News n Notes from the Web

US intelligence service bugged website visitors despite ban

Friday December 30, 2005
by Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1675325,00.html

The intelligence service at the centre of the row over eavesdropping tracked visitors to its website, despite US government regulations. Monitoring files, known as "cookies", were discovered by a privacy activist at a time when the White House is on the defensive about its use of the National Security Agency to monitor the communications of US citizens.
Although the cookies were dismantled this week and the NSA issued an apology on Wednesday, the episode will add to pressure on the White House to engage in a national debate about its use of the agency, and its interpretation of the constitutional limits on George Bush's presidential powers.The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Arlen Specter, confirmed this week that he intends to conduct hearings into President Bush's secret order in 2002 authorising the NSA to conduct email and telephone surveillance of US citizens without a court warrant. The hearings are expected to get under way next month. "There likely will be a national debate about whether the president really has the kind of power he's been using," Mr Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters.
In a posting on his googlewatch.org website a privacy activist, Daniel Brandt, says he discovered that the NSA was using tracking devices when he logged on to the agency website on Christmas Day. He found the site was using two persistent cookies that would not expire until 2035, well beyond the life of most computers.
While the use of cookies is seen as a convenience at commercial websites, allowing a visitor access without laboriously retyping passwords, their utility for government websites - which do not typically have repeat visits - is uncertain.
US government agencies have been barred from using persistent cookies since 2000 because of privacy concerns. The regulations were imposed after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had been using cookies to monitor visitors to its anti-drug advertisements.
However, Mr Brandt and others have noted repeated violations of the ban. Three years ago, the CIA website was obliged to remove its cookies after Mr Brandt noticed that the devices were still in use. Following his latest discovery, Mr Brandt sent faxes to the NSA public affairs office and the contractor running the agency's website. The agency issued an apology on Wednesday. Although privacy advocates yesterday said the episode was of relatively limited concern given the scope of the NSA's surveillance capabilities, the tracking was viewed as an another example of unwarranted intrusion by the intelligence service. "This illustrates the principle that unchecked authority goes astray. In this case, it's a relatively trivial infraction," said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists. "But to me the point is that we need more aggressive and penetrating oversight than we have."
Since the New York Times disclosed the domestic spying operation, the White House has worked strenuously to damp down public outrage, arguing that the surveillance was limited to those with known links to al-Qaida. However, that posture becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as new evidence surfaces on the range of the NSA activities. In a follow-up story, the New York Times reported last week that the NSA had monitored far larger volumes of telephone and internet communications than initially acknowledged by the White House. Some of the information was obtained after US telecommunications companies allowed backdoor access to streams of telephone and internet traffic.

Why Washington Is Playing with Fire - These are not clever times in Washington

By Joe Klein, Time Magazine, Saturday Dec 10, 2005
An important press conference was not held in Washington last week. The leaders of the Democratic Party did not say, "We'd like to thank President Bush for his new, realistic tone about the war in Iraq. In his recent speeches, the President has acknowledged that U.S. military strategy has been defective, especially in the Sunni triangle. He has made clear the difficulty we have had in training Iraqi security forces. He has expressed concern about the power that ethnic militias have overthose forces. He has expressed dismay about the corruption rampant in the new democratic Iraq. He has admitted that large reconstruction contracts given to U.S. corporations like Halliburton have been a failure. He has repeatedly asserted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the intelligence that caused him to attack Iraq was wrong. We applaud the President for finally acknowledging those mistakes. Given the Administration's sad record of incompetence in planning and executing this war, we do have concerns about the President's ability to bring it to a successful conclusion. In the meantime, we hope he will continue to be candid about the difficulties we are facing in Iraq."

Or something like that. Jujitsu is an ancient and honorable political strategy: if you are clever, you can upend your opponent by leveraging the force of his own assertions. But these are not clever times in Washington. The President has taken to the manic repetition of the word victory, apparently on the advice of a Duke University professor, Peter Feaver, a new addition to the National Security Council staff. Feaver conducted a cold-blooded review of recent polling and concluded that the American public would be more tolerant of the carnage if victory, whatever that means, were the likely result. And so Bush gave a speech at the Naval Academy where plan for victory signs were festooned wantonly. But spin was mitigated by the substance of the speech, which was followed by an even more substantive effort last week at the Council on Foreign Relations. The President is finally using the right words to describe the nature of the enemy, the difficulties on the ground and the more pragmatic steps needed for counterinsurgency and reconstruction. But he remains weak—to the point of being purposely deceptive—on the time and resources needed to succeed with those plans. The Feaver slogan seemed like half a fortune cookie: "You should plan for victory ... but expect something less."

Indeed, the most effective Democratic criticism of the President's "victory" offensive came from two West Point graduates who had opposed the war, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island and General Wesley Clark, and both took Bush to task for the skimpiness of the Iraq effort. Clark wrote a New York Times Op-Ed piece offering a thoughtful list of suggestions for a more successful prosecution of the war that he had opposed, including the deployment of more troops (which he would transfer from other regions). Reed pointed out that the President, despite his talk of limited success in the reconstruction of the cities of Najaf and Mosul, "didn't tell the American people how we're going to replicate that success in other parts of Iraq ... how many more teams of Americans, both military and civilian, need to go into these communities (and) what it will cost us." Most important was Reed's tone—quiet, humble, dispassionate, substantive.

Such sobriety seems beyond the reach of most Democrats. They make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth. The party chairman, Howard Dean, was not inaccurate when he said, "The idea that we are going to win this war ... is just plain wrong." If Dean had added the word militarily, most generals would agree with him. The trouble is, Dean—as always—seemed downright gleeful about the bad news. He seemed to be rooting for defeat. More subtle but no less feckless is the curious case of John Kerry, who has been calling for the withdrawal of 20,000 American troops as soon as the Iraqi elections are completed on Dec. 15. He has said this knowing full well that the Pentagon is planning to reduce the force by 20,000 after Dec. 15 as part of its normal troop-rotation schedule. One hopes he won't be so crass as to take credit for the drawdown when it occurs. But then Kerry—and many other Democrats—have been calling for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, based on progress in Iraq, as if that were some sort of bold and different idea. It isn't. It is precisely what the President has said he will do.

And now the Republicans are preparing to retaliate by running a vomitous television ad portraying Dean, Kerry and others as "retreat and defeat" Democrats, waving the white flag of surrender. In this holiday season, out of respect for the dead and wounded, and the enormity of the tragedy, wouldn't it be nice if all those rabid partisans—on both sides—just gave it a rest for a while?  
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Arguing for enhanced powers of presidency

By Peter Canellos, Boston Globe Staff - December 18, 2005
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's radio address yesterday was an eight-minute bullet of a speech aimed at his growing number of congressional critics, who have turned on the president in a dramatic set of rebukes over torture policy, the Patriot Act, and his authorization of spying on Americans.

The speech stands as one of Bush's most forceful statements, a manifesto calling for enhanced executive power to protect the United States from terrorist plots. But its unsparing language also reflects an urgency bordering on desperation over the extent to which a Congress dominated by his own party has deserted him on his strongest issue -- fighting the war on terrorism. Bush declared that the Senate's vote on Friday to block renewal of the Patriot Act ''is irresponsible, and it endangers the lives of our citizens. . . . In the war on terror, we cannot be without this law for a single moment."
The Senate's rejection of Bush's request for renewal of the Patriot Act followed lengthy but fruitless negotiations with the administration to include more judicial scrutiny of searches of US citizens. In the past, Bush has been able to count on a rock-solid Republican majority in both chambers to support his most important initiatives, along with sizable numbers of moderate Democrats. But on both the Patriot Act and on a measure sponsored by Senator John McCain to ban abusive interrogations of prisoners, the president called his congressional soldiers into action -- and many of them failed to respond. Scores of Republicans defected on the torture amendment, and four GOP mavericks joined a solid bloc of Democrats to tie up the Patriot Act.

The lawmakers' decisions seemed motivated by more than the usual political considerations: Many Republicans said an unambiguous statement on torture was needed to restore the nation's prestige abroad; and senators of both parties expressed concerns about concentrating too much power in the executive branch. Then came The New York Times report Friday that said Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept overseas phone calls and e-mails from people in the United States. Bush's actions, which he maintains are justified under his powers as commander in chief, nonetheless violated a 1978 act of Congress and set the stage for a full-scale power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. Bush's radio speech yesterday was his first public pushback in that struggle.
Throughout American history, emergencies have led presidents to claim enhanced powers. But Congress has always moved aggressively to rein in presidential powers after the immediate crisis has passed. Abraham Lincoln ruled as a virtual dictator for much of the Civil War. But immediately afterward, the Republican Congress grabbed control of Reconstruction and impeached a president of its own party, Andrew Johnson, when he tried to intervene.
Woodrow Wilson took on greater power both domestically and overseas during World War I, but Congress reasserted itself dramatically to thwart Wilson's postwar plans for a League of Nations. Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the scope of executive power to combat the Depression, only to have many of his plans rejected in his second term by a Congress of his own party. After the Vietnam War, Congress helped drive Richard Nixon from office in the Watergate scandal and spent the rest of the 1970s enacting laws designed to curb executive powers.

One of those post-Watergate laws said the executive branch couldn't spy on US citizens without a warrant. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush authorized the NSA to do just that. White House lawyers asserted that Bush had such power under the Constitution during a national security emergency. In his speech yesterday, the president explained his rationale for such powers: ''This authorization is a vital tool in our war against terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them."
If Bush can convince the public that such powers are necessary, Congress may back off. But the votes of the past week illustrate just how much power in both chambers has shifted away from the White House's allies.
The Republican majority in the House, which marched almost in lock step with former majority leader Tom DeLay, has been slowly unraveling since DeLay stepped aside to fight an ethics indictment. Still, House rules give the leadership team the power to control the agenda, and the team remains mostly loyal to Bush.

The Senate is much harder to control. Democrats have been far more disciplined in their opposition to Bush under their new leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. Unable to count on any Democratic votes, Bush has been forced to rely on the 55 -- out of 100 -- Republicans. But Republicans lack the required number of votes -- 60 -- to choke off a filibuster, giving Democrats the power to block important bills. Moreover, increasing numbers of GOP senators have taken stances against the administration. They include McCain, who promoted the torture amendment; Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Sununu of New Hampshire, both of whom led opposition to the Patriot Act extension; and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee chairman who condemned Bush's approval of domestic spying and vowed to hold hearings into the administration's actions. These Republicans, along with a half-dozen others like them, seem to hold the balance of power in Bush's Washington.

The key to the next round of struggles between Congress and the president, most likely to play out as the Patriot Act gets closer to expiring on Jan. 1, will be how those lawmakers define their responsibilities -- as senators upholding the power of their chamber, or as Republicans upholding the powers of their president. 
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U.S., Under Fire, Eases Its Stance in Climate Talks

By Andrew C. Revkin - New York Times - Dec 10, 2005
MONTREAL, Saturday, Dec. 10 - The United States dropped its opposition early Saturday morning to nonbinding talks on addressing global warming after a few words were adjusted in the text of statements that, 24 hours earlier, prompted a top American official to walk out on negotiations.
At the same time, other industrialized nations that have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty binding them to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, agreed to start meeting to set new deadlines once the existing pact's terms expire in 2012.
Such is the nature of progress in the 17-years-and-counting effort by the world's nations to act in the face of scientists' conclusions that emissions from burning essential fuels like coal and oil are raising temperatures and could potentially disrupt climate patterns and inundate coasts.
The United States and China, the world's current and projected leaders in greenhouse gas emissions, still refused to agree to mandatory steps to curtail the emissions as the talks drew toward a close early Saturday. But there was a growing sense that some longstanding barriers, particularly between developed and developing nations, were starting to erode under the weight of evidence that climate was shifting in potentially dangerous ways.
In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.
The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.
At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.
Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. "This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.
In the end, though, some adjustments of wording - including a shift from "mechanisms" to the softer word "opportunities" in one statement - ended the dispute.
In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the administration was determined to achieve greenhouse-gas reductions not through binding limits but through long-term work to develop cleaner technologies.
"If you want to talk about global consciousness," he said, "I'd say there's one country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused on cooperation, and that is focused on helping the developing world, and that's the United States."
There were still a few more details involving Russia that were being worked on, but delegates and participants among the 9,000 people in the halls were confident the overall deal would hold. The amount of progress is still achingly slow, many environmentalist say. The world's major sources of greenhouse emissions - the United States, big developing countries like China and India, and a bloc led by Europe and Japan - remain divided over how to proceed under both the 1992 treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, an addendum that took effect this year.
The original treaty - since ratified by 189 nations, including the United States - has no binding restrictions. The Kyoto pact does impose mandatory limits on industrialized nations, but they do not apply to developing nations, including China and India. The United States and Australia have rejected that pact.
On Friday, countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol were close to agreeing on a plan to negotiate a new set of targets and timetables for cutting emissions after its terms expire. But under pressure from some countries already having trouble meeting Kyoto targets, the language included no specific year for ending talks on next steps, instead indicating that parties would "aim to complete" work "as soon as possible." Early in the afternoon, Mr. Clinton gave a hastily arranged speech to the thousands of delegates in which he sketched a route around the impasse that included gentle rebukes of those seeking concrete targets and also of the Bush administration.
Mr. Clinton said that, given the impasse over global targets for emissions, countries might do better to consider specific, smaller initiatives to advance and disseminate technologies that could greatly reduce emissions in both rich and poor countries. "If you can't agree on a target, agree on a set of projects so everyone has something to do when they get up in the morning," he said. In a comment clearly directed at the Bush administration, he declared to waves of applause that just as the United States had taken a precautionary approach in its fight against terrorism, "there is no more important place in the world to apply the principle of precaution than the area of climate change." "I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future," Mr. Clinton said. "We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity."
The Montreal talks have yielded significant new signs that developing countries are beginning to consider ways to promote economic growth without increasing emissions. Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and Brazil all proposed ways to add incentives for reducing destruction of rain forests to the climate agreements. China agreed to additional discussions under both the 1992 and Kyoto treaties about ways to involve big developing countries in projects that could curb the heat-trapping pollution - as long as they did not involve binding limits. But even if new talks under the Kyoto treaty lead to new targets for industrial nations, some scientists said Friday that they would not be enough to stem harmful warming without broader actions by the biggest and fastest-growing polluters. In a statement from London, Lord Martin Rees, the new president of Britain's Royal Society, an independent national scientific academy, said the disputes among wealthy nations over how to reduce emissions were distracting them from carrying out steps to make the cuts.
Environmental campaigners insisted that the Kyoto process would eventually force other countries, particularly the United States, to act. These advocates predicted a growing market for "cap and trade" credits, in which businesses acquire credits by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions below a required level, then sell those credits to other businesses or even other countries, which can then increase their output of emissions above the target level.
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State of the Nation

Thursday 8 December 2005

let me get this straight
according to our venerable leaders:

there is no global warming (and no need at all for the U.S. to address it)
there is no environmental threat or pollution to deal with in the U.S.
there is no major damage to New Orleans and no major threat from Katrina-like weather
there is no insurgency in Iraq (because there are no "insurgents" there)
there is no torture being inflicted by U.S. representatives
there is no major corruption among Congressional leaders
there is no evolution

so i guess there's really nothing at all to worry about

--- A Weak Defense ---
Washington Post Editorial - Tuesday, December 6, 2005; A28

IN AN ATTEMPT to quell a growing storm in Europe over the CIA's secret prisons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday issued a defense based on the same legalistic jujitsu and morally obtuse double talk that led the Bush administration into a swamp of human rights abuses in the first place. Ms. Rice insisted that the U.S. government "does not authorize or condone torture" of detainees. What she didn't say is that President Bush's political appointees have redefined the term "torture" so that it does not cover practices, such as simulated drowning, mock execution and "cold cells," that have long been considered abusive by authorities such as her State Department.
Ms. Rice said, "It is also U.S. policy that authorized interrogation will be consistent with U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." What she didn't explain is that, under this administration's eccentric definition of "U.S. obligations," cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is not prohibited as long as it does not occur on U.S. territory. That is the reason for the secret prisons that the CIA has established in European countries and other locations around the world, and for the "renditions" of detainees to countries such as Egypt and Jordan: so that the administration can violate the very treaty Ms. Rice claims it is upholding.
Ms. Rice did offer some persuasive arguments, including that "captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice"; that's one reason we believe congressional action to regulate those detentions and interrogations is overdue. It's hard not to sympathize with the secretary of state, who has seen 10 months of meticulous and until now successful work to repair transatlantic relations undermined by a policy not of her making. Yet the Bush administration surely cannot expect that the uproar in European countries, including staunch allies such as Britain, will be contained through such hairsplitting spin. The political backlash is still growing, and the damage could be considerable. For example, the plans of the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to rebuild close relations with the United States have been seriously threatened by emerging reports of German participation in CIA renditions.
The only way to remedy the damage is to change the underlying policies. Such a change would help rather than hurt the fight against terrorism. By now the administration should recognize that, whether or not its abductions of terrorist suspects from European countries have been legal or justified, they have surely been counterproductive: The blowback against questionable renditions from Italy, Sweden and Germany has damaged the ability of those countries to support future collaboration with the CIA. If CIA prisoners are still being held in Europe, they probably won't be staying much longer; Washington's Eastern European friends stand to suffer severe censure from the European Union.
One simple step by President Bush would resolve much of the controversy over prisoner abuse, and ease Ms. Rice's journey through Europe this week. The president could accept Sen. John McCain's amendment to the defense appropriations bill, which prohibits "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" for all prisoners held by the United States. The legislation has overwhelming support in Congress, as the White House recognizes; already, the administration has shifted from threatening a veto to bargaining with Mr. McCain over granting immunity to CIA personnel involved in abuses. Once a clear ban on inhuman treatment is in place, the administration will have no legal reason to hold al Qaeda suspects in secret foreign prisons. Even better, Ms. Rice will have more credibility the next time she declares that the United States does not engage in torture.
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