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What Kind of Intelligence Does the HIG Expect to Get from Anas al-Libi?

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There has been all manner of commentary about the rendition and detention on a poorly functioning ship of Abu Anas al Libi. There are credulous claims about the humanity of the High Value Interrogation Group’s tactics that nevertheless remain officially classified. There’s the growing awareness that al-Libi’s case differs from Ahmed Warsame’s in several key ways. And then there’s John Bellinger, trolling the Obama Administration for violating rules the Bush Administration did not in superb fashion.

These are important questions. But they distract from another important question.

What kind of intelligence do they really expect to get from al-Libi?

The explanation for his capture has focused on his alleged role in the 1998 Embassy Bombings. While there are no statutes of limitation for murder, that’s nevertheless an event that took place over 15 years ago. Even some of the analysts we often rely on — not to mention his family — suggest he hasn’t had an active role in al Qaeda for over a decade, or at least since he returned home to Libya 2 years ago. Lisa Monaco offered weak claims about the importance of al-Libi.

During an appearance on PBS Newshour, Deputy National Security Adviser Lisa Monaco repeatedly referred to Abu Anas Al-Libi as a “member” of Al Qaeda. However, she stopped short of calling the Libyan-born Al-Libi a “senior operational leader”—a phrase which seemed to have special significance when the Justice Department evaluated the legality of lethal force against U.S. citizens and is also believed to apply to targeting of foreign nationals outside combat zones.

Newshour reporter Jeffrey Brown asked Monaco about whether Al-Libi posed an “imminent” threat to Americans, but Monaco wouldn’t say that and also seemed to avoid declaring that he was an Al-Qaeda operative or even a leader of the group.

“Al-Libi did pose a threat to the United States as a senior al-Qaida member and somebody who is also charged in an indictment for his role as part of the Al Qaeda worldwide conspiracy,” Monaco declared.

This is, at the least, a significant difference from Ahmed Ghailani (who was seized with an active cell in Pakistan and interrogated for years about that active cell before being tried for his role in the Embassy Bombings) and Ahmed Warsame (who was seized for his active role in working with AQAP and al-Shabaab), though it perhaps resembles Suleiman Abu Ghaith.

I’m not saying al-Libi had no active role in terrorism. The timing — the raid took place at the same time as the strike on Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, who allegedly helped plan attacks in Kenya — might suggest al-Libi played some role in the Westgate Mall attack and other operations in Africa.

Perhaps the most complete explanation for why al-Libi is a current threat is this description.

An unclassified report published in August 2012 highlighted al Qaeda’s strategy for building a fully operational network in Libya. The report (“Al Qaeda in Libya: A Profile”) was prepared by the federal research division of the Library of Congress (LOC) under an agreement with the Defense Department’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO). [See LWJ report, Al Qaeda’s plan for Libya highlighted in congressional report.]

Abu Anas al Libi has played a key role in al Qaeda’s plan for Libya, according to the report’s authors. He was described as the “builder of al Qaeda’s network in Libya.”

Al Qaeda’s senior leadership (AQSL) has “issued strategic guidance to followers in Libya and elsewhere to take advantage of the Libyan rebellion,” the report reads. AQSL ordered its followers to “gather weapons,” “establish training camps,” “build a network in secret,” “establish an Islamic state,” and “institute sharia” law in Libya.

Abu Anas al Libi was identified as the key liaison between AQSL and others inside Libya who were working for al Qaeda. “Reporting indicates that intense communications from AQSL are conducted through Abu Anas al Libi, who is believed to be an intermediary between [Ayman al] Zawahiri and jihadists in Libya,” the report notes.

Al Libi is “most likely involved in al Qaeda strategic planning and coordination between AQSL and Libyan Islamist militias who adhere to al Qaeda’s ideology,” the report continues.

Al Libi and his fellow al Qaeda operatives “have been conducting consultations with AQSL in Afghanistan and Pakistan about announcing the presence of a branch of the organization that will be led by returnees from Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and by leading figures from the former LIFG.” The LIFG refers to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group formed in Libya in the 1990s.

The suggestion that al-Libi might be the liaison between Ayman al-Zawahiri and extremists in Libya (extremists we helped to overthrow Qaddafi) is more interesting, particularly given Libya’s public objections to al-Libi’s rendition. Perhaps the ultimate plan is to hold al-Libi responsible for Benghazi (though interrogating him in a floating prison might endanger any charges if he was involved, which would be a big problem given the need for some finality on Benghazi). But it might raise interesting questions about whether the extremists we helped in Libya really constitute al Qaeda, or instead constitute a legitimate force within that country.

As of now, however, the US public story is that we captured this guy who has been living in the open for two years for a crime he committed 15 years ago. And that instead of whisking him immediately to NY to stand trial for that crime, we are instead pissing off the Libyan government and nudging up against a slew of domestic and international laws by conducting a floating interrogation from which we might learn only decades old facts. If that’s the story (and again, I suspect the government at least claims there is more), it makes all the legal and ethical issues surrounding his detention all the more problematic.

“Whoa Whoa Whoa, Stop!” Dianne Feinstein Misstates the 2011 Violations

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One of the most enlightening aspects of yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Hearing on FISA came when Dianne Feinstein tried to rebut witness Tim Edgar’s categorization of the 2011 violations described in John Bates October 8, 2011 opinion. In her rebuttal, she proved she either doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, or chooses to misrepresent the opinion, which found that NSA had violated the law and Fourth Amendment in its Section 702 program.

Edgar was arguing (see page 5-6) that if the FISA Court opinions were publicly released, we’d know about ridiculous semantic definitions — like “relevant” — as those definitions were invoked, not years after the fact, which would lead to greater trust in the FISC.

As his second example, he cited NSA’s collection of US person communications on upstream collection. (After 2:20)

EDGAR: [T]he NSA’s interpretation of the requirement in Section 702, for content surveillance targeting foreign persons, that those procedures must target foreign persons is also surprising. The FISA court’s recently released opinions show that communications that target foreign persons include not only communications that are to or from that person, but also those that are merely about that person in a particular narrow sense, that the selection — the selector for that person appears in the communication.

Even communications which are not to or from, or about, the foreign target at all have been acquired as the result of the manner in which some NSA collection was conducted.

DiFi interrupted him (whoa whoa whoa stop!) — and (having read his statement in advance) started reading a written rebuttal to provide her version of the 2011 violations.

FEINSTEIN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. Exactly what program are you talking about?

EDGAR: In the recently released FISA court opinion about upstream collection in the compliance incidents in 2011, it was documented how information from multiple communications — what they called “multiple communications transactions” — was obtained not by mistake, but because of the way the system was designed. That included any selector that was a foreign target in the entire multi- communications transaction.

And so that created a lot of controversy in the FISA court, and required the FISA court to work with the Justice Department and the intelligence community to narrow the minimization guidelines.

FEINSTEIN: OK. Because this is — this is important, may I interrupt this just — respond? [reading from prepared statement] In mid 2011, NSA notified the DOJ, the DNI, and the FISA court, and House and Senate Intelligence Committees, of a series of compliance incidents impacting a subset of NSA collection under Section 702 of FISA, known as upstream collection.

This comprises about 10 percent of all collection that takes place under 702, and occurs when NSA obtains Internet communications, such as e-mails, from certain U.S. companies that operate the Internet background;[sic] i.e., the companies that own and operate the domestic telecommunication lines over which Internet traffic flows.

In essence, the issue that arose in 2011 was that NSA, while trying to acquire e-mails to, from, or about an overseas target, realized it, and was inadvertent — that it was inadvertently acquiring other e-mails, including some e-mails sent between persons inside the United States that happened to be bundled with the e-mail messages NSA was trying to collect.

This bundling is done by Internet companies in order to make it easier to send information quickly over the telecom lines that make up the Internet. Unfortunately, NSA’s technical systems could not easily separate the individual messages within these bundles. And the result was that NSA collected some e-mail messages it did not intend to acquire.

OK. We held a lengthy hearing on the court’s ruling on October 20, 2011, at which General Alexander and Lisa Monaco — then the assistant attorney general for national security — described the court’s ruling and what they were doing to address it.

Here’s my point: It was a mistake. Action was taken immediately to correct it. It came to us. We took action. [bold mine, underline emphasis DiFi applied in delivery]

DiFi’s prepared statement misstates the facts as presented in Bates’ opinion in several ways:

  • The issue had existed since before July 2008
  • The collection was — according to the court ruling — not inadvertent
  • NSA only corrected the problem under threat of criminal referral, after months of delay

First, the issue did not arise in 2011.

As Bates made clear, “NSA has been collecting MCT’s since before the Court’s approval of the first Section 702 certification in 2008.” Read more →

Did NSA and JSOC Team Up to Game Obama and Monaco on Yemen Terror Alert?

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NBC published a fascinating article yesterday that provided new and interesting details on the events surrounding the escalation of drone strikes in Yemen that took place in response to the “intercepted conference call” that wasn’t a conference call. Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito and Jim Miklaszewski report on the personnel and policy changes that were taking place in the Obama administration as these events unfolded and how these changes had led to a decrease in drone strikes:

Obama announced that he had chosen Lisa Monaco to replace Brennan as his top counterterror official on January 25, and she officially assumed the role of Homeland Security Advisor on March 8. The U.S. launched four strikes on Yemen between January 19 and January 23, just before Obama’s announcement about Monaco, but didn’t launch another until April 17.

“With Brennan going over to CIA and Monaco replacing him, it took time,” said a senior counterterrorism official. “This was a while coming. JSOC (the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command) was pushing for more strikes and more operations but the White House slowed everything down.”

Those three strikes in mid-April were followed by another lull in strikes until mid-May, when there were two strikes just before Obama’s drone policy speech:

In tandem with the drone speech, the President issued new internal guidance to officials that tightened controls on what targets could be hit and who could make the decision to launch a drone.

What followed, sources said, was more frustration from Defense Department officials, and a third, seven-week-long interruption in drone strikes that led to a backlog of identified militant targets in Yemen.

But the “targeting” done by JSOC in Yemen isn’t of the same quality as the information prepared for targeting by the CIA for strikes in Pakistan, according to the NBC report:

In May, around the time of Obama’s speech, senior military officials prepared “targeting packages” for Monaco, with a roster of suspected militants in Yemen that they wanted to eliminate. The “targeting packages” contain background information on the identified targets. The CIA’s packages for Pakistan are often very detailed, while the Defense Department’s research on Yemeni targets was sometimes less detailed.

In fact, the JSOC apparently even admitted that some of these recent targeting packages pertained to lower level targets, but in an apparent use of pre-cogs, they claimed these were going to be important al Qaeda figures in the future and the administration had to deal with the question of “pain now, or pain later” in their recommendation to take out these lower level operatives.

Keep in mind that these meetings to discuss drone targets, also know as “Terror Tuesday” meetings, are populated by high level security personnel from many agencies. Both JSOC, as the target developer for drone strikes in Yemen, and NSA, as the purveyor of information gleaned from surveillance, would of course be present.

As @pmcall noted to me on Twitter, the “intercept” then magically appeared and opened the floodgates for strikes:

Here’s how the NBC article described that: Read more →

If Wanting to Reveal that All Americans’ Metadata Gets Swept Up Is Treason, Edward Snowden Is in Distinguished Company

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Earlier this evening, Dianne Feinstein called Edward Snowden’s decision to leak NSA documents an act of treason.

“I don’t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason,” the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters.

The California lawmaker went on to say that Snowden had violated his oath to defend the Constitution.

“He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s treason.”

Perhaps DiFi can be excused for her harsh judgment. After all, in addition to exposing the sheer range of surveillance our government is doing, Snowden made it very clear that DiFi allowed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to her committee.

And continues to allow Clapper’s lie to go unreported, much less punished.

But I thought it worthwhile to point out the many people who have committed to make the FISA Court Opinions describing, among other things, how the government’s abuse of Section 215 violated the Constitution.

In 2010, DOJ promised to try to declassify important rulings of law.

In 2010, as part of the same effort, Clapper’s office promised to try to declassify important rulings of law.

In 2011, prior to be confirmed as Assistant Attorney General, now White House Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco promised, “I will work to ensure that the Department continues to work with the ODNI to make this important body of law as accessible as possible.”

All these people claimed they wanted to make FISC’s opinion, among other things, on the secret use of Section 215 public.

What Snowden released on Section 215 — just a single 215 order to Verizon, without details on how this information is used — is far, far less than what DOJ and ODNI and Lisa Monaco pledged to try to release. Given that the collection is targeted on every single American indiscriminately, it won’t tell the bad guys anything (except that they’ve been sucked into the same dragnet the rest of us have). And while it shows that FBI submits the order but the data gets delivered to NSA (which has some interesting implications), that’s a source and method to game the law, not the source or method used to identify terrorists.

So if Snowden committed treason, he did so doing far less than top members of our National Security establishment promised to do.

Wait.

There’s one more member of this gang of — according to DiFi — traitors committed to tell Americans how their government spies on them. There’s the Senator who said this on December 27, 2012.

I have offered to Senator Merkley to write a letter requesting declassification of more FISA Court opinions. If the letter does not work, we will do another intelligence authorization bill next year, and we can discuss what can be added to that bill on this issue.

Oh, wait! That was Senator Dianne Feinstein, arguing that they didn’t have time to pass an actual amendment, attached to the actual FISA Amendments Act renewal, forcing the government to turn over this secret law.

But she promised to write a letter!

And even, DiFi claimed (though similar promises to John Cornyn to obtain the OLC memo authorizing Anwar al-Awlaki’s killing went undelivered), to include a requirement in this year’s intelligence authorization requiring the government to turn over far more information on the government’s use of Section 215 than Snowden did.

I get that DiFi doesn’t agree with his method — that he leaked this rather than (!) write a letter. I get that Snowden has exposed DiFi for allowing Clapper lie to her committee, in part to hide precisely this information.

But in debates in the Senate, at least, DiFi has claimed to support releasing just this kind of information.

The Downside of Losing Blabby Brennan as Homeland Security Czar

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Screen shot 2013-04-17 at 4.03.26 PMAs I’ve noted in passing, the Boston Marathon will be the first major homeland security episode that John Brennan’s replacement, Lisa Monaco, will coordinate at the White House. As NJ describes in this profile, Monaco has worked for years at FBI and DOJ in national security, so it’s not like the Administration loses expertise with Monaco in the Homeland Security Czar.

But it does mean the Administration doesn’t have John Brennan, who has been known to give briefing on crises to his predecessors with TV contracts, as when he leaked that UndieBomb 2.0 was an Saudi sting to Fran Townsend and Richard Clarke.

About an hour or two ago, the media was buzzing, with CNN in the lead. The FBI had identified a suspect, they reported. The FBI had arrested someone, and would be bringing the suspect to the Court House, they reported. Along the way John King suggested, video evidence to the contrary, the suspect was a “dark skinned male.”

A key source in those report was Fran Townsend, working from tips from people inside government.

Ultimately, FBI actually released a press release making clear there hadn’t been an arrest.

Meanwhile, in response to CNN and other outlets’ reporting, a big crowd had formed at the courthouse. Predictably, a bomb threat came into the courthouse, so then the police had to evacuate the courthouse.

As CNN’s reporters were standing around trying to avoid apologizing for possibly tipping of the suspect of the attack, they started blaming their sources, suggesting they had been “used” to flush out the suspect, even while warning that saying “too much” might lead the suspect to do some undesirable things.

It was a thorough clusterfuck.

Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Monaco is doing a great job, and I actually don’t think it’s the job of the Homeland Security Advisor to hand feed the cable news channels.

But I guess blabby Brennan would have at least ensured that Townsend got her story correct.

Update: This chart of the clusterfuck is pretty funny.

Lisa Monaco Moves On without Fulfilling Promise to Reveal FISA Court Opinions

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In response to Chuck Grassley’s question whether the government has struck the right balance between national security and civil liberties leading up to her confirmation as Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Lisa Monaco claimed the right balance had indeed been found.

Do you believe that an appropriate balance has been struck between national security concerns and civil liberties?

Agents, analysts and prosecutors who work every day to protect us from national security threats do so pursuant to the authorities Congress has given them under the Constitution. I believe these authorities reflect an effort to strike a balance between the imperative of protecting national security interests of the United States on the one hand and the importance of doing so consistent with the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Through carefully crafted authorities, compliance efforts within the Executive Branch and robust Congressional oversight of those compliance efforts, I believe we have been able to strike the right balance over time.  As the threat continues to evolve, and technology develops that better enables us to detect and disrupt threats while at the same time providing new tactics and capabilities to those who would do us harm, we must be constantly vigilant in our efforts to maintain that balance.

In her other answers, she emphasized the importance of having “relevance” standard access to call data and other records so as to provide the probable cause to investigate people.

As noted above, NSLs (some of which are issued under ECPA) form the building blocks of national security investigations under a relevance standard. This is vital to the ability of national security investigators to obtain information that forms the basis for probable cause and to further national security investigations.

In utterly related news, Jeff Merkley recalled last month that during her confirmation process in 2011, Monaco supported the idea of releasing FISA Court opinions that–it appears–would reveal how these “relevant to” laws have been used to substantiate probable cause.

Congress never intended the intelligence community to have a huge database to sift through without first getting a regular probable cause warrant, but because we do not have the details of exactly how this proceeds and we cannot debate in a public forum those details, then we are stuck with wrestling with the fact that we need to have the sorts of protections and efforts to close loopholes that Senator Wyden has put forward.

What we do know is that this past summer, the Director of National Intelligence said in a public forum that on at least one occasion the FISA Court has ruled that a data collection carried out by the government did violate the fourth amendment. We also know that the FISA Court has ruled that the Federal Government has circumvented the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law. But too much else of what we should know about this law remains secret. In fact, we have extremely few details about how the courts have interpreted the statutes that have been declassified and released to the public.

[snip]

In 2010, due to concerns that were raised by a number of Senators about the problem of classified FISA Court opinions, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they would establish a process to declassify opinions of the FISA Court that contained important rulings of law. In 2011, prior to her confirmation hearing, Lisa Monaco, who is our Assistant Attorney General for National Security, expressed support for declassifying FISA opinions that include “significant instructions or interpretations of FISA.”

Yet here were are, two years later, and Lisa Monaco is moving on to replace John Brennan at the White House. Yet we still haven’t seen the memos that describe how the government uses massive databases of information collected using this “relevance” standard to then access the private communications of Americans (which are probably the same databases).

Mind you, Monaco is not the person most responsible for refusing to declassify documents that describe the shreds of the Fourth Amendment in this country–she’s not the Original Classification Authority.

Nevertheless, we’ve got another fan of massive data mining moving into an oversight free position in the White House without having fulfilled her commitment to tell the American people what they’re doing with that data mining.

The Lawyers that Stayed, the Lawyers that Left

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Charlie Savage covers a very troubling development in the case of Ali al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who is serving a life sentence for serving as Al Qaeda’s videographer.

After Hamdan had his conviction vacated by the DC Circuit last year because material support was not a war crime at the time of his support for al Qaeda, Bahlul’s conviction was put in jeopardy too. As Savage earlier reported, there was a debate among the national security lawyers. And in spite of the fact that almost everyone disagreed with Eric Holder on this count, Holder made them press forward anyway.

The Obama administration, after a high-level debate among its legal team, told a federal appeals court on Wednesday that the conviction of a Guantánamo Bay prisoner by a military commission in 2008 was valid even though the charges against him — including “conspiracy” and “material support for terrorism” — were not recognized as war crimes in international law.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. decided to press forward with the case, fighting the appeal of a guilty verdict against the prisoner, a Yemeni man named Ali al-Bahlul. In an unusual move, Mr. Holder overruled the recommendation of the solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who had wanted to drop the case because the appeals court had rejected the same legal arguments in another case several months ago, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

The chief prosecutor of the military commissions system, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, had also urged the Justice Department to drop the case and pointedly did not sign the 22-page brief to the court on Wednesday. It concedes that the judges must side with Mr. Bahlul at this stage because of the earlier ruling in the other case, but argues that the earlier ruling was wrong.

It sure appears that Eric Holder is just counting on getting the same kind of batshit crazy ruling he got in Latif, so as to sustain his legally unjustified detention.

What’s especially interesting about this, however, is the Kremlinology. Back in early December over the course of two days time, both Jeh Johnson and Harold Koh resigned. It felt very much like a protest, or a refusal to be part of something that struck them as legally unsound (I thought then–as still suspect–it was partly a response to John Brennan’s halt of the effort to put drones on a sound legal footing).

And now we know that around that time, the Attorney General was overriding not just their advice, but that of most of the others involved in this, including the Solicitor General and the Military Commission Chief Prosecutor.

Yesterday’s brief, incidentally, was signed by the Acting Deputy General Counsel at DOD, not Johnson (of course).

So Johnson and Koh are gone. And Eric Holder? The Administration just announced he will stay into the second term. (And, not incidentally, yesterday I floated the suggestion that Lisa Monaco, who sided with Holder on this fight, would be named to replace FBI Director Mueller later this year; a number of smart people suggested that was a smart prediction.)

Update: In the WaPo version of this story, Steve Vladeck suggests that if the government really planned to push forward with an appeal of this to SCOTUS (that is, to reverse the ruling in Hamdan II), the language in the brief would have been stronger.

Incidentally, I wonder yet again about the case of the three Somalis in this context. Is this why they added a conspiracy charge to their indictment, to establish that as a precedent in this situation?

It’s Hard to Summarize Opinions Pertaining to Two Purportedly Unrelated Laws

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Steven Aftergood relays the explanation of a senior intelligence official as to why the intelligence community can’t release even a teensy little bit of the FISA Court’s classified opinions.

“We tried,” a senior intelligence agency official said, but the rulings were hard to declassify. After redacting classified operational information and other sensitive details, no intelligible text of any consequence remained, according to this official.

The Department of Justice made a similar assertion years ago in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, stating that “Any legal discussion that may be contained in these materials would be inextricably intertwined with the operational details of the authorized surveillance.”

Aftergood’s source goes on to explain that they can’t just summarize the Court’s decisions, because … well, I don’t really understand this objection, but I suspect it has to do with some disagreement between the FISC and DOJ about the opinions that currently exist.

But the intelligence agency official said that unclassified summaries of surveillance court decisions were probably not a satisfactory alternative.  A summary written by the Department of Justice would not be a statement of the court’s opinion at all, the official said.  At best, it would represent the Administration’s own understanding of what the court had ruled, paraphrased for public release.

Aftergood holds out hope that a letter from Dianne Feinstein will provide sufficient independent direction to convince the Court to write their own summary.

Now, I’m interested in this for two reasons. First, consider what it means that the Administration and their complacent-overseer DiFi refused to let Jeff Merkley’s amendment–which would have called for summaries in some cases–pass. For starters, it would have shortened the time frame (two years have already passed since Lisa Monaco assured Senators she’d declassify opinions if only they confirmed her) it’d take to ask the Courts for a summary and get it. Additionally, it would have required the government admit if they could not, would not, declassify any teensy bit of the opinions on this secret law. That is, they’d have to finally admit there is secret law, which they’re denying right now.

I’m officially predicting that all this will be wrapped up a few short months after after the PATRIOT Act gets extended in 2015, forestalling the moment yet again when we confirm that the government is conducting massive surveillance on innocent Americans.

But then there’s the claim that they cannot summarize this themselves (suggesting, as I said, that there was no way DOJ could write a summary that the FISC would buy off on).

Frankly, I don’t buy that. Even John Yoo’s November 2, 2001 opinion authorizing the illegal wiretap program–a 21 page document redacted down to 183 words–communicates the main gist of the opinion:

FISA only provides a safe harbor for electronic surveillance and cannot restrict the President’s ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security.

[snip]

FISA purports to be the exclusive statutory means for conducting electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence.

[snip]

Such a reading of FISA would be an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s Article II authorities.

[snip\

Thus, unless Congress made a clear statement in FISA that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area–which it has not–then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading.

[snip]

…we do not believe that Congress may restrict the President’s inherent constitutional powers, which allow him to gather intelligence to defend the nation from direct attacks.

[snip]

…intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.

[snip]

A warrantless search can be constitutional “when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.”

[snip]

…no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation.” Haig v. Agee. 453 US 280. 307 (1981)

Of course, in this case, the government is hiding the current interpretation of law. So rather than displaying the ugly shreds of our Constitution as it existed when Dick Cheney roamed the halls (though some of these opinions were written under the Bush Administration), the government is faced with revealing the ugly shreds of our Constitution as it exists. And 183 words, even in an opinion written by FISC, is probably sufficient to get some complacent people rather worried.

Then there’s the matter I noted the other day. In Merkley’s speech supporting his amendment, he focused on how Section 215 plays–apparently in conjunction with FAA (that’s why the government doesn’t want FAA debated at the same time as Section 215; because we might get “confused”)–particularly the passage that allows the government to get business records relevant to an investigation.

Let me show an example of a passage. Here is a passage about what information can be collected: “ ….. reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation (other than a threat assessment) conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2),” and so on.

Let me stress these words: “relevant to an authorized investigation.”

There are ongoing investigations, multitude investigations about the conduct of individuals and groups around this planet, and one could make the argument that any information in the world helps frame an understanding of what these foreign groups are doing. So certainly there has been some FISA Court decision about what “relevant to an authorized investigation” means or what “tangible things” means. Is this a gateway that is thrown wide open to any level of spying on Americans or is it not? Is it tightly constrained in understanding what this balance of the fourth amendment is? We do not know the answer to that. We should be able to know.

As I noted, Merkley professes not to know whether the “relevant to” provision of Section 215 has been used to gut probable cause in a way far more thorough than even John Yoo accomplished. But most of the co-sponsors of his Amendment do know.

And while I still think you’d be able to summarize even that, if the thing they’re trying to hide is that Section 215 has been grafted onto FAA so as to permit the government to access any tangible thing from anyone for whatever shoddy reason the government invents, I do get why it’d be hard to summarize that and still hide the fact that that’s what is now going on.

I guess they think it’d be confusing for us if their claims that there isn’t a massive program of government surveillance were proven to be utterly false.

Lisa Monaco Would Like to Thank the Academy

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One nice touch of today’s press conference rolling out the latest FBI-created plot (aside from comedy lines like “they had no regard for the rule of law” and “we will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground”) is that the fairly new Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Lisa Monaco, got a speaking role.

That’s certainly not inappropriate; given that this plot was either invented by or targeted at Iran, the NSD would be right in the thick of the action.

It’s the content of her statements, focusing almost entirely on thanking participants in the “investigation,” I find so interesting. She started by thanking her reports in the NSD, particularly the Counterterrorism Section. Then the US Attorney’s Offices in Southern District of NY and Houston. Then the FBI, the DEA, and the NY Joint Terrorism Task Force. After having thanked those groups–two of which (FBI and DEA) are members of the Intelligence Community–she then thanked the Intelligence Community.

Finally, I want to thank the intelligence community for its critical role in this matter. The National Security Division was designed to serve as the place where intelligence and law enforcement come together at the Justice Department. I am proud to say that we served that purpose here. This case demonstrates exactly how the division is supposed to work and should serve as a model for future cases.

(Holder offers less demonstrative thanks to the intelligence community too.) In other words, the head of the NSD, which would handle cooperation between the ops side and the law enforcement side, dedicated one-fifth of her comments, a quarter of her thanks, to the IC members presumably above and beyond the FBI and DEA officers who led this sting.

By itself, that’s not a surprise. After all, even the recent model plane UAV plot the FBI invented would have involved the NSA and CIA closely because the FBI seems to have targeted Rezwan Ferdaus, the plotter, because of his comments in jihadist chat rooms. But by contrast with such operations as that one, the complaint in this case offers no obvious tip to the involvement of the IC.

Sure, there would be intelligence analysts, the experts on the Quds Force (though the FBI agent writing the complaint attributed information on the Quds to Treasury and State declarations and “other ‘open source’ information,” in the same way he attributes information on Los Zetas to “published reports”). There might be Treasury investigators, the people who use SWIFT to track the two international wire transfers that are the primary evidence in the case, but the FBI could probably track the transfers themselves, not least because the transfers ended up in an FBI bank account and I suspect they went through a friendly bank in NYC. You’d think the NSA would be involved, but the informant, who I call “Narc,” taped all the phone conversations himself until Arbabsiar’s arrest, after which the FBI taped his calls. There is a reference to pictures of Quds members, presumably taken by intelligence agencies.

But those are the only visible signs of IC involvement. Indeed, the complaint appears designed to hide any hint of IC involvement and the sting appears designed to avoid any obvious involvement from the IC. That is, from the looks of things, this arrest required less involvement from the IC than Fardaus’.

Which I assume is the point: to create the appearance of an FBI arrest that seems entirely unmotivated by underlying intelligence plots.

And yet unnamed agencies in the IC got prominent kudos for their “critical role in this matter.”

With that in mind, I wanted to point to a few interesting details in the complaint.

Perhaps most interesting, the complaint’s account of how a seeming incompetent like Arbabsiar got sent out to negotiate ties between the Quds and Los Zeta indicates Arbabsiar suggested he get involved, not his cousin Abdul Reza Shahlai (described here as Iranian Official #1).

ARBABSIAR told Iranian Official #1 that as a result of his business in both Mexico and the United States, he (ARBABSIAR) knew a number of people who traveled between the two countries, and some of those people, he (ARBABSIAR) believed, were narcotics traffickers. Iranian Official #1 told ARBABSIAR that he wanted ARBABSIAR to hire someone who could kidnap the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States and that ARBABSIAR should find someone in the narcotics business, because people in that business are willing to undertake criminal activity in exchange for money.

And note how, at the start, Shahlai wanted only a kidnapping? Arbabsiar and Narc turned it into an assassination. And Narc offered up the C4 that is the entire basis of the WMD complaint (and, more largely, the terrorism charge).

Note, too, how it was orchestrated such that Arbabsiar would be in custody making calls back to Iran that would capture Arbabsiar’s co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, in the plot (every single one of these charges is a conspiracy charge, so getting some evidence against Shakuri was critical to even charging Arbabsiar without having him engage in an actual attack). The explanation was that Narc wanted something–either more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico–as a guarantee of the remainder of the $1.5 million payoff before he’d order the hit. Shakuri advised against Ababsiar traveling to Mexico.

SHAKURI stated that no more money should be given to [Narc], and advised ARBABSIAR against traveling back to Mexico. SHAKURI said that ARBABSIAR was responsible for himself if he did travel.

Then, when he was in custody pretending to be in Los Zetas custody, Arbabsiar called Shakuri and told him Narc wanted more money–presumably a ploy by the FBI to get Shakuri reconfirming the plan for the plot and his involvement in the money transfer. But Shakuri rejected that request.

SHAKURI then stated: “You said it yourself, they–from our point of view of–when we get our merchandise, we get our merchandise.” SHAKURI added, “We have guaranteed the rest. You were our guarantee.”

If this were a real plot and Los Zetas were really playing hardball for a bigger advance, then Shakuri’s decision might well have gotten Arbabsiar killed. At the very least, Shakuri’s refusal to pony up any more advance money suggests some ambivalence about the operation (or Arbabsiar’s life).

Now, it’s not clear when Arbabsiar decided to cooperate with the FBI–only when he was arrested (and promptly waived Miranda rights), or back in the spring when he proposed reaching out to Los Zetas to his cousin and along the way turned a kidnapping into a terrorist attack.

But it seems clear that someone orchestrated this sting from behind the scenes to create the appearance of a Quds-sponsored terrorism plot in the US. And for that reason, among the other players and directors and cinematographers Lisa Monaco thanked at the press conference, she also thanked the IC for the critical role they played in orchestrating the show.