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Hello, 2006. The New York Times kicked off the new year by refusing to answer its own ombudsman's questions about the timing of the newspaper's anonymous illegal leak-dependent National Security Agency monitoring story. Long live transparency and accountability. Meanwhile, Times reporter James Risen launched his anonymous illegal leak-dependent book, "State of War," with a self-congratulatory appearance on NBC's "Today" show. Risen's leakers, he told Couric, were the opposite of the Valerie Plame case leakers because his people came forward "for the best reasons." How do we know that's true? Because Risen says it is. So there. Risen then patted himself...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday that the limited Congressional briefings the Bush administration has provided on a National Security Agency eavesdropping program violated the law.In a letter to President Bush, the representative, Jane Harman of California, said the briefings did not comply with the National Security Act of 1947. That law requires the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to be "kept fully and currently informed" about the spy agencies' activities. ...Ms. Harman wrote in her letter that the law allowed briefings to be limited to the eight leaders only in...

The Left -- from The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel to Newsweek's Jonathan Alter -- has pulled out the impeachment card and is brandishing it as the weapon that will drive George W. Bush from the White House. This could be more than talk. Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is consulting with legal eagles as she explores the idea.I must say, I am tickled at their efforts. I supported impeaching the perjury-prone President Clinton, but preferred censure to removing him from office. I also saw the damage to Republicans who pushed to chase Clinton out of office.But the Bush-haters won't heed history,...

Global petition to stop the war in Iraq Date: 5 Jan 2006 GLOBAL CALL FOR NONVIOLENT CIVIL RESISTANCE TO END THE U.S.-LED MILITARY OCCUPATION OF IRAQ Contact: dm@aglobalcall.org Global Call to Action Voluntown, CT, USA Our website: www.aglobalcall.org FROM: Nobel Peace and Literature Laureates Cindy Sheehan and other peace and human-rights activists Religious leaders of various traditions Prisoners of Conscience Former government ministers Poets, authors, journalists A Global Call for Nonviolent Civil Resistance at U.S. and British government installations around the world has been issued by Nobel Peace and Literature Laureates along with Cindy Sheehan and other peace and human-rights activists, religious...

WASHINGTON - The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee told President Bush Wednesday that the White House broke the law by withholding information from the full congressional oversight committees about a new domestic surveillance program. In a letter to Bush, Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said the National Security Act requires the heads of the various intelligence agencies to keep the entire House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States." Only in the case of a highly classified covert action can the president choose to inform a...

It seems the Bush administration -- being a group of sane, informed adults -- has been secretly tapping Arab terrorists without warrants. During the CIA raids in Afghanistan in early 2002 that captured Abu Zubaydah and his associates, the government seized computers, cell phones and personal phone books. Soon after the raids, the National Security Agency began trying to listen to calls placed to the phone numbers found in al Qaeda Rolodexes. That was true even if you were "an American citizen" making the call from U.S. territory -- like convicted al Qaeda associate Iyman Faris who, after being arrested,...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 03, 2006 CONTACT: Brendan Daly/Jennifer Crider 202-226-7616 Pelosi’s Declassified Letter on NSA Activities Washington, D.C. – House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today released the following letter, which she wrote four years ago when she was Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and was recently declassified at her request. The letter to Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, then National Security Agency (NSA) Director, expressed concerns about NSA electronic surveillance activities and the authority for those activities. Pelosi also released the response letter from Hayden. Both Pelosi’s letter and Hayden’s response were redacted when they were declassified. October...

The bright holiday atmosphere of the end of 2005 in New York was eclipsed only by the dark political clouds created by George W. Bush's political enemies. The lovely clear weather in Manhattan is continually muddied by venomous attacks on the American president from his media and political foes for having dared to order the wiretapping of conversations held by American citizens as part of his war on Muslim terror. The sounds of "Jingle Bells" mingling with Hanukka songs last week in New York was incessantly interrupted by a cacophony of talking heads on television arguing whether the president was...

Up until a couple of weeks ago, George W. Bush's script to put the misery of 2005 behind him had seemed destined for a smooth rollout. Buoyed by the apparent success of the Iraqi elections, the President would score a quick confirmation victory with Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, follow it up with a soaring State of the Union address and then return to full campaign mode with a sweep around the country, talking about big issues like immigration and Medicare and throwing the spotlight on a resurgent economy. But the revelation that his Administration has been spying in this...

The New York Times' "public editor" delivered a blistering attack on the paper for what he called "stonewalling" about its story on the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping. Byron Calame said on Dec. 19 that he sent 28 questions to executive editor Bill Keller about the Times' "woefully inadequate" explanation of its decision to sit on the story for a year. Keller refused to answer the questions, saying, "There is really no way to have a full discussion of the back story without talking about when and how we knew what we knew, and we can't do that." Calame said that...

Did the FISA court Stop Us From Connecting the Dots? By Teri O'BrienJan. 3, 2006Ever since the New York Times revealed the horrifying news that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor both sides of conversations that involve known al Qaeda operatives, the usual chorus of carping critics has whined incessantly "Why didn't they just go to the FISA court?" They proceed to robotically recite a meaningless statistic, purporting to demonstrate that this super-secret court, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, is a "rubber stamp." For example, on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, January...

Editorial: Spying can save lives The terror threat justifies electronic surveillance THE two sides of the debate in the US over the authority or otherwise of intelligence agencies to electronically monitor suspects are arguing over issues from different generations. Critics of domestic spying rightly suggest the Bush administration may be skirting around the law as it stands. Their opponents argue that even if this is so, civil liberties are not much use to anybody atomised by a terrorist attack, particularly one that a more comprehensive intelligence effort could have stopped. Those who fear the encroaching power of the state to...

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New York Times executives are "stonewalling" on questions about the paper's decision to publish top secret information about the Bush administration's use of the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance operations against terrorists, the paper's public editor charged on Sunday. "The New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate," public editor Byron Calame wrote in a New Years Day column. In its initial report on Dec. 16, Times said that editors held the story at the request...

THE New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency...................

Thundering silence and selective outrage Wes Vernon January 1, 2006 Intriguing, is it not? The inside-the-beltway liberal establishment was utterly scandalized that someone dared to leak to columnist Robert Novak the name of a desk-bound CIA bureaucrat, Valerie Plame. Surely, that same cabal is jumping up and down demanding to know the identity of the subversive who leaked to the New York Times information on a program to monitor phone calls between al-Qaeda operatives and persons on American soil. No? Thundering silence? Fascinating! Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell kicked off 2006 by noting such "selective outrage" on Fox News Sunday's...

They can never refuse the bait. Just when you think the President has stuck his neck out too far…the Democrats grab the long knives…and…then instead of victory they dig themselves in deeper and deeper. Tax cuts John Bolton John Roberts The Murtha resolution And now National Security. The New York Times and Washington Post are now going to do to themselves and the Democrats exactly what they’ve been trying to do the President. Their political use of national security leaks is gong to cause several unintended, self-damaging effects. First off it has only helped the President’s approval ratings. You know...

An interesting comment was left on Ed Morrissey’s blog last night about the NSA Wiretaps and who may be responsible for the leak: All this speculation about whistle blowers and such….and the exempt media continues to portray these leaks about NSA somehow as Bush’s fault., or that the whistle blowers were acting under the highest most genuine of principles and concerns for the Constitution…all of it simply mind boggling. Well, rather gthan sit back home out in the great middle of America, I decided to go to the source…headed for DC after Christmas…been an informative trip. Anyway, how is this...

WASHINGTON — The investigation into who leaked information about a National Security Agency secret wiretapping program on potential terror suspects needs to focus on the motivation behind the leak, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday. "There are differences between felons and whistleblowers, and we ought to wait 'til the investigation occurs to decide what happened," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told "FOX News Sunday." The Justice Department on Friday opened an investigation into who leaked the information about the program, sparking debate over its threat to national security and presidential powers versus civil liberties. The program, first revealed...

More than a week after the story was exposed as a hoax, Sen. Ted Kennedy has yet to apologize for touting false claims from a University of Massachusetts student who said officials from the Department of Homeland Security visited his home and repeatedly interrogated him after he tried to obtain a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book." In mid-December, the unidentified student instigated the hoax by describing the phony grilling to reporters for the New Bedford Standard-Times. The story appeared on Dec. 17, the day after the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was monitoring the phone...