Thursday, January 8, 2004
On the same day that the anti-war Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report stating, under no uncertain terms, that the Bush Adminsitration “systematically exaggerated” Iraq’s WMD capability, the U.S. Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group leave Iraq.
So after nine months, no WMD are found and the Bush Administration withdraws 400 of the 1400 staff on their weapons inspection staff. Hoping tenacity and reptition can overcome reality, the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell provides the most tepid defense of the Administration’s policy to date: “I am confident of what I presented last year, the intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me,” Mr Powell told reporters.
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
The Saturday before Saddam Hussein was captured, President Bush signed into law the Intelligence Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2004. Tucked away in this legislation is language allowing the FBI to collect any citizen’s financial information without judicial review or meaningful Congressional oversight. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and read Section 374 of the law for details.
This means that an FBI agent can draft a “national security letter” (NSL) and, as if by magic, get “financial information,” which is newly defined to include your transactions with stock brokers, travel agents, jewelry stores, the U.S. Post Office, casinos, and real estate agents, and car dealerships.
The support for this provision was predicated on an urgent need for the FBI to get this information. This is difficult to understand, since the FBI already has the power to get this information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Strangely, the FBI claims that it has never used the this power. So what’s going on here? Why give them this power when they’re not using the power they already have?
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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/155120_potmaybe.html
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
