Ten Years after 9/11, Inherent Authority Dies a Small Legal Death

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Al-Haramain has submitted its brief for the appellate review on a number of issues related to the government’s illegal wiretapping of the charity. The questions at issue are:

1. Does FISA waive federal sovereign immunity?
2. Does FISA preempt the state secrets privilege?
3. Was plaintiffs’ non-classified evidence sufficient to prove their warrantless electronic surveillance?
4. Did the district court properly award counsel’s full attorney’s fees?
5. Did the district court err in dismissing defendant Mueller in his individual capacity?

Most of the brief will be familiar to those who have followed this case. But this passage–because it comes at the appellate level–is new.

Finally, we note that defendants do not challenge the district court’s ruling that the President lacks inherent power to disregard FISA’s preemption of the state secrets privilege. See 564 F. Supp. 2d at 1121 [ER 108]; supra at 16. Thus, for purposes of this appeal, defendants have forfeited any claim of inherent power to disregard FISA. See, e.g., Independent Towers of Wash. v. Washington, 350 F.3d 925, 929 (9th Cir. 2003). More broadly, defendants have abandoned any defense of the TSP’s purported theoretical underpinning that the President may disregard an Act of Congress in the name of national security.

This forfeiture should come as no surprise. Top officials in the Obama administration had conspicuously repudiated the inherent power theory before taking office. See Donald Verrilli (now Solicitor General) et al., Brief for Amici Curiae Center for National Security Studies and the Constitution Project, American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency, 493 F.3d 644 (6th Cir. 2007), 2006 WL 4055623, at *2 & *15 (inherent power theory is “particularly dangerous because it comes at the expense of both Congress’s and the judiciary’s powers to defend the individual liberties of Americans”); Neal Kumar Katyal (now Principal Deputy Solicitor General), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The Legal Academy Goes to Practice, 120 HARV. L. REV. 65, 117 (2006) (“overblown assertions” of inherent power “risk lawlessness in the name of national security”); Eric Holder (now Attorney General), Address to American Const. Society (June 13, 2008), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CKycFGJOUs&feature=relmfu (videotape at 3:41–3:52) (“We must utilize and enhance our intelligence collection capabilities to identify and root out terrorists, but we must also comply with the law. We must also comply with FISA.”). [my emphasis]

The passage is not central to the argument except insofar as it notes the government has procedurally given up the theory that they used to initially rationalize the illegal wiretap program. It is, as I said, just a small legal death, limited to this one case, rather than a wholesale repudiation.

Nevertheless, I thought the timing–not just coinciding with the anniversary of 9/11 but also the release of Dick Cheney’s autobiographical novel–rather apt.

And the rhetorical value in citing three of DOJ’s top lawyers dismissing the theory–which the brief repeats by citing Holder’s even more damning call for “a reckoning” in that same ACS speech at the very start of the brief does have value.

“[S]teps taken in the aftermath of 9/11 were both excessive and unlawful. Our government . . . approved secret electronic surveillance of American citizens . . . . These steps were wrong when they were initiated and they are wrong today. We owe the American people a reckoning.” Eric Holder, June 13, 2008

Verilli’s and Katyal’s and Holder’s criticism of inherent power may have just been the rhetorical blatherings of political lawyers then in the political and legal opposition, blatherings not entirely consistent with steps they have taken since they’ve been in positions of authority.

But for the purposes of this legal brief, who better to kill the theory of inherent authority than the Attorney General?

Nine Years after Aluminum Tube Fear-Mongering, Judy Miller Is Back at It

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Murdoch’s empire has a funny approach to its own mantra, “never forget.” On what is effectively the ninth anniversary of Judy Miller’s aluminum tube extravaganza, she’s back at work fear-mongering in the WSJ.

This time, she’s serving as NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly’s stenographer. It appears Kelly decided to use the occasion that other anniversary, 9/11, to sow propaganda to counter the work the AP has done exposing Kelly’s CIA-on-the-Hudson.

A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week’s torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They’re also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they’re still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.

Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD’s counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights. [my emphasis]

As is typical for Judy, she parrots the crafty misdirection of her sources.

The police have to factor terrorism into “everything we do,” Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it.

A journalist, after all, would have pointed out that the NYPD’s spooks aren’t simply following leads. as Kelly suggested. Rather they have sought to map out entire communities, based solely on ethnic and racial profiling.

The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray.

Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would “deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities.”

Nor does Judy show any more critical assessment when listing 7 of those 13 plots against NYC that Kelly mentioned, leaving the incorrect impression that Judy’s description that these were “thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts” applies to all these plots.

You can check out the real story of those 7 cases below. As I’ve pointed out, the NYPD failed to discover the two most developed plots. At least from what is publicly known, the NYPD was only involved in 4 of the 7 cases and the ones it led have been criticized as entrapment or mere aspirational plots. And there’s a bit of leakiness from the NYPD that on at least one (and possibly two) occasions has hurt ongoing investigations.

So here’s what New Yorkers have gotten for Ray Kelly’s $3.3 billion investment (assuming the $330 million cited by Judy has remained constant) in his very own spy department.

1) It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said.

The NYPD “undercover officer” in this case, Osama Eldawoody, had infiltrated Siraj’s Bay Ridge Islamic community, getting paid almost $100,000 for his three year effort setting up the plot. He incited Siraj and his young, schizophrenic friend, James Elshafay, in part by showing pictures from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Siraj never had any explosives–Eldawoody was supposed to provide those–and in fact tried to back out of the plot days before he was arrested.

2) Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to “take out the entire building.”

As with the Siraj case, the NYPD had long cultivated Ferhani (according to his lawyers, like Elshafay, he is mentally ill) and Mamdouh; the cops provided the arms used as an excuse to arrest them. The NYPD tripped the sting just days after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Feds declined to take the case, questioning whether the gun deal was really a terrorism case and whether the case would hold up in court. And the grand jury rejected the most serious charges against the men.

3) Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 “who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here.”

Almonte and Alessa were first identified in 2006 via the FBI tip line. They traveled to Jordan (Jordan?! Who goes to Jordan to join a terrorist group?) allegedly to try join terrorists, but failed to do so. It’s unclear when the NYPD first assigned an undercover officer to the two (or why the NYPD did so instead of the FBI), but the first mention of that officer came shortly after the Nidal Hasan attack, so it’s possible the NYPD decided to more aggressively pursue people who had read or listened to Anwar al-Awlaki’s and other English-language jihadist propaganda after that attack. The men definitely did intend to try to join a terrorist group in Somalia (though there are reasons to suspect the undercover officer suggested it; and the evidence suggests they wanted to engaged in jihad there, not in the US) and they did listen to jihadist propaganda. But the bulk of the evidence simply consists of the number of times they trained using gyms or video games and accounts of the number of Camelbak water systems they bought.

4) Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 “Liquid Bomb Plot,” or “Operation Overt,” in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America;

This was, by all appearances, a real, serious plot. While I’m sure the NYPD was alerted to the plot, there’s no reason to believe the NYPD was ever central to the investigation. And Dick Cheney’s sabotage of the British investigation into it would later lead to Najibullah Zazi’s attempted plot.

5) Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009. The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado.

Not only did the NSA and FBI discover this plot, and not only did the NYPD not discover it in spite of using Zazi’s imam as an informant, but they damaged the investigation by tipping Zazi off through that imam.

6) Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River.

This plot was apparently discovered via chat room surveillance, with FBI leading the investigation (though Peter King was quoted as saying the NYPD was involved in the investigation). FBI sources described the plot as aspirational, not the “serious plot” Judy describes. Not only hadn’t suspects traveled to the US, they hadn’t yet done the Pakistani training they hoped would prepare them for the attack. Of particular interest, international cooperation was disrupted on this investigation because someone leaked news of it to the NY Daily News. Given that after that leak NYC’s leaders used it to call for more counter-terrorism funding, and given that some reports insisted the Feds would continue to share information with local authorities, it seems likely that someone in NY leaked it.

7) Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.

And Faisal Shahzad. Judy doesn’t mention that the NYPD’s investigations outside of NYC didn’t include Shahzad’s community in CT nor the hawala he used in Long Island to obtain funding from Pakistan. But at least she included it in her list, implicitly admitting that the CIA-on-the-Hudson she was celebrating didn’t find this plot.

So the story Kelly wanted Judy to tell was that the 1,200 people spying on New Yorkers have done something. And, an obedient stenographer as always, that’s what she uncritically wrote. But even a cursory look behind the claims she makes shows Kelly’s spooks have largely been entrapping dull-witted young Muslim men and hurting FBI investigations with leaks.

Be afraid, Judy says. But it’s clear she’s mistaken about what we need to fear.

Obama Rejects Senate Advice and Consent Over the Guy Who Data Mines Our Communications

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The Administration has released a veto threat of the Intelligence Authorization that I’m going to deal with in reverse order.

The last objection argues that we can’t require the head of the NSA–the agency that gets to collect and data mine virtually all of America’s telecom metadata, as well as a lot of the actual content–face Senate confirmation because that person might not be confirmed.

Confirmation of Appointment of the Director of the National Security Agency:  The Administration strongly objects to section 421, which would add a requirement that the person nominated for the position of Director of the National Security Agency be confirmed by the Senate.  The Administration believes that if this provision were to become law, a critical national security position would likely remain unfilled for a significant period of time, adversely impacting the management and function of the National Security Agency.

Admittedly, Obama has had problems getting his nominees through Congress, partly because of Republican intransigence, partly because he hung out his most progressive nominees to dry, and partly because he hasn’t gotten nominees in place.

But the solution for that is not to give up! The solution is turn Republican intransigence into a political liability. And there’s no easier area to do that with than National Security. Indeed, the only National Security nominees I’m aware of who got held up (aside from Eric Holder until he promised not to prosecute torture) were TSA nominees who supported TSA workers’ right to organize; with them, Obama made no effort to accuse Republicans for exposing the country to danger over a political spat. And even James Clapper–about whom a number of Senators had concerns–got confirmed unanimously.

Then there’s the Administration’s objection to the requirement for records of diplomatic negotiations about detainees.

Submission of Information on Detainees Held at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: The Administration strongly objects to sections 307 and 309, which would state that the DNI must provide the Intelligence Committees with each Department of State cable, memorandum, or report containing certain information relating to Guantanamo Bay detainees, as well as government-to-government assurances related to the transfer of those detainees. The Administration believes that such disclosure will have a significant adverse impact on the willingness of foreign partners, who often expressly request this information not be disseminated, to communicate frankly on these matters.

The cables and other documents at issue – originated and controlled by the Department of State, not the ODNI – contain deliberative commentary and sensitive diplomatic discussions and negotiations, including commitments made by foreign governments relating to the handling of transferred detainees. The Department of State has accordingly declined to produce these documents to Congress or to U.S. federal courts because of the need to protect diplomatic communications in conducing effective foreign relations. The Administration is concerned that these provisions may conflict with the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority to control the disclosure of information when necessary to preserve the Executive’s ability to perform its constitutional responsibilities.

There’s a deep, deep irony here. If this were Dick Cheney’s Administration, he would have added a “besides, Congress leaks so much we can’t let these sensitive materials circulate.” Except the Executive Branch is here refusing to share with the legislative branch the kinds of cables that were leaked to WikiLeaks, largely because of the incompetence of the Executive Branch.

You see, the Executive Branch may have “constitutional authority to control the disclosure of information,” but not, apparently, the basic competence to do so.

And so Congress can’t know whether the US is letting detainees of certain nationalities–like, say, Saudi Arabia–be released because of diplomatic sensitivities. Congress can’t know whether we release someone like David Hicks to help a political ally win an election. And Congress also can’t know what is probably the greater sensitivity, whether and how the Executive Branch, and allies like the Saudis, believe they’re flipping detainees to work as spies (often mistakenly).

I can see why such a requirement would elicit a veto threat.

But I think the real veto threat comes from stuff we’re not allowed to know about.

The Administration looks forward to reviewing the updated classified annex accompanying H.R. 1892.  In a letter from the Director of National Intelligence dated August 30, 2011, the Administration identified specific provisions in the Senate classified annex that also raised serious concerns.  If H.R. 1892 is presented to the President and includes the issues of concern described below and includes, but does not adequately address, the specific provisions of the Senate classified annex, the President’s senior advisors would recommend a veto.

The fact that much of this veto threat pertains to stuff that is substantive and sensitive enough to appear in the classified annex suggests it might be a real issue (and note that the items to which the Administration objects are in the Senate annex, not the House one, so they’re not something Michele Bachmann dreamt up to be cute). It is very rare that Administrations differ with Congress on such substantive issues (as opposed to, say, GAO review). Which suggests this may well be the really interesting source of the veto threat.

William Welch & DOJ’s Dishonest Intelligence Witness Against Jeff Sterling

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In a comment to Marcy’s The Narratology of Leaking: Risen and Sterling post yesterday, MadDog related this nugget regarding the Sterling case from a Steve Aftergood article in Privacy News:

I know EW’s post’s focus was on Sterling’s defense team’s strategy, but I’d be remiss in not commenting on this tidbit from Steven Aftergood’s post:

“…In addition, a former intelligence official now tells prosecutors that portions of his testimony before a grand jury concerning certain conversations with Mr. Risen about Mr. Sterling were “a mistake on his part.” As a result, prosecutors said (8 page PDF), Mr. Risen himself is “the only source for the information the government seeks to present to the jury.”…”

I wondered just what this paragraph meant. Did it mean, as I assumed, that one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, a former intelligence official, had in fact recanted the former intelligence official’s grand jury testimony?

Here is just what the prosecution blithely said on the matter from page 5 of their supplement (8 page PDF):

“…Fifth, the testimony of the “former intelligence official” referenced in the Court’s Opinion has changed. The former official will now only say that on one occasion, Mr. Risen spoke with him about the defendant and stated that the defendant had complained about not being sufficiently recognized for his role in Classified Program No. 1 and in his recruitment of a human asset relating to Classified Program No. 1, and that on a separate occasion, Mr. Risen asked him generic questions about whether the CIA would engage in general activity similar to Classified Program No. 1. This former official, however, cannot say that Mr. Risen linked the second conversation with the defendant, although both conversations occurred within several months of each other. The former official termed his grand jury testimony, which linked the two conversations together, as a mistake on his part. In addition, the former official further modified his testimony to say that although Mr. Risen had acknowledged visiting the defendant in his hometown, Mr. Risen’s trip to see the defendant was not the main purpose of his travel, but rather a side trip.

The testimony of this former official had been cited by the Court as providing “exactly what the government seeks to obtain from its subpoena [to Mr. Risen]: an admission that Sterling was Risen’s source for the classified information in Chapter Nine.” Memorandum Opinion (Dkt No.148) at 24. The former official’s testimony will not now provide such a direct admission, further underscoring the government’s contention that for the reasons discuss in its Motion, Mr. Risen is the only source for the information the government seeks to present to the jury…”

So, that got me thinking, what is the status of the “former intelligence officer” in question? Is he still on the witness list? Who is it, and why is he “former”? Has he been charged with false statements to a government officer under 18 USC 1001? Has he been charged with perjury under 18 USC 1623? Is there a criminal investigation regarding the duplicity underway? What is being done?

Because, giving the government’s prosecutors the benefit of the doubt that they did not misrepresent or puff the “former intelligence officer’s” statements and testimony to start with, which is a pretty sizable grant for a William Welch run show, then it seems pretty clear that the “former intelligence official” is now saying that he either testified to things he did not, in fact know at the time, or he embellished/lied to the grand jury and the attending prosecutors.

The problem with the above is, the “former intelligence official is not entitled to any protection or benefit of the doubt for a “recantation” under 18 USC 1963(d). Here is the relevant portion on Read more →

The Death Squads “Protecting” Our Country

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There was an odd pair of stories in the WaPo last week. On Thursday, there was a story by two reporters on the CIA’s increased focus on killing its targets, whether by drone or paramilitary strike.

In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill.

Then, on Friday, there was an excerpt of the chapter from Dana Priest and Will Arkin’s book on JSOC. In addition to describing JSOC’s own lethality…

JSOC’s lethality was evident in its body counts: In 2008, in Afghanistan alone, JSOC commandos struck 550 targets and killed roughly a thousand people, officials said. In 2009, they executed 464 operations and killed 400 to 500 enemy forces. As Iraq descended into chaos in the summer of 2005, JSOC conducted 300 raids a month.

…. It also described how JSOC has been infiltrating DC’s bureaucracy.

Then he gave access to it to JSOC’s bureaucratic rivals: the CIA, NSA, FBI and others. He also began salting every national security agency in Washington with his top commandos. In all, he deployed 75 officers to Washington agencies and 100 more around the world. They rotated every four months so none would become disconnected from combat.

Some thought of the liaisons as spies for an organization that was already too important.

Both stories were good additions to earlier reports that have already laid this groundwork. But I found them notable for the way they were featured at the WaPo with nary a nod at each other. Sure, the CIA story noted that it has collaborated with JSOC. And the JSOC story talks about them feeding targeting information to CIA. Both stories claim their paramilitary force has the greater authority. Both at least mention Leon Panetta; the CIA one mentions David Petraeus; neither mentions Panetta and Petraeus swapping agencies.

But what we’re really talking about is an increasing focus on paramilitary approaches to security, using both JSOC and CIA, with the reporting agency seemingly chosen based on which offers the neatest legal cover.

The point, though, is to have super-lethal organizations unbound by the bureaucracy or law that puts limits to them.

And, as the CIA story admits, the civilian leadership–the President–matters less and less, at least in terms of receiving analysis (and presumably making decisions based on that analysis) or judging efficacy.

“We were originally set up with a more singular focus on policymakers,” said Moore, the head of the CIA’s analytic branch. But for a growing number of analysts, “it’s not just about writing for the president. It’s about gaining leads.”

[snip]

“When CIA does covert action, who does the president turn to to judge its effectiveness?” a former senior U.S. intelligence official. “To the CIA.”

Which brings us to this David Swanson piece, relating an exchange Susan Harman had with Berkeley’s Law School Dean, Chris Edley. When asked why the Obama Administration had not prosecuted torture or wiretapping, Edley revealed the Administration was worried about the CIA, NSA, and military “revolting.”

“Then Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he’d been party to very high level discussions during Obama’s transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they’ve done anyhow).

“Afterwards I told him that CIA friends confirmed that Obama would have been in danger, but I added that he bent over backwards to protect the criminals, and gave as an example the DoJ’s defense (state secrets) of Jeppesen (the rendition arm of Boeing) a few days after his inauguration.

“He shrugged and said they will never be prosecuted, and that sometimes politics trumps rule of law.

Now I’ve long suspected that Obama backed off all rule of law for both the national security establishment and the banks out of fear he’d end up like John F. Kennedy. And Edley’s comments, at least, don’t suggest Obama was worried the “revolt” would involve physical threats to himself.

Nevertheless, these three developments together really ought to be a worry.

We’re expanding two lethal paramilitary forces–death squads–that (taken together, especially) evade normal oversight. It’s not clear whether the civilian leadership controls them–or vice versa.

Is it really a good idea to make them even more lethal?

10 Years Later, 9/11 Commission Says President Is Failing to Protect Civil Liberties

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The 9/11 Commission released a 10-year report card on the recommendations they made back in 2004. And one of three recommendations that remains entirely unfulfilled–the only one that is entirely the responsibility of the executive branch–is implementing a board to defend civil liberties.

“[T]here should be a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the [privacy] guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties.”

An array of security-related policies and programs present significant privacy and civil liberty concerns. In particular, as the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community have dramatically expanded their surveillance of potential terrorists, they have used tools such as National Security Letters that may implicate the privacy of Americans. Privacy protections are also important in cyber security where the government must work with the private sector to prevent attacks that could disrupt information technology systems and critical infrastructure. The same Internet that contains private correspondence and personal information can also be used as a conduit for devastating cyber attacks.

To ensure that privacy and liberty concerns are addressed, the 9/11 Commission recommended creating a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to monitor actions across the government. Congress and the president enacted legislation to establish this Board but it has, in fact, been dormant for more than three years.

Describing the PCLOB as “dormant” is actually a huge favor to Obama. It only suggests, but does not make explicit, that before the end of his Administration Bush actually got around to rolling out the PCLOB–evenven if it was so compromised by executive branch control that Lanny Davis felt obliged to resign.

But Obama has avoided even that much oversight by simply letting the PCLOB go unfilled for his entire Presidency. As the report card explains, Obama finally got around to making nominations after Democrats lost the numbers in the Senate to approve his nominees (though one was the Michael Mukasey Assistant Attorney General who rolled out greater investigative powers for the FBI). And even if those two were by some freakish even confirmed, PCLOB would still be short a quorum to do any work.

The Obama administration recently nominated two members for the Board, but they have not yet been confirmed by the Senate. We take the administration at its word that this Board is important: in its May 2009 review of cyber security policy, the administration noted the Board’s importance for evaluating cyber security policies. We urge the president to appoint individuals for the remaining three positions on the board, including the chairman, immediately, and for the Senate to evaluate their nominations expeditiously.

[snip]

If we were issuing grades, the implementation of this recommendation would receive a failing mark. A robust and visible Board can help reassure Americans that these programs are designed and executed with the preservation of our core values in mind. Board review can also give national security officials an extra degree of assurance that their efforts will not be perceived later as violating civil liberties.

PCLOB is an entity mandated by law. But the President refuses to comply with that law to provide for some oversight over civil liberties, no matter how inadequate.

It’s not me accusing Obama of failure on this point–it’s a bipartisan commission primarily concerned with the national security of the country. But they are, in fact, calling him a failure.

DOJ Sues to Stop AT&T/T-Mobile Merger

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Finally, the Department of Justice did something (aside from its good work on Civil Rights) worthy of its name: it sued to prevent the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

The Department of Justice today filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to block AT&T Inc.’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA Inc.   The department said that the proposed $39 billion transaction would substantially lessen competition for mobile wireless telecommunications services across the United States, resulting in higher prices, poorer quality services, fewer choices and fewer innovative products for the millions of American consumers who rely on mobile wireless services in their everyday lives.

The department’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to prevent AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom AG.

“The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile would result in tens of millions of consumers all across the United States facing higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products for mobile wireless services,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole.   “Consumers across the country, including those in rural areas and those with lower incomes, benefit from competition among the nation’s wireless carriers, particularly the four remaining national carriers.   This lawsuit seeks to ensure that everyone can continue to receive the benefits of that competition.”

“T-Mobile has been an important source of competition among the national carriers, including through innovation and quality enhancements such as the roll-out of the first nationwide high-speed data network,” said Sharis A. Pozen, Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.   “Unless this merger is blocked, competition and innovation will be reduced, and consumers will suffer.”

The press release, at least, cites a lot of T-Mobile documents to argue for T-Mobile’s key role in keeping the cell phone industry competitive, not an AT&T document that was recently leaked showing that AT&T pursued the merger for anti-competitive reasons.

The complaint cites a T-Mobile document in which T-Mobile explains that it has been responsible for a number of significant “firsts” in the U.S. mobile wireless industry, including the first handset using the Android operating system, Blackberry wireless email, the Sidekick, national Wi-Fi “hotspot” access, and a variety of unlimited service plans.   T-Mobile was also the first company to roll out a nationwide high-speed data network based on advanced HSPA+ (High-Speed Packet Access) technology.  The complaint states that by January 2011, an AT&T employee was observing that “[T-Mobile] was first to have HSPA+ devices in their portfolio…we added them in reaction to potential loss of speed claims.”

The complaint details other ways that AT&T felt competitive pressure from T-Mobile.   The complaint quotes T-Mobile documents describing the company’s important role in the market:

  • T-Mobile sees itself as “the No. 1 value challenger of the established big guys in the market and as well positioned in a consolidated 4-player national market”; and
  • T-Mobile’s strategy is to “attack incumbents and find innovative ways to overcome scale disadvantages.   [T-Mobile] will be faster, more agile, and scrappy, with diligence on decisions and costs both big and small.   Our approach to market will not be conventional, and we will push to the boundaries where possible. . . . [T-Mobile] will champion the customer and break down industry barriers with innovations. . . .”

Still, I would bet this suit became a lot easier to file now that AT&T’s lies about the merger have been exposed.

Update: The complaint references just two AT&T documents (see paragraph 30). Neither is the leaked document, but they deal with fundamentally the same issue, how AT&T responded to T-Mobile on upgrading its network.

The Government Still Doesn’t Say Whether or Not It Has Recordings of James Risen

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There’s an interesting passage in this government filing to get Judge Leonie Brinkema to reconsider her guidelines regarding James Risen’s testimony in the Jeffrey Sterling suit. It seems to address Brinkema’s suggestion in her ruling that there might be recordings of Sterling passing classified information to Risen.

The government has not stated whether it has nontestimonial direct evidence, such as email messages or recordings of telephone calls in which Sterling discloses classified information to Risen; nor has it proffered in this proceeding the circumstantial evidence it has developed.

Here’s how the government responds.

There is no non-testimonial direct evidence in this case that can establish what Risen can. There are no recorded telephone calls in which Sterling discloses classified information to Risen, nor are there emails in which Sterling discloses the same. Had there been such recordings or emails, that evidence would have been disclosed in the Bruce Declaration5 or in the government’s response to Risen’s motion to quash the 2010 grand jury subpoena, and the government certainly would have provided such discovery after indictment. There simply is no such evidence.

5 The Bruce Declaration, which the Court has had in an unredacted, classified form since 2008, and which the government adopted and re-submitted in 2010, is an accurate and fair summary of the anticipated trial evidence in this case. See Dkt. 144. The defendant received a redacted, classified version of the Bruce Declaration on June 18, 2011. Pursuant to this Court’s Order of June 28, 2011, the government provided counsel for Risen a redacted, unclassified version of the Bruce Declaration (that remains under seal) on June 29, 2011, so that counsel for Risen would have an adequate factual background for the hearing on July 7, 2011.

Note they don’t say they don’t have any recorded telephone calls between Risen and Sterling. Rather they say, “There are no recorded telephone calls in which Sterling discloses classified information to Risen, nor are there emails in which Sterling discloses the same.” They attribute that claim to their Bruce Declaration, which as they note provides a list of all the evidence they intend to use, not all the evidence they have.

That’s important, because we know they have the content of emails, at least those from Sterling to Risen. The indictment references a March 10, 2003 email from Sterling to Risen suggesting that Risen read an article on Iran.

Defendant STERLING stated, “I’m sure you’ve already seen this, quite interesting, don’t you think? All the more reason to wonder … J.”

The indictment also accuses Sterling of “meeting with Author A in person to orally disclose classified information.

The only two ways I can think of to know that is if, 1) they knew Sterling didn’t pass information via their phone calls because they have all those calls, or 2) if he if specifically referenced meeting to give him information in an email. But the government has introduced no evidence of the latter, at least not publicly.

I suspect Brinkema has good reason to suspect the government has wiretaps of Sterling talking to Risen (if they did, given the circumstances of the case, there’d be a good chance they got those wiretaps from their vacuuming of information at circuits, not from a formal wiretap placed on Sterling’s phone). And now, along with the dance over how much Brinkema will permit the government to ask Risen on the stand, they’re conducting a dance over whether or not the government will have to admit that.

DOJ’s Twisted Notion of Rule of Law Is Poisoning Our Country

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Yesterday, Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years and a $10,000 fine for his successful efforts to expose an improper BLM drilling auction.

At his hearing, DeChristopher rebutted the prosecution’s claim that he needed to face a tough sentence to uphold rule of law.

Mr. Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law.

[snip]

This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

Mr. Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I “obstructed lawful government proceedings.” But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding. I know you’ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned. But that case did not involve the BLM’s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development. A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration. In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law. In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.

[snip]

I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr. Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience.

And in response, of course, the judge did lock DeChristopher away. It’s a farce given the facts of the case, but consider how it looks when, as DeChristopher invites, you consider DOJ’s other efforts to “uphold rule of law.”

Compare the damage–if any–DeChristopher’s actions did to that which BP has done. As bmaz noted in April, a year after the Macondo explosion, no one has yet been held accountable for 11 deaths, to say nothing of the physical damage to the Gulf. And as Jason Leopold recently reported, our unwillingness to heed whistleblowers has led to more damage from BP. Part of the problem, of course, is the difficulty finding a judge without a financial interest in BP.

Or compare DeChristopher’s punishment with that of Massey energy. DOJ has records that Massey faked safety records for the Big Branch mine, yet over a year after 29 people were killed, no one has been held responsible. Don Blankenship not only got to retire with $12 million, he continues to get paid by the company as a “consultant.”

Or compare DeChristopher’s punishment with that of Angelo Mozilo or Lloyd Blankfein. Between them, they had a huge role in causing Americans trillions of dollars in preventable losses. After fining Mozilo $67 million he won’t pay personally, DOJ judged that Mozilo’s actions did not constitute criminal wrongdoing, so he remains free to enjoy his corruptly gained riches. And in spite of the apparent fact that Blankfein lied to Congress last year about the ways Goldman crashed the economy, DOJ has only now begun to make motions of investigating his lies.

And consider the others who tried to expose government wrong-doing. The government spent three years trying to prosecute Thomas Drake for whistleblowing–apparently because they suspected he leaked details of the illegal wiretap program. And it is currently pursuing a strategy that may land James Risen in prison–Risen says, in retaliation for his reporting on the illegal wiretap program. Yet DOJ went to great lengths to avoid holding anyone responsible for actually doing the illegal wiretapping.

We’re about to try Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri for his alleged role in the USS Cole bombing, which is fine. But the government not only hasn’t punished his torturers, but it hasn’t punished those who destroyed exonerating evidence of his torture.

DOJ has apparently given up any pretense of supporting the rule of law. The law is a tool used to punish political protest and exposure of wrong-doing. And it is a tool to protect the corporations whose crimes do far more damage to this country.

John Robb recently predicted that after a Soviet-style collapse, our legal system will collapse.

What happens to the legal system when the US suffers a Soviet style collapse?  Answer:  It will rapidly decay.

Here’s a simple formula for this (it works for both legal systems and government bureaucracies):

Low legitimacy + slashed operating budgets = rampant corruption

Regardless of any decay in the legal system, business will still be conducted.  Small disputes will be resolved through the existing system, with graft tipping the scales or speeding the outcome.  Large disputes involving substantial wealth transfer will be something else entirely.  These disputes will be resolved through the ability of one party or the other to apply the threat of (or actual) violence to the negotiation process.

These pressures won’t only be the result of counterparties that have access or control the large mafias/gangs/militias (or corporate militaries) that will spring up during economic collapse (far larger than we’ve seen the US to date).  Threats will also be mounted by government/defense/security officials that use their government sanctioned command of violence (police, SWAT, military units, etc.) as a means to personal enrichement.

But (as his suggestion about the impunity people like Mozilo and Blankfein were given shows) he gets the chronology wrong. Aside from the bribed BP judges, it’s not corruption per se that is collapsing our judicial system. It’s the apparently conscious choice on the part of the government to void the concept of rule of law, the choice to treat political speech and whistleblowing as a much greater crime than the corporate crimes that have devastated our country.

I think DeChristopher is right: seeing his sentence isn’t going to scare anyone into cowing in the face of such a capricious legal system. Rather, it makes it clear what the stakes are.

WSJ: Don’t Be Mean to Us Like Fitz Was to Judy

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Most sane people are outraged by the WSJ’s hacktalicious editorial calling for calm on the hack scandal.

As well they should: the editorial discredits WSJ as a paper.

But I was particularly interested in this bit.

In braying for politicians to take down Mr. Murdoch and News Corp., our media colleagues might also stop to ask about possible precedents. The political mob has been quick to call for a criminal probe into whether News Corp. executives violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with payments to British security or government officials in return for information used in news stories. Attorney General Eric Holder quickly obliged last week, without so much as a fare-thee-well to the First Amendment.

The foreign-bribery law has historically been enforced against companies attempting to obtain or retain government business. But U.S. officials have been attempting to extend their enforcement to include any payments that have nothing to do with foreign government procurement. This includes a case against a company that paid Haitian customs officials to let its goods pass through its notoriously inefficient docks, and the drug company Schering-Plough for contributions to a charitable foundation in Poland.

Applying this standard to British tabloids could turn payments made as part of traditional news-gathering into criminal acts. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t pay sources for information, but the practice is common elsewhere in the press, including in the U.S.

The last time the liberal press demanded a media prosecutor, it was to probe the late conservative columnist Robert Novak in pursuit of White House aide Scooter Libby. But the effort soon engulfed a reporter for the New York Times, which had led the posse to hang Novak and his sources. Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news?

This is structured as an appeal to other media outlets, warning them that if they pile on, it might well hurt them too (this structure continues to the rest of the editorial).

This argument ends with the Scooter Libby argument–the claim that the NYT, because it purportedly “led the posse to hang [Bob] Novak and his sources” (including, among others, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby), ended up getting embroiled in the Libby case (in spite of the fact that NYT discredited itself by protecting Libby for a year after they had published his name as Judy’s source).

Fair enough. The NYT–and especially Judy Miller–was exposed to be as hackish as Novak was (and, as another outlet who published bogus leaks in the Joe Wilson pushback, the WSJ) when its laundering of government leaks was made clear.

So the WSJ is rightly reminding other media outlets that they are as hackish as it is. Perhaps they have specific incidents of hackishness in mind?  Maybe the rest of the press should worry that a focus on how corrupt our press has gotten will reflect badly on them too. It appears, for example, that the WaPo is worried about just such a thing.

Then, oddly (working backwards from the Judy Miller issue), the WSJ warns that if other media outlets pile on, it’ll criminalize payments made in the course of news-gathering–with a claim that such a horror would only matter for British tabloids. Only, that’s not exactly true, is it? And that’s before you consider the number of “consultants” TV stations pay for their “expertise.”

Then, in the first part of this passage, the WSJ rails against what is probably one of its biggest worries–it’ll be held liable in the US for the fairly well-established bribery it engaged in in the UK (even assuming no such bribery were discovered here in the US). It suggests that a poor helpless media company would never bribe a government for something real–like a contract. Putting aside the appearance that Murdoch’s minions bribed the cops.

Except at the heart of this scandal is Murdoch’s attempt to get full control of BSkyB. Not to mention Murdoch’s fairly well-established pattern of trading political support for Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, and David Cameron in exchange for political favors.

This is bribery every bit as much as Halliburton’s bribery to get Nigerian contracts was bribery. A satellite concession is every bit as tangible a goal as is a contract. But it attempts to couch decades of Murdoch’s ruthless business practices in First Amendment hand-wringing. It suggests that whatever meager journalism Murdoch’s minions do, it should excuse his illegal business practices.

This WSJ editorial is a damning exhibit in outright hackery.

But I suspect its audience–other hackish media outlets–finds it a persuasive read.

Update: With this editorial in mind, I wanted to point to a few paragraphs of Alan Rusbridger’s description of how the Guardian broke this story. A key part of it, he describes, was in partnering with the NYT to break the omertà among British papers.

Big story? Not at all. Not a single paper other than The Guardian noted [a $1 million settlement against News of the World for bullying] in their news pages the next day. There seemed to be some omertà principle at work that meant that not a single other national newspaper thought this could possibly be worth an inch of newsprint.

Life was getting a bit lonely at The Guardian. Nick Davies had been alerted that Brooks had told colleagues that the story was going to end with “Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy.” “They would have destroyed us,” Davies said on a Guardian podcast last week. “If they could have done, they would have shut down The Guardian.”

If the majority of Fleet Street was going to turn a blind eye, I thought I’d better try elsewhere to stop the story from dying on its feet, except in the incremental stories that Nick was still remorselessly producing for our own pages. I called Bill Keller at The New York Times. Within a few days, three Times reporters were sitting in a rather charmless Guardian meeting room as Davies did his best to coach them in the basics of the story that had taken him years to tease out of numerous reporters, lawyers, and police officers.

The Times reporters took their time—months of exceptional and painstaking work that established the truth of everything Nick had written—and broke new territory of their own. They coaxed one or two sources to go on the record. The story led to another halfhearted police inquiry that went nowhere. But the fact and solidity of the Times investigation gave courage to others. Broadcasters began dipping their toes in the story. One of the two victims began lawsuits. Vanity Fair weighed in. The Financial Times and The Independent chipped away in the background. A wider group of people began to believe that maybe, just maybe, there was something in this after all. [my emphasis]

News Corp would have destroyed the Guardian, Rusbridger and Nick Davies say, if they had had the dirt to do so. Such threats are presumably how News Corp enforced the omertà on the story.

Now look at the editorial. It appears, first of all, to be an appeal to precedent–a similar kind of appeal often made when pointing out that an espionage prosecution of Julian Assange will criminalize newsgathering.

It argues that a prosecution of News Corp under the FCPA would be a bad precedent, equating contracts with–well, I”m not sure what News Corp is admitting to here, as its media interests do amount to a contract. It then suggests–the logic is faulty–that such a prosecution would also criminalize the news gathering of those who pay for stories. This seems to be an implicit threat directed at those who do pay for stories (note that this editorial doesn’t say News Corp, including Fox TV, doesn’t pay for stories, just WSJ), perhaps an attempt to silence TV news.

But then, after having already impugned newspapers that, like the Guardian and NYT, gave “their moral imprimatur” to WikiLeaks, the editorial levels a threat clearly directed at the NYT, noting how the the newspaper’s purported efforts to go after Novak’s sources ended up backfiring on the NYT.

Not long after Rusbridger described the omertà that helped News Corp forestall consequences in the UK, Murdoch’s mouthpiece here in the US issued a veiled threat against the NYT.

I’m betting that Murdoch thinks the NYT will be easier to destroy than the Guardian.