed about. The episode is serious – it’s now the subject of investigation by a special prosecutor. Goss’s tenure also included the whole Foggo corruption matter which was still playing out in 2006, indeed, which played a big role in Goss being forced to suddenly step down as CIA director in May 2006.
So it’s beginning to sound like someone was going after the person most likely to investigate both the torture tape destruction and the connections between Goss staffers and disgraced Congressman Cunningham.
Most of this appears to be moot, because prosecutors are dropping the case against the AIPAC lobbyists, which is a good thing, because the precedent intended by this case was to criminalize the receipt of any classified material by an American citizen without any espionage being involved, and could be very easily extended to journalism.
As I’ve said before, I’m glad that Harman is not House Intel Chairman, but tht latest from Jeff Stein, who broke the story, is a classic case of the CIA screwing itself up, and f%$#ing itself over:
Frustrated and angry at Gonzales for aborting the investigation, intelligence officials let Pelosi know about the wiretap and its contents, according to the three former national security officials.
‘She knew. We made sure she knew,’ said one of the former officials, chuckling.
The officials would discuss the matter only on terms of anonymity, because even the existence of the wiretap remains classified.
These guys want to be unshackled from the Frank Church era restrictions, and they pull crap like this.
You are going to have Congressional committees investigating you in a way that is far less pleasant than an unlubed proctology exam now, and you are to blame for this.
Morons….We should have outsourced you lot’s job to the ex-KGB when the wall came down.
First, we have a report that the “Israeli agent” that Jane Harman was having a phone conversation with was an Israeli-American named Haim Saban, if the name sounds familiar, it’s because you watch the credits for Mighty Morphin’ Power rangers.
He’s a producer who made much of his fortune by importing and redubbing the children’s show.
Then we have Ron Kampeas at the JTA noting that the phone call in question happened in the Summer of 2005, which is pre-Katrina, has her discussing becoming Intel committee chairman.
Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. It was around a week before the scope of the incompetence hit, and began destroying whatever remained of Bush’s post 911, so the possibility of a Democratically controlled house was remote. People were still talking about a permanent Republican majority.
In any case, Keampeas points us toward
Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy magazine, who appears to have a line on the personalities, and the machinations therein within the intelligence establishment that might figure in this:
On the other side, the statement from the Neww York Times editor that Harman did not attempt to influence the publication of the illegal wiretap article may not be true, as Bill Keller has clarified his statements, and it appears that she contacted Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman regarding the matter, at the request of Michael Hayden, who keeps showing up in every bit of evil in the intelligence establishment like a demented Amway salesman.
It also means that Harman was actively working against the election of John Kerry, because if the Times had published before the election, it would likely have swung the race.
Finally, we have Jane Harman asking for the transcripts of her phone calls to be declassified and released.
Here is my older post on this, and try to figure this out.
It’s beginning to read like a John le Carré novel.
Let me start by saying that I’ve always thought that she was an anti-civil rights scumbag, so that colors my view of her, but this news is really big.
You can go to CQ politics for Jeff Klein’s story, but the short version is that Jane Harman wanted to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and in the process of lobbying various folks to get that position, which ultimately went to Silvestre Reyes, she talked to some member of the Israel lobby who was under a court authorized wiretap because they were under suspicion of being an Israeli intelligence operative, and she said that she would “waddle into” the AIPAC prosecution, and that she wanted them to intercede with Nancy Pelosi on her behalf regarding the Intel committee post.
According to sources who saw the transcript, she finished the discussion with the phrase, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
Certainly, the implication of “interceding with Pelosi,” is that campaign donations were involved, though the article does not make a specific claim of campaign donations for Harman’s action.
This gets more complex because Alberto Gonzalez quashed the investigation of Harman because he wanted her support of the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretap program, she had always been supportive of the program, and the New York Times was finally getting ready to release the story, and they wanted a Vichy Dem to speak for them.
Let’s be clear, there was no indication of a quid pro quo between Abu Gonzalez and Harman, but neither did there need to be one. She was always in the tank on this issue.
I would also note that while Klein suggests that Harman interceded to get the story spiked at the Times in 2004, the editors there have categorically denied this.
I’m not sure whether there was a crime or not. Law enforcement officials seem to think so, but law enforcement officials always think that, as the other Matt notes, “….how many politicians’ reputations could really stand up to serious surveillance? ….. we have a political system that’s substantially powered by a kind of systematic, quasi-legalized bribery.”
He also has the bigger point, which is that politics is messy business, and if you were to wire tap any political figure, you would end up with stuff that is just plain sleazy, because that is how political “sausage” is made.
His best point, however is this:
Thinking about that further reinforces the point that selective, unaccountable surveillance is very dangerous. A president could do a great deal to gin up pretexts to wiretap members of congress and blackmail them even without the members doing anything unusually egregious.
Which really is the big point on why we should all object to the surveillance society.
Meanwhile a friend of John Aravosis thinks that this is all a tempest in a teapot, noting, accurately, that the AIPAC “spies” are not charged with espionage, i.e. acting as an agent for a foreign power, but rather acquiring sensitive government data under the (never used in this circumstance in the past 90 years) 1919 Espionage act:
The heart of the CQ story is incorrect…because Harman wasn’t acting on behalf of Israel. Rosen and Weissman aren’t being accused for spying on behalf of Israel. The CQ story is trying to depict Rosen and Weissman as convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. What Rosen and Weiss did is nothing like what Pollard was convicted of. Rosen and Weissman met with the State Department official on their behalf, not at the behest of Israel or AIPAC. To suggest so is wrong and that’s what stinks about this story. The fact that Stein’s title of CQ’s “Spy Talk Columnist” shows the inherent bias of this story and shows that it is teetering on pure fantasy.
In any case, it’s clear that if she had a normal security clearance, it would be yanked pending an investigation, and that she should never be chairman of the Intel committee, and it appears that Pelosi was aware of this episode, and it may have contributed to her passing over Harman for the position.
So I was reading this account of a Seymour Hersh interview on Fresh Air in which he says that Cheney loyalists have been “burrowed” into sensitive government positions, and continue to feed him information:
“I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay-behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve been driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay-behind that you can continue to have contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay-behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.”
(Audio at bottom)
And the first thing that went through my head was, “People from the NSA are talking to a guy who orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent?”
Then I realized that the real question was, “Why does Richard Bruce Cheney still have a security clearance?”
Based on my reading of the entire Lewis “Scooter” Libby case, it’s clear that Patrick Fitzgerald had concerns that Cheney was aware of the leaks on some level, though he lacked any hard evidence (missing emails anyone?) to go any further.
That being said, a security clearance is not a legal procedure, it’s an administrative procedure, and to a significant degree, it is necessary for the holder of this clearance to show that they not a security risk, either intentionally or through negligence.
There is also an additional duty to report any credible potential security violations to the appropriate authorities.
This is a lower standard of proof than, for example, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, or obstruction of justice statutes.
There is therefore a significant concern that Dick Cheney violated the terms of his clearance, and pending an investigation, his clearance should be suspended pending an investigation.
Unlike a government employee whose livelihood is dependent on having a clearance, this should not provide an undue burden, and a hearing, with witnesses, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Mr. Cheney, testifying under oath, would be an appropriate venue to decide whether or not he was either deliberately or negligently cavalier with sensitive intelligence data.
Of course, if Mssrs Cheney or Libby were to make untrue statements in the process of giving their testimony, that would be a matter for the federal prosecutors.
I’m not sure how to deal with a spy agency that is so focused on an eventual war with India that it allies itself to terrorists, short of some of those predator strikes should hit ISI HQ.